I wish there was a standardized way to let folks who run a website such as this one know how much a casual passer-by viewer enjoys the byproduct of their work.
replies(4):
ETA: For those who love space but are similarly OOTL on the specifics of modern missions: this is from a telescope launched to the L2 point (next to Webb!) last July, and is currently a bit over 1/6th of the way through it's expected lifetime.
Details here: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid... and obv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29
In comparison to Webb, it's focused on ~visible light surveys of the medium to far range, whereas Webb was built for ~infrared investigations of very distant objects. It was budgeted around 1/4th the cost of Webb (and ended up being ~1/20th due to Webb's costs running from $1B to $10B...) See https://www.jameswebbdiscovery.com/other-missions/euclid/euc...
If you're looking for a new wallpaper, it would be hard to beat this 8000x8000 pic it took of the Perseus galaxy cluster, casually depicting 100,000 galaxies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29#/media... The discoverer of galaxies, Kant, would literally weep. We're lucky to live when we do!
Hopefully there will be a zoomable image (like Google Maps) eventually.
[1] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...
Edit: Was just thinking that image does us tells us something i.e, there no large artificial structures or billboards anywhere we can see. Maybe I watch too much sci-fi but honestly would have expected someone to build some huge structure around a star or planet, would be disappointing if no one does.
I think at the scale of the universe life even thinking capabilities life is almost certainly inevitable.
What's not inevitable is that it can thrive, and survive to a galactic scale. That's not even yet certain for us.
Universe is too big, we're all too far apart. Civilizations come, civilizations go. Some may not be on a planet where even rocket travel may be possible - no source of energy dense enough. Some can get wiped out by disasters. Asteroids. It's happened on this planet a bunch of times.
It's like the Birthday paradox. It's likely 2 people have the same birthday. It's not likely that someone else has YOUR birthday.
1 in 10 billion trillion is some pretty serious odds.
It does get more complicated if we factor in life happening quickly enough without an extinction event.
But after looking at images like this there is just NO WAY we are the only ones.
Observation is the most basic step of science. By viewing, we can find evidence of theoretical concepts or see something that conflicts those theories so they can be discarded or tweaked. It's not like there are experiments that could be used to test theories, so observing is all there is
What I'm more pessimistic about is how long such intelligence might live. How many civilizations reached a point of harnessing nuclear power and then wiped themselves out with nuclear war?
And we will remain invisible and out of reach, but completely observant, and influential in their world. After all, we wrote the program.
And they will study the code and discover their own "natural laws" and invent their own things.
And they will progress until they create a completely simulated world of their own.
I wonder at which level are we. How many sims down from the original program...
It is pitch dark. Could one raindrop survive long enough to at least hear the sound of another landing before it disintegrates?
Is the time between the drop striking the plane and the drop smashing apart so short that no drop ever hears another, or even sees evidence that any drop other than itself ever existed?
If it is a machine that can reproduce itself, growth, collect energy, use energy, do actions based on events, etc, then animals match this profile (perhaps even plants), and also, at some point computer will probably reach that goal.
Despite that, computers won't have a "soul", so where this soul comes from is a big mystery.
I'm not even sure that two humans can prove with certainty that the other ones has a soul, this is still an unsolved problem.
The benefit I get is knowing that this is not all one "big bang"
We are so quick to laud our own achievements, but fail to give credit where it is due.
We build nuclear power plants, waste water treatment plants and the beginnings of quantum computers. And we congratulate ourselves for a job well done, after spending an unspeakable amount of resources on them. We maintain them with a constant labour force, regular maintenance shutdowns and a ton of money.
Meanwhile the sun keeps shining, the clouds keep raining and your mind keeps minding.
And they do it on zero budget. No off days. No staff. Automatically.
And with all this engagement, the energy remains the same.
Something that involves "thinking capabilities" in a form we would recognise?
That's always what I consider when someone mentions the Fermi Paradox.
Humans tend to barely recognise "thinking capabilities" in other mammals. There is intriguing evidence that plants "communicate" and "remember", and have been doing so around us for at least as long as mammals have existed with humans barely noticing and usually ignoring or criticising researchers who suggest that perhaps plants may be "thinking".
https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/plant-sentience-a-...
If we don't even recognise "thinking capabilities" in the plants that have been around us for as long as we've been around as a species, what're the chances that we would notice and recognise "conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life" when we saw it?
Suddenly 1 in 10 billion trillion odds doesn't seem so (and I apologise in advance for this) astronomical...
/pedant
Think about other earth-centric scenarios, and try and imagine if dolphins or octopuses or fungus or maybe even insect colonies or plant ecosystems had "won" and become the apex lifeforms on earth instead of humans. I wonder just how different concerns like "civilisations" and "war" and "nuclear power" would have played out in those cases? I wonder if assumptions like "industrial revolutions" and the inevitability of scientific discovery being used in detrimental ways like we have done with nuclear science actually correlate with "intelligence"?
This mosaic accounts for 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will capture over six years. During this survey, the telescope observes the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. By doing this, it will create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made.
So my question is, what comes after Euclid?
Will the next one capture better details further out (if further is possible)?
Kind of like James Webb compared to Hubble.
I half suspect the aliens who can construct structures large enough to see from lightyears away are by far most likely to be building Dyson Spheres around stars which make them significantly less likely to be seen rather than something we'd notice.
I think the odds are that at least one of them does.
Like they say, the first million is the hardest.
Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around the globe of this.
Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. That doesn't seem random does it?
Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Doesn't seem to though.
Prior to that it was thought that the entire visible universe was around 100,000 parsecs across (what we know now to be just the Milky Way.)
If you ever study evolution on the other hand, you would realize how fantastical these assumptions all are. No, life elsewhere if anything is far more likely to look like how it did for most of the history of life on earth: unicellular. People forget that even multicellularity, let alone an organism with an entire bodyplan, emerged from pure chance, and could have easily been wiped out or outcompeted for resources as soon as it came if it didn’t have sufficient fitness. How lucky it was for us that our ancient eukaryotic ancestors enveloped that first mitochondria. How different life would look today if that never happened and we never had such an energy source to actually support these later iterations, considering all life that exists today are directly descended from this single line. How supremely unlikely it all is to tread even close to the same path. How many potential paths are lost along the way and how many paths only emerged as a result of previous paths.
That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space.
So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are about a hundred planets per galaxy that also have those attributes within a percentage point. If you allow some wiggle room then you have tens of thousands or even millions.
We know conditions here on Earth varied significantly more than 1% over billions of years and life survived and even thrived.
Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.
With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with different photons all around carrying "how this location looked X years ago". "All" you have to do to know what happened is find the right photon to see whatever it is you want to see.
First of all, Bits != Q-bits. You can clone bits. You can't clone Q-bits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
Second, photocopies are static. The physical world is not static.
But you would spot transient phenomena like supernovae.
It shows us how mind bogglingly vast the universe is and how we're literally nothing compared to it. Paradoxically, it also makes me feel incredibly potent and capable as a human being in that being this small we can know so much!
Your size is to the distance of that distant spiral galaxy (420 Mly - 10e24m) as a neutrino is to you (effective cross section of a 1MeV neutron = 10e-24m: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length))
A telescope that could zoom into an exoplanet would have an f value of a kajillion or so.
In a way our universe is very lazy, at large scales where consciousness exists the universe is coherent, predictable. The smaller you get the lazier and fuzzier the universe gets to save computational work. The actual state of things is only computed on small scales when you measure them. The speed of light puts limits on how far humanity can travel to extend the bounds of the simulation. Maybe the expansion of the universe is yet another hedge at limiting how far human can travel. Also, as things are red shifted due to expansion you can run the simulation of far away places slower due to time dilation.
The speed of light and the plank length are both hard codes to bound computational work. The plank length to bound computation getting too complex in the micro scale and the speed of light to limit computation in the macro scale.
It is also very convenient that the closer we look at things the more we see that under the hood things are discrete which is very convenient for simulating.
Maybe every level of the sim increases the plank length and decreases the speed of light in order to deal with inefficiency of doing a sim within a sim? Maybe at the final level of the sim we end up with the truman show.
Sure, maybe that’s a requirement for the type of life we on earth know about, but I don’t see why other elements couldn’t have also formed in just the right way to be able to reproduce, and maybe eventually “think”.
We’re naturally inclined to be ok with giant distances on the horizon. It’s natural to put more emphasis on that part of the world. Hold up your thumb to the horizon and notice how many things fit alongside it compared to your thumb help downwards against the ground.
On the surface of our planet the up direction isn’t usually interesting and the down direction isn’t even there. It is therefore quite horrifying (“fun”) to imagine space going down forever.
Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW
Like imagine making a complete account of all world views of all people in all of history - all perspectives, and all the physical events of that history. There is almost infinite detail there. In a way, in the universe all the details of all the things matter, including at the physical level, otherwise you wouldn't get the diversity and complexity you get now.
Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology (recall the black hole images). It is well within our ability to set up a constellation of satellites, perhaps spanning a few of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
Assuming the cosmological principle is true and the universe is infinite, wouldn’t we be guaranteed an infinite number of Sols? ;)
We only know what we think we know. We could just be grains of sand in someone else's world for all we know.
It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.
In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.
Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.
Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.
Maybe these species are distributed evenly throughout our 90-billion-lightyear-in-diameter universe.
Maybe half evolved to our current level of sophistication in less time than it took us.
So... what is the minimum duration of time, after the big bang, that some lineage of creatures might take to evolve from sludge into a life form capable of emitting data via radio waves? It cannot happen instantaneously... first conditions need to cool down enough to be amenable. Beyond that, it seems to require a little time for evolution to get to human-like level, it took us 13+ billion years.
So given the lack of meaningful signals we have detected so far, Occam's Razor says the nearest intelligent life that currently exists out there is too young and far away for its transmissions to have yet reached Earth.
https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
"pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from you to remote servers and back again."
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
Storing data as acoustic waves gave a higher capacity in practice, as propagation is slower thus fitting a larger number of symbol per time unit.
I understand that we'd have to account for the movement of objects, of course, but with computers, seems like a small hurdle...
A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.
You "just" need to get far enough away (~600AU). Interferometry is extremely difficult to pull this off with and it’s further complicated by the host star being so much brighter than the exoplanet.
See this recent Fraser Cain interview with Dr. Slava Turyshev:
https://www.youtube.com/live/lqzJewjZUkk?si=WWNdR1PESYzD0d4X
But I won't go to the mat arguing my impression; we only have evidence from one planet to go by, so any view here lacks empirical evidence.
By Greg Egan, so highly recommended.
> you'd have to get really far back from the Sun to resolve the image, no?
Yah, a few hundred AU.
> you are beholden to the orbital mechanics of your viewing satellite as it plods along.
Yah, any mission like this -- interferometry or gravitational lensing -- is going to be super long and hit very few targets.
> Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology
Yah, at radio frequency while pinned to a common rock. The wavelength of visible light is hundreds of nanometers and we're talking across massive distances and significant gravity gradients and even relativistic corrections. The "big" space interferometers currently being considered are in the mid-infrared (e.g. longer wavelengths) across baselines of hundreds of meters.
All of these ideas are really hard.
So why not use interferometry instead? Well, it has some significant drawbacks. For example: the Event Horizon Telescope used radio telescopes - and pretty much had to, due to how interferometry works: you need to be able to compare the phase shifts between the multiple telescopes, which means you need to be able to sample the signal faster than the radio frequency you're using and record it. The EHT records 64 gigabits per second for each telescope, and then all this data needs to be combined to compute the resolved image. This amount of data would be problematic for space-based telescopes - even on Earth, it was not practical to send multiple petabytes over the internet, so it was saved to hard drives which were shipped by truck instead. This isn't practical in space, so you would need to transmit the data by radio, which means you'd end up with some crazy ratio of thousands of hours of transmitting for every one hour you spend recording.
Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native" are human terms referring to categories we invented to make sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken, slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some timescales, unbalanced in others.
Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's hardly a case an ecosystem was destroyed. Adding non-native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes transforming them into something dissimilar to what came before - but it's not like life disappears. The ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo".
> That doesn't seem random does it?
Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you zoom out enough and smooth over details.
It's a beautiful nightmare, isn't it?
The story went that their local system was in some sort of a dust cloud, so they had no stars visible from their planet. At some point, that cloud somehow dissipated. On the planet, one of the inhabitants bothered to look up one night, and it hated everything it saw. So the race developed a space program to go out there and destroy it all.
For some reason I think it was Adams' H2G2, but the tone of my recollection does not quite feel on-brand for those stories. Not sure.
Also, Captain Archer in Enterprise used the name Sol when making contact with aliens.
Yes, climate change is a massive problem, and humanity is ignoring it to our own peril.
But peril here means the unnecessary deaths and displacement of hundreds of millions of people - a civilization-defining tragedy no doubt, but ultimately nothing so serious as to cause our extinction.
We have the technology and knowledge to adapt, change course, finally get of fossil fuels, and enter into a new age of sustainable renewable energy.
We're gonna do it too late, and whole ecosystems, species, and far too many humans are all going to perish. Sea life may become extinct.
But at no point is our survival as a SPECIES in question.
But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about things like various bird or mammal species than I am some bacteria.
> whether two spatially separated events occur at the same time – is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame.
But What I don’t understand about this is why is “time” framed as observer based? In my mind, the events do happen at the same time and just are unable to be observed as such. I feel like time is a figment of our imagination, it’s just a measurement. In my pea brain time makes sense more as a constant and the other things are something else that impacts the latency of observance
Small quibble: Credits for the soundtrack are missing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_2001%3A_A_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope
[4] https://www.copernicus.eu/en/about-copernicus/infrastructure...
The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.
History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.
Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.
They flew out of the cloud.
They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.
For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.
"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.
On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.
If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so.
So if intelligent life -- capable of becoming a space-faring civilization -- is common, why is the galaxy not colonized already?
Kursgesagt has a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?
That fact still messes me up every time! Like, I know very well that 52! is a ridiculously huge number. And still, it feels like "but it's just 52 cards, give me an afternoon and I'll do it, how many combinations can there be?"...
Yet, here we are, made of it.
Yes, it is. It is 420 million years in the past in our frame of reference. The link you posted is about how frames of reference of other observers might differ from ours. However, doesn't make the notion "420 million years in the past [in our frame of reference]" any less well-defined.
Perhaps instead it is to be observed in energy preserving vessels (i.e. emit nothing) in transit to the next fuel stop (a planetary system). Perhaps dark matter can be explained by the congested highway of these unobservable vessels.
Not so, I would say.
Space and time are inherently linked under special (and General) relativity. For two observers who have relative motion between them, the space (distance between two 'events') and time (between the said events) are both different.
When some poem or a song talks about the universe being frozen at a given instant of time, that can be only in a given reference frame. There's no absolute time for the universe.
There's still doubt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_result...
+1. A big randomness, following the laws of Physics that are themselves possibly rooted in something.
With that big randomness, by some chance, intelligent life has happened that can wonder.
Where's more to be uncovered are in the laws of Physics (and why are they what they are), and thereby better matching the probabilities of the said randomness.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
- Douglas Adams
Using the term "error correction" incorrectly assumes there is some "correct" state to return to, but nature is indeed random and continuously evolving, and there is no privileged "correct" state, just the ever-evolving current state.
The Christian belief is that creation was made for God and not the other way around. It's actually profoundly not focused on the self.
Its a logical consequence of the speed of light being constant in all inertial reference frames, regardless of the velocity.
This is an axiom of special relativity, but it has also been verified at (admittedly low) relative velocities.
That in itself is somewhat absurd, but it leads to further absurdities when you do the math. In order for the speed of light to remain invariant, you can no longer speak of an absolute (preferred) frame of reference.
You can of course, privilege certain reference frames e.g. Earth, but its rather arbitrary.
To prove, we would need to find such life.
To not have doubt, we need to have a reasonably high confidence that such life is there. However, the estimates are so wild and range from very unlikely to no-doubt. Thus, there is doubt (to the best we understand).
I think people are attached to the current state of life on earth, not realizing that it is transient. Life itself and the many forms it can embody is amazing, the exact form it currently takes is not that special.
But even then, if we knew what caused the universe to exist, we would then be looking at the cause of the universe and wondering what caused that cause to exist. And so I think we'd still be left wondering why anything exists at all at the end of the day.
Anyway, from Kant’s Wikipedia:
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms. From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his lifeThe Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across. So at least that long assuming we can ever attain near-light-speed travel (unlikely). And due to cosmic inflation, many other galaxies are receeding at faster than light speed, so we could never get there.
There could be a lot of intelligent life (as intelligent as us, maybe more so) that can never realistically travel beyond their local star systems, and we'd never notice them.
It’s basically impossible to grasp what looking at a hundred thousand galaxies means, and that’s just a small section. It’s literally beyond human comprehension.
In October 2016, deep-field images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggested that there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, or about 10 times more galaxies than previously suggested, according to the journal Nature. In an email with Live Science, lead author Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, said there were about 100 million stars in the average galaxy.
Sorry for the rant, I don’t get to do any dimensional analysis in my work and miss it from HS chemistry, lol. This kinda stuff makes me want to be a flat earther…
Sure, it's easy to imagine someone doing it a million years faster than us. But at the same time it's very likely we are just early to the party.
What would it be like to not be like anything?
1. God is wasting the vast, vast, vast majority of the universe on emptiness while he focuses on his fave planet.
2. The universe is full of humans, in which case Jesus is presumably getting re-crucified every few seconds to absolve new groups. Or I guess maybe he split up into a trillion copies that all got crucified at once? Or we’re the 1-in-a-trillion lucky ones that everyone else just gets to hear about?
3. The rest of the universe has aliens because god got bored/wanted things for us to play with, as his super special favorite species. The aliens don’t get to look like god, ofc.
No offense intended to anyone, but I don’t see how you could possibly accept Christian doctrine without necessarily thinking of earth as unfathomably special.
In PIE it's sunnōn. In some languages that evolved to some variation of sun or son, in some to became sol (notably Latin). And many use both variations in some capacity
We're just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
But all this makes sense when you realize it’s a primitive human myth made by primitive people with limited understanding of the universe and the world around them.
They even got as far as describing God as "uncaused causality" centuries ago, which lined up pretty well with the translation of the name God reportedly gave one of their forbearers from a burning bush, "I am who am," or colloquially, "I'm the one who just is. I am being-itself, not contingent in any way, outside your concepts of 'before' or 'contingent upon.'"
I don’t really get the point that you’re making.
We'd need to start cracking some kind of jumping/FTL/etc technology to have any hope of real exploration.
And I have heard it all before: worm holes, warp drive, etc pp. A fun exercise, but not rooted in reality at all.
All you can do is to appeal to completely unknown, unimaginable magical breakthroughs, which are inherently difficult to discuss, so I don't think this will be very fruitful.
I have heard intelligent people claim a good few times now, and feel like it's obviously unscientific. It seems faith-based. Sure, life on Earth has proven to be resilient and adaptable, but we've no way to be sure how the planet will develop in the coming thousands and millions of years.
Climates and ecosystems and geology change. Life on Earth has persisted through some wild misadventures and atmospheric changes, but it's a very complex system. Surely it's theoretically feasible that some surprising thing could set us off on a course towards ending up with an atmosphere similar to Venus or Mars one day? How can we know with certainty this won't happen?
To me it seems like "life-ism" rather than species-ism at that point. The idea that "life will go on, no matter what" seems so obviously intuitive to a member of the Life class. I fear it is a misguided - though romantic, and somewhat touching - sentiment.
If the calculations were to say there's very high chances of the universe teeming with life at many places, but life is not 'found' yet, then I would say it like 'no proof but no doubt'.
What the Wright Brothers did was the easiest of the three: New engineering. It didn't contradict anything then known in accepted science.
Fusion energy is being studied now, and it's substantially more difficult than what the Wright brothers did because it requires New Science. But it doesn't violate any of the accepted fundamentals of the universe, so it will probably happen eventually.
Now we come to the most difficult of the three: New Fundamentals. Traveling to other galaxies falls in this category. For it to work we would have to discover some brand new principle that makes the universe work, and that principle would need to be so radical that it makes what we now know about the laws of physics wrong.
That's not likely to happen. By comparison, the Wright brothers' invention was for all practical purposes inevitable; people had been flying heavier-than-air craft like gliders and kites for hundreds of years. All that was needed was an energy-dense power plant.
Is anything possible? Sure.
Is anything currently proposed as possible likely to sterilize the planet? No.
We could get hit by a mini-moon sized asteroid tomorrow though that liquifies the crust, of course.
Caveats:
1. It's really, really hard to supply enough energy to go that fast, even with fusion power.
2. Your passengers won't be able to go home again, because by the time they get back everyone they've ever known will be long dead.
3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of dust and disintegrate.
It is absolutely incomprehensible how _vast_ the Universe is.
I can only hope one day I'll be reborn as a lifeform who can bend time and space to explore it all.
Also, to @ratedgene if you feel left out, you should be part of something meaningful. Go join the exploration mission for space travel and astronomy. It's a resume submission away. [4]
Having worked at NASA, the work environment, while critical and argumentative much of the time, is still very much sci-fi fans and the dream of galaxies far far away. If European, then ESA. [5] If Asiatic, possibly JAXA [6], China's space agency [7] is usually off limits to posters on HN.
If not those, how about grants and research in related areas. There are many ways to contribute. [8] Checking, there's currently 18 of 3331 solicitations due in the next 30 days. [9]
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/dive-into-anything-ghost-js-bIYvFm...
[2] https://anvaka.github.io/pm/#/?_k=4hdian
[4] https://www.nasa.gov/careers/
[5] https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA
[6] https://global.jaxa.jp/about/employ/index.html
[7] https://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/
[8] https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/
[9] https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/solicitat...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-house-overs...
Cleverness: I'm funny and I'm confident enough in it to risk doing it publicly
Status: The statuses of you and Bob allow you to play a joke on them. Often such jokes are a public demonstration of status, like children do more explicitly and often unconsciously in the schoolyard.
Empathy: 'I say suffering is funny'; it asserts a willingness to violate a taboo, be unempathetic, and therefore potentially dangerous
Personal power: I'm powerful and independent enough to do something on a whim
etc.
Ed: I've slipped into the fallacy a bit. Reference frames don't have locations, so they can't be "nearby". Just pretend I said "reference frame of a nearby object".
Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean if we clash with anything (even as small as a space dust) while traveling at a substantial fraction of c, it would disintegrate us?
At 1% the speed of light (approx 3000000 m/s) and a medium-mass dust (1x10-5 kg, stationary), not enough force or area to dent steel (350 N/mm^2), but over time, lots of dust could cause erosion (quick math/estimates).
E.g.: You might believe that some variability in conditions (hot-house Earth, iceball Earth) is required to "kick start" evolution. Okay, then simply pick out the subset of the parameter space with that amount of variability.
So, despite the stigma attached to all things UAP/UFO, I think it should be upvoted and not downvoted.
But I don't think we will find it. Life is special. The earth is special. And all the planets and all the stars and all the solar systems and all the galaxies cannot make something special again. So alas, we are earth. and we are all that is out there. And the rest of the universe is just there for our awe. That is how special we are.
I'm always speechless when I see these. Simply mind boggling
I was thinking v would be more like 10% of c, which would mean about 1000kG (1 kiloton) of TNT, or about 1/20 of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. From a particle of dust weighing 10mG. You'd be toast.
I just presume that such observation spacecraft makes sense to be made as a rather long term investment than some one-time fly-by thing like New Horizons, so the sensible thing to do is to have it in an orbit around the Sun at that (≥650AU) distance and to take multiple observations. Of course, the easiest solution may be for the orbit to be elliptical one, with the useful position only around its aphelion, in which case it will be able to observe only a single target indeed. But, I also presume that past the first few such elliptical orbit experiments the aim will shift to have the spacecrafts set on distant (and most likely circular) orbits that make possible observations at any time and thus its target would be something akin to a horizon rather than a single point, wouldn't it?
What we do know that we don’t know, is already a massive amount - enough to not have any actual confidence in any guesses we could make.
Hell, Europa could have life in it, and we currently couldn’t tell. Venus too. Maybe Mars. Maybe IO.
It’s a whole class of shitty jokes where you mess with people under the entire purpose of doing it without them knowing. If Bob knows he’s being messed with, that’s something completely different.
But I cannot truly physically believe how much there is here in our universe.
It’s one thing to see zooming out animated diagrams
It’s a whole other thing to see these photos.
Imagine having a mind capable of holding every planet in every galaxy as familiar as we know our own.
I don't see where it's expressed above (?); no willfullness involved - I didn't even realize that you thought were having such a heated discussion. The other commenter also didn't pick up on it either.
Short of some extremely radical new physics, humans will never, ever reach these other galaxies. Maybe the Magellanic Clouds, and Andromeda (which is coming to us).
Even the most optimistic sci-fi like Star Trek balks at traversing intergalactic space and they have warp drive, wormholes and sometimes go to other dimensions!
The Wright brothers seem like a poor example. But consider the slowing down of time near mass, the tunnel effect, superconductors, super fluids... There are many examples of things that make absolutely no sense in the context of older theories. I don't think our theories are the final ones just because we can explain most things that we have observed so far.
Sure I find it hard to imagine how individuals could travel to another galaxy, absent something like usable wormholes. But some kind of giant world moving through space over the span of millions of years, why not?
The point of these discussions is not to find the correct answer about what will happen. It's just fun to dream and imagine the possibilities, precisely because nobody has the answer (and certainly not those who pretend to know what's possible).
The problem is that an exponential slowdown at each level requires discounting the probability of being in a simulation by an exponential amount per level. So instead of being able to say that the weighted odds of being in a simulation are higher than the odds of not being in a simulation, you have to say that, at best, there's a small chance of being in a simulation.
Multicellular life is certainly less common, and sapience is also less common (and may not be only an emergent property of multicellular life) than just replicating chemical structures.
Certain pushes in Earth's history likely shaped and sculpted current state, but the general factors aren't terribly uncommon (water, Goldilocks zone, somewhat stable solar systems, etc.). Moons at our size are less common, and whether that is crucial is unknown. Snowball earth and hell-phase may be common. Plate tectonics may be a limiting factor.
I look forward to humanity discovering this, then finally agreeing that perpetuation of sapience generally or humanity specifically beyond the heat death of the universe is a good goal, much better than the common banal drivel that drives our wars or religions today.
If you are looking for a goal, then you are looking for a fight or a war.
Instead, a good goal is what comes from the good lessons of religions: the idea that humanity is nothing, that you are nothing, that your plans are nothing, and all that matters is the creator and the rewards he set abound around the problems that you struggle against. Lessons like good vs evil are derived from this paradigm. And the paradigm also inspires studying the universe from obsession with the creator's enigma.
OTOH all ideas that lead to war and conflict grow from obsession with the self. If not the self, then with your people, and if not the people then with your hatred for anyone other than your self and your people.
For closer objects this shift is useful, as it's the only way to directly measure the distance to a object: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_in_astronomy Every other method for estimating distances to astronomical objects (standard candles, redshift, etc) are based on parallax measurements.
(Or randomly and very seldom but often enough in vast interstellar space to give rise to dark matter like phenomenon?)
The other nice thing about being on an escape trajectory is that because of how gravitational lensing works, rather than a focal point you get a focal line. So as the probe continues moving away from the sun, it can continue imaging its target (and the image quality may get better as it gets further out, since the ring gains more separation from the surface of the Sun.)
- I leave Earth and travel 1ly at speed c
- I arrive one year later
- An Earth telescope will see the destination as it was when I left
- It will take another year to see me arrive
So in a way that's already happening because I'm traveling quite quickly - twice as fast as it seems from Earth's perspective - and I arrive in what appears from Earth to be the past.
If I’m talking about a class of things explicitly defined by having attribute X and someone comes in and says “I don’t think that has attribute X”, that’s willfully if ignoring what is being discussed.
Also, don’t give a lecture about making up people’s state of mind and then pretend I think I’m having a heated discussion. It’s not heated, I’m just explaining in the simplest terms possible that there is a class of jokes where the subject does not know a joke is occurring. It just seems heated to you because you don’t like being told you’re missing the point.
If you say these are not changes, only actions, then the same can be said of the Universe: it didn't change, the rules of physics have always been the same, it just does things according to its rules.
I'm not going to pretend I have anything like the math or theoretical physics knowledge to grok the latest perspectives on whether the universe actually had a beginning or an end, or whether it goes through singularities, or any of probably a dozen other theories that I've vaguely heard of and are over my head, never mind all the ones I don't even know about. I'm not aware of any that posit the universe is truly unbound by time, though, that time is not somehow a constraint on the state of the universe such that it doesn't actually change, except from our own perspective. Is that even what you're suggesting? Or have I missed your point entirely?
But this can be done for any system just as well: instead of saying that the egg was broken to make an omlette, you could say that the egg has always been in the same state: the state where it is whole before the omlette, and broken afterwards. The egg itself is a timeless concept, but we just experience it differently as time passes for us. I don't see why this argument works for God and not for my egg.
So from our/Noah's perspective, that situation has come and gone, has changed, because we're bound by physics and the passage of time and cannot exist in that circumstance any longer. But from God's perspective, that world is always destroyed by flood. It may be the case that the criteria that categorize a world as "destroyable by flood" never exist in our experience of time again, and it may equally be the case that God knows this will be the case.
But God's willingness to destroy the world by flood under those criteria has not and will never change, because God's will does not change.