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First images from Euclid are in

(dlmultimedia.esa.int)
1413 points mooreds | 58 comments | | HN request time: 3.047s | source | bottom
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neom ◴[] No.41909872[source]
Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)
replies(18): >>41910015 #>>41910437 #>>41910440 #>>41910444 #>>41910670 #>>41910845 #>>41911871 #>>41912134 #>>41913189 #>>41913514 #>>41913608 #>>41914208 #>>41914357 #>>41916581 #>>41918228 #>>41919777 #>>41924732 #>>41925552 #
1. wayoverthecloud ◴[] No.41910437[source]
I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe really have any "meaning", the term that humans invented and that even they are unsure of? Then, I think it's a big randomness, a random accident, a big joke, just happening with nothing to make sense of.
replies(7): >>41910601 #>>41911668 #>>41913445 #>>41913522 #>>41913544 #>>41914113 #>>41927557 #
2. imchillyb ◴[] No.41910601[source]
So many rules, laws, and systems for all of this to be random. Seems a waste of good code if everything is random.

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.

replies(9): >>41910671 #>>41910727 #>>41911203 #>>41911218 #>>41911587 #>>41911788 #>>41912847 #>>41913552 #>>41916483 #
3. frabjoused ◴[] No.41910671[source]
My money is on it just being a playing field for the game of life. A damn good one at that.
4. andsoitis ◴[] No.41910727[source]
> Randomness should have error correction, as it's random.

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.

5. felizuno ◴[] No.41911203[source]
I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2, 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think random implies balance though I understand that statistically this is the expected outcome of large set randomness such as ...the universe... (OP)

Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW

replies(1): >>41911582 #
6. samus ◴[] No.41911218[source]
Ecosystems eventually adapt to the newcomers. And it's not like the species already part of the ecosystem wouldn't ever evolve to something detrimental to the whole.
7. semi-extrinsic ◴[] No.41911582{3}[source]
Randomness and probabilities can be incredibly hard to wrap our heads around.

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.

replies(3): >>41913005 #>>41913715 #>>41924668 #
8. phito ◴[] No.41911587[source]
Ecosystems do adapt. They look broken to us because of our ridiculously small life span.

That's why I dislike framing climate change actions as "saving the planet". The planet will be just fine. We won't.

replies(2): >>41911745 #>>41912024 #
9. feoren ◴[] No.41911668[source]
It's not a joke, because jokes have underlying meaning. It is somewhere between a "random accident" and the only way it could have possibly been given the constraints of fundamental physics. I suspect that everything that could possibly be, is, but it's random that you are you and I am me and we find ourselves here in this corner of this galaxy in this part of the universe which might itself be the inside of a giant black hole. But even if our universe is random, that doesn't mean there's nothing to make sense of. There's lots to make sense of.
replies(2): >>41912264 #>>41927594 #
10. caf ◴[] No.41911745{3}[source]
You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.
11. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.41911788[source]
> Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species.

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.

12. shiroiushi ◴[] No.41912024{3}[source]
"The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.
replies(2): >>41912122 #>>41913963 #
13. conductr ◴[] No.41912122{4}[source]
It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.
replies(1): >>41912145 #
14. shiroiushi ◴[] No.41912145{5}[source]
Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles.

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.

replies(2): >>41914759 #>>41915776 #
15. kortilla ◴[] No.41912264[source]
Jokes don’t always have meaning. “I want to play a joke on Bob” can very easily mean “I’m just going to torture Bob a bit for my amusement”. The joke will not have meaning to Bob.
replies(2): >>41912958 #>>41916613 #
16. ordu ◴[] No.41912847[source]
If you first saw Earth billion years ago, you wouldn't be able to predict the current state of affairs. Why? Because there would be myriads of possible outcomes, and you'd struggle to pick one, even just imagining all of them would be impossible for a weak human mind. Weak human mind cannot truly grasp the full extent of what happens now despite it can look at it directly.

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"?

17. alonsonic ◴[] No.41912958{3}[source]
It has a meaning to Bob because the joke exists for a reason he can comprehend even he doesn't like it.
replies(2): >>41913855 #>>41917865 #
18. grvbck ◴[] No.41913005{4}[source]
> 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.

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?"...

19. alok-g ◴[] No.41913445[source]
>> I think it's a big randomness

+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.

replies(1): >>41923914 #
20. layer8 ◴[] No.41913522[source]
Or it might be the necessary logical consequence of having anything at all.
replies(1): >>41915826 #
21. codeulike ◴[] No.41913544[source]
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

- Douglas Adams

22. HarHarVeryFunny ◴[] No.41913552[source]
Every part of the ecosystem, at any point in history, has co-evolved to be the state it is in - it's an intricate network all balanced to co-exist. If you change any part of the this ecosystem then the rest will have to adapt to the change, but evolutionary timescales are relatively long, and it's not going to settle down to where it was before. Whether you regard a new balance as simply that, or as the old balance being destroyed is just your choice of description.

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.

23. fsagx ◴[] No.41913715{4}[source]
52! even has its own website:

https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

24. Brian_K_White ◴[] No.41913855{4}[source]
That's only true if he's aware of it.
replies(1): >>41916037 #
25. phito ◴[] No.41913963{4}[source]
Sure but you know very well that when people say "the planet" they mean "the ecosystem". It doesn't change what I meant. There's been mass extinctions before, way worse than what will happen with human-made climate change. Life has proven to be very resilient and ecosystems re-emerge.

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.

replies(1): >>41915836 #
26. km144 ◴[] No.41914113[source]
I don't think the universe can have "meaning" in the human sense, because any potential "meaning" is outside of our field of observation or understanding. If something indeed created the universe or some definitive sequence of events spurred it into existence, I think that would constitute "meaning" enough for humans to be satisfied. But there is almost certainly not way to observe that fact because it is outside of the realm of our possible experiences.

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.

replies(1): >>41915067 #
27. conductr ◴[] No.41914759{6}[source]
It’s definitely sad and especially so that humans are causing/contributing to it. It’s mostly because of our timescale being only witness to a decline and what’s lost is tangible and known. What’s unknown is how on an evolutionary timescale the field is being reset for the next round of species to emerge. From that perspective, it’s a bit interesting to think what could happen. Particularly in the mammal world as humans have or will have eradicated most large predators. Prey populations will swell/collapse and cause adaptation. Some current herbivores/omnivores may convert to carnivore due to the availability of resources. A lot will happen. If you freeze time to protect existing species too much, it’s mostly just for sentimental reasons. Some species do a great service to current ecosystems and are vital to human life as we know it, protecting those is a little different IMO (bees come to mind.)
28. smeej ◴[] No.41915067[source]
I think this is why Christians posit that the Creator actually entered into humanity, so we could understand--or at least be as much less wrong in our speculations as we can handle, small as we are.

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.'"

replies(1): >>41923902 #
29. sourcepluck ◴[] No.41915776{6}[source]
> Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles.

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.

replies(2): >>41916059 #>>41919977 #
30. AlecSchueler ◴[] No.41915826[source]
I've always thought of it more as the logical consequence of having nothing, the need for there to be a something to oppose it.
replies(1): >>41926396 #
31. AlecSchueler ◴[] No.41915836{5}[source]
I take it you're also a smoker?
replies(1): >>41917887 #
32. lazide ◴[] No.41916037{5}[source]
But we try to not talk about Cincinnati.
33. lazide ◴[] No.41916059{7}[source]
Co2 has had spikes up to > 5000 ppm in the atmosphere in the past.

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.

34. SamPatt ◴[] No.41916483[source]
Non-native species don't exist when you use long time scales and realize humans are species too.

Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by Chris Thomas is an interesting book on this topic.

35. mmooss ◴[] No.41916613{3}[source]
There is a lot of subtle meaning layered into that:

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.

replies(1): >>41917856 #
36. kortilla ◴[] No.41917856{4}[source]
Yes, none of that meaning is apparent to Bob, which is my point.
replies(1): >>41919856 #
37. kortilla ◴[] No.41917865{4}[source]
No, bob doesn’t know he’s even being intentionally fucked with. There are many videos of this style of “prank” available on the internet.
38. phito ◴[] No.41917887{6}[source]
... What? No.
replies(1): >>41926743 #
39. mmooss ◴[] No.41919856{5}[source]
I think it is apparent to Bob and to everyone else, implicitly but unmistakeably; it's a message on many levels.
replies(1): >>41921214 #
40. shiroiushi ◴[] No.41919977{7}[source]
Well, this planet's been hit by asteroids including the massive one that made the Chixhulub crater, and life persisted. I think the idea that some life wouldn't survive all but the most catastrophic event (i.e. something liquifying the entire crust) is honestly nuts. Pumping a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere isn't going to destroy life; there's plenty of plants and bacteria that thrive with lots of CO2, even if humans don't.
41. kortilla ◴[] No.41921214{6}[source]
No, it is not apparent to Bob. Please stop willfully misinterpreting it.

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.

replies(1): >>41921659 #
42. mmooss ◴[] No.41921659{7}[source]
You don't need to make up a state of mind for other people - the smart approach is to realize you have no idea what they are thinking - just politely say what you have to say. The second paragraph is fine.

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.

replies(1): >>41931901 #
43. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41923902{3}[source]
Sure, but it is a meaningless take. It posits into existence this being with this property, when you can just as easily posit that the universe itself has this property.
replies(1): >>41927202 #
44. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41923914[source]
I don't think there's any reason to believe that there can be an explanation for the laws of physics in this sense. Just like the laws of logic, they might just be.
replies(1): >>41926352 #
45. Zitrax ◴[] No.41924668{4}[source]
I guess properly is important there, in reality certain initial orderings are more common and we use certain techniques for shuffling with our hands making it less random than "properly".
46. alok-g ◴[] No.41926352{3}[source]
I agree.

There's surely however more to uncover for Physics.

47. alok-g ◴[] No.41926396{3}[source]
When they applied Heisenberg principle to vacuum to bring up zero point energy, Casimir force was found, etc., I understood thtis as the principle opposing nothingness.
48. AlecSchueler ◴[] No.41926743{7}[source]
But your life is transient, you might as well pollute yourself.
replies(1): >>41933753 #
49. smeej ◴[] No.41927202{4}[source]
But the universe can and does change. Something that is, in that most fundamental sense, does not also have potentiality. Anything that can change, that can be "other than it is," must have some potentiality un-actualized, must not fully "be," because there are some things it is not but could be (and, indeed, later will be).
replies(1): >>41932017 #
50. veunes ◴[] No.41927557[source]
That's a deep thought! I think the idea of "meaning" is something we created to make sense of the world around us
51. veunes ◴[] No.41927594[source]
I like the idea that while everything may feel random, there’s still a rich tapestry of experiences and interactions to explore
52. kortilla ◴[] No.41931901{8}[source]
It’s willful because you have ignore the very small and to the point comment I made about talking about jokes where the subject is unaware.

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.

replies(1): >>41940459 #
53. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41932017{5}[source]
According to the Bible, God also changed, in several ways. He made a covenant with Noah, he chose a people and negotiated with Moses which commandments to give them, he came down to Earth to live and die as a human, and there are probably others.

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.

replies(1): >>41937459 #
54. phito ◴[] No.41933753{8}[source]
I can't, I have self preservation instincts.
55. smeej ◴[] No.41937459{6}[source]
Being able to interact with changing things does not require changing if you're outside the things that change. For example, if you're outside of time (which, admittedly, is really hard to wrap our heads around), from Noah's perspective, you went from "not having made a covenant with him" to "having made a covenant with him," but that's only true relative to Noah's position, not yours. You have no "before" and "after" because you're not inside time.

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?

replies(1): >>41948574 #
56. mmooss ◴[] No.41940459{9}[source]
You do keep talking about my state of mind, ironically in the first and last sentences of this comment. You have no idea, of course, what you're talking about, regarding me or anyone.
57. tsimionescu ◴[] No.41948574{7}[source]
I think you responded to my point, but not in a way that is convincing to me at least. If God was willing to destroy the world in a flood before the covenant, and is no longer willing afterwards, then I would say that God has clearly changed. I accept that you could posit that God was always in the same state, one where he was willing to destroy the world before the flood, and not willing after.

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.

replies(1): >>41955506 #
58. smeej ◴[] No.41955506{8}[source]
I think I would summarize it somewhat differently, that God is (as a constant state of being) willing to destroy the world with a flood whenever it is as it was in Noah's time (which criteria determine this are not necessarily known to us, except insofar as they were met then and are not met now).

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.