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First images from Euclid are in

(dlmultimedia.esa.int)
1413 points mooreds | 26 comments | 21 Oct 24 20:15 UTC | HN request time: 1.814s | source | bottom
1. Jun8 ◴[22 Oct 24 03:11 UTC] No.41910854[source]▶
Watching this is ... hard to find the words to describe it. It's insane!

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))

replies(4): >>41911030 #>>41911331 #>>41911402 #>>41913178 #
2. JKCalhoun ◴[22 Oct 24 03:53 UTC] No.41911030[source]▶
Small and so brief too.
3. seoulmetro ◴[22 Oct 24 05:01 UTC] No.41911331[source]▶
>in that being this small we can know so much!

We only know what we think we know. We could just be grains of sand in someone else's world for all we know.

replies(1): >>41912904 #
4. kranner ◴[22 Oct 24 05:16 UTC] No.41911402[source]▶
That we can know anything at all is a miracle in itself. It could have been just fine evolutionarily for us Earth creatures to be no more than Large Action Models with no inner experience, but somehow we ended up as these perceiving, cogitating, apprehending beings.
replies(3): >>41912322 #>>41912458 #>>41914387 #
5. valval ◴[22 Oct 24 08:30 UTC] No.41912322[source]▶
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
replies(1): >>41913314 #
6. namaria ◴[22 Oct 24 08:59 UTC] No.41912458[source]▶
Our existence and the universe being knowable is all intertwined.

A reverse entropy universe or a random one would preclude any meaningful learning, thus also the evolution of intelligence and technological civilization as well.

7. udev4096 ◴[22 Oct 24 10:25 UTC] No.41912904[source]▶
"Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."

- Carl Sagan

replies(1): >>41921266 #
8. bamboozled ◴[22 Oct 24 11:20 UTC] No.41913178[source]▶
we're literally nothing compared to it

Yet, here we are, made of it.

9. elteto ◴[22 Oct 24 11:43 UTC] No.41913314{3}[source]▶
How arrogant and silly to look at these incredible pictures and think “Yep, this was all made for ME. I am the center of the universe!”.
replies(2): >>41913577 #>>41914169 #
10. protonbob ◴[22 Oct 24 12:30 UTC] No.41913577{4}[source]▶
Q1: What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.

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.

replies(2): >>41914448 #>>41915061 #
11. IAmGraydon ◴[22 Oct 24 13:41 UTC] No.41914169{4}[source]▶
How arrogant for anyone to look at these incredible pictures and think they know ANYTHING at all. We may be the center of it all, we may not, this may be a massive simulation, or a massive random accident. The only correct answer is to admit we know nothing. Humans are so fixated on knowing everything.
replies(2): >>41915017 #>>41915529 #
12. bbor ◴[22 Oct 24 14:01 UTC] No.41914387[source]▶
How could you possibly be an affective agent without knowledge? And how could anything ever use knowledge without perceiving it? Whenever anyone talks about philosophical zombies, I say “show me one, then” — until then I’m sticking with (what I see as) the scientific consensus, which is that we’re material like literally everything else is in the Actual, perceivable world.

What would it be like to not be like anything?

replies(1): >>41915759 #
13. bbor ◴[22 Oct 24 14:07 UTC] No.41914448{5}[source]▶
Well, creation was made for one god, which happens to look just like us and never once mentions other peoples. To be a Christian astronomer you have to believe one of these:

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.

replies(1): >>41915196 #
14. elteto ◴[22 Oct 24 15:06 UTC] No.41915017{5}[source]▶
I do know one thing: fairy tales are not real.
replies(1): >>41917983 #
15. elteto ◴[22 Oct 24 15:10 UTC] No.41915061{5}[source]▶
It actually is incredibly human-centered, to the point that humans were made in _his_ image and the Sun is supposed to turn _around_ the Earth.

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.

replies(2): >>41915216 #>>41923580 #
16. protonbob ◴[22 Oct 24 15:22 UTC] No.41915196{6}[source]▶
Oh I do think it’s special. But thinking of the universe as a waste because there are lots of uninhabited planets is pretty human focused. Why would it be a waste for an infinite god with infinite amount of attention to spend time creating a large universe?
17. protonbob ◴[22 Oct 24 15:25 UTC] No.41915216{6}[source]▶
Not to get to into the weeds but being made in the image of God does not necessarily involve physical appearance. Also, it has nothing to do with being heliocentric or geocentric.

I don’t really get the point that you’re making.

18. mr_mitm ◴[22 Oct 24 15:50 UTC] No.41915529{5}[source]▶
I think this line of reasoning does a disservice to all the scientists and thinkers who contributed to a considerable amount of knowledge. We learned so much about the universe in the past 100 years, it's impudent to call this nothing just because it's not everything.
replies(1): >>41916125 #
19. kranner ◴[22 Oct 24 16:10 UTC] No.41915759{3}[source]▶
I'm also a materialist, and the lack of p-zombies here cannot preclude their existence elsewhere.
replies(1): >>41921405 #
20. IAmGraydon ◴[22 Oct 24 16:44 UTC] No.41916125{6}[source]▶
I'm talking about filling in the blanks in things that are not yet known, not discounting all scientific progress. The point was that the person I replied to held just as irrational a belief as the person they were criticizing. Neither of them knows the deeper nature of reality and whether humanity was created by something or is just an accident of nature, so both of their replies are absurd as one another's.
21. valval ◴[22 Oct 24 19:48 UTC] No.41917983{6}[source]▶
To be fair, as a christian I don’t believe in goblins and unicorns. I do believe in something though. I suppose you do too, and in the end our core beliefs might not even be that different.
replies(1): >>41920495 #
22. elteto ◴[23 Oct 24 01:01 UTC] No.41920495{7}[source]▶
But that’s just where you happen to draw the line and is not really relevant. You do believe in whatever your bestiary happens to contain, like magical burning bushes, giants, and super-strong men with magical hair. Whether a goblin is in there or not is an implementation detail.
23. seoulmetro ◴[23 Oct 24 02:47 UTC] No.41921266{3}[source]▶
Yeah, but there are more atoms than grains of sand. We can still be grains of sand in someone's universe.
24. bbor ◴[23 Oct 24 03:11 UTC] No.41921405{4}[source]▶
How would you know one when you saw it, though? What is a p-zombie, if you’re not allowed to use any synonyms for “soul”?
replies(1): >>41942514 #
25. pbhjpbhj ◴[23 Oct 24 10:18 UTC] No.41923580{6}[source]▶
Geocentrism is not a particularly Christian belief. It's also as true as heliocentrism.
26. kbelder ◴[25 Oct 24 05:39 UTC] No.41942514{5}[source]▶
The concept of p-zombies requires a soul, or other mystic forces. It just hides it. Materialists should reject the notion as inherently incoherent. Two things cannot be physically the same, where one is conscious and the other not. To think so, is to invalidate physics.