First images from Euclid are in

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. :)

The actual problem is that we were made early enough to begin to understand the full scale of it, but we're still not mature enough to go out there and explore it. Therefore, you can reason that now is the right time to get behind anything that pushes us beyond the Earth.

These distances are well outside the scope of exploration. Getting to the next solar system is already a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Getting to the next galaxy? Forget it. Getting to these galaxies we see in the picture? Absolutely no way. I know people like to be optimistic about these things but it's honestly pure wishful thinking.

This is short-sighted. Maybe not in our lifetimes. If it were 1902, you'd probably be mocking the Wright brothers.

There are three levels of difficulty in innovation: New Engineering, New Science, and New Fundamentals.

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.