161–170 of 310 posts
It's so very unlikely that there aren't millions of other lifeforms out there. Sometimes I think that life could well have been just my soul and no one else, but here I am sharing this world with billions of other people, trillions of other lifeforms on this planet alone. So it is possible that more than one lifeform exists, that they share this universe and communicate in it. Why shouldn't this also be possible on m…
For a little bit of context for how impressive this is, here's my take on it with a consumer grade 8" Newtonian telescope from my backyard: https://www.astrobin.com/full/w4tjwt/0/
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You’re assuming that space was compressed into a single point at the Big Bang. However, this is not implied by the Big Bang or cosmology. All we can truly infer is that the universe was very hot and dense and that spacetime experienced rapid expansion. We do not know the size, extent, or shape of space at that time, and we don’t even know how much matter and energy were present. We only have a notion of the density.
We may not know the exact size at the start, but we know it was infinitesimally smaller than it is today. So the size of the initial universe isn't a big factor in the equations about how big it likely is today. Weather it started as a few centimeters across or a few thousand light years across, both are functionally zero compared to the current size.
Our current knowledge is functionally zero in the grand scheme of things.
The youtube link to a 'zoom' in video to the image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkVprNB5XbI What is really, really neat to notice isn't just the detail in that final image.... look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies. The nebula is about 1375 light years away. Those galaxies in the distance.... are billions of light years away. It's hard to comprehend.
> look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies. just to add to the awe of that, pretty much every "dot" in one of these images is going to be another galaxy. individual stars from within the Milky Way will have diffraction spikes and very obvious as a single item.
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Buddhism is deeply rooted in reincarnation and the progression of a common person to an enlightened being through different ranks over the span of multiple lifetimes. I am pretty sure there is a dimension of life that we have yet to discover and learn about. And for the time being Buddhism is the only “religion” that openly discusses this progression. Hinduism has the same but in my experience it’s a lot more reserve…
I think any view of life consistent with its emergence by evolution isn't consistent with reincarnation, or certainly doesn't support it. But given the universe in total may be unimaginably larger than our observable universe, and the total universe may well be an insignificant feature of an unimaginably larger reality, its quite possible that versions of us appear in a fractal-like way, over and over across reality.…
By and large, to really have success with this is to learn meditation (not master it by any means), because even basic meditation will naturally provide insight that is outside of the scope of the mental framework you are accustomed to as a mind.
Even in science, there is a lot of focus on what happens to the person on a physical and a mental level, but little on what happens outside of it, which can only be learned by being quiet/still.
I like your reply and it is balanced, and I am not sure that I could reply to it in any other way than I did now. My personal experiences transcend a lot of such discussion, even what I am saying myself, but those are the elements of being human, being bound by something.
I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution!
Absolutely incredible. For a little bit of context for how impressive this is, here's my take on it with a consumer grade 8" Newtonian telescope from my backyard: https://www.astrobin.com/full/w4tjwt/0/
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We don’t know that, though. Consider an evolution of a flat coordinate plane given by (x,y) -> (e^t * x, e^t * y). This process can run forever and has the property that all points appear to move away from all other points through time, yet the size of the plane never changes. It’s better to think of the Big Bang as describing a point in time rather than a point in space.
Does anyone know why wolframalpha is plotting this with cute little arrows? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+%28x%2Cy%29+%3D+%2...
f(x,y) = (c * x, c * y)
f(x,y) = c * (x,y)
f(P) = c * P
Total noob question here and I apologize in advance. Are these the “actual” pictures or are they “touched up” by an artist ? If they the real pictures then this is truly impressive …
On this Wiki page you can see multiple such images, and the process described:
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I love that there are multiple sensors that can be compared to like this, but also love when the optical images from Hubble are compared as well. The images that combine all of the frequencies from Chandra X-rays, Hubble's optical, and now Webb's IR make for some truly fascinating images.
Is this image of what the eye would see or is it modified?
Absolutely incredible. For a little bit of context for how impressive this is, here's my take on it with a consumer grade 8" Newtonian telescope from my backyard: https://www.astrobin.com/full/w4tjwt/0/
Edit: Oh, you can click through the image and see technical details. Very cool.