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Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

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Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's this galactic farmer you're talking about?

One or more beings with power and intelligence many orders of magnitude higher than our own. To call it god or gods gives a religious tone to it that totally derails the discussion and I’m specifically avoiding. This isn’t about going to church on Sundays. There are a few answers to the “Where are they?” question. One is that the parameters to the Drake equation mean life is so rare we actually are alone (as another…

Have you read the dark forest trilogy?

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#242
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I don't know if I'm more impressed by their level of detail from a $10 billion telescope or your level of detail from a consumer-grade telescope!

The James Webb image shows a level of detail we have never seen before. Hundreds of galaxies in the background that are invisible on the consumer grade telescope. Here's the full resolution image: https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...

I'm quietly chomping at the bit for a Webb full deepfield survey rather than the hint of it we saw in 2022...

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#243
post #6

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…

>that they share this universe and communicate in it. Why shouldn't this also be possible on millions of other earth-like planets out there? one trivial but powerful observation that von Neumann made was that our galaxy say, is actually pretty small. It's about 100k light years big, which means that any civilization spreading at only a tiny fraction of the speed of light could expand through the entire milky way in o…

Or we are as ignorant about the aliens as ants are about us.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#245
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One or more beings with power and intelligence many orders of magnitude higher than our own. To call it god or gods gives a religious tone to it that totally derails the discussion and I’m specifically avoiding. This isn’t about going to church on Sundays. There are a few answers to the “Where are they?” question. One is that the parameters to the Drake equation mean life is so rare we actually are alone (as another…

Have you read the dark forest trilogy?

I haven’t.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The JWST, as is well known, is a near and mid infrared telescope, its range (600 to 2850 nm) overlapping with human vision only a little bit in the deep red. So every single JWST image is necessarily in false color.

Even Hubble images are false color as well. It uses filters and then recombines them to RGB channels. People naturally ask what they would actually see, but they actually wouldn't see much of anything. Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image. We've been shown so much from sci-fi with space ships showing nebulas and nova remnants out their view screens, but that' just not what one wo…

> Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image.

I remember seeing Jupiter in colors when looking at it from the backyard of a friend of mine.

That telescope didn't have a motor and we were constantly chasing Jupiter manually. It stays inside the ocular only for a few seconds, then Earth points us into another direction.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One or more beings with power and intelligence many orders of magnitude higher than our own. To call it god or gods gives a religious tone to it that totally derails the discussion and I’m specifically avoiding. This isn’t about going to church on Sundays. There are a few answers to the “Where are they?” question. One is that the parameters to the Drake equation mean life is so rare we actually are alone (as another…

Ok, now I see what you are going for. It's a compelling idea but there is no evidence helping it. For me, it's easier to take what we see in our own "lawn" and expand it outwards to the cosmos as a whole. A frog evolved from a single-cell as well as an elephant did, and the geological landscapes we see are the result of physics, time and random fluctuations. I apply that to every other galaxy and that's it. Of course…

No evidence helping it? Not a single thing that’s ever happened supports the idea that our current reality was constructed?

> For me, it's easier to take what we see in our own "lawn" and expand it outwards to the cosmos as a whole.

The uncomfortable thing about reality is that it’s often different from what is easier for us.

What you choose to expand out into the galaxy or even the entire universe is a critical choice. You could choose to extend the relationships between plants, or how power structures develop, or the explosion of complexity localized on Earth, or the human tendency to purposefully create environments for life.

> the geological landscapes we see are the result of physics, time and random fluctuations

Most of them. Not all of them. Bingham Canyon Mine is an open pit 4km wide and 1.2km deep. El Teniente mine is 3,000km of tunnels up to 2km deep. There’s Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam. There are artificial islands and nuclear test sites.

That’s all just in the last 150 years. Draw the trend of human progress and where does it end up a billion years from now?

That’s even just assuming the conditions that created the universe mirror the conditions here on Earth, which is a tremendous assumption. It might be like having a letter dropped through your door slot for the first time and reasoning the postal service is entirely made of paper folded and stuffed into other paper. The actual reality of mail carriers with pensions, trucks with antilock breaks and sorting machines bigger than any animal that has ever existed would be unfathomable. Anyone suggesting it would be easily dismissed in favor of a simpler and less correct explanation.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#248
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is a difficult concept, and I think the way the big bang is commonly portrayed in media often leads to this misconception of the big bang as starting at a point in space rather than a density. I uncovered this for myself when asking, "where is that point now?" and discovering it was never a point at all, space is expanding from all points simultaneously.

The easy answer to the hard concept is that the big bang is not the increase in size of a thing. It is an increase in dimensions, including time. Our notions of size, of dimension, might not exist outside the bubble. We would therefore never perceive an edge, but that doesn't mean that one does not exist nor that there may be a finite size.

Even that's not especially easy, because you then need to deal with "if the dimensions themselves are changing, why aren't protons the size of planets?"

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#249
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH I like your shot more than JWST. You can at least see the whole horsehead. NASA should check their zoom setting.

Yep lets build a $10B space telescope to zoom out and use 0.001% of its resolution, matching a backyard telescope.

What good is a telephoto lens if you're just gonna zoom in on the very top of people's heads? It won't make for very good memories.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#250

I am reminded of David’s song in Psalm 19 … It’s amazing to me how in the thousands of years since he wrote these words, we’ve still only scratched the surface of observing the beauty and depth of creation. The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is he…

Beautiful catch! I’m always amazed by the Bible’s timelessness. Even when I know to expect it, it still impresses me.
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