171–180 of 310 posts
How much of the pictures in the article are processed? What does the unprocessed photo look like?
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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.
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We are lucky that we live in a sweet-spot era where the universe is old enough that we have 13 billion years to look back on, but young enough that all the galaxies haven’t receded behind the cosmic horizon yet due to the accelerated expansion of the universe. In some billion years, intelligent beings will only have historic records, if anything at all, to look back to how the observable universe used to be filled wi…
I don't understand people that aren't filled with dread with this concept. And I understand why so many humans fall back to something like religion to cope. It's the only way it seems to become complacent with our role in the cosmic horror. I know all the intellectual arguments for optimistic nihilism. I vote in elections even though my "one vote" doesn't matter amongst millions, and in some degree my single human li…
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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.…
The easiest way to test the theory is to go into the unknown and find out for yourself. You can walk into life situations with a predisposition (which is a useful skill to have) and then see the feedback that you get in return. 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…
My response is staying with science, which just means staying with evidence and reasoning that avoids our unbounded ability to fool ourselves. I.e. repeatable experiments by others, tested model predictions, mathematical and statistical checks, etc.
That is all science and math are. An accumulation of tools and systems that improve the reliability of our thinking. They increasingly help us mitigate our exceptional talent for fooling ourselves.
If we find another way to "know", it will get included into science too.
I am a big believer that our personal experience and relationship with life is improved by meditation, staring by learning to quiet our minds and focus/refocus on one simple thing at a time (breathing for instance, or nothing). Then use our ability to focus to mindfully listen to our bodies, then our feelings, then our beliefs, our values, our situations, finally what it all means.
But our minds/brains don't internally track providence of information. What is real and beyond us, vs. what we imagine or want. It is all mixed up in our heads, thus the ease with which we trick ourselfs, and others.
I am a big believer in imagination, to the sky and beyond anything we see. But the very unboundedness of imagination is why just because we can imagine something, and it seems right, fulfills some deep balance, and seems vivid, desirable, and makes clear sense that must be true, ... that doesn't actually make it true, real, or coherent, not even a little bit.
> I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution!
Evolution created multicellular creatures, nervous systems, and brains, which in turn have created a species/society that is actively searching for knowledge and putting it to work for survival at higher orders of organization. I.e. science, economics, politics, technology, etc. Limited resources (at any given time) continue to drive us to solve new problems and learn more, to continue surviving even as we complicate and expand the environment we survive in.
So in that sense, life is already moving past biological chemistry into other substrates, and we are already learning to harness the arrangement of atoms to go further. And eventually, perhaps, harness the fine structure of space-time, and beyond.
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Is this image of what the eye would see or is it modified?
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.
For anyone having similar problems, I recommend the source linked at the bottom of this blog post: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2411/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Sky
From the Wikipedia entry:
>Deep Sky is narrated by Michelle Williams telling the story about the production of the James Webb Space Telescope and its impact on the technological improvements it made upon the Hubble Space Telescope.[6]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28370567/
https://youtu.be/5Mt_alPEyzI?si=36j5gKKrYUrOBI5w
I was fortunate to watch it on Vision Pro in IMAX and it was spectacular.
On the giant screen the Horsehead Nebula was mindblowing.
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Fascinating. Do you think it's possible that we can map these out in the next 50 years?
For the gravitational wave background, maybe with LISA we might be able to get a glimpse, but the neutrino background seems like it'd take some truly unprecedented breakthroughs in our ability to detect neutrinos to have any chance of mapping it out.
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And when 'zooming in' and seeing the top 2/3 of the photo ( https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im... ) I am super amazed that all these small discs showing are galaxies. GALAXIES (sorry for the caps). How tiny are we (Humans, Earth, Solar system)... less than a speck of dust in the Sahara. I used to look up in space when I was growing up and there wasn't any light pollution to the small town I…
And yet, it is the atomic nucleus that is one of the most complex objects in nature.
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> Statistics is a very precise science. Can you show your work or is it just a gut feeling? In my case, my gut feeling, but is it so unlikely? As mentioned in "Cosmos: Possible Worlds", planets may go through a "habitable zone", which is the window in which they are just the right distance from just the right star, and they have the right elements in their surface or whatnot. And then just the right random events hav…
> it cannot be that nowhere else but here on Earth did this happen. > I don't know if this is statistics. It surely is gut feeling. It's possible that life emerging is so unlikely that it has never happened before anywhere even if it could happen again. We do not have the data to establish how likely and in fact we don't even have enough data to fill in all the gaps of how life on earth emerged in the first place. Ou…
What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe. It seems unlikely that nowhere else did the preconditions for life arise, and in fact, it seems likely that they must have arisen in multiple places. Immensely many places, in fact. Considered like that, it's more unlikely that life didn't appear anywhere else but in this Pale Blue Dot.
We look at our planet, and all that had to happen for those first lifeforms to come into existence, and it seems so unlikely... but not impossible. And we're playing with a lot of dice here! Very hard not to roll a few sixes with a bag of dice so large.