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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

#251

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/

Your picture is itself quite impressive. Do you mind sharing more about the equipment and process it takes to capture something like that? Edit: Oh, you can click through the image and see technical details. Very cool.

"Do you mind sharing more about the equipment and process"

I'm sorry, but this is making me laugh so hard. I don't know a lot about astrophotography, but one thing I've experienced so far is that astrophotographers love to talk about their equipment and process.

It's like asking a grandparent, "Oh, do you have pictures of your grandkids?" It kind of makes their day. :)

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#252

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…

Re: your "creator beings", I think we cannot say for sure, but where is the evidence? It's an extraordinary claim with almost nothing backing it.

You make a point here:

> What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be.

But the difference between ourselves and bacteria is that we can reason about things other than our immediate surroundings; and about magnitudes other than those we live in. If bacteria in a Petri dish developed intelligence, curiosity about the world, and some sort of scientific method, might they not discover there is a world outside their Petri dish? Maybe they would get many things wrong, but wouldn't they be able to indirectly determine at least some things about the wider universe (the lab!), even if they never get to meet us? And wouldn't they be able to develop some tools to finally observe the human beings in the lab, at least partially? And finally, wouldn't they be able to think "hey, these scientists are not the gods of the sacred Protozoan Book, they must be made of the same building blocks as we are!". We're talking intelligent bacteria who go to university and publish papers, mind you.

I don't think there is any evidence about the hypothesis that life is a single occurrence, like a basket woven by Travis Jungroth. It could still be true, but I think it's one of the least interesting starting points to think about the universe. It's somewhat like solipsism; maybe it's true, but it leads nowhere -- and we cannot tell, anyway.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#254
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feeling of awe, if that could be shared with most people on earth - perhaps they wouldn't waste their pity lives fighting each other.

Wasn’t their recently an article on how witnessing a solar eclipse has a measurable effect on people’s view of the world? It certainly affected me.

I have never seen a solar eclipse in person, but I wonder whether this type of feeling has similarities with the overview effect [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#255

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…

I suppose there could be a distinction, but that is the idea of God, and that is the rational foundation for God's existence in Abrahamic religions. Funny to think that scientific development could invoke faith in some ways.

I think it's not the same. Religions are usually not mainly about more powerful beings creating other beings. There's always a whole set of prescriptive rules, "this is how you're supposed to live your life" that doesn't apply here.

This is not a nitpick, it's actually the main thing about religion. Giving meaning and purpose to life. The hypothesis of some beings creating the rest of life in the universe doesn't provide this.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 choi…

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

I'm curious. What evidence do you see?

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#257
I was watching David Kipping on Lex, and he mentioned some absurd number of requests to Hubble and Webb get denied (like 90%+). With Starship advancing at such a rapid pace, and with their launch size capabilities, I really hope cheaper "single purpose" telescopes start getting produced and launched. Could be a cool business opportunity for some obscure engineering company.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#258
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A normal visible light telescope absolutely shows color. You can just point a DSLR with a zoom lens and no filters at the sky, take a picture of M42, and confirm that yourself.

I'm sorry, but the last time I checked a DSLR is not my eye. I have plenty of images from my telescope and various cameras. How you can conflate the 2 is beyond me. Comparing a long exposure from a digital sensor to what your eye can see is beyond bonkers and confusion of the topic at hand, or right in front of our eyes to keep it on subject

Your comment about the colour fidelity of deep sky objects is waay too sloppily written for you to get away with that tone!

I mean, just look at what you wrote:

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

as anyone who owns a telescope that can point at trees knows, you can definitely "look at things" and see them in colour (assuming you have normal colour vision).

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#259
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…

I don't think this is a good indication.

Assuming that von Neumann was right, and assuming it's even technologically possible to achieve 1% of light speed, here's some alternative explanations of why we don't see aliens in the Milky Way:

- Maybe we're ahead of the race here. It's unlikely, but it has to be the truth for some intelligent lifeform. Why not us? I admit this is unlikely.

- Maybe galaxy exploration is technically feasible but economically unfeasible. Aliens would have to solve the same problems than us.

- Maybe galaxy exploration is technically and economically feasible, but the overwhelming majority of lifeforms go extinct before reaching this point, an none have been able so far (additional assumption: life is relatively new in the universe, much like it's relatively new on Earth itself).

- Maybe galaxy exploration is possible and evidence of life forms has reached us, but we didn't understand them because we weren't looking for the right things.

- Maybe galaxy exploration is possible and aliens want us to remain untouched and unaware, much like some wish would happen with lost Amazonian tribes (only the aliens would be more successful).

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Although they sensibly tend to focus on interpretation at the particle level, avoiding the hype and wishful mysticism that would tend to crop up around its implications for us as individuals. Is this yet another one of those scientific facts that does not require a proof? > Too many imaginative people and popularizers have a tendency to jump from actual equations/constraints they don't understand, to non-scientific…

While I get your general critique I am not quite clear if you are critiquing me, including me with the science inspired confabulators.

Just in case you were including me in that:

For the record, the many worlds interpretation just sticks with the field equations of quantum mechanics (extremely well tested).

It doesn’t invent the quantum collapse, which actually isn’t necessary to interpret them and which raises many questions that have never been well answered. I.e. when does collapse occur, how is information conserved if collapse keeps injecting information into all quantum systems, in situations with time reversal (different orders of events for different viewers in relativistic scenarios) how is information being destroyed. On and on. Collapse is both an unnecessary and problematic interpretation in an attempt to avoid a continuation of superpositions.

What we see as collapse is just the experience of being included in the field equations as the quantum systems information becomes too complex (via thermodynamics, information escaping the experiment) for superposition to be detected anymore at a practical level.

But as we learn to control larger and larger systems, we do indeed find superposition isn’t bound by mass or system size. In fact, all of quantum computing depends on it not being bounded. It is just a challenge to keep information in isolation, I.e. from spreading in a way that is unrecoverable.

Just as eventually we will be able to “simulate” intelligence in a quantum computer, we are already intelligence in a quantum system. We just can’t control the quantum information in us so we lose any systematic relation/observability to the superpositions of our particles.

Chemistry throughout our body operates consistently with the quantum behavior of all other chemistry. Our particles are no different from any other particles.

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