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First images from Euclid are in

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Re: First images from Euclid are in

#251

Post by bbor »

kranner wrote: post #114
Jun8 wrote: post #90

Watching this is ... hard to find the words to describe it. It's insane! It shows us how mind bogglingly vast the universe is and how we're literally nothing compared to it. Paradoxically, it also makes me feel incredibly potent and capable as a human being in that being this small we can know so much! Your size is to the distance of that distant spiral galaxy (420 Mly - 10e24m) as a neutrino is to you (effective cro…

That we can know anything at all is a miracle in itself. It could have been just fine evolutionarily for us Earth creatures to be no more than Large Action Models with no inner experience, but somehow we ended up as these perceiving, cogitating, apprehending beings.

How could you possibly be an affective agent without knowledge? And how could anything ever use knowledge without perceiving it? Whenever anyone talks about philosophical zombies, I say “show me one, then” — until then I’m sticking with (what I see as) the scientific consensus, which is that we’re material like literally everything else is in the Actual, perceivable world.

What would it be like to not be like anything?

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#252

Post by ThomasBHickey »

layer8 wrote: post #214
neom wrote: post #10

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. :)

It’s even more “massive” down below. There are only 27 orders of magnitude between human size and the size of the observable universe, but 35 orders of magnitude between human size and the Planck length. ;)

'Fundamentals' by Frank Wilczek explores this: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554034/fundamentals...

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#253

Post by bbor »

protonbob wrote: post #218
elteto wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How arrogant and silly to look at these incredible pictures and think “Yep, this was all made for ME. I am the center of the universe!”.

Q1: What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever. The Christian belief is that creation was made for God and not the other way around. It's actually profoundly not focused on the self.

Well, creation was made for one god, which happens to look just like us and never once mentions other peoples. To be a Christian astronomer you have to believe one of these:

1. God is wasting the vast, vast, vast majority of the universe on emptiness while he focuses on his fave planet.

2. The universe is full of humans, in which case Jesus is presumably getting re-crucified every few seconds to absolve new groups. Or I guess maybe he split up into a trillion copies that all got crucified at once? Or we’re the 1-in-a-trillion lucky ones that everyone else just gets to hear about?

3. The rest of the universe has aliens because god got bored/wanted things for us to play with, as his super special favorite species. The aliens don’t get to look like god, ofc.

No offense intended to anyone, but I don’t see how you could possibly accept Christian doctrine without necessarily thinking of earth as unfathomably special.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#255

Post by ratedgene »

This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my whole life. I'm just over here worried about small nothings and now I'm filled with an overwhelming feeling that I should be a part of something much larger. Truly inspiring, and a little bitter sweet. :)

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#257

Post by conductr »

shiroiushi wrote: post #166
conductr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.

Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles. But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about t…

It’s definitely sad and especially so that humans are causing/contributing to it. It’s mostly because of our timescale being only witness to a decline and what’s lost is tangible and known. What’s unknown is how on an evolutionary timescale the field is being reset for the next round of species to emerge. From that perspective, it’s a bit interesting to think what could happen. Particularly in the mammal world as humans have or will have eradicated most large predators. Prey populations will swell/collapse and cause adaptation. Some current herbivores/omnivores may convert to carnivore due to the availability of resources. A lot will happen. If you freeze time to protect existing species too much, it’s mostly just for sentimental reasons. Some species do a great service to current ecosystems and are vital to human life as we know it, protecting those is a little different IMO (bees come to mind.)

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#258

Post by densh »

grahamj wrote: post #91
vasco wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another way it's really cool to be able to "see the past" even if all we see is always the past. At this level it is like a super power. If only some aliens had put a mirror somewhere far so we could see ourselves too. Or multiple mirrors at different distances. With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with different photons all around carry…

You don't need mirrors, you just need to get in front of the photons. A time machine or warp drive will do :) Also the past is the only thing you can perceive, there effectively is no now.

Is there a science fiction universe that explores a hypothetical warp drive that lets you travel very far relatively quickly, but the travel is only possible with simultaneous backwards time travel that's proportionate to the distance traversed? So you can hop across star systems but can't do a roundtrip A -> B -> A without significantly shifting time from the point of view of A backwards (irreversibly from the point of view of the traveler).

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#259

Post by densh »

steveoscaro wrote: post #82
vasco wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another way it's really cool to be able to "see the past" even if all we see is always the past. At this level it is like a super power. If only some aliens had put a mirror somewhere far so we could see ourselves too. Or multiple mirrors at different distances. With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with different photons all around carry…

Well that sounds like a good premise for a scifi book or movie.

You should check out Three Body Problem (the book, not the mediocre netflix adaptation).

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#260

Post by tsujamin »

ratedgene wrote: post #255

This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my whole life. I'm just over here worried about small nothings and now I'm filled with an overwhelming feeling that I should be a part of something much larger. Truly inspiring, and a little bitter sweet. :)

> existential terror has entered the room
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