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First images from Euclid are in

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Re: First images from Euclid are in

#311

Post by colordrops »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #286
colordrops wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so important about "sharing a common ancestor"? It doesn't say anything about the spread of different types of life that could evolve, considering we have a sample size of one, and it also says nothing about how difficult it is for any particular form to evolve intelligence.

Because there are probably an uncountable number of different turns life could have made instead to lead to dramatically different outcomes. Life iterates on itself. Mutations on top of mutations. Mitochondria could have just as easily never been enveloped by our eukaryotic ancestors and life would look a hell of a lot different today.

Having a high cardinality of permutations doesn't say anything one way or another about the probability of life arising. it's just hand waving.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#312

Post by colordrops »

m3kw9 wrote: post #229
colordrops wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so important about "sharing a common ancestor"? It doesn't say anything about the spread of different types of life that could evolve, considering we have a sample size of one, and it also says nothing about how difficult it is for any particular form to evolve intelligence.

Knowing physics is roughly same every where in the universe, same rules of biology will apply elsewhere where if conditions meet, maybe earth is one of many conditions that can form life.

There's no reason to believe that because the physics are the same the biology will be the same. that's a big ungrounded assumption.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#313

Post by lynguist »

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. ;)

So we are rather “large” beings and not small ones.

Are these orders of magnitude scaled by 10 to go from one to the next?

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#314

Post by andrewflnr »

nullwriter wrote: post #163
gary_0 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the speed of light is the speed of causality, technically it's not really 420 million years in the "past" in any meaningful sense. The present is relative, not universal. The collected light we see in our telescopes is a lie about a particular universe that will never be, at least in any tangible way. On a cosmic scale, every spot in the universe sees its own unique sequence of events going on around it, a…

Absolutely mind blowing - I've not thought of this and will be reading about it

Don't think about it too much. It's wrong. Relativity of simultaneity only kicks in when you have reference frames moving at noticeably different velocities. Which is... not entirely wrong in this case due to the expansion of the universe, but would be equally true of a nearby reference frame moving away equally fast. It's nothing to do with light travel time.

Ed: I've slipped into the fallacy a bit. Reference frames don't have locations, so they can't be "nearby". Just pretend I said "reference frame of a nearby object".

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#315

Post by 0x5345414e »

lynguist wrote: post #313
layer8 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;)

So we are rather “large” beings and not small ones. Are these orders of magnitude scaled by 10 to go from one to the next?

Yes

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#316

Post by layer8 »

worldsayshi wrote: post #261
layer8 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;)

It could really be much larger beyond the observable horizon though? But I guess we will never know.

It might, and that’s part of the reason why I put a smiley. On the other hand, the larger you go, the less relevant it becomes, because if the light cones don’t touch then it might just as well be a separate universe.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#317

Post by standardUser »

Every speck of light that doesn't have the 'flare' of a nearby star is not a star, but another galaxy. Sure, the one particularly detailed galaxy they zoomed in on looks cool. But the way they present this is missing the forest for the trees.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#318

Post by seanw444 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #288
seanw444 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is short-sighted. Maybe not in our lifetimes. If it were 1902, you'd probably be mocking the Wright brothers.

There are three levels of difficulty in innovation: New Engineering, New Science, and New Fundamentals. What the Wright Brothers did was the easiest of the three: New engineering . It didn't contradict anything then known in accepted science. Fusion energy is being studied now, and it's substantially more difficult than what the Wright brothers did because it requires New Science. But it doesn't violate any of the ac…

Well, fortunately, our rock-solid science has some major holes to be patched. There's no way to guess what consequences those will have to our understanding of what we're limited to exploring.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#319

Post by behnamoh »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #292
Night_Thastus wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion reactors won't really help. Sure, you can accelerate indefinitely - but only at maybe 1G or a bit more if you don't want to kill the occupants. Then you have to flip and decelerate. Unless we find a way to freeze/stasis people, the limits are still shockingly small. We'd need to start cracking some kind of jumping/FTL/etc technology to have any hope of real exploration.

Well... you don't need to freeze people if you can travel at a substantial fraction of c, because of time dilation. Caveats: 1. It's really, really hard to supply enough energy to go that fast, even with fusion power. 2. Your passengers won't be able to go home again, because by the time they get back everyone they've ever known will be long dead. 3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of du…

> 3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of dust and disintegrate.

Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean if we clash with anything (even as small as a space dust) while traveling at a substantial fraction of c, it would disintegrate us?

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#320

Post by behnamoh »

vjk800 wrote: post #308
1970-01-01 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual problem is that we were made early enough to begin to understand the full scale of it, but we're still not mature enough to go out there and explore it. Therefore, you can reason that now is the right time to get behind anything that pushes us beyond the Earth.

Since we don't observe any sign of anyone else explore it, or even broadcast themselves through it, it might be that it's not possible to explore it.

Or maybe it's due to the Dark Forest theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis#:~:text....)
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