For a sense of scale, the Horsehead Nebula has a diameter of 7 light years which is greater than the distance of 4 light years from us to Proxima Centauri.
Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
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Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#52It'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…
Each galaxy is a neuron and we are a spec of electricity within a spec of a neuron experiencing ourself, the universe, in realtime, together, forever
Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is only true if we believe Earth is special, which we have no bases. So I'll stick to statistics for now, thank you very much.
Statistics is a very precise science. Can you show your work or is it just a gut feeling?
> 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 have to happen and there's the spark of life. And then a gazillion extinction events must be averted, at times when the Tree of Life (to use the metaphor from Cosmos) is at its most fragile, when all of life could be cut down before its prime.
It sounds unlikely for any single planet, any single star system, any single galaxy, etc. But on the grand scale of the universe, 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. But I think it's the right kind of gut feeling...
Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#54Wow. The NIRCam image is probably going to be the most exciting new photo, but I can't get over how well MIRI reveals the internal structure of the nebula. NIRCam: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Horsehead_... MIRI: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Horsehead_... Comparison: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Slider_Too...
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Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#55That's an incredibly detailed image. Every single time I see one of these amazing space pics, it's hard not to get all philosophical and wonder about the size of space & time on cosmic scale, how small our earth is and how insignificant our regular problems are. I don't care if I don't get to see flying cars or AGI in my lifetime but I will be very disappointed if our knowledge of space remains more or less the same…
That always makes me want to ditch whatever I'm doing and switching gear to hiking, coding and studying Mathematics and Physics.
Bitter realization at the end, of course.
Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#56There's a lot of beautiful photos of distant nebulas and galaxies — but if I understand correctly, astronomers actually construct 3d data. Is there a place where I can view these 3d models of different space objects?
Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. I'll grant you that once we have found a single other planet with life. Until then we're doing statistics on a single data point and no, the number of planets and galaxies etc are not sufficient to statistically determine the prevalence of life because as yet none of them are confirmed to have life. This is wishful…
This is only true if we believe Earth is special, which we have no bases. So I'll stick to statistics for now, thank you very much.
If you're sticking to statistics, the right answer is we don't know enough. The general rule of thumb I've seen is that you want to see n * p >= ~20 to be able to accurately assess the probability.
For the difficulty of evolution of life, we have a total N of 1-5 of life-could-have-evolved, depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be about life's chances (could life have evolved on Venus? Mars? Titan? Europa? any other moons I'm forgetting about).
At this point, the statistics says more about your priors than they do about actual data, since there's not enough data to actually do any statistics on.
Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#58Gorgeous and upsetting that I'll never be able to visit it. 13 billion years before me, potentially trillions of years after me. Seems like such a waste of the spark of awareness that I can't take that awareness and experience the galaxy in all its glory.
Isn't a nebula a cloud of dust? I'm not sure how dense it gets, but would someone even notice if they were inside of the nebula?
I was thinking this too. These cosmic objects look solid from afar, but they could be just slightly more dense than the surrounding space on average.
Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#59Wow. The NIRCam image is probably going to be the most exciting new photo, but I can't get over how well MIRI reveals the internal structure of the nebula. NIRCam: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Horsehead_... MIRI: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Horsehead_... Comparison: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Slider_Too...
Crazy how many galaxies are in that one photo (in the background).
Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail
#60It's amazing to me how an interstellar-sized cloud formation looks very much like a cloud formation in the sky on earth.
Nature is very fractal, the same pattern occurs on multiple levels. You even see the same thing in human constructs.
But what's giving it it's seemingly clear cutoff boundary? I have trouble imagining anything in the nothingness of space taking the role of the forces that shape our atmospheric clouds. It feels a bit as if it was some arbitrary artistic decision like that 2001 slit scan or the Solaris ocean. Then on the other hand of course it's amongst the few most "artistic" ones picked from all those super tiny projection viewports we have taken from the sphere of view directions, so perhaps we should not be all that surprised. It's not quite the level of unlikely discovering a planet populated by mattresses would be.