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Pointing the Hubble telescope at "nothing"
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I came across this the other day, and it blew my mind.
http://www.flixxy.com/hubble-ultra-deep-field-3d.htm
Basically, scientists got curious what would happen if they pointed the Hubble space telescope to a seemingly empty patch of the sky. Their first attempt didn't reveal too much detail, but after that they tried it for a longer time and with more advanced optical sensors... and... yeah, watch the video.
A hundred billion galaxies, each of which spreading apart every farther from each other, at different speeds (as measured by their color).
It is because of this immense sense of scale that I do not think we're alone in the universe.
http://www.flixxy.com/hubble-ultra-deep-field-3d.htm
Basically, scientists got curious what would happen if they pointed the Hubble space telescope to a seemingly empty patch of the sky. Their first attempt didn't reveal too much detail, but after that they tried it for a longer time and with more advanced optical sensors... and... yeah, watch the video.
A hundred billion galaxies, each of which spreading apart every farther from each other, at different speeds (as measured by their color).
It is because of this immense sense of scale that I do not think we're alone in the universe.
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I, like many of you, watched Bill Nye the Science Guy as a child. And he said something in one of his shows that I have never forgotten. He said that of course there is life in our universe. The size of it makes it a near certainty. But because of its immense size, the chances of us finding it, or it finding us, are astronimically small.
Just thought I'd share that.
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steam - WeAreAllGeth
I have more hope than Bill Nye. A fool's hope, perhaps. But if humanity persists, we will make our home among the stars one day. And I suspect that there, we will find new life.
It's kind of cool to be at the beginning of that, I think. I was born less than half a century after we made our first steps out into our future home. I wonder if that's rather like being among the first animals crawling on land, or one of the first homo sapiens a generation after they discovered how to create fire.
Science++
Damn.
:^: for the HHGTTG allusion.
We are like little neutrons.
I was inclined to think this way, too, but then I realized:
It didn't take us very long to figure out how to fuck up the planet. Give us a few more millennia, and I bet we'll be fucking up the universe, too.
The planet is much, much smaller. I mean, an oxygen molecule can fuck up a fuel, but it's not going to destroy the solar system anytime soon.
Also, theoretical bounds on speed limits might just ruin us.
And the universe is very big and very amazing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U&feature=player_embedded
Where's Samantha Carter when you need her?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTwvkGjsNEY
I've never been convinced by this argument. Let's say that the number of intelligent species in the universe is roughly [number of planets] * [probability of a planet developing life]. People say, of course the number must be larger than 1, because the number of planets is so huge! but we have absolutely no idea what the probability is, though it must be fairly small. For all we know it could be 10^-10000000, so we're lucky to have even one planet in the universe with life.
I have a problem with your numbers. Namely: life, appears to be pretty fucking indestructible. Some guys cold germs flu to the moon, sat their for a few years, and then were brought back on one of the Apollo missions and came back to life happily once they were returned to an environment they can live in.
Their are bacteria which beat out nuclear radiation in fuel rod settling pools by piling CG-base pairs into the genetic structure so they can photosynthesize in them, and extremophiles living on volcanic vents.
Now, none of this is, obviously, intelligent or even high-level fauna and flora. But I'd feel pretty confident saying there's almost certainly life everywhere - something I'll feel a lot more confident about if we find any elsewhere in the sol system (I am extremely curious about what might be able to form in an energetic environment like Jupiters atmosphere).
And if you can get bacteria - the very basic precursors of evolution, then I'd say it drives the potential for intelligent extraterrestial life way up.
Things should get pretty interesting in the next decade when the Earth-sized planet hunter telescopes start operating and scanning the stars in our local neighborhood. If it turns out habitable zone planets are reasonably common and the spectroscopic data suggests the right elemental composition, then that would be a hell of a thing.
EDIT: It's also worth noting that there are some very good reasons to think a project like SETI may never find anything. The radio age of human communication has only existed for about 100 years. It's entirely possible that radio technology gets superceded before anyone would bother to build a transmitter powerful enough to announce their presence on the interstellar stage (which would require post-scarcity type technology to do, essentially). If in the next 20-40 years we were to figure out how to preserve entanglement and use it for information transfer, then even if we did build an interstellar civilization we would produce no radio emissions detectable over the background because everything would be the definition of point-to-point. The radio age would've lasted only ~150 years then.
I rather enjoy the notion that maybe someday we'll build FTL radios and the second we switch them on we'll hear all the interstellar civilization's traffic.
I'm not sure if it's exactly the same, but the song you're thinking of is SonneIt's at the end.
Also cool video!
Nothing we know about the origins of life makes it seem like the circumstances are that exceptional.
I find this unlikely, but mostly because we'd need FTL travel to get to everywhere, even if we have infinite time. Space expanding faster than light will fuck with you.
This would be awesome, even if breaks causality.
We know enough, and we know that even if it happens once every two hundred billion trillion planets...there's still going to be billions of planets with life out there. Our galaxy alone has hundreds of billions of stars. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Given enough chances, even the tiniest probabilities approach 1.
There's not much you can infer from a sample size of one.
[Edit: Also, the universe is not generally believed to be infinite or to contain an infinite number of stars.]
There was a stretch of channels back when I had satellite TV where at any given time there was at least one on.
Now half of those are showing home improvement crap, and I'd be lucky to find a rerun of The Universe.
Actually, they do, given the function is linear, and doesn't have a negative slope. Forgive my non-mathy word usage and poor ability to explain what I mean, it's been a while.
Functions can sum to a finite number as the limit approaches infinity, but the function here is of the form f(x)=kx, where k is the extremely low "chance of life on any given planet" constant, and x is the number of planets. Because k is a constant, as x approaches infinity, f(x) approaches infinity too. And the sample size of one indicates that k is nonzero.
That last point about the finite universe invalidates the theory on the basis of real limitations, though.
we haven't and aren't going to fuck up earth
earth will be here long after we're gone unless we continue to be incredibly lucky
all we can do is maybe fuck up earth enough to make it significantly more difficult for us to live as we're currently accustomed to
Hubble coming back down is going to be a weird day for me, it's been up there pretty much exactly a year longer than I've been alive and it's done quite a bit to push me towards studying physics. There was a plan to bring it back down with the shuttle and put it in a museum (where it belongs get it movie reference ha ha) but that got decided against for a number of reasons so it's probably just going to plop unceremoniously into the ocean somewhere.
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It's not gonna do that, is it?
I mean, by the time it gets back there won't be enough left to make a plop.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
Goodness knows the Hubble won't have that luxury.
Hah
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
For serious though, I absolutely love the universe and all the images of it that come from the Hubble Deep Field, it's this kind of stuff that lights my imagination and makes my heart warm up with hope for the future of humanity, however naive it is in reality's constant flux of distractions keeping us from the stars.
George Smoot has an interesting talk using the same universe scan. If you want to feel tiny, lose a sense of scale, I recommend watching it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c64Aia4XE1Y
On Sundays, Discovery is showing How The Universe Works.. it's basically Discovery's version of The Universe, and is hosted by Mike Rowe. Pretty good so far. It's on before the Stephen Hawking (crazy) power hour.
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
I would comment on the humbling beauty of this photo, but Carl Sagan put it much better than I ever could: