Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

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.

You already noticed the technical card [1], but I can describe some of the details that go into this for those unfamiliar with the items on it.

1. The scope they used is roughly equivalent to shooting with an 800mm telephoto lens. But the fact that it's 8" wide means it can let in a lot of light.

2. The camera [2] is a cooled monochrome camera. Sensor heat is a major source of noise, so the idea is to cool the sensor to -10deg (C) to reduce that noise. Shooting in mono allows you shoot each color channel separately, with filters that correspond to the precise wavelengths of light that are dominant in the object you're shooting and ideally minimize wavelengths present in light pollution or the moon. Monochrome also allows you to make use of the full sensor rather than splitting the light up between each channel. These cameras also have other favorable low-light noise properties, like large pixels and deep wells.

3. The mount is an EQ6-R pro (same mount I use!) and this is effectively a tripod that rotates counter to the Earth's spin. Without this, stars would look like curved streaks across the image. Combined with other aspects of the setup, the mount can also point the camera to a specific spot in the sky and keep the object in frame very precisely.

4. The set of filters they used are interesting! Typically, people shoot with RGB (for things like galaxies that use the full spectrum of visible light) or HSO (very narrow slices of the red, yellow, and blue parts of the visible spectrum, better for nebulas composed of gas emitting and reflecting light at specific wavelengths). The image was shot with a combination: a 3nm H-Alpha filter captures that red dusty nebulosity in the image and, for a target like the horsehead nebula, has a really high signal-to-noise ratio. The RGB filters were presumably for the star colors and to incorporate the blue from Alnitak into the image. The processing here was really tasteful in my opinion. It says this was shot from a Bortle-7 location, so that ultra narrow 3nm filter is cutting out a significant amount of light pollution. These are impressive results for such a bright location.

5. They most likely used a secondary camera whose sole purpose is to guide the mount and keep it pointed at the target object. The basic idea is try to put the center of some small star into some pixel. If during a frame that star moves a pixel to the right, it'll send an instruction to the mount to compensate and put it back to its original pixel. The guide camera isn't on the technical card, but they're using PHD2 software for guiding which basically necessitates that. The guide camera could have its own scope, or be integrated into the main scope by stealing a little bit of the light using a prism.

6. Lastly, it looks like most of the editing was done using Pixinsight. This allows each filter to be assigned to various color channels, alignment and averaging of the 93 exposures shot over 10 hours across 3 nights, subtraction of the sensor noise pattern using dark frames, removal of dust/scratches/imperfections from flat frames, and whatever other edits to reduce gradients/noise and color calibration that went into creating the final image.

[1] https://www.astrobin.com/w4tjwt/0/

[2] https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi294mm-pro/

Thanks! I hadn't gotten to writing this out, but you've pretty much nailed it.

> They most likely used a secondary camera whose sole purpose is to guide the mount and keep it pointed at the target object.

I did use a guide camera with an off-axis guider, I'm not sure why it wasn't in the equipment list. I've added it.

> The RGB filters were presumably for the star colors and to incorporate the blue from Alnitak into the image.

This is primarily an RGB image, so the RGB filters were used for more than the star colors. This is a proper true color image. I could get away with doing that from my location because this target is so bright. The HA filter was used as a luminance/detail layer. That gave me a bunch of detail that my local light pollution would hide, and let me pick up on that really wispy stuff in the upper right :)

> The processing here was really tasteful in my opinion.

Awe shucks, thanks :blush:

Ah, of course it's HaRGB. Really cool. I'm curious, you de-star the color layers or leave them as is when combining channels? When I've tried HaRGB, the Ha layer has the best/smallest stars which means that the RGB color layers end up leaving rings of color on the background around each star.

I don't remember exactly what I did, but I do remember running into that kind of problem. I probably used starnet2 to remove stars before doing much processing, and recombining stars towards the end.

One of my favorite comments ever on HN. I’m big into photography and yet learned something on nearly every bullet. Thank you!

Well, if you think photography is too easy you could try taking up astrophotograhy :)

The exact opposite for me! I have a hard enough time getting composition and exposure correct shooting stuff here on Earth!

Now I need to know the ballpark cost of this whole setup, so it will block me from trying to get into yet another very costly hobby.

EDIT: oh, just saw it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40206558

You packed so much knowledge in your brief response! Thank you!

Thanks for detailing this. Learned a lot.

"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. :)

Haha, yeah. I could go on for hours. I've had to learn that most people really don't want a lecture series on the finer points of astrophotography. Seabass's comment was pretty much perfect; a bit of detail, but not so much to get lost in the detail.

I tried to write a quick comment on my process a couple of times before they posted, and each time I had way too many words on a small detail.

Nonsense! Just one more story, please?

(Thanks for sharing!)

How about a talk by an expert on the topic of noise in an image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RH93UvP358

Amazing shot! Lots of good stuff, really liked this full moon shot https://www.astrobin.com/w0lzn5/B/ - the color!

Here is my Esprit 120mm widefield version https://www.astrobin.com/full/r97r5j/0/

Oh nice! Except for Alnitak (I love me some spikes), I like yours more.

That’s super cool!!! Looks like quite a niche/technical hobby with amazing output. Do you mind sharing how much equipment costs to get similar results?

It's a wonderful niche/technical hobby, but it's not cheap. You could even say it's "pay to win". I didn't buy all of my stuff at once, and I had some mistakes, but I'd guess I use on the order of $10k in equipment.

Just to follow on, you can gets started with quite a bit less. My dad took a stab at some basic shots with his prosumer Nikon and a basic tracking tripod.

That's still $1000 body, $1000 glass, $500 tripod, give or take. So far from cheap if you're starting from scratch. But if you already have a body and some glass, it's not a stretch. Or, if you're ok with hunting for used gear, the body and glass can be ~half off new retail.

I'm assuming that'd be a non-moving/automated tripod?

I have a d850 full-frame DSLR and either a 200mm 2.8 or 500mm 5.6, with some decent tripods; but earth's rotation tends to get me pretty quickly with any long-exposure photos :(

I've seen some pretty impressive stuff done with a relatively cheap / simple DSLR setup.

The basics of astrophotography aren't that expensive, but it gets exponentially more expensive to meaningfully "zoom in". Because DSLRs with typical lenses are pretty zoomed out you can get away with much cheaper gear. You might look into getting a "star tracker". It's like a telescope mount for a camera; it'll keep the still relative to the stars but because they don't need to be as accurate they're far cheaper to make. They'll probably work just fine for your 200mm 2.8 lens for a fraction of the cost of a mount.

I think it's rotating, but doesn't have a secondary camera as described above. Maybe he spent more than $500, but I tend to doubt it, but I'm also not sure of the specifics beyond he's using a crop-frame Nikon DSLR with a lens he already had for birding (I think).

I mean I don't know if I'm more impressed by their level of detail from a $10 billion telescope or your level of detail from a consumer-grade telescope!

The James Webb image shows a level of detail we have never seen before. Hundreds of galaxies in the background that are invisible on the consumer grade telescope.

Here's the full resolution image:

https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...

Oh, don't get me wrong, I am absolutely astounded by the JWST's level of detail and am in awe of the pictures it takes. And they are obviously far more detailed than the OP's. I also think it was a worthy expense. I was just noting that my awe of both is comparable when you normalize for cost!

I'm quietly chomping at the bit for a Webb full deepfield survey rather than the hint of it we saw in 2022...

If this post is to be believed, a full deepfield survey would take four thousand to fourty thousand years. https://www.reddit.com/r/jameswebb/comments/wrwsfc/how_long_...

Thanks, but it if you look closely you'll see that the Webb image has almost an image worth of detail within each pixel of my image.

Once in a while, I have the impulse to buy the equipment to make these kinds of photos, then I check the price (at least 4k USD), realize I am not from US and cool down tell next time.

It's consumer level, but not cheap at all.

Its all relative, right? The cost is about a millionth of the JWST image. A millionth!

At that price difference it's silly to not buy the gear! Right? Right?

Yours is a superb image, too. Very impressive indeed. Kudos!

That's a really lovely shot.

TBH I like your shot more than JWST. You can at least see the whole horsehead. NASA should check their zoom setting.

Yep lets build a $10B space telescope to zoom out and use 0.001% of its resolution, matching a backyard telescope.

What good is a telephoto lens if you're just gonna zoom in on the very top of people's heads? It won't make for very good memories.

Wow. 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...

And when 'zooming in' and seeing the top 2/3 of the photo (https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...) I am super amazed that all these small discs showing are galaxies. GALAXIES (sorry for the caps).

How tiny are we (Humans, Earth, Solar system)... less than a speck of dust in the Sahara.

I used to look up in space when I was growing up and there wasn't any light pollution to the small town I was growing up in. At some point I think I started suffering from 'cosmic horror'. In later years I would pay attention only to the moon, and that reduced my stress significantly.

Nowadays (like in this bit of news, with photos) when I stick to the small photo in an article, I feel ok. When I see it in full size and I zoom in, and I realize that "sh*t! these 5-10-50 tiny white marks are GALAXIES.. and I have to change topics/tabs to keep the cosmic horror at bay.

Interesting. I've also always had a visceral response to particularly clear night skies - but it's only ever been a profoundly positive feeling. It kind of erases the idea that my "problems" have any significance at all.

The loss of dark skies is so painful, maybe the worst thing modern life brought to us. I remember laying in the grass with my grandma looking at the stars for hours, she would tell me how the whole village gathered around the only TV they had to watch the moon landing live, about sputnik, galaxies, satellites, &c. there aren't many things as mesmerising, maybe watching a fire or the ocean waves, but it doesn't trigger the same emotions in me.

I don't travel much but when I go to remote areas star gazing is up there on my list of things to do; watch the stars until you're about to pass out from hypothermia, go back inside, make some tea, enjoy the fireplace, forget about the daily (non) problems, it never gets old

Experience that all the time with the same imagery, with the same amazement / horror combination.

What's more amazing is when you share this fact to most people "did you know each dot here is a GALAXY, not a star!" they go "heh... interesting" and shrug.

For some reason that makes the whole thing even crazier to me

I think it just doesn't really click for people most of the time. Eg for my mom no amount of showing science pics and explaining the scale of the distances conveyed things, it only really clicked when Jupiter became visible in the night sky as a particularly bright and large point of light which caught her interest, and when we moved to somewhere dark enough that the galactic plane was faintly noticeable.

Yeah, I haven't seen the milky way with naked eye for a few years.

Cosmic horror is a good one. I've only seen the Milky Way with my own eyes a couple of times and the last time gave me an existential cosmic horror too.

I went to sleep thinking about the unignitable size and age of what's all around us in every direction, but particularly that I had just looked at our own galaxy... a galaxy that has been there for billions of years, has always been there my entire and is there right now and there's only this tiny invisible thin bit of atmosphere separating us from it.

Then I thought about the fact tha our solar system is orbiting it right now, and we're orbiting the sun on an invisible track, and the moon orbits us on its own invisible track too.

That's quite a lot to deal with when you only woke up for a pee in the middle of a night in a camping holiday in Wales.

I kinda had an out-of-body experience when watching the Kurzgesagt video on The Largest Black Hole in the Universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FH9cgRhQ-k

Watching the zoom-out to picture ultra-massive black holes is surreal.

To fuel your cosmic horror: Some of the dots may even be galaxy clusters

Hahahahaha cheers, I had just forgotten about this and was going to sleep, but hey, what's a couple more hours of freaking out! :)

And yet, it is the atomic nucleus that is one of the most complex objects in nature.

Complex in terms of our attempts to fully define it, or?

Crazy how many galaxies are in that one photo (in the background).

Number of stars in the Milky Way: 100 billion

Number of galaxies in the universe: 200 billion to 2,000 billion

Is 2,000 billion some theoretical limit or something else? Thanks.

Yes. Take the age of the universe, multiple by the rate of expansion to get the total size of the universe, then multiple by the average density of galaxies in the observable universe. There are some further complications, but at the root it is basic algebra.

Replying to the other replies here - this regards the observable universe. Speed of light limits and all that. Of course we have no reason to believe the universe just stops at the point where we happen to lack the ability to observe.

Well, no. The density in the observed universe is used to extrapolate the number of galaxies in the non-observed universe. The size of that universe is extrapolated from the rate of expansion and the time since the big bang.

The size and shape of the observable universe also changes. A moving observer, say someone doing 30% of lightspeed, will see further in one direction than another. Accelerate quickly enough and the "dark" side of your custom observable universe might catch up with you, causing all sorts of havoc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect

You’re assuming that space was compressed into a single point at the Big Bang. However, this is not implied by the Big Bang or cosmology. All we can truly infer is that the universe was very hot and dense and that spacetime experienced rapid expansion. We do not know the size, extent, or shape of space at that time, and we don’t even know how much matter and energy were present. We only have a notion of the density.

We may not know the exact size at the start, but we know it was infinitesimally smaller than it is today. So the size of the initial universe isn't a big factor in the equations about how big it likely is today. Weather it started as a few centimeters across or a few thousand light years across, both are functionally zero compared to the current size.

> Well, no. The density in the observed universe is used to extrapolate the number of galaxies in the non-observed universe. The size of that universe is extrapolated from the rate of expansion and the time since the big bang.

> We may not know the exact size at the start, but we know it was infinitesimally smaller than it is today. So the size of the initial universe isn't a big factor in the equations about how big it likely is today. Weather it started as a few centimeters across or a few thousand light years across, both are functionally zero compared to the current size.

Most things you're saying are correctly rooted except for what's beyond the observable universe. I'm not sure why the staunch belief that you can confidently claim this. To be clear, you aren't provably wrong - likewise not provably right either.

The replies to you are just fine, they represent a significant portion of the scientific community that says our universe is likely infinitely big and that, possibly, the big bang was infinitely small, yet still, still infinitely large. An infinite expanding into infinite still results not knowing what's out there.

PBS Space time talks about it in terms of "scale factor"[0] instead of absolute diameter.

Still, these are all debatable theories, so your take _could_ be valid, but generally, it points infinitely large.

[0] https://youtu.be/K8gV05nS7mc?t=271

We don’t know that, though. Consider an evolution of a flat coordinate plane given by (x,y) -> (e^t * x, e^t * y). This process can run forever and has the property that all points appear to move away from all other points through time, yet the size of the plane never changes.

It’s better to think of the Big Bang as describing a point in time rather than a point in space.

> Consider an evolution of a flat coordinate plane given by (x,y) -> (e^t * x, e^t * y). This process can run forever and has the property that all points appear to move away from all other points through time, yet the size of the plane never changes.

What do you mean by that last claim? Any observable region is bigger at later times than it is at earlier times. The reason all points always appear to be moving away from all other points is that that is in fact happening.

What's the significance of claiming that the size of the infinite plane never changes? It's just as true that if you start with the unit interval [0, 1] and let it evolve under the transformation f(x) = tx, the size of the interval will never change -- every interval calculated at any point in time will be in perfect 1:1 correspondence with the original (except at t=0). But this doesn't mean that the measured length of the interval at different times isn't changing; it is.

Does anyone know why wolframalpha is plotting this with cute little arrows?

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+%28x%2Cy%29+%3D+%2...

It's a vector field! It has 2 dimensional inputs and 2 dimensional outputs, so it doesn't fit on your traditional graph.

    f(x,y) = (c * x, c * y)
    f(x,y) = c * (x,y)
    f(P) = c * P

We know the observable universe was part of the big bang and is expanding, maybe even because we're observing it. We have no concept of whether that dense spot was all there was, and there are a whole slew of other caveats, so it could even be orders of magnitude larger.

Our current knowledge is functionally zero in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah this is a difficult concept, and I think the way the big bang is commonly portrayed in media often leads to this misconception of the big bang as starting at a point in space rather than a density.

I uncovered this for myself when asking, "where is that point now?" and discovering it was never a point at all, space is expanding from all points simultaneously.

The easy answer to the hard concept is that the big bang is not the increase in size of a thing. It is an increase in dimensions, including time. Our notions of size, of dimension, might not exist outside the bubble. We would therefore never perceive an edge, but that doesn't mean that one does not exist nor that there may be a finite size.

I explain it to folks as if one was trying to go further south than the south pole. There's nothing physically impeding you; it's simply that once on the pole, all directions are north.

Even that's not especially easy, because you then need to deal with "if the dimensions themselves are changing, why aren't protons the size of planets?"

> The density in the observed universe is used to extrapolate the number of galaxies in the non-observed universe.

The unobserved universe is likely to be many orders of magnitude larger than the observed universe. It is possible that it is unimaginably larger.

Technically, it is possible that the unobserved universe is infinite, however whether that is a credible option depends on individual scientists informed intuitions. We simply have no experimental or theoretical evidence either way at this point.

So there is no estimate of how many galaxies there are in the universe in toto.

> The density in the observed universe is used to extrapolate the number of galaxies in the non-observed universe.

As has already been pointed out, our best current model of our universe is that it is spatially infinite. That means an infinite number of galaxies.

The finite galaxy numbers that astronomers give are for the observable universe.

> The size and shape of the observable universe also changes.

Not the way you are describing, no. The observable universe does increase in size as time goes on, because there is more time for light to travel so the light we see can come from objects further distant. Its shape, however, does not change.

A good reference is Davis & Lineweaver's 2003 paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808

> A moving observer, say someone doing 30% of lightspeed, will see further in one direction than another.

I don't know where you're getting this from. What part of the universe you can observe from a given point does not depend on your state of motion.

> Accelerate quickly enough and the "dark" side of your custom observable universe might catch up with you, causing all sorts of havoc.

This is nonsense. The Unruh effect is (a) nothing like what you are describing, and (b) irrelevant to this discussion anyway, since the Unruh effect only applies to objects which have nonzero proper acceleration, which is not the case for any galaxies, stars, or planets in the universe.

As far as we know, the total universe may have infinite size, and thus contain infinitely many galaxies.

That doesn't necessarily follow - the universe can be infinite in size, but contain a finite amount of matter.

Not the universe we observe, no. There is no valid model in GR that has this property and matches our observations of the universe as a whole. Models with a finite amount of matter surrounded by an infinite region of vacuum exist in GR, but they are not homogeneous and isotropic on large scales, while our observations indicate that our universe is.

True, I was keeping the reasoning about the average density. A homogeneous universe is still the null hypothesis.

Is that really the way to see it? As I understand it, the Big Bang didn't happen in "one place". The Universe is expanding from an compressed state - the Big Bang state. But there is no center point. We can only see that there's expansion but it's not from a single point. The only known "center point" is us. And the only reason it's a center point is because we can only see as far away as light has traveled since the Big Bang.

> As I understand it, the Big Bang didn't happen in "one place"...there is no center point.

That is correct. The only tenable answer to "where did the Big Bang take place" is "everywhere".

This theory of multiple points supports the big ring and other structures outside the “this shouldn’t exist” bubble. The bubble is the Big Bang + rate of expansion. It was thought that there was nothing outside of the farthest point… but there is!

What about the big ring [0]? Or other mega structures of galaxies outside that “bubble”?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ring

>Take the age of the universe, multiple by the rate of expansion to get the total size of the universe, then multiple by the average density of galaxies in the observable universe

My understanding is that, at the largest scales, clusters of galaxies are organized along a series of gravitationally bound filaments, sometimes called the cosmic web.

So they aren't distributed like random noise, but more like a web. I have no reason to think this changes anything about calculating average densities, but it is notable that there's the general density but probably a significantly different density within that structure.

So if the universe has a size then what do you see if you are on the edge of it? Do you see stars to the left and nothing to the right? I mean given the speed of light and the age of the universe and the rate of expansion there are regions inaccessible to us but that doesn't quite mean the universe has a finite size.

The observable universe has a size, the cosmic microwave background is what we 'see' at the 'edge' in terms of photons (~400k years after the big bang). We could see further if we could map out the gravitational wave or neutrino backgrounds (1 sec after the big bang).

But for now we can't really say if the universe in its entirety has a finite size.

Fascinating. Do you think it's possible that we can map these out in the next 50 years?

For the gravitational wave background, maybe with LISA we might be able to get a glimpse, but the neutrino background seems like it'd take some truly unprecedented breakthroughs in our ability to detect neutrinos to have any chance of mapping it out.

Funny, in reading up on both, I had higher hopes for the gravitational waves.

It seems like GWB is a superposition of infinite overlapping waves that would be impossible to single out and "unwind" in order to form a map.

And big bang neutrinos are very weak, which makes them undetectable. My assumption was we'd need a breakthrough in measurement sensitivity but is there more to it?

Naive thought - can a subsurface detector on the moon serve as an ultracold shielded scenario?

Finite size doesn’t require an edge. Consider the surface of a balloon for a 2-D case (or the perimeter of a sphere, for a 1-D case): it has finite extent, but no edge.

It has a surface, though, which is what PP was asking about.An answer to the question is, yes, nesr the edge/face, one side is dark. But relativity and expansion makes the situation a bit more complicated.

Isn't the rate of the expansion of the universe increasing?

And that assumes the observable universe is homogeneous, which it isn't

> Isn't the rate of the expansion of the universe increasing?

It is now, but up until a few billion years ago, it wasn't, it was decreasing. Many of the objects we currently see are far enough away that the light we are now seeing from them was emitted while the universe's expansion was still decelerating.

> that assumes the observable universe is homogeneous, which it isn't

No, the models cosmologists use do not assume the universe is homogeneous period. They only assume it is homogeneous on average, on large distance scales (roughly scales larger than the size of the largest galaxy clusters).

*observable universe

Yes. I find it amusing I sparked a debate on what might be beyond the observable universe, when my point was entirely about what you could theoretically observe in the night sky.

100 billion is the low end estimate for our galaxy.

400 billion is the high end.

[dead]

A few years ago, I calculated that there are approximately one Mole (6e23) of stars in the visible universe. That was a fun result.

We are probably looking at galaxies when we look at some stars and have no idea how many turtles deep things go.

I love that there are multiple sensors that can be compared to like this, but also love when the optical images from Hubble are compared as well.

The images that combine all of the frequencies from Chandra X-rays, Hubble's optical, and now Webb's IR make for some truly fascinating images.

Is this image of what the eye would see or is it modified?

The JWST, as is well known, is a near and mid infrared telescope, its range (600 to 2850 nm) overlapping with human vision only a little bit in the deep red. So every single JWST image is necessarily in false color.

Even Hubble images are false color as well. It uses filters and then recombines them to RGB channels. People naturally ask what they would actually see, but they actually wouldn't see much of anything. Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image. We've been shown so much from sci-fi with space ships showing nebulas and nova remnants out their view screens, but that' just not what one would see.

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

Maybe I misread your statement "Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image". Certainly you can see color when looking at planets (mars, jupiter, saturn). But more importantly: you can see M42 in color with a telescope and eyes, it doesn't need to be a camera or film. If your point is that it's hard for your retina to detect a rich color spectrum from distant objects without either magnification or time-averaging, sure, but that's not how your comment reads.

Before you jump to "bonkers" maybe give the people you reply to some credit- I'm an amateur astronomer with facts at his disposal.

> Before you jump to "bonkers" maybe give the people you reply to some credit- I'm an amateur astronomer with facts at his disposal.

As am I, and any time I use an eye piece, it is nothing but b&w for DSOs even for something as bright as Orion's Nebula. The spirit of the conversation is if people can see the true color the way images from large telescopes posted in articles like this. They cannot. You take the reaction from the average person that has only seen processed images after looking through a telescope for the first time, and they will almost always have a bit of disappointment in their voice. I have taken my scope to rooftop bars and let patrons look through at whatever can be seen at the time. I have yet to do this and not meet someone that's never looked through a telescope with their own eyes--which is the point of my effort.

I understand. The way you wrote it it sounded like you were implying that the scope itself strips the color spectrum ("black and white") when really it's just the light is so faint that our cones don't really register color while our rods can easily register bright white light. (i work with weird people who don't like false color and instead look at the image as a series of monochromatic filtered images because you can see more detail that way)

For demonstration, I always attach a DSLR to prime focus and display Live View.

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).

Yes, because in a thread about the JWST, then moving to backyard telescopes, we all naturally assume we're pointing them at trees.

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

I remember seeing Jupiter in colors when looking at it from the backyard of a friend of mine.

That telescope didn't have a motor and we were constantly chasing Jupiter manually. It stays inside the ocular only for a few seconds, then Earth points us into another direction.

The youtube link to a 'zoom' in video to the image:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkVprNB5XbI

What is really, really neat to notice isn't just the detail in that final image.... look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies.

The nebula is about 1375 light years away. Those galaxies in the distance.... are billions of light years away. It's hard to comprehend.

> look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies.

just to add to the awe of that, pretty much every "dot" in one of these images is going to be another galaxy. individual stars from within the Milky Way will have diffraction spikes and very obvious as a single item.

It's dizzying even on the galactic scale to internalize that discrete, visible stars are "right there" compared to the general murkiness of the Milky Way. A sphere of very near stars right next to us relatively speaking

There really is a lot of stuff left to see for the first time

"A lot" is the number of fish in a swarm maybe.

This is so far away from our concept of counting things that the mind just gives up. There's no comparison, no dumbing down to X amount of football fields, just nothing.

I find it depressing, confusing but also inspiring and fascinating at the same time.

Yes, there is so much we can’t possibly know or experience in our lifetimes, perhaps in the span of time our species will exist, to the extent that it becomes easy to imagine ourselves more like bacteria on a speck of dust floating in the air rather than on any scale towards the inverse. We’re incredibly small in size and mental capacity.

In ways the bacteria on the dust are oblivious to the scale and nature of the world around them, we seem similarly lost and hopeless in the pursuit of comprehending the universe. We just weren’t built to grasp this kind of scale. We can enjoy images of the tiniest little slices of it, though. I’m actually very grateful for that. I think it’ll be a source of endless wonder for my entire life.

I heard comparisons of the number of stars in the observable universe to the number of all grains of sand on Earth's beaches, or the number of molecules in a bottle of air. Not sure if that helps anyone, though.

The radius of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years. The Horsehead Nebula that they zoom into in the video is 0.000001375 billion light-years from Earth. I'm doing mind acrobatics to try to understand the scale but... nope! :)

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

Some substances can get you there.

I found this mesmerizing. Particularly fun is to scrub forward and backward through the video to clarify where exactly you're looking. (I found it worked better on the embedded video in the article than the yt one, not sure why)

There's also a zoom on the image on ESA - https://esawebb.org/images/weic2411a/

The zoomable version: https://esawebb.org/images/weic2411a/zoomable/

Do you (or does anyone) know about how zoomed in the video is at the start? Like is that the milky way and are there some things in that starting frame that I could identify with the naked eye?

It seems like it is already quite zoomed in to start with, but I can't tell how much.

At the start of the video you are looking at a good potion of the whole visible sky. If you look at the very center of the frame, there is Orion, and you can see the three close bright stars together that we zoom in towards are Orion's belt.

Oh my goodness... Yes, there's Orion and the belt. This gives me way better idea of what I'm seeing. Thank you so much.

That'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 as today without much progress.

Edit: typo

We are lucky that we live in a sweet-spot era where the universe is old enough that we have 13 billion years to look back on, but young enough that all the galaxies haven’t receded behind the cosmic horizon yet due to the accelerated expansion of the universe. In some billion years, intelligent beings will only have historic records, if anything at all, to look back to how the observable universe used to be filled with billions of galaxies.

What if the only place where intelligent life was ever possible in the universe is being actively made impossible to live in by intelligent beings, which means after they're gone extinct, there'll be no intelligent beings to appreciate its beauty?

That seems a quite likely outcome to me. On the positive side, once it happens, there will be no one who would mourn it.

Buddhism is deeply rooted in reincarnation and the progression of a common person to an enlightened being through different ranks over the span of multiple lifetimes.

I am pretty sure there is a dimension of life that we have yet to discover and learn about. And for the time being Buddhism is the only “religion” that openly discusses this progression.

Hinduism has the same but in my experience it’s a lot more reserved. Bali is a great example of this (which has a strong Hinduism foundation), of how you can create “paradise on Earth” and yet 99.99% of tourist’s don’t ever encounter the root of that paradise.

Humans will learn the full extent of life long before they go extinct.

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.

Also, given the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the most basic (Occam's razor) interpretation of the equations, we are constantly spinning off a foam of combinatory alternatives of ourselves and everything around us, because the particles that make us up are doing that. So we live many lives, and even when we die in one perceived timeline, other versions of ourselves continue their journey.

Both of those are scientifically plausible, especially the second - which many scientists already believe to be true.

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. Too many imaginative people and popularizers have a tendency to jump from actual equations/constraints they don't understand, to non-scientific psychologically motivated "implications" and ideologies. Quantum mechanics has been abused enough that way.

The easiest way to test the theory is to go into the unknown and find out for yourself. You can walk into life situations with a predisposition (which is a useful skill to have) and then see the feedback that you get in return.

By and large, to really have success with this is to learn meditation (not master it by any means), because even basic meditation will naturally provide insight that is outside of the scope of the mental framework you are accustomed to as a mind.

Even in science, there is a lot of focus on what happens to the person on a physical and a mental level, but little on what happens outside of it, which can only be learned by being quiet/still.

I like your reply and it is balanced, and I am not sure that I could reply to it in any other way than I did now. My personal experiences transcend a lot of such discussion, even what I am saying myself, but those are the elements of being human, being bound by something.

I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution!

I am not exactly sure what you are saying! :)

My response is staying with science, which just means staying with evidence and reasoning that avoids our unbounded ability to fool ourselves. I.e. repeatable experiments by others, tested model predictions, mathematical and statistical checks, etc.

That is all science and math are. An accumulation of tools and systems that improve the reliability of our thinking. They increasingly help us mitigate our exceptional talent for fooling ourselves.

If we find another way to "know", it will get included into science too.

I am a big believer that our personal experience and relationship with life is improved by meditation, staring by learning to quiet our minds and focus/refocus on one simple thing at a time (breathing for instance, or nothing). Then use our ability to focus to mindfully listen to our bodies, then our feelings, then our beliefs, our values, our situations, finally what it all means.

But our minds/brains don't internally track providence of information. What is real and beyond us, vs. what we imagine or want. It is all mixed up in our heads, thus the ease with which we trick ourselfs, and others.

I am a big believer in imagination, to the sky and beyond anything we see. But the very unboundedness of imagination is why just because we can imagine something, and it seems right, fulfills some deep balance, and seems vivid, desirable, and makes clear sense that must be true, ... that doesn't actually make it true, real, or coherent, not even a little bit.

> I think manipulation of elements (for example) will be considered as a very primitive thing in the grand scheme of evolution!

Evolution created multicellular creatures, nervous systems, and brains, which in turn have created a species/society that is actively searching for knowledge and putting it to work for survival at higher orders of organization. I.e. science, economics, politics, technology, etc. Limited resources (at any given time) continue to drive us to solve new problems and learn more, to continue surviving even as we complicate and expand the environment we survive in.

So in that sense, life is already moving past biological chemistry into other substrates, and we are already learning to harness the arrangement of atoms to go further. And eventually, perhaps, harness the fine structure of space-time, and beyond.

> 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 psychologically motivated "implications" and ideologies.

Similarly, too many imaginative people who lack adequate depth in epistemology and non-binary logic like to practice both on the internet as if they know what they're doing. And the beauty of it is: if the minds of the population have been adequately conditioned, no one notices.

But wait, there's even more Oracle level soothsaying of the unknowable below:

-------------

My response is staying with science, which just means staying with evidence and reasoning that avoids our unbounded ability to fool ourselves. I.e. repeatable experiments by others, tested model predictions, mathematical and statistical checks, etc.

That is all science and math are. An accumulation of tools and systems that improve the reliability of our thinking. They increasingly help us mitigate our exceptional talent for fooling ourselves.

If we find another way to "know", it will get included into science too.

-------------

I'm sorry to be such a party pooper, but when religious or mystical people make epistemically unsound claims, the knives almost always come out for them, a little in the opposite direction shouldn't hurt too much. And besides: "science" claims to welcome criticism, much like religious people claim to follow their scriptures. But then, who doesn't like to have their cake and eat it too?

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.

I think it's interesting (though not surprising) that your long response avoided every single piece of your text that I quoted, as well as my question and other text (ie: the unknowable) of my critique.

I wasn't quite sure what you were saying.

Trying again:

> Is this yet another one of those scientific facts that does not require a proof?

Quantum mechanics is full of unintuitive, amazing effects, that get hyped by non-experts into imagined meanings. The latter isn't science.

But the actual quantum field equations themselves are as hard science as it gets.

> I'm sorry to be such a party pooper, but when religious or mystical people make epistemically unsound claims, the knives almost always come out for them, a little in the opposite direction shouldn't hurt too much. And besides: "science" claims to welcome criticism, much like religious people claim to follow their scriptures. But then, who doesn't like to have their cake and eat it too?

> "science" claims to welcome criticism

Science welcomes well thought out analytical or experimental challenges. Not criticism without merit, contrariness based in ignorance of the subject, ideological attacks, or simple negativity - all those just waste time.

Think informed critique, not just any "criticism".

> much like religious people claim to follow their scriptures.

Science only works to provide the best, incomplete, but most useful model we have of the truth, at any given time, backed up by independent evidence and math. It is subject to new evidence, a deliberate awareness and focus on current limitations - which is where scientists spend most of their time - with the expectation that today's best understanding will be eclipsed.

In stark contrast, Scriptures claim to be the stable truth without need for justification. Scriptures often frame "doubt" as undesirable, and their authority as above evidence. Unbelievers are often cast as morally compromised. Religions are rarely known for encouraging the discovery and sharing of contra-evidence, or the search for alternate and better viewpoints.

Very different.

> But then, who doesn't like to have their cake and eat it too?

Not sure what the cake and eating it too is? Science for being hypocritical like religion? (Not my view, but trying to understand yours.)

>> 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?

> Quantum mechanics is full of unintuitive, amazing effects, that get hyped by non-experts into imagined meanings. The latter isn't science.

Once again, you do not answer the question.

Are you asserting that your claim above is a fact? Yes/No

>> "science" claims to welcome criticism

> Science welcomes well thought out analytical or experimental challenges. Not criticism without merit, contrariness based in ignorance of the subject, ideological attacks, or simple negativity - all those just waste time.

> Think informed critique, not just any "criticism".

a) Please state unambiguously (Yes/No) whether you consider my criticism valid, or whether it falls into your "other" category.

b) Who decides what qualifies as valid, and is that done in a non-biased, non-ideological manner?

c) By what means did you come into possession of knowledge of the entirety of what all scientists do, and how they do it? (Here I am presuming that you consider scientists to be a part of science....and if you don't, I would then wonder how things like "Science welcomes" is implemented).

> Science only works to provide the best...

Please reveal the source of your omniscient knowledge. The supernatural is certainly allowed, but I've been led to believe that science folks "don't" believe in the supernatural.

> In stark contrast, Scriptures claim to be the stable truth without need for justification. Scriptures often frame "doubt" as undesirable, and their authority as above evidence. Unbelievers are often cast as morally compromised. Religions are rarely known for encouraging the discovery and sharing of contra-evidence, or the search for alternate and better viewpoints.

I'd say this is at least "mostly true".

> Very different.

True - but do you also know this much less famous part: they are also very similar, simultaneously.

> Not sure what the cake and eating it too is? Science for being hypocritical like religion? (Not my view, but trying to understand yours.)

Bullseye. Scientific ~believers/followers are indeed hypocritical, like religious people[1], and in many ways even above and beyond religious people (in that: if one has superior especially in specific ways scriptures, as science does imho, then violations of them are more egregious, in certain dimensions).

[1] I suppose I should reveal that the root cause is inheritance from People, though an ideology taking root in the mind is necessary to exploit its capabilities to their maximum.

> I think any view of life consistent with its emergence by evolution isn't consistent with reincarnation,

Why?

Evolution is environmental selection, in a context of reproduction with error. We have chemical, geological, genetic and morphological evidence of its history. And the history of the things it produces, our bodies, and then nervous systems, and our minds. Our minds being constructed biologically, implemented with neurons that maintain its activity and memories.

So we know how our eyes, brains and hair came to be with a truly remarkable amount of evidence.

The theory of evolution is also mathematically tractable, to the point of being a tautology. It explains vast amounts of phenomena, and can be tested in the lab and with computer models.

It is a highly robust theory in practice. Useful for doing such things as optimizing aircraft wing geometry.

We know how information flows in evolution, encoded in form and blueprints, how they are maintained and duplicated. Where there is information continuity, where there is not and why.

--

Reincarnation proposes a different form of continuity, that is not just unsupported by evolution, it is in stark contrast to everything we have learned about it and from it.

Reincarnation isn't even a well defined concept, and has no evidence for it. It has no explanatory power or any proposed connection to evolution that makes sense.

It is not only not supported by evolution, but violates everything we know about how life develops and reproduces.

What is reincarnation exactly? There are nothing but vague definitions, which violate any principle of the information flows, we call survival and reproduction, as explained by evolution.

What part of continuity does it maintain? Why does it happen? How does it happen? How and why would it appear and evolve? What was the initial process? In what initial form? How would it progress? What maintains its existence as a phenomena?

Why would it happen at death? Given death isn't a simple event, how does it "know"? Why not continuous reincarnations? Why not merged reincarnations? What constraints what can reincarnate into what? How would any of this work?

Nobody has been able to propose construction, reproductive, selection or adaptation mechanisms for anything that looks even vaguely like reincarnation.

Nobody has been able to propose tests that would identify a reincarnation event vs. non-event, its presence or effects that others can work with.

Nobody has created an experiment to initiate or monitor a reincarnation.

Nobody has a formal model for it. Or even an informal model beyond hand waving. In contrast to the unending number of worlds that don't exist, but mathematicians have no trouble exploring.

Reincarnation is an incoherent psychologically motivated conjecture.

Like many other such culturally generated and valued ideas, it is also interesting, fascinating, imaginative and inspirational. A positive contribution to stories and dreams. Even a comfort, to those who don't require their beliefs and values to be well formed or verifiable.

There's a crucial bit in your reasoning, the assumption that the mind is a result of the brain. Your entire argument rests on this fulcrum.

All the questions you pose do carry the intention you mean IF you abide by that assumption. That mind stems from matter.

If we recognize that material science is purely speculative when it comes to explaining the intricacies of the inner world of the mind, we could make a list of similar questions.

For example:

> What part of continuity does it maintain? Why does it happen? How does it happen? How and why would it appear and evolve? What was the initial process? In what initial form? How would it progress? What maintains its existence as a phenomena?

You could ask this same question about feelings and thoughts and intentions. If you could answer it, if you could track down and correlate all those details from thoughts to neurons, you'd be able to read minds and predict people's behaviors mechanically.

In a materialist conception of the world, there is something binding the assumption that mind arose from brains to our current scientific understanding. There's a bridge of "we'll figure out the details if we stay on the train of scientific progress". But that's a promise.

That vagueness that you call out, standing from a scientific mindset, that same vagueness appears when you stand grounded in direct (non conceptual) experience, and you ask to science "what is a thought?".

There's no precise definition in science as to what makes up a thought, and science is born out of thought. That is worth contemplating (which is not the same as thinking).

What you're objecting is not unreasonable, but you're describing why reincarnation is incompatible with materialism, not with evolution. If you don't share the assumption of matter over mind, then there is room for compatibility, of mind working in tandem with matter in a process that we don't fully understand, in which reincarnation occurs in ways that we don't understand materially, and in which evolution occurs biologically in ways we kind of understand.

How does this comment relate to the comment it's replying to?

Life will survive beyond humanity, trust me. Intelligence already exists in a few animals on this planet, and another few million years could have them at the top of the food chain, exploring our relics.

I don't understand people that aren't filled with dread with this concept.

And I understand why so many humans fall back to something like religion to cope. It's the only way it seems to become complacent with our role in the cosmic horror.

I know all the intellectual arguments for optimistic nihilism. I vote in elections even though my "one vote" doesn't matter amongst millions, and in some degree my single human life is the same on a timescale of (hopefully) trillions of humans by the time we get to the point of worrying about the receding observable universe.

And yet...

The change is too slow for anyone to be personally affected by it. Besides, the universe as such is devoid of any meaning; meaning is only something that we create internally. The fact that we dread voids and emptiness is also a result of evolutionary needs, there is no “dread” outside of us.

Humans are the universe defining meaning.

Considering that I used to experience that dread, and how I used to think, and the patterns I see in your speech -- I'd say that dread is not a response to the concept, but due to over intellectualizing.

The dread is precisely the intellect recoiling at its limits. It reaches for other intellectual theories to rescue it but this is of course in vain.

The way out is to seek answers in other complimentary areas and ways of seeing the world.

People create various stories just to escape concept of void. But if one does not seek those lies, there is no need for nihilism. Because even if our consciousness was not relevant - it is only thing we have. It is relevant to us. It is us till we meet the void.

> it's hard not to get all philisophical and wonder about the size of space & time on cosmic scale

Indeed!

Never a bad time to re-watch Cosmos and (in my opinion) the awesome sequel(s) by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Is it weird to admit I even choke up during some of the episodes?

(As an aside, why is it so hard to find the sequels to Cosmos in any streaming service. In my country it's not on Netflix, Disney+, Apple, HBO/Max, Star+, Prime Video. What the hell...? I just want to re-watch the damned thing and I don't own a Blu-ray player. Do I have to pirate the stuff?)

It should be one of the things that Disney owns outright today (from having bought some but not all of Fox/News Corp), so Disney+ is the natural home, but that version of Cosmos was a very expensive show so between the "Disney Vault" and Disney again remembering they can get revenue from lending shows to other services it does seem to be off Disney+ for the moment.

JustWatch says it is streaming on ad-supported Free service Tubi in the US right now: https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/cosmos-a-spacetime-odys...

(JustWatch is a too useful service at this point in the Streaming Wars to figure out where shows and movies currently are. I am getting to point of buying more Blu-Rays again, though, because there are too many services and many of the ad-supported ones like Tubi and Pluto are sometimes really obnoxious, and some of the paid services I have strong reasons I don't want to pay for them. I certainly have friends that have gone back to piracy, and it does sound more tempting as the Streaming Wars get worse.)

Thanks, JustWatch is indeed very useful!

I'm not in the US so Tubi doesn't work for me. Apparently none of the Cosmos series (original or the two sequels) is available in my country. Not even to buy.

I'm so thrilled! I cannot wait to NOT watch this anywhere legally!

Oh well, to the Bay it is.

You gave it a fair shot, go ahead and come join us at the bay where the grass is green, the videos full HD and nobody wants your money (just your soul).

We wanted Spotify for video, we got Netflix, Disney+, Apple, HBO/Max, Star+, Prime Video, and your local thing too. And they still haven’t got what you want to watch. /sigh

Neil de Grasse Tyson is still on my 'to watch' list, but you may be interested in Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Solar System / Universe' series. From what I've heard, Brian Cox is something of the British equivalent of Tyson. 'Wonders-' is a beautifully shot series that is both educational and remains impressive over a decade on (2010-2011).

The only thing that might be disappointing if you're already into astrophysics is that it's rather dumbed-down compared to his books, which are more earnest, closer perhaps in style to Feynman's Lectures.

I really like Brian Cox, but I do really wish he'd aim his content a bit higher and pack a bit more information into it. I hesitate to use "dumbed down" though (maybe I would if I didn't like him so much), more like it's just a bit too laid back and slow like it's aimed at people not really paying attention.

I feel like Brian Cox over-corrected as his career has progressed further and further into the "science edutainer" career. His early books were fascinating glimpses into String Theory and M-Theory and often got criticized for being too dense.

To be fair, a similar criticism is often levied at Niel deGrasse Tyson as well that his modern persona is too laid back and slow and aimed at people not really paying attention, but some of his early astrophysics stuff was dense and cool and you still get those glimpses when he is advocating for astrophysics content.

(Relatedly, it's a part of why I respect Bill Nye's late career attempts at aging his attempted shows up and advocating for things like climate science in them, even if those messages and content density sometimes sadly falls to bad or mixed reviews. It is impressive to see him trying.)

I think the divulgator role is necessary though. I like Neil's laid back & slow persona. He communicates for effect, glossing over details which would overwhelm casual audiences. He is emotional, grave or funny as needed. He simplifies where it's needed for a 40 minute episode of a show aimed at general audiences (like myself!).

I feel the role of science communicators/eduitaners such as these is to spark an interest in the topic. You can later go for details elsewhere, or even pursue a career in science.

Yeah, I agree there is a great utility to it, and it can be of great benefit. I also still think that it feels a useful criticism to keep mentioning as well because there's that always balance to strike in the huge wide spectrum between "mainstream and fluffy and almost void of content" and "deep and interesting but hard to follow and more clearly for a niche audience.

It's a bit of a hysteresis, right, of constantly trying to fight for that "perfect" (nonexistent?) fit of strong content to largest audience. Like with most science itself, you experiment with some content, use the reviews and criticism you get back to compensate for the next content. When I accuse Brian Cox or NdGT "over-compensating" a little to the broad it's not that I don't think they are doing the right thing, it's that I hope their next hysteresis swing might go a bit denser again and maybe criticism like mine will be useful if either of them read HN.

Similarly, I respect Bill Nye's attempts so much because it seems (from the outside, from mixed reviews I've read, from other people talking about the shows) to be, if not "failing" then certainly not as successful as they could be. As science reminds us, failed experiments are useful too, and I don't necessarily want people to believe in the boring null hypothesis that "People don't want harder science discussions" and I don't want for people like Bill Nye to give up on trying to broach the hard topics (like Climate Change and more science that should be mainstream but is fighting disinformation and/or disinterest). (Not that I think Bill himself would give up, but that it might discourage people trying to follow in Bill's footsteps.) I would love to see more of these "edutainers" trying to do the hard stuff more of the time, get a wilder balance/mix. I want to see more stuff in general in the spectrum as a whole. I don't think "celebrity" is necessarily zero sum and that these "edutainers" are competing among each other for the same audiences, but there does seem to be some scarcity factors for "celebrity scientist" at play to account for.

Wow, never even heard of Brian Cox! Will find this series you mention. Thanks for the recommendation.

I'm not a physicist of any kind so I'm ok at the "science divulgation" level.

You are not alone

We're probably not getting to space without AGI or at least some level of sophisticated AI. At a certain point our biological bodies are just wed to the Earth and its ecosystem, as we are animals that are products of the Earth.

If "we" ever get out there, some form of mechanical AI will. And we will never know it because once we send those ships off, we'll be long gone before the return signal gets to us from some far of locale. Imagine a voyager who can self-repair, mine asteroids, print circuits, etc. Now imagine giving it a 1 million year mission. Maybe by then we'll all have given up on biology and we'd be the "robots" on that ship.

Sometimes the universe makes beings like us, but not often, and probably makes all manner of interesting beings that will most likely be forever out of reach, and us out of their reach. Kudos to some life on a faraway planet, I wish we could meet.

Also its fun to think of the universe as a system. Here's this incomprehensibly large thing constantly in motion, constantly having stars die out and explode, and new ones born, etc all the time but to us at incredible slow speeds, everywhere, yet at incredible distances from each other. Its like this bellows that keeps a fire lit, over and over, non-stop. But not quite non-stop because this great furnace too will (probably) have a proper death. This universe life cycle chart is both a feat of science and an incredible work of a permanent and grim mortality of all things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Ba...

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.

I am reminded of David’s song in Psalm 19 … It’s amazing to me how in the thousands of years since he wrote these words, we’ve still only scratched the surface of observing the beauty and depth of creation.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Beautiful catch! I’m always amazed by the Bible’s timelessness. Even when I know to expect it, it still impresses me.

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 millions of other earth-like planets out there?

Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. What's also implausible is that, given the impossible vastness and hostility of interstellar space, that any will ever manage to contact us, specifically. Fortunately, we've got lots of crazy lifeforms here on Earth to keep us occupied, if we can take a moment to stop extincting them as fast as we possibly can.

> 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 thinking and statistical truthiness.

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.

Why does that make the earth special?

Is the single one in a million dimensional one-hot vector special? Why?

If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random. Just the other random values don't get to ask the question...

> If only intelligent life can have this conversation then it will always be "but why us?!?!" well, it was random

"It was random" in my opinion explains little. If it was sentient, maybe the dice would say "why did I land showing my '6' face? Why me?" and the answer would be many other dice landed showing their '6' faces. Random, but given enough dice rolling you'll get another '6'.

The universe is finite but it's mind-boggingly large. I think Earth is special because a- I was born there, enough said, and b- it has just the right conditions and luck for life to exist. But I don't think it's so special that it's the only planet in the whole mind-boggingly large universe to be this way. There must be other planets/dice rolling out there.

Until we find another such planet we cannot know for certain, but in my opinion it seems unlikely that these conditions don't exist anywhere else but on Earth. Why? Well, because the universe is so large -- the dice pool is very, very large.

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...

> 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.

It's possible that life emerging is so unlikely that it has never happened before anywhere even if it could happen again. We do not have the data to establish how likely and in fact we don't even have enough data to fill in all the gaps of how life on earth emerged in the first place. Our gut feelings are likely heavily influenced by science fiction or other priors and can't be trusted for knowledge but we are as a species very good at deluding ourselves into thinking we know things that we don't.

But that's it. Life doesn't seem so unlikely, does it? There are things we still don't understand about it, but we understand some, and it's not magic. It can happen, given the right conditions, much like mold may grow on a piece of bread under the right conditions.

What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe. It seems unlikely that nowhere else did the preconditions for life arise, and in fact, it seems likely that they must have arisen in multiple places. Immensely many places, in fact. Considered like that, it's more unlikely that life didn't appear anywhere else but in this Pale Blue Dot.

We look at our planet, and all that had to happen for those first lifeforms to come into existence, and it seems so unlikely... but not impossible. And we're playing with a lot of dice here! Very hard not to roll a few sixes with a bag of dice so large.

> There are things we still don't understand about it, but we understand some, and it's not magic.

> What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe.

We know a whole lot about ways life changes once it's there but we haven't observed life emerging from non-life and our hypotheses for how life emerged on earth has more holes than swiss cheese and it doesn't have to be magic in order to be exceedingly improbable. And magnitudes work in both ways, if it is sufficiently improbable for life to emerge, let's say 1 chance in 1E100 against then even if you had dice rolls in proportion to all the subatomic particles in the universe (~1E80) multiplied by the number of seconds since the big bang (~4E17) then it would still be about 3 orders of magnitude against the likelihood of life emerging even once. In this scenario if the probability was 4E97 then we'd expect for life to have emerged once. Until we have the data to infer what the probability actually is we can't determine which scenario is the case.

True, we cannot determine the scenario.

> but we haven't observed life emerging from non-life

But our laboratory is very, very small, so that proves little.

And we know life emerged at least once, and it doesn't seem particularly improbable. That's what I mean by "not magic"; not that we understand every little step, but we have some idea.

I don't think it's scifi to believe it's unlikely only Earth has sparked life. The one thing that is unlikely is that we will ever witness life anywhere else, but that's a different problem.

I know nothing compared to people who work in the field, so I don't have my own work, I trust theirs.

Whose work exactly? I'm always eager to read about this fascinating question.

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.

I do think there’s other life out there. But just considering the other side, the statistical model only applies if the existence of life is actually stochastic.

If a farmer plants a single tree in the middle of a square mile plot and rips up anything else that grows, any Fermi approximations done by the tree are going to be quite misleading.

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 commenter linked to). Another group of answers is that there is life, but something about the relationship between us means we don’t observe them. Maybe they’re hiding from us. Maybe they’re hiding from everyone.

I think the range of possible answers that people think of for this scenario is generally much too narrow. The power imbalances can be wildly greater than “they’re avoiding us”. We experience power imbalances this large every day. What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be.

Maybe this universe is a total construction. Maybe it’s partially constructed, in the same way a farmer “makes” a farm from the Earth. If anything like that is the case, stochastic models are completely the wrong way to reason.

It would be like if I wove a basket. There’s now at least one basket made by Travis Jungroth. Surely there must be more? Out of the millions of baskets made across time, what’s the probability that only one was made by me? Even for a low probability of any individual basket, the numbers start getting decent there’s another out there.

But there’s not. I just… decided to make only one.

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.

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, one could think that single cell to be "planted" like a seed would be but no supporting evidence for now (or ever?).

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 choice. You could choose to extend the relationships between plants, or how power structures develop, or the explosion of complexity localized on Earth, or the human tendency to purposefully create environments for life.

> the geological landscapes we see are the result of physics, time and random fluctuations

Most of them. Not all of them. Bingham Canyon Mine is an open pit 4km wide and 1.2km deep. El Teniente mine is 3,000km of tunnels up to 2km deep. There’s Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam. There are artificial islands and nuclear test sites.

That’s all just in the last 150 years. Draw the trend of human progress and where does it end up a billion years from now?

That’s even just assuming the conditions that created the universe mirror the conditions here on Earth, which is a tremendous assumption. It might be like having a letter dropped through your door slot for the first time and reasoning the postal service is entirely made of paper folded and stuffed into other paper. The actual reality of mail carriers with pensions, trucks with antilock breaks and sorting machines bigger than any animal that has ever existed would be unfathomable. Anyone suggesting it would be easily dismissed in favor of a simpler and less correct explanation.

> 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?

Mostly things that exist without other concrete explanations. Consciousness in humans and animals. A lack of contact with other intelligent life. The constants of the universe being such that the universe can exist at all and not do something like collapse on itself.

The common report of having met non-human entities, especially when on psychedelics.

Our own tendency to creat artificial worlds (farms, zoos) and simulations.

None of it proves anything or necessarily moves towards a constructed reality versus a specific alternative.

I understand you're not saying this is a proof of anything.

However, I have a hard time understanding the connection between those things you list and "... and therefore this may be evidence of a constructed universe."

I just don't see it. For example, things "without concrete explanations" are more easily chalked to our lack of understanding. Or even better, to the idea that there's no "why" to the universe, it just is; we can sometimes understand the "how" to some degree, if at all.

I think some emergent properties like consciousness and others are elegantly hypothesized about in Stephen Jay Gould's "The Panda's Thumb". Some things arise as secondary structures to other things which more readily relate to the environment. Like some hypothesize -- mind you, not interested in whether this specific hypothesis is right or wrong, just an example -- that walking upright/hip posture may have precipitated the evolution of mammalian brain cortex as a side effect!

I don't want to pick on or challenge your every sentence, because I understand this is just opinion and we're all entitled to it. But I really don't see where's the evidence for a constructed universe.

If there were highly advanced beings that constructed the universe, and designed it to obfuscate that very fact, what would evidence of that look like?

If they are perfect at hiding their hand, we wouldn't be able to tell.

But that kind of thinking is akin to solipsism, a mental dead end. What if you're the only real person and the rest is simulated or a dream? Would you be able to tell?

What if god left all those dinosaur fossils as a joke, and big dinos never really existed? Well, it's possible, but it's a thought-terminating idea, so best not considered.

But you’re the one doing the thought terminating. These things don’t have to be a dead-end.

What if it wasn’t perfectly obfuscated? Is there any evidence at all you’d consider to be in favor of the world being not as it first appears? Not something that’s way more easily explained otherwise, like fossils.

There are things that come to mind for me. One is the brain’s ability to experience hypergeometry and additional dimensions on psychedelics. I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone. I don’t think geometry scales in the way that running does, for example.

Similarly is are the many cases of people experiencing beings outside of consensus reality. People see people talking to them clear as day, that no one else sees. You can write this off as either a drug-induced hallucination or mental illness, but that’s deciding the cause a priori. It’s circular reasoning.

Without getting into the details of hallucinations and experiences you mention: how is anything of that even weak evidence of a constructed reality?

> I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone

Regardless, it's exactly how evolution works. Evolution allows for irrelevant and harmless traits with no purpose to exist. It even allows for somewhat harmful traits to exist, as long as they are balanced by a competitive advantage they piggyback on (e.g. what if hallucinations and listening to voices are a side effect of creativity and imagination?).

What would a constructed universe look like? I dunno. I would like to see contradicting evidence and timelines, maybe even obvious "coverups", maybe if a hyperadvanced civilization appeared across the whole globe (no secrecy) saying "hey it was us!" (but maybe they'd be lying, so who knows).

Skepticism is one of our most important tools. It tells us to triple check any extraordinary evidence and rule out all possible natural/ordinary explanations first.

You would have to pass a pretty high bar to consider a constructed universe... and remember, it would have to be strong evidence, because like you objected, "well God/Genuine faked all the fossils" is uninteresting.

I didn't say they are perfect, I asked what do you think evidence of that would look like.

I don't know how to answer the question.

Possibly timespans for interesting things to happen would be way shorter (compared to sentient animal lifespans). Less wasted time. Fewer deadends. No/fewer extinction events (possibly, or maybe our aliens designers like seeing stuff die or explode like with do playing SimCity?).

Things would make more obvious sense. There would be fewer contradictions. The purpose of life would be clearer, since it was designed. The physics and "rules" of the universe would have fewer special cases and would be easier to model. There would be no paradoxes. We would be able to explore the whole universe more easily.

I'm sure you can think of objections to each of my arguments, but really, some evidence would be there. Everything currently and firmly points the opposite way, except we don't know what happened before the Big Bang... but that's "pink invisible unicorns" stuff which I don't think we will be able to ever answer conclusively.

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.

I’m specifically not invoking faith. This doesn’t support Abrahamic religions more than any other. The line of reasoning here applies just as much to Hinduism, simulation theory, many creation stories, zoo theory, etc.

The idea that the universe was created by a higher being applies to every religion, but does not invoke faith? If you were to believe that theory at all it would require faith. How else could you believe it? No matter what you call it, there is a leap of faith.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, here's the definition of faith from Merriam Webster that I think applies:

  a(1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God
   (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion
  b(1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof
   (2): complete trust

Second, we could come to seriously believe in this theory through consensus direct interactions with these higher powers. That wouldn't require a leap of faith at all. If robots showed up and were like "we were sent by your creators, they say you're doing great" and gave us a second moon as a present, that would be very strong proof of more powerful beings.

Yes, if we had direct contact with the higher being that created our universe, or any proof of their existence, humans would no longer require faith regarding the existence of God...

How would you use this theory if you didn't believe it held any truth? You certainly can't draw any corollaries from it. If it is actually a relevant condition worth considering, then you must believe it to be tenable to some degree.

There's a condition where when I kick a ball, just before I touch it, the ball actually invisibly flies to the moon and back and then moves forward. It would be a condition under which Newton's laws fail... but I would have to actually believe in that condition to some degree to use it. It is also similarly unfalsifiable. With current observations it is scientifically untenable, and believing in that condition would require faith.

Any model can be proven incomplete if you conjure up unfalsifiable conditions that exist outside its domain and believe in them.

> b(1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof

For you to use the theory of creation in any meaningful way you must believe it is tenable. For you to believe it is tenable, without being faithful, there must be proof. Proof of this existence comes in many forms, where is your proof? Morality? Reason? Those aren't entirely scientific proofs...

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to censure or disprove creationism and the metaphysical systems built upon it, they are very important and super interesting... but I don't think any of them are without a bit of faith, and they are certainly beyond science's capabilities. This is why I was saying it was interesting that science could invoke faith in some way.

Have you read the dark forest trilogy?

Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, The Dark Forest is the 2nd book.

Ah my mistake, thanks.

I haven’t.

OK, it deals with some of these subjects.

But even saying that much is kind of a spoiler.

It's a great read, IMO.

First of all: the question needs to be qualified by what we mean by "out there". The galaxy? The observable universe? The entire universe?

The universe might be infinite, in which case: yes, there is life out there. We know the probably of life forming on any given planet must be greater than zero, or else we wouldn't be here. From this we can deduce the average volume which contains exactly one planet with life, which must be finite. Whether it makes sense to talk about what could be happening beyond the cosmological event horizon is another discussion.

If we are talking about the observable universe or an even smaller volume: How can you say it's statistically implausible without knowing the probability of life forming on any given planet? It might be incredibly small, yet greater than zero. Your line of reasoning is incredibly common but I can't help but feel like it's mainly driven by wishful thinking.

Probably extrapolating from the fact that life here on Earth being found in harsh conditions, and those conditions being likely to be found all over the universe.

"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox"

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

>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 only a million years. We could very well spread through the entire galaxy in the near future if we manage to get to like, 1% of light speed in the next few hundred years.

So our galaxy, which contains a few hundred billion stars almost certainly has no other intelligent life in it for the simple reason that it'd be everywhere. That doesn't mean there's no microbial life or maybe technological life billions of light years out there but the fact that we're so alone in our neighborhood is a pretty strong indicator in the direction that advanced life might be much more rare than some people assume.

> So our galaxy, which contains a few hundred billion stars almost certainly has no other intelligent life in it for the simple reason that it'd be everywhere.

By that account another civilisation as advanced as us would say they're equally alone in the galaxy no ? yet here we are. And you forget time, they might have done that 2b years ago and there is nothing left for us to detect, or they might do it in 2b years and we might not be there to witness it. Also there might be barriers we're not aware of, for example advanced civilisations could go through things like extinction through pollution, over consumption of resources before reaching a tipping point to being multi planetary, &c.

Plus we're far from the only galaxy, there might be galaxy wide civilisations out there, far far away. And more important, nothing guarantees the premise of multi-planetary civilisation has any validity outside of sci-fi

It's like going in the woods twice a year, not seeing mushrooms and concluding mushrooms don't exist on earth because surely you'd have seen them by now! The bottom line is that we just have absolutely no clue

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).

Or we are as ignorant about the aliens as ants are about us.

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

Strong evidence for a race of horse-headed aliens.

We don’t know how large the universe is, and how (un)likely life is. Life could very well be highly unlikely with respect to the size of the universe. We currently have no good way to tell. The only thing we know is that life is not impossible.

r/Reincarnation

The zoom-in video at the end is utterly unbelievable, don't miss it. What an engineering and scientific triumph.

And it's in glorious 432p resolution!

Edit: Here is the 2160p version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdHnF9Go_DQ

Particularly if you notice all the galaxies above the top of the gas cloud in the final frame.

I wonder how fast an observer would need to be traveling for it to look like that!

99.x% the speed of light, but the image would be blueshifted and highly distorted.

Since the images in the article are from infrared cameras, blue-shifting the light might just land the view from those IR images into the visible spectrum for the observer! Just need to tune the speed correctly.

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.

From Wikipedia: Most nebulae are of vast size; some are hundreds of light-years in diameter.

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Gorgeous 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.

> 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.

But you just did. That's what we're doing.

The horse head part that we see is 3x4 LY in size. If you wanted to experience that horse head like you would, say, a mountain -- just a large, field of view dominating visage. You would need to be about 20+ Lightyears away from it.

I don't know how bright the nebula is, but after 20 lightyears, I don't know how much the human eye could perceive it. And, likely, by the time you got close enough to actually see it, it may well just be a hazy cloud with no definition, since you'd be so close.

Things like these may only be able to be experienced by us through artificial means. Through embellishment and enhancement.

You can go and buy a "smart telescope" today that you can push a button, and point it at any of the "local" nebulas or other bright objects in the sky. Yet, if you look through the eyepiece, you won't see much. Even with magnification, it's a gray, fuzzy blob. The smart telescope will automatically capture more light, through longer exposures, and create a composite image with better definition and detail. Even with magnification, we can not experience those objects directly.

Astronomy, for me, is most "personal" with a pair of binoculars, particular a pair of stabilized binoculars. A mundane pair will open up the sky in a breathtaking way. Because it's more "real". It's not a picture on screen, and it wide and sweeping and huge.

But you can't really get those really fun Milky Way photos folks are making, not with binoculars. You CAN see the Milky Way under dark skies, but not like those photo capture them.

So, simply, "you can shut up. Stop typing now. Really", you may well have just experience the nebula as best as it can be done right now. Run that video on a huge TV in a dark room, it will help. Maybe see if any of this stuff is coming to an IMAX theater near you.

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?

> Isn't a nebula a cloud of dust?

I think "dust" is a term of art in astronomy. A cloud of rocks the size of cars could be dust. I suppose that if you can't resolve the particles, then it's dust.

If I look at this part of the Orion Nebula, it looks opaque; I can't see what's behind it. So I guess if I were in the middle of the nebula, then I wouldn't be able to see out of it. There are many stars in the nebula that are not visible (in visible light).

So I suppose that what you'd see would depend on where in the nebula you were sitting; if you were near a star, the dust would be illuminated, and the sky would be bright. If you were not near a star, presumably the sky would be dark, and you'd look up and see nothing, like the inhabitants of the planet Cricket.

> Isn't a nebula a cloud of dust?

Yes.

> I'm not sure how dense it gets, but would someone even notice if they were inside of the nebula?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26326/how-dense-...

(Google is your friend.)

There are multiple types of nebulae. Absorption nebula (or dark nebula) and reflection nebula are clouds of "dust" (more likely lots of rocks).

There are also emission nebula which are clouds of ionized gases that emit light.

The horsehead nebula is an absorption nebula that sits in front of light-emitting emission nebula. It's fairly easy to image the horsehead with a star tracker and DSLR, though not to this level of detail.

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.

I have reservations for the restaurant at the end of the universe.

If you look closely at the kitchen in the background, it’s all frozen microwave food.

So it's an Applebees?

There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.

Why will there only be trillions of years after you? Why not quadrillions? Couldn't we just pick an arbitrary number up to the largest variety of infinity?

I don’t think visiting it would be very interesting. It’s a giant dust cloud that would probably be unnoticeable from any close perspective.

Go camping and bring some friends and psychedelics, it'll help you get over your FOMO

Depending on the person this can go both ways.

So the irony of these large cosmic structures is that if you were within them or in there proximity you wouldn't know. I mean you could see if you were in a nebula by the dust and gas you could detect in most or all directions. But you probably couldn't tell how that would look from 10,000 light years away.

But there's a distance where such structures would probably fill the night sky because you were close but not too close. Some of these structures aren't necessarily visible to the naked eye, even if close, but some are. I wonder what that would do if you were on a planet where the horsehead nebula (or something similar) filled the sky and its brightness rivalled the Moon.

For a size comparison, here's a stacked, partially star-tracked image I took fully shot at 85mm on a full frame camera to show the perspective. The vertical 3 bright stars to the center/left are the belt of Orion.

The small black notch in the red nebula to the bottom right of the belt is the horse head.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZp_R1npsT-/?img_index=1

JWST optics makes quite unique diffraction spikes. Not only that there are eight of them, but on full resolution images [1] they have distinct pattern, as if made from separate dashed lines.

Are colors of those tiny lines (mostly red here - although this is false-color image) also diffraction artifacts, or do they correspond to actual spectrum of the stars causing them?

[1] https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...

That's how you can immediately tell a JWST image from Hubble; hubble has 4-spike patterns.

The color gradation is due to phasing effects from the different wavelengths of light being combined, and the checkerboard effect is an artifact of the segmented mirrors.

JWST has separate modes for spectroscopy. They’re pretty cool!

When I look at these images I instantly and fully understand why we are interested in the universe.

It is such an incredibly thing. Absolutely astonishing.

For this to exist and me shunting JavaScript around from place to place.. whats the point?

A million years from now our descendants will speak JSON. Your GitHub profile will be one of many temples and ancient sites - an Angkor Wat, a Gobekli Tepe.

People of the future will ask: "{ "question": "What is this .gitkeep file?" }"

And the sages will answer: "{ "answer": "It is a tomb or religious site." }"

The point is that you get to buy dinner tomorrow.

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It'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.

There are lots of forces at play! The article mentions some of them. Structures are shaped not just by gravity, but by electromagnetism, starlight, supernovae, and more.

Anyone else get the strangest sinking feeling in the final seconds when it's almost fully zoomed in and you come to the realization that the hundreds of specs in the distance are GALAXIES?

Yes I did too. < Insert HHGTTG quote about how big space is > > it is kind of mind bending when I try to think about it.

I like the little happy sunrise galaxy looking thing that’s at the top right corner of the bottom left square of the if you cut it into a 3x3 grid.

I highly recommend "Deep Sky."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Sky

From the Wikipedia entry:

>Deep Sky is narrated by Michelle Williams telling the story about the production of the James Webb Space Telescope and its impact on the technological improvements it made upon the Hubble Space Telescope.[6]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28370567/

https://youtu.be/5Mt_alPEyzI?si=36j5gKKrYUrOBI5w

I was fortunate to watch it on Vision Pro in IMAX and it was spectacular.

On the giant screen the Horsehead Nebula was mindblowing.

Here's a link to the actual image.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/53686360156/...

What do you all think all this comes from? To me personally it always baffles me with wonder. I think of the analogy of a mouse living in a cage. Do they actually even realize they are inside a cage? Inside a world constructed by some other being?

What baffles me is that the explanation of reality is too complex for our brains to grasp. Same as to how the mouse will never be able to understand they live in a cage (or even the concept of a cage?) no matter the knowledge we throw at them.

Such an incredible concept.

It reminds me there is still so much to explore, although the threshold for exploring is so high.

For context, I mean in comparison to earth. Consider that only 500+ years ago civilizations were discovering new land masses with unique flora and fauna. Discoveries that fundamentally changed the entire world as they knew out. Those sorts of discoveries are gone and that's rather depressing.

But that is virtually nothing compared to the wonders out there in space. Unfortunately much of it is destined to be barren, unlike earth, and travel is kind of an unsolvable problem at the moment and perhaps forever. But the potential is unfathomable.

I wonder what the red and blue stripe artifacts are in the lens flares.

The 6+2 spikes around the bright stars is a diffraction pattern created by the edges of the hexagonal mirror segments (the six large spikes) and the three struts that hold the secondary mirror (also six spikes, but four overlap with the mirror spikes).

https://smd-cms.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/webb-dif...

I’m aware of that. I was talking about the repeating pattern of blue and red stripes within the spikes.

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.

This site uses WAY too much SPA crap, and the actual photo itself seems to be a broken link on my phone (that takes me to a weird squasi-progressive homepage without changing URL?).

For anyone having similar problems, I recommend the source linked at the bottom of this blog post: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2411/

The amount of faint Galaxies in the final image is absolutely astounding, there's no way we are alone.

Lightcone theory [1] explains to us how we're likely prevented from ever actually "meeting" the others.

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

Funny timing – I just ran into this great Veritasium video which speaks of Lightcone theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6akmv1bsz1M

Yeah, that's a non sequitur.

Is it roughly correct to think the speed of the camera in the ESA video would be 683,280,000 times the speed of light? Considering the zoom in took ~1 minute, and that's the number of minutes in 1300 years (the distance to Horsehead Nebula).

How much of the pictures in the article are processed? What does the unprocessed photo look like?

All of the Webb observations are done in infrared light, which is invisible to us humans.

So the smartass answer is that it looks all black :)

I guess the unprocessed "photos" look like multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers. Nothing a human could appreciate. The interesting question is how they are processed.

The paper contains links to the raw data, descriptions of the data transformations they did, and links to some github projects, but it's all way over my head :) https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/forth/aa49198-24.pdf

It's fully processed. The Webb sees in infrared (0.6–28.3 μm), and the human eye sees in visible spectrum, which is like 380,000 - 750,000 μm, so not the same ballpark at all. I believe that the nebula cannot be seen with the naked eye at all. It can be photographed though, but it only becomes visible after combining and processing many long exposures.

There'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?

I wonder how dynamic this place is. I know it's light years across, but is there any chance to see movement within the smallest structures if we were to revisit the same image on a ~yearly timescale?

The Crab Nebula changed over time, but it's of course a different kind of "nebula" https://esahubble.org/images/opo9622b/

Maybe the horsehead nebula is different from 1 million years ago.

From the article: "The gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead have already dissipated, but the jutting pillar is made of thick clumps of material that is harder to erode. Astronomers estimate that the Horsehead has about five million years left before it too disintegrates."

Total noob question here and I apologize in advance. Are these the “actual” pictures or are they “touched up” by an artist ? If they the real pictures then this is truly impressive …

It's the intensity of infrared(-ish) light hitting multiple sensors with different wavelength filters.

If you were to look at it in person it would be a fairly smooth white patch. The colors are artificially assigned, but not by an artist. You pick a specific color for each wavelength. The Hubble palette is spelled out here: https://www.astronomymark.com/hubble_palette.htm

In case of most space photos, they are not what you would see with your eyes. Usually they capture data differently that how an eye would, and then visualize that. They sometimes strive for getting close to naked-eye perception, but usually it's not a goal.

On this Wiki page you can see multiple such images, and the process described:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color#False_color

They're "touched up" in a scientific way to remove flaws in the telescope (light leaking in from the sides, some distracting aspects of the diffraction patterns that from around stars). The colors come from combining several black-and-white images, taken at different frequencies. You can explore the subjectivity of infrared images by opening them in GIMP and playing with the hue slider.

Well since these images are taken in a different part of the EM spectrum than visible light, the colors are false. But the images aren't touched up in the sense that shapes and sizes are altered.

I always find it fascinating that what you are seeing is a 1500 year old `close-up' of the nebula as that is how long (approximately) it took for the photons to get here.

We live in an exciting time where technology has evolved beyond imagination, yet the universe hasn't changed much in that short time span.

On the other planet they think it's a bear foot

Ultimately, the vision of beauty in the universe is as vast and diverse as the universe itself, thx for sharing.

If you haven't watched the short clip on the article, do it right now!

We are living inside of an infinite fractal. Who would have thought.

The vastness of the cosmos is kind of upsetting in an odd way.

Honestly, I'm happy to be alive to see these kinds of images! I wish my dad was still around he'd be fascinated.

Absolutely crazy. when it zoomed out there were still whole bunch of galaxies

how huge is the universe? its like asking ants how big the earth is.

god look at all those itty bitty galaxies behind it... so exciting

One of the greatest things about Webb's photography is that *every* image is a deep-field image.

My god, it's full of galaxies!

Universe is fractal, Please stop iterating, it will cause a buffer overflow

I want them to zoom in further to find a horsehead with the horsehead. Mind blown!

We are but a breakpoint in an endless and eternal buffer overflow. Happy debugging!

Crazy!

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Unprecedented is quickly becoming the most overused adjective

We keep doing new things, though.