How often do you just take time and wonder - What IS out there in the black ?
POSTED BY: AURaptor
UPDATED: Friday, May 8, 2009 20:30
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:That’s about the size of it.
Originally posted by Kwicko:
I liken it to telling someone that here's the Sahara Desert, and there's a diamond in it the size of a grain of sand, and I want them to find it. Oh, and there's one more catch - that diamond only exists for one second every one thousand years. Good luck!
Those who use the size of the universe to claim that it is statistically impossible for life not to exist somewhere else in the universe, never seem to stop to think that the same immensity means we will very probably never encounter any such life if it does exist. Personally, I’m certain that out of the thousands of galaxies, one of them must have a planet where some form of intelligent life has formed other then us, but it will take life times to navigate just within our tinny cluster of 11 stars. Baring some scientific discovery that overturns much of what we understand about physics right now (which isn’t entirely ridiculous) we will never populate the tinny Orion Spur (the arm of the Milky Way where the Sun is located), much less move beyond our own galaxy.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
Exactly so. And it's not just the size of the universe you've got to take into account - it's the size of the immensity of TIME - all time as we know it, or as it exists since the Big Bang. You've got sixteen to twenty BILLION years in which life could have evolved, existed, become intelligent and aware, and then found us. Think about it - we've existed on this rock for probably less than 3 million years - out of some 4-5 billion that the rock has been here. Within the last hundred or so we've figured out radio transmissions. Within the last 50 we've figured out space flight in any form (if you accept that we ever went to the moon, that is). So we've got a window of about 50 years out of 20 billion where someone might have found us interesting.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm not saying we shouldn't be on the lookout for that diamond in the sand, because if we DO find it, it could be worth... EVERYTHING. It could be worth the universe. Or could cost us the same.
So it's worth looking, but no going in that the odds in your favor are vanishingly small.
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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Quote:
Originally posted by RIPWash:Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
I stopped worrying about it when it occurred to me that life and conditions for life are so rare that we will probably never find them outside of our planet.
Yup. I wouldn't say I've ever *worried* about it. I do wonder, though. Not so much about what IS out there, but what HAS BEEN and WILL BE. 20 billion years is a long time...
As for life in the universe, I'm fairly convinced that wherever life CAN exist, it WILL. Life reaches out, always. Thing is, though, that if you lay out a graph with the age of the universe as one axis, and the SIZE of the universe as another, and then start looking around for specific points - both in space AND in time - where life might have existed, you start seeing how futile the search can be. And we're talking about ANY form of life that we'd recognize as "life"; that doesn't even account for narrowing it down to "intelligent life".
I liken it to telling someone that here's the Sahara Desert, and there's a diamond in it the size of a grain of sand, and I want them to find it. Oh, and there's one more catch - that diamond only exists for one second every one thousand years. Good luck!
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
"It's LIFE, Captain, but not as we know it."
From a Christian viewpoint, that's something I've struggled with. We are just a tiny speck in the ginormous universe. It would seem that the odds would be that there MIGHT be other life out there. But on the other hand, it's said that Earth is in such a precise position relative to the Sun that any deviation from it's course and life couldn't exist here. And it's with that thought process I often wonder about the planets and moons of the 'Verse. Terraforming would have meant much more than just making the land liveable and air breathable. At least that's what I would expect.
And the life not as we know it? I think sometimes that could absolutely be true. There COULD be life out there that we just wouldn't expect - lifeforms that breath different atmosphere's, see differently, reproduce differently, etc.
But, as I believe there IS a God it's amazing that he put all that stuff out there for our viewing enjoyment.He can hold it all in the palm of his hand, looks through all of it down to the spec we call Earth and sees US and loves us. I know that might not be a popular point of view here, but that's an awesome thought and one that I cherish.
Mal: You think she'll hold together?
Zoë: She's torn up plenty, but she'll fly true.
Mal: Could be bumpy.
Zoë: Always is
Things get weirder every day, Ripper. Scientists HAVE found a roughly Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star, in the orbital zone around that star where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. So while it might not be *common*, Earth-ish planets might not be all that rare, either. We've looked at so very little of our own galaxy, and haven't looked at all into the depths of other galaxies, of which there are billions, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Just imagine, there are thousands of stars out there for every person on Earth, every person that ever existed or ever will.
I find it every bit as awe-inspiring to imagine us looking out into that "abyss" as I do to imagine some creator looking back in at us. Think of it - it's all there, and so far as we know, it's all ours, if only we could figure out how to get there...
And who knows what life might be out there? Who knows if we'd even recognize it if it were? We *barely* recognize each other as life, most of us DON'T recognize animals as having any sort of intelligence, and plants? Fuhgeddabouddit. For all we know, a lichen colony in upper Michigan could be the most intelligent thing on Earth - after all, it's smart enough not to let on that it's smart. :) We just haven't figured out h
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"Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this "deepest-ever" view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Besides the classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors that are important clues to understanding the evolution of the universe. Some of the galaxies may have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang.
Representing a narrow "keyhole" view all the way to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of sky 1/30th the diameter of the full Moon (about 25% of the entire HDF is shown here). This is so narrow, just a few foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy are visible and are vastly outnumbered by the menagerie of far more distant galaxies, some nearly as faint as 30th magnitude, or nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision. (The relatively bright object with diffraction spikes just left of center may be a 20th magnitude star.) Though the field is a very small sample of sky area it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks the same in all directions.
The image was assembled from many separate exposures (342 frames total were taken, 276 have been fully processed to date and used for this picture) with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), for ten consecutive days between December 18 to 28, 1995. This picture is from one of three wide-field CCD (Charged Coupled Device) detectors on the WFPC2.
This "true-color" view was assembled from separate images were taken in blue, red, and infrared light. By combining these separate images into a single color picture, astronomers will be able to infer -- at least statistically -- the distance, age, and composition of galaxies in the field. Bluer objects contain young stars and/or are relatively close, while redder objects contain older stellar populations and/or farther away.
This material was presented to the 187th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Antonio, Texas on January 15, 1996. Credit: Robert Williams and the Hubble Deep Field Team (STScI) and NASA"
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Thanks, Jongs. I love that picture. Or montage. :)
As I heard it described, the "slice" of sky represented in that photo is about the size your eye sees the period at the end of this sentence - if you held it out at arm's length, that is. And in that tiny speck of the sky... billions of stars and hundreds of galaxies. :jawdrop:
And if you look deeper, you'll see even more stars and galaxies.
Some people think about this stuff and feel very insignificant; I think about it and am just in awe that I'm even able to see it and comprehend the vastness of the universe. That alone proves that we are anything but insignificant! :)
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:
Thanks, Jongs. I love that picture. Or montage. :)
As I heard it described, the "slice" of sky represented in that photo is about the size your eye sees the period at the end of this sentence - if you held it out at arm's length, that is. And in that tiny speck of the sky... billions of stars and hundreds of galaxies. :jawdrop:
And if you look deeper, you'll see even more stars and galaxies.
Some people think about this stuff and feel very insignificant; I think about it and am just in awe that I'm even able to see it and comprehend the vastness of the universe. That alone proves that we are anything but insignificant! :)
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Don't look at it too long, or you might turn into a Reaver. Oh wait, staring into the abyss of space didn't actually cause that now as we know.
That pic really blew my mind when it came out a few years ago....imagine, each one of those specks is a full galaxy, and the distances between them are millions of light years. Our own galactic neighbor, Andromeda is 2.2 million light-years away from us and only appears as an indistinguishable star-like speck of light in the sky.
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Quote:
Our own galactic neighbor, Andromeda is 2.2 million light-years away from us and only appears as an indistinguishable star-like speck of light in the sky.
Yeah... on the one hand, it appears to the naked eye as nothing more than a tiny, insignifican smudge in the sky, not even a point of light that you can focus on, just a tiny blur.
On the other hand - and this is the part I like - YOU CAN SEE ANOTHER FREAKING GALAXY WITH YOUR NAKED EYE!
How player is that, man?
Mike
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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