Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)
I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe really have any "meaning", the term that humans invented and that even they are unsure of? Then, I think it's a big randomness, a random accident, a big joke, just happening with nothing to make sense of.
It's not a joke, because jokes have underlying meaning. It is somewhere between a "random accident" and the only way it could have possibly been given the constraints of fundamental physics. I suspect that everything that could possibly be, is, but it's random that you are you and I am me and we find ourselves here in this corner of this galaxy in this part of the universe which might itself be the inside of a giant black hole. But even if our universe is random, that doesn't mean there's nothing to make sense of. There's lots to make sense of.
Jokes don’t always have meaning. “I want to play a joke on Bob” can very easily mean “I’m just going to torture Bob a bit for my amusement”. The joke will not have meaning to Bob.
So many rules, laws, and systems for all of this to be random. Seems a waste of good code if everything is random.
Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around the globe of this.
Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. That doesn't seem random does it?
Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Doesn't seem to though.
> Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species.
Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native" are human terms referring to categories we invented to make sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken, slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some timescales, unbalanced in others.
Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's hardly a case an ecosystem was destroyed. Adding non-native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes transforming them into something dissimilar to what came before - but it's not like life disappears. The ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo".
> That doesn't seem random does it?
Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you zoom out enough and smooth over details.
If you first saw Earth billion years ago, you wouldn't be able to predict the current state of affairs. Why? Because there would be myriads of possible outcomes, and you'd struggle to pick one, even just imagining all of them would be impossible for a weak human mind. Weak human mind cannot truly grasp the full extent of what happens now despite it can look at it directly.
But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?
"The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.
It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.
Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles.
But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about things like various bird or mammal species than I am some bacteria.
You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.
I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2, 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think random implies balance though I understand that statistically this is the expected outcome of large set randomness such as ...the universe... (OP)
Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW
Randomness and probabilities can be incredibly hard to wrap our heads around.
A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.
> Randomness should have error correction, as it's random.
Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.
Ecosystems eventually adapt to the newcomers. And it's not like the species already part of the ecosystem wouldn't ever evolve to something detrimental to the whole.
To my limited knowledge it's not even clear what the edges are but I think it's probably safe to say that the bigger it is, the more complexity you can cram in there.
Absolutely astonishing. Thank you to everyone involved in this effort. It's completely mindboggling to think it's only 4 hundred years from Kepler deriving the equations of orbital motion to us being able to do this. Just stunning.
It's just so crazy to me to see a galaxy 420 million light years away. That is so much time for what we're seeing to have changed. I presume life can form within that window given the right conditions, so to some degree it just feels a bit sad that the distance is so great that we can't actually see what may exist in this moment that far away
Given that the speed of light is the speed of causality, technically it's not really 420 million years in the "past" in any meaningful sense. The present is relative, not universal. The collected light we see in our telescopes is a lie about a particular universe that will never be, at least in any tangible way. On a cosmic scale, every spot in the universe sees its own unique sequence of events going on around it, all of it rendered virtually immutable by the relative slowness of c.
I’ll admit I’m severely undereducated in this stuff, probably less than an average high schooler these day but nevertheless I feel like I’ve considered this before and never knew it had a name. Which makes me feel not completely stupid.
> whether two spatially separated events occur at the same time – is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame.
But What I don’t understand about this is why is “time” framed as observer based? In my mind, the events do happen at the same time and just are unable to be observed as such. I feel like time is a figment of our imagination, it’s just a measurement. In my pea brain time makes sense more as a constant and the other things are something else that impacts the latency of observance
If not for observation, what does "happen" mean? Keep in mind observation in the physics sense doesn't mean conscious observation but rather that anything experiences something at all.
In another way it's really cool to be able to "see the past" even if all we see is always the past. At this level it is like a super power. If only some aliens had put a mirror somewhere far so we could see ourselves too. Or multiple mirrors at different distances.
With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with different photons all around carrying "how this location looked X years ago". "All" you have to do to know what happened is find the right photon to see whatever it is you want to see.
"pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself,
as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from you to remote servers and
back again."
In theory, couldn't we focus on a perfect spot near a black hole where the light has been warped 180 degrees around it... i.e. if the black hole is 100 light years away, you'd see ( with perfect zoom, of course ) a picture of the earth 200 years ago...?
I understand that we'd have to account for the movement of objects, of course, but with computers, seems like a small hurdle...
This is very exciting. I was part of the Euclid collaboration roughly ten years ago as a grad student. Finally we can see the fruits of the labor of the many scientists involved. The images are of course very exciting, but I'll be even more excited about the scientific results that will be released in the coming years.
Watching this is ... hard to find the words to describe it. It's insane!
It shows us how mind bogglingly vast the universe is and how we're literally nothing compared to it. Paradoxically, it also makes me feel incredibly potent and capable as a human being in that being this small we can know so much!
That we can know anything at all is a miracle in itself. It could have been just fine evolutionarily for us Earth creatures to be no more than Large Action Models with no inner experience, but somehow we ended up as these perceiving, cogitating, apprehending beings.
Our existence and the universe being knowable is all intertwined.
A reverse entropy universe or a random one would preclude any meaningful learning, thus also the evolution of intelligence and technological civilization as well.
"Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."
A fun thing I like to do every so often is to try to break away from the natural notion that space has a horizon and that instead force myself to feel that it continues equally in all directions.
We’re naturally inclined to be ok with giant distances on the horizon. It’s natural to put more emphasis on that part of the world. Hold up your thumb to the horizon and notice how many things fit alongside it compared to your thumb help downwards against the ground.
On the surface of our planet the up direction isn’t usually interesting and the down direction isn’t even there. It is therefore quite horrifying (“fun”) to imagine space going down forever.
Many years ago I read some sci-fi novel, and in it was a sub-plot of a warring alien species that started destroying anything and everything they came across in their travels.
The story went that their local system was in some sort of a dust cloud, so they had no stars visible from their planet. At some point, that cloud somehow dissipated. On the planet, one of the inhabitants bothered to look up one night, and it hated everything it saw. So the race developed a space program to go out there and destroy it all.
For some reason I think it was Adams' H2G2, but the tone of my recollection does not quite feel on-brand for those stories. Not sure.
The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.
History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.
Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.
They flew out of the cloud.
They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.
For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.
"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.
On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.
Yes. I like to look at the moon and think of it as being "down" and I'm the one at an angle. Rather than "there's nothing under me, just the ground" it's "there's nothing under me, just nothing forever."
The Romance languages use that name (or something very closely related). English uses "Sun", but just as it borrows a ton of stuff from Latin/French/etc., it also borrows "Sol" for its word "solar".
Also, Captain Archer in Enterprise used the name Sol when making contact with aliens.
How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure.
If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so.
So if intelligent life -- capable of becoming a space-faring civilization -- is common, why is the galaxy not colonized already?
We are a necessary but insufficient part of the proof of life. One cannot say "no proof" when necessary proof has been achieved. All that remains is a second example -- the first took several billion years to achieve self awareness.
I mean there is a very non 0 chance that Europa (moon) itself has life in it, it might not be more than very basic life, but there is a non zero chance that it does have it.
Something that involves "thinking capabilities" in a form we would recognise?
That's always what I consider when someone mentions the Fermi Paradox.
Humans tend to barely recognise "thinking capabilities" in other mammals. There is intriguing evidence that plants "communicate" and "remember", and have been doing so around us for at least as long as mammals have existed with humans barely noticing and usually ignoring or criticising researchers who suggest that perhaps plants may be "thinking".
If we don't even recognise "thinking capabilities" in the plants that have been around us for as long as we've been around as a species, what're the chances that we would notice and recognise "conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life" when we saw it?
What is the probability that two raindrops land at the same time?
It is pitch dark. Could one raindrop survive long enough to at least hear the sound of another landing before it disintegrates?
Is the time between the drop striking the plane and the drop smashing apart so short that no drop ever hears another, or even sees evidence that any drop other than itself ever existed?
We're multiplying a very large number (number of planets) with a very small number (chance of intelligent life). The margin can make the answer go either way.
Why do you think the chance of intelligent life is a very small number? Considering we know of several million species, the chances are that we are right in the middle of the curve, and can't recognize the vastly more intelligent species the way an ant can't recognize our intelligence.
There may be countless other planets with intelligent life right now, but... if it took them millions of years to evolve... and they're millions of lightyears away... we might have to wait millions of years for signals to reach Earth from the eldest civilizations in the closest galaxies.
Why would we have to wait? Why would you assume that they're only sending signals now? Why would you not assume that they had a head start on sending signals before us?
My guess would be that there are millions of other intelligent species out there.
Maybe these species are distributed evenly throughout our 90-billion-lightyear-in-diameter universe.
Maybe half evolved to our current level of sophistication in less time than it took us.
So... what is the minimum duration of time, after the big bang, that some lineage of creatures might take to evolve from sludge into a life form capable of emitting data via radio waves? It cannot happen instantaneously... first conditions need to cool down enough to be amenable. Beyond that, it seems to require a little time for evolution to get to human-like level, it took us 13+ billion years.
So given the lack of meaningful signals we have detected so far, Occam's Razor says the nearest intelligent life that currently exists out there is too young and far away for its transmissions to have yet reached Earth.
Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but the milky way is only 105 thousand light years across. So even if you assume an earth like planet couldn't have formed any earlier than ours, other intelligent life in the galaxy only has to go through the geological processes and evolve a tiny tiny fraction of a percent faster to have tons of time to send all the signals they ever want. Nearest other galaxy is only a couple million LYA which ain't too bad either.
My guess, again based on the lack of cosmic signals we have detected, is that intelligent life is rare enough - at this age of the universe, at least - that we have no company yet in the Milky Way. That leaves a lot of room though - there might already be simpler forms of life.
But I won't go to the mat arguing my impression; we only have evidence from one planet to go by, so any view here lacks empirical evidence.
If it is a machine that can reproduce itself, growth, collect energy, use energy, do actions based on events, etc, then animals match this profile (perhaps even plants), and also, at some point computer will probably reach that goal.
Despite that, computers won't have a "soul", so where this soul comes from is a big mystery.
I'm not even sure that two humans can prove with certainty that the other ones has a soul, this is still an unsolved problem.
Unless the "soul" or the feeling of self is a property of the universe itself and could apply to computers given enough computer power and "free will".
Trying not to be negative, but statements like this completely disregard the degree of thought and evidence that needs to be accounted for to make a reasonable statement that isn't just pulling an ungrounded opinion out of the air. I mean why exactly is it doubtful? It doesn't seem doubtful to many other very intelligent people, so perhaps you should back it up with a bit of reasoning or evidence.
I think at the scale of the universe life even thinking capabilities life is almost certainly inevitable.
What's not inevitable is that it can thrive, and survive to a galactic scale. That's not even yet certain for us.
Universe is too big, we're all too far apart. Civilizations come, civilizations go. Some may not be on a planet where even rocket travel may be possible - no source of energy dense enough. Some can get wiped out by disasters. Asteroids. It's happened on this planet a bunch of times.
It's like the Birthday paradox. It's likely 2 people have the same birthday. It's not likely that someone else has YOUR birthday.
See even here there's no reason to be this doomery.
Yes, climate change is a massive problem, and humanity is ignoring it to our own peril.
But peril here means the unnecessary deaths and displacement of hundreds of millions of people - a civilization-defining tragedy no doubt, but ultimately nothing so serious as to cause our extinction.
We have the technology and knowledge to adapt, change course, finally get of fossil fuels, and enter into a new age of sustainable renewable energy.
We're gonna do it too late, and whole ecosystems, species, and far too many humans are all going to perish. Sea life may become extinct.
But at no point is our survival as a SPECIES in question.
"Astronomer Frank Drake created a formula to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way. Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modified the equation to calculate the odds that Earth was the first intelligent life in the universe. They concluded that the odds of Earth being the first are less than one in 10 billion trillion, which suggests that other intelligent species have likely evolved."
1 in 10 billion trillion is some pretty serious odds.
It does get more complicated if we factor in life happening quickly enough without an extinction event.
But after looking at images like this there is just NO WAY we are the only ones.
I don't really doubt that life with human-level (or greater) intelligence has evolved at least a few times.
What I'm more pessimistic about is how long such intelligence might live. How many civilizations reached a point of harnessing nuclear power and then wiped themselves out with nuclear war?
I think even that's perhaps a warped anthropocentric view of intelligence?
Think about other earth-centric scenarios, and try and imagine if dolphins or octopuses or fungus or maybe even insect colonies or plant ecosystems had "won" and become the apex lifeforms on earth instead of humans. I wonder just how different concerns like "civilisations" and "war" and "nuclear power" would have played out in those cases? I wonder if assumptions like "industrial revolutions" and the inevitability of scientific discovery being used in detrimental ways like we have done with nuclear science actually correlate with "intelligence"?
That 600 times zoom-in on 1% of the eventual survey of 1/3rd of the non milky way sky... Shows a couple of galaxies, which if the milky way is "typical" represent a couple of billion stars.
Suddenly 1 in 10 billion trillion odds doesn't seem so (and I apologise in advance for this) astronomical...
Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten trillion planets.
That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space.
So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are about a hundred planets per galaxy that also have those attributes within a percentage point. If you allow some wiggle room then you have tens of thousands or even millions.
We know conditions here on Earth varied significantly more than 1% over billions of years and life survived and even thrived.
But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.
The Drake Equation is a fun idea and all but I think it should go up there with Sagan's Nuclear Winter work as more thought experiment than reality.
It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.
In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.
Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.
I think there's a pretty compelling argument that could be made that matter assembling itself into conscious beings follows pretty naturally from life itself, given a long enough time horizon and assuming the properties of basic elements holds constant throughout the universe which seems pretty likely.
I’m no physicist/biologist, but I always find it odd when they look for water on other planets to see “if life could exist”.
Sure, maybe that’s a requirement for the type of life we on earth know about, but I don’t see why other elements couldn’t have also formed in just the right way to be able to reproduce, and maybe eventually “think”.
It's a matter of water being a great place for carbon based chemistry to occur. Why carbon? Because it is so dynamic. It readily forms complex molecules which interact in interesting ways.
Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.
And thats just how life on earth happened to iterate in recent terms. For most of the history of life on earth, it was unicellular. It could have just as easily remained a planet of unicellular life for another few billion years if it weren’t for a few chance mutations that happened to be slightly more competitive over the background.
I think you fail to see the sheer probability just from the number of galaxies and the timeline itself where life can form and extinguish in even few million years. Every planet in the universe gets various amount of tries over eons
That’s hardly proof considering these examples all share a common ancestor. I ask you, can you communicate with a slime mold? Even the slime mold is more similar to ourselves than any potential life we’d find elsewhere, as we share a common ancestor.
What's so important about "sharing a common ancestor"? It doesn't say anything about the spread of different types of life that could evolve, considering we have a sample size of one, and it also says nothing about how difficult it is for any particular form to evolve intelligence.
I agree. There is a huge bias in our culture that we imagine a human supremacy. We are the top of the food chain we think. The masters of our world we argue, despite simple bacteria being superior in all environments compared to fragile sickly humans. We not only assume that aliens would think like us, we think they would even look like us with more or less the same body plan. We think they would have the same cultural sensibilites of exploration aboard a ship, of making treaties and even sharing technology. Even in this thread you get pushback from replies and downvotes from people who are almost offended that this would not be the case.
If you ever study evolution on the other hand, you would realize how fantastical these assumptions all are. No, life elsewhere if anything is far more likely to look like how it did for most of the history of life on earth: unicellular. People forget that even multicellularity, let alone an organism with an entire bodyplan, emerged from pure chance, and could have easily been wiped out or outcompeted for resources as soon as it came if it didn’t have sufficient fitness. How lucky it was for us that our ancient eukaryotic ancestors enveloped that first mitochondria. How different life would look today if that never happened and we never had such an energy source to actually support these later iterations, considering all life that exists today are directly descended from this single line. How supremely unlikely it all is to tread even close to the same path. How many potential paths are lost along the way and how many paths only emerged as a result of previous paths.
Fun to imagine someone or something out there mapping us as well. What a cool video. I think one of the best things about space travel will be the loss of ego we go through when we really understand how vast the world is.
Apparently psychedelics can cause the so called ego death. I wonder if it’s the same driving force: a realization of how vast and limitless the world is.
Humans are great at turning a new insight into a way to feel better about themselves compared to others that haven't had the insight. We are driven by our ego, so I find that very unlikely.
my God! it's full of stars! [1] I can't help but think that living and evolving under a starry sky has had a deep impact on our reptile brains and the process is still ongoing. First it was the simple act of looking up to a mysterious, clean and regular clockwork unfolding in the heavens. The fortuitous match of eye structure, atmospheric transparency to certain wavelengths etc. that created a permanent mental stimulus that was complex yet not beyond grasp. Astronomy and the development of Mathematics were closely intertwined in the dawn of civilization [2]. Then it was the invention of the telescope [3], one of our first sensory-extension devices, that marked the beginning of the modern science and technology era. Culminating into the satellite era (detached "eyes" lifted into low-Earth orbits) and the incredible ESA projects like Euclid (looking out at the furtherst reaches of space) and Copernicus [4] (looking back at us and our predicament). It does feel that the process of learning about the universe and our place within it is still in full swing. It is still a great time to be alive!
Small quibble: Credits for the soundtrack are missing.
We still have a long way to go to beat this draw distance, but we are on our way. The day will come when we have "sentient" beings, living in a massive world created by us. And they will ponder the same things as we do now.
And we will remain invisible and out of reach, but completely observant, and influential in their world. After all, we wrote the program.
And they will study the code and discover their own "natural laws" and invent their own things.
And they will progress until they create a completely simulated world of their own.
I wonder at which level are we. How many sims down from the original program...
The more I learn about physics the more I am convinced this is a simulation.
In a way our universe is very lazy, at large scales where consciousness exists the universe is coherent, predictable.
The smaller you get the lazier and fuzzier the universe gets to save computational work. The actual state of things is only computed on small scales when you measure them. The speed of light puts limits on how far humanity can travel to extend the bounds of the simulation. Maybe the expansion of the universe is yet another hedge at limiting how far human can travel. Also, as things are red shifted due to expansion you can run the simulation of far away places slower due to time dilation.
The speed of light and the plank length are both hard codes to bound computational work. The plank length to bound computation getting too complex in the micro scale and the speed of light to limit computation in the macro scale.
It is also very convenient that the closer we look at things the more we see that under the hood things are discrete which is very convenient for simulating.
Maybe every level of the sim increases the plank length and decreases the speed of light in order to deal with inefficiency of doing a sim within a sim? Maybe at the final level of the sim we end up with the truman show.
This is an interesting idea but personally I think the opposite - the universe is not lazy and all details matter at all levels.
Like imagine making a complete account of all world views of all people in all of history - all perspectives, and all the physical events of that history. There is almost infinite detail there. In a way, in the universe all the details of all the things matter, including at the physical level, otherwise you wouldn't get the diversity and complexity you get now.
Why would their be exponential slowdown? Time can be relative, but superbroadcasting can help explain the loss of fidelity as we scale down. So you can't "Clone" but you can superentangle multiple copies in a degraded state.
But I'm not a brain in a jar. That is not my experience.
The benefit I get is knowing that this is not all one "big bang"
We are so quick to laud our own achievements, but fail to give credit where it is due.
We build nuclear power plants, waste water treatment plants and the beginnings of quantum computers. And we congratulate ourselves for a job well done, after spending an unspeakable amount of resources on them. We maintain them with a constant labour force, regular maintenance shutdowns and a ton of money.
Meanwhile the sun keeps shining, the clouds keep raining and your mind keeps minding.
And they do it on zero budget. No off days. No staff. Automatically.
And with all this engagement, the energy remains the same.
600x zoom didn't seem to help from the 150x zoom. Wonder if we will ever be able to see actual planet surfaces or we need some other technology to do that, i.e, we should have small satellites every 10 light years. but this map is amazing and a good step forward.
Edit:
Was just thinking that image does us tells us something i.e, there no large artificial structures or billboards anywhere we can see. Maybe I watch too much sci-fi but honestly would have expected someone to build some huge structure around a star or planet, would be disappointing if no one does.
> there no large artificial structures or billboards anywhere we can see.
I half suspect the aliens who can construct structures large enough to see from lightyears away are by far most likely to be building Dyson Spheres around stars which make them significantly less likely to be seen rather than something we'd notice.
Really? I wouldn't think the sun is nearly massive enough to do what would be required here. Stars visible near the edge of the Sun appear in slightly different spots from their actual locations. If there was a distant planet directly behind the Sun whose light were focused back to an image on our side of the Sun, you'd have to get really far back from the Sun to resolve the image, no? And furthermore, it's exceedingly difficult to orient such an apparatus to look in the desired direction; you are beholden to the orbital mechanics of your viewing satellite as it plods along.
Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology (recall the black hole images). It is well within our ability to set up a constellation of satellites, perhaps spanning a few of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
Yes, you'd need to get quite far from the Sun to use it as a lens - about 650 AU is where it starts becoming practical. It would also not be re-orientable, so any "telescope" launched to that location would only be able to observe a single target. (But, notably, it is far easier to send a probe to a far point in our own solar system than it is to send it to another star entirely.) There's a paper that goes into much more detail at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.06351
So why not use interferometry instead? Well, it has some significant drawbacks. For example: the Event Horizon Telescope used radio telescopes - and pretty much had to, due to how interferometry works: you need to be able to compare the phase shifts between the multiple telescopes, which means you need to be able to sample the signal faster than the radio frequency you're using and record it. The EHT records 64 gigabits per second for each telescope, and then all this data needs to be combined to compute the resolved image. This amount of data would be problematic for space-based telescopes - even on Earth, it was not practical to send multiple petabytes over the internet, so it was saved to hard drives which were shipped by truck instead. This isn't practical in space, so you would need to transmit the data by radio, which means you'd end up with some crazy ratio of thousands of hours of transmitting for every one hour you spend recording.
> you'd have to get really far back from the Sun to resolve the image, no?
Yah, a few hundred AU.
> you are beholden to the orbital mechanics of your viewing satellite as it plods along.
Yah, any mission like this -- interferometry or gravitational lensing -- is going to be super long and hit very few targets.
> Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology
Yah, at radio frequency while pinned to a common rock. The wavelength of visible light is hundreds of nanometers and we're talking across massive distances and significant gravity gradients and even relativistic corrections. The "big" space interferometers currently being considered are in the mid-infrared (e.g. longer wavelengths) across baselines of hundreds of meters.
> Really? I wouldn't think the sun is nearly massive enough to do what would be required here.
You "just" need to get far enough away (~600AU). Interferometry is extremely difficult to pull this off with and it’s further complicated by the host star being so much brighter than the exoplanet.
See this recent Fraser Cain interview with Dr. Slava Turyshev:
The naïve optical instrument will be diffraction limited. The resolving power of a lens, basically how "sharp" the resulting image will be, goes down as you decrease the size of the aperture relative to the focal length (that is, as the f-stop number goes up).
A telescope that could zoom into an exoplanet would have an f value of a kajillion or so.
The mosaic contains 260 observations made between 25 March and 8 April 2024. In just two weeks, Euclid covered 132 square degrees of the Southern Sky in pristine detail, more than 500 times the area of the full Moon.
This mosaic accounts for 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will capture over six years. During this survey, the telescope observes the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. By doing this, it will create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made.
So my question is, what comes after Euclid?
Will the next one capture better details further out (if further is possible)?
Since it's apparently a 3d map (?) I'd be curious if they will re-run the scan and compare between the scans? Pure speculation my part, but that would be pretty interesting, surely.
Man I REALLY hope we solve Dark Energy/Matter in my lifetime. That'd be so cool. I put it up there with long term habitation on another world (moon or mars is fine to me!).
Really impressive work, thanks for sharing. The video, that is -- the astronomy is indistinguishable from magic and thus way beyond the reach of words like "impressive", obviously. I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more stuff" is an important next step, but godspeed nonetheless.
ETA: For those who love space but are similarly OOTL on the specifics of modern missions: this is from a telescope launched to the L2 point (next to Webb!) last July, and is currently a bit over 1/6th of the way through it's expected lifetime.
In comparison to Webb, it's focused on ~visible light surveys of the medium to far range, whereas Webb was built for ~infrared investigations of very distant objects. It was budgeted around 1/4th the cost of Webb (and ended up being ~1/20th due to Webb's costs running from $1B to $10B...) See https://www.jameswebbdiscovery.com/other-missions/euclid/euc...
If you're looking for a new wallpaper, it would be hard to beat this 8000x8000 pic it took of the Perseus galaxy cluster, casually depicting 100,000 galaxies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29#/media... The discoverer of galaxies, Kant, would literally weep. We're lucky to live when we do!
> I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more stuff" is an important next step
Observation is the most basic step of science. By viewing, we can find evidence of theoretical concepts or see something that conflicts those theories so they can be discarded or tweaked. It's not like there are experiments that could be used to test theories, so observing is all there is
Life on Earth is the same. If we are to get off Earth, we need to know what life to bring with us. We need to look a lot more, and much more closely at all the evolutionary products out there to make those decisions (if we arrogant humans can indeed even manage the intricacies of such an endeavor).
I agree wholeheartedly with all of your sentiments, but I don't think that Kant discovered galaxies or had much interest in them. That honor goes to Messier or Hubble, I believe.
Messier catalogued many objects, some of which were galaxies, but he did not know what they were. It was Hubble who first figured out (in the 1920s) that there were definitely separate galaxies.
I can never truly wrap my head around the time component here, this is 400+ million year old light! in earth terms, that's when most life was still ocean-bound
I wish there was a standardized way to let folks who run a website such as this one know how much a casual passer-by viewer enjoys the byproduct of their work.
If you're in the EU (particularly Germany, France and Italy, who are the three largest funders), you can let your representatives know you appreciate ESA's work.
You are of course right that there are lots of potential motivations for spending extra time on the page. But it will likely be interpreted as enjoyment in the absence of other feedback mechanisms.
If you'd prefer not to watch a video, try this page [1] that has images.
Hopefully there will be a zoomable image (like Google Maps) eventually.
[1] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...
Thank you
Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)
I think that too. That it's surely meant to be something. But sometimes I think what does "meaning" even mean? Does universe really have any "meaning", the term that humans invented and that even they are unsure of? Then, I think it's a big randomness, a random accident, a big joke, just happening with nothing to make sense of.
It's not a joke, because jokes have underlying meaning. It is somewhere between a "random accident" and the only way it could have possibly been given the constraints of fundamental physics. I suspect that everything that could possibly be, is, but it's random that you are you and I am me and we find ourselves here in this corner of this galaxy in this part of the universe which might itself be the inside of a giant black hole. But even if our universe is random, that doesn't mean there's nothing to make sense of. There's lots to make sense of.
Jokes don’t always have meaning. “I want to play a joke on Bob” can very easily mean “I’m just going to torture Bob a bit for my amusement”. The joke will not have meaning to Bob.
So many rules, laws, and systems for all of this to be random. Seems a waste of good code if everything is random.
Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around the globe of this.
Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. That doesn't seem random does it?
Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Doesn't seem to though.
> Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species.
Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native" are human terms referring to categories we invented to make sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken, slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some timescales, unbalanced in others.
Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's hardly a case an ecosystem was destroyed. Adding non-native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes transforming them into something dissimilar to what came before - but it's not like life disappears. The ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo".
> That doesn't seem random does it?
Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you zoom out enough and smooth over details.
If you first saw Earth billion years ago, you wouldn't be able to predict the current state of affairs. Why? Because there would be myriads of possible outcomes, and you'd struggle to pick one, even just imagining all of them would be impossible for a weak human mind. Weak human mind cannot truly grasp the full extent of what happens now despite it can look at it directly.
But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?
Ecosystems do adapt. They look broken to us because of our ridiculously small life span.
That's why I dislike framing climate change actions as "saving the planet". The planet will be just fine. We won't.
"The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.
It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.
Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles.
But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about things like various bird or mammal species than I am some bacteria.
You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.
I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2, 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think random implies balance though I understand that statistically this is the expected outcome of large set randomness such as ...the universe... (OP)
Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW
Randomness and probabilities can be incredibly hard to wrap our heads around.
A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.
> Randomness should have error correction, as it's random.
Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.
Ecosystems eventually adapt to the newcomers. And it's not like the species already part of the ecosystem wouldn't ever evolve to something detrimental to the whole.
My money is on it just being a playing field for the game of life. A damn good one at that.
The Cosmic Deep State went to great lengths to make all of this very.... big.
Big Universe has it out for the little guy. It's trying to make it very hard to make sense of its master plan.
Too big to fail?
Entropy never sleeps
It’s ridiculous. That final zoomed in image that showed one galaxy has maybe 300 million stars in it. Just that one. The scope is… unbelievable silly.
Probably closer to 300 billion stars. (It's roughly the same size as the Milky Way, which is estimated to have ~ 100 to 400 billion stars.)
Take a look at the Hubble ultra deep field image. It’s a tiny part of the sky but it’s hundreds of galaxies. It’s hard to wrap your head around…
To my limited knowledge it's not even clear what the edges are but I think it's probably safe to say that the bigger it is, the more complexity you can cram in there.
someone made a larger universe a few blocks down the road, and so we made a larger one just to one-up him
Wondering is the what.
No Man's Sky
Yeah. Do you want to donate your liver?
Absolutely astonishing. Thank you to everyone involved in this effort. It's completely mindboggling to think it's only 4 hundred years from Kepler deriving the equations of orbital motion to us being able to do this. Just stunning.
It's just so crazy to me to see a galaxy 420 million light years away. That is so much time for what we're seeing to have changed. I presume life can form within that window given the right conditions, so to some degree it just feels a bit sad that the distance is so great that we can't actually see what may exist in this moment that far away
Given that the speed of light is the speed of causality, technically it's not really 420 million years in the "past" in any meaningful sense. The present is relative, not universal. The collected light we see in our telescopes is a lie about a particular universe that will never be, at least in any tangible way. On a cosmic scale, every spot in the universe sees its own unique sequence of events going on around it, all of it rendered virtually immutable by the relative slowness of c.
It's a beautiful nightmare, isn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
Absolutely mind blowing - I've not thought of this and will be reading about it
I’ll admit I’m severely undereducated in this stuff, probably less than an average high schooler these day but nevertheless I feel like I’ve considered this before and never knew it had a name. Which makes me feel not completely stupid.
> whether two spatially separated events occur at the same time – is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame.
But What I don’t understand about this is why is “time” framed as observer based? In my mind, the events do happen at the same time and just are unable to be observed as such. I feel like time is a figment of our imagination, it’s just a measurement. In my pea brain time makes sense more as a constant and the other things are something else that impacts the latency of observance
If not for observation, what does "happen" mean? Keep in mind observation in the physics sense doesn't mean conscious observation but rather that anything experiences something at all.
It might be possible to build a powerful telescope to see life on planets that are closer to us, though: https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its-time-to-build-th...
Or go for the gravitational lens provided by our sun (580 AU out).
Ohh I love the idea of a massive telescope that's just compromised of thousands of individual satellites!
In another way it's really cool to be able to "see the past" even if all we see is always the past. At this level it is like a super power. If only some aliens had put a mirror somewhere far so we could see ourselves too. Or multiple mirrors at different distances.
With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with different photons all around carrying "how this location looked X years ago". "All" you have to do to know what happened is find the right photon to see whatever it is you want to see.
For prior art in this field, see:
https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
"pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from you to remote servers and back again."
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
Storing data as acoustic waves gave a higher capacity in practice, as propagation is slower thus fitting a larger number of symbol per time unit.
From chainsaws to ICMP echo packets (and more)
http://tom7.org/harder/
In theory, couldn't we focus on a perfect spot near a black hole where the light has been warped 180 degrees around it... i.e. if the black hole is 100 light years away, you'd see ( with perfect zoom, of course ) a picture of the earth 200 years ago...?
I understand that we'd have to account for the movement of objects, of course, but with computers, seems like a small hurdle...
You don't need mirrors, you just need to get in front of the photons. A time machine or warp drive will do :)
Also the past is the only thing you can perceive, there effectively is no now.
Well that sounds like a good premise for a scifi book or movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Light-Year_Diary
By Greg Egan, so highly recommended.
This is very exciting. I was part of the Euclid collaboration roughly ten years ago as a grad student. Finally we can see the fruits of the labor of the many scientists involved. The images are of course very exciting, but I'll be even more excited about the scientific results that will be released in the coming years.
Watching this is ... hard to find the words to describe it. It's insane!
It shows us how mind bogglingly vast the universe is and how we're literally nothing compared to it. Paradoxically, it also makes me feel incredibly potent and capable as a human being in that being this small we can know so much!
Your size is to the distance of that distant spiral galaxy (420 Mly - 10e24m) as a neutrino is to you (effective cross section of a 1MeV neutron = 10e-24m: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length))
That we can know anything at all is a miracle in itself. It could have been just fine evolutionarily for us Earth creatures to be no more than Large Action Models with no inner experience, but somehow we ended up as these perceiving, cogitating, apprehending beings.
Our existence and the universe being knowable is all intertwined.
A reverse entropy universe or a random one would preclude any meaningful learning, thus also the evolution of intelligence and technological civilization as well.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Small and so brief too.
>in that being this small we can know so much!
We only know what we think we know. We could just be grains of sand in someone else's world for all we know.
"Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."
- Carl Sagan
A fun thing I like to do every so often is to try to break away from the natural notion that space has a horizon and that instead force myself to feel that it continues equally in all directions.
We’re naturally inclined to be ok with giant distances on the horizon. It’s natural to put more emphasis on that part of the world. Hold up your thumb to the horizon and notice how many things fit alongside it compared to your thumb help downwards against the ground.
On the surface of our planet the up direction isn’t usually interesting and the down direction isn’t even there. It is therefore quite horrifying (“fun”) to imagine space going down forever.
Many years ago I read some sci-fi novel, and in it was a sub-plot of a warring alien species that started destroying anything and everything they came across in their travels.
The story went that their local system was in some sort of a dust cloud, so they had no stars visible from their planet. At some point, that cloud somehow dissipated. On the planet, one of the inhabitants bothered to look up one night, and it hated everything it saw. So the race developed a space program to go out there and destroy it all.
For some reason I think it was Adams' H2G2, but the tone of my recollection does not quite feel on-brand for those stories. Not sure.
The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.
History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.
Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.
They flew out of the cloud.
They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.
For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.
"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.
On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.
You are right, it is from h2g2.
It's the planet Krikkit, which is a major part of Life, The Universe and Everything, the third book in the series.
Yes. I like to look at the moon and think of it as being "down" and I'm the one at an angle. Rather than "there's nothing under me, just the ground" it's "there's nothing under me, just nothing forever."
So many solar systems out there, life evolved in many planets for sure. No proof but no doubt.
No, there's only one solar system in the entire universe. There's countless star systems though, but only one of those stars is named Sol.
/pedant
You can't know that there's only one named sol by the locals.
One day we'll be sued by aliens for trademark infringement.
We live in what's known as a planetary system. Star systems involve only stars.
If that’s where we’re going I’ll try to pedant-raise you.
Assuming the cosmological principle is true and the universe is infinite, wouldn’t we be guaranteed an infinite number of Sols? ;)
Do people actually call the Sun "Sol"? I thought that was more of a video game thing.
The Romance languages use that name (or something very closely related). English uses "Sun", but just as it borrows a ton of stuff from Latin/French/etc., it also borrows "Sol" for its word "solar".
Also, Captain Archer in Enterprise used the name Sol when making contact with aliens.
It's Солнце (Solntse) in Russian.
If you speak Portuguese or Spanish, yes.
Latins and medieval scientists did. In Italian we call it "Sole".
I can't think of any English-speaking places that do... but you see it used in "solar", for example.
"But where is everybody?" [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
They are all wondering the same thing. Distances are so vast that the overwhelming probablity is that we'll just never notice each other.
How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure.
If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so.
So if intelligent life -- capable of becoming a space-faring civilization -- is common, why is the galaxy not colonized already?
Kursgesagt has a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
We have proof. Us.
The posit was "life evolved in many planets for sure" but your evidence is "us"?
We are a necessary but insufficient part of the proof of life. One cannot say "no proof" when necessary proof has been achieved. All that remains is a second example -- the first took several billion years to achieve self awareness.
Like they say, the first million is the hardest.
"No proof but no doubt" is such a great way to put it.
I mean there is a very non 0 chance that Europa (moon) itself has life in it, it might not be more than very basic life, but there is a non zero chance that it does have it.
Life? Probably. Something that has thinking capabilities? Much more doubtful.
> Something that has thinking capabilities?
Something that involves "thinking capabilities" in a form we would recognise?
That's always what I consider when someone mentions the Fermi Paradox.
Humans tend to barely recognise "thinking capabilities" in other mammals. There is intriguing evidence that plants "communicate" and "remember", and have been doing so around us for at least as long as mammals have existed with humans barely noticing and usually ignoring or criticising researchers who suggest that perhaps plants may be "thinking".
https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/plant-sentience-a-...
If we don't even recognise "thinking capabilities" in the plants that have been around us for as long as we've been around as a species, what're the chances that we would notice and recognise "conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life" when we saw it?
What is the probability that two raindrops land at the same time?
It is pitch dark. Could one raindrop survive long enough to at least hear the sound of another landing before it disintegrates?
Is the time between the drop striking the plane and the drop smashing apart so short that no drop ever hears another, or even sees evidence that any drop other than itself ever existed?
So you're saying out of the trillions upon trillions of stars that the chances are no life can think but us?
I think the odds are that at least one of them does.
We're multiplying a very large number (number of planets) with a very small number (chance of intelligent life). The margin can make the answer go either way.
You are basing the chance of intelligent life number on what? Reality is we have no clue what this number is.
Exactly, so we shouldn't say things like "no doubt" when it comes to the question of extra terrestrial life.
Why do you think the chance of intelligent life is a very small number? Considering we know of several million species, the chances are that we are right in the middle of the curve, and can't recognize the vastly more intelligent species the way an ant can't recognize our intelligence.
There may be countless other planets with intelligent life right now, but... if it took them millions of years to evolve... and they're millions of lightyears away... we might have to wait millions of years for signals to reach Earth from the eldest civilizations in the closest galaxies.
Why would we have to wait? Why would you assume that they're only sending signals now? Why would you not assume that they had a head start on sending signals before us?
My guess would be that there are millions of other intelligent species out there.
Maybe these species are distributed evenly throughout our 90-billion-lightyear-in-diameter universe.
Maybe half evolved to our current level of sophistication in less time than it took us.
So... what is the minimum duration of time, after the big bang, that some lineage of creatures might take to evolve from sludge into a life form capable of emitting data via radio waves? It cannot happen instantaneously... first conditions need to cool down enough to be amenable. Beyond that, it seems to require a little time for evolution to get to human-like level, it took us 13+ billion years.
So given the lack of meaningful signals we have detected so far, Occam's Razor says the nearest intelligent life that currently exists out there is too young and far away for its transmissions to have yet reached Earth.
Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but the milky way is only 105 thousand light years across. So even if you assume an earth like planet couldn't have formed any earlier than ours, other intelligent life in the galaxy only has to go through the geological processes and evolve a tiny tiny fraction of a percent faster to have tons of time to send all the signals they ever want. Nearest other galaxy is only a couple million LYA which ain't too bad either.
My guess, again based on the lack of cosmic signals we have detected, is that intelligent life is rare enough - at this age of the universe, at least - that we have no company yet in the Milky Way. That leaves a lot of room though - there might already be simpler forms of life.
But I won't go to the mat arguing my impression; we only have evidence from one planet to go by, so any view here lacks empirical evidence.
It depends what you call Life.
If it is a machine that can reproduce itself, growth, collect energy, use energy, do actions based on events, etc, then animals match this profile (perhaps even plants), and also, at some point computer will probably reach that goal.
Despite that, computers won't have a "soul", so where this soul comes from is a big mystery.
I'm not even sure that two humans can prove with certainty that the other ones has a soul, this is still an unsolved problem.
Unless the "soul" or the feeling of self is a property of the universe itself and could apply to computers given enough computer power and "free will".
Trying not to be negative, but statements like this completely disregard the degree of thought and evidence that needs to be accounted for to make a reasonable statement that isn't just pulling an ungrounded opinion out of the air. I mean why exactly is it doubtful? It doesn't seem doubtful to many other very intelligent people, so perhaps you should back it up with a bit of reasoning or evidence.
I see no reason to doubt.
I think at the scale of the universe life even thinking capabilities life is almost certainly inevitable.
What's not inevitable is that it can thrive, and survive to a galactic scale. That's not even yet certain for us.
Universe is too big, we're all too far apart. Civilizations come, civilizations go. Some may not be on a planet where even rocket travel may be possible - no source of energy dense enough. Some can get wiped out by disasters. Asteroids. It's happened on this planet a bunch of times.
It's like the Birthday paradox. It's likely 2 people have the same birthday. It's not likely that someone else has YOUR birthday.
> What's not inevitable is that it can thrive, and survive to a galactic scale. That's not even yet certain for us.
Sadly, that's looking less and less likely as time goes on.
See even here there's no reason to be this doomery.
Yes, climate change is a massive problem, and humanity is ignoring it to our own peril.
But peril here means the unnecessary deaths and displacement of hundreds of millions of people - a civilization-defining tragedy no doubt, but ultimately nothing so serious as to cause our extinction.
We have the technology and knowledge to adapt, change course, finally get of fossil fuels, and enter into a new age of sustainable renewable energy.
We're gonna do it too late, and whole ecosystems, species, and far too many humans are all going to perish. Sea life may become extinct.
But at no point is our survival as a SPECIES in question.
One proof is that we are thinking, and so are dogs, cats and monkeys to a lesser extent.
That's Earth. There is no model to say that life always goes on that way. We just have no clue.
"Astronomer Frank Drake created a formula to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way. Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modified the equation to calculate the odds that Earth was the first intelligent life in the universe. They concluded that the odds of Earth being the first are less than one in 10 billion trillion, which suggests that other intelligent species have likely evolved."
1 in 10 billion trillion is some pretty serious odds.
It does get more complicated if we factor in life happening quickly enough without an extinction event.
But after looking at images like this there is just NO WAY we are the only ones.
I don't really doubt that life with human-level (or greater) intelligence has evolved at least a few times.
What I'm more pessimistic about is how long such intelligence might live. How many civilizations reached a point of harnessing nuclear power and then wiped themselves out with nuclear war?
I think even that's perhaps a warped anthropocentric view of intelligence?
Think about other earth-centric scenarios, and try and imagine if dolphins or octopuses or fungus or maybe even insect colonies or plant ecosystems had "won" and become the apex lifeforms on earth instead of humans. I wonder just how different concerns like "civilisations" and "war" and "nuclear power" would have played out in those cases? I wonder if assumptions like "industrial revolutions" and the inevitability of scientific discovery being used in detrimental ways like we have done with nuclear science actually correlate with "intelligence"?
It's not even clear that the ants haven't won.
That 600 times zoom-in on 1% of the eventual survey of 1/3rd of the non milky way sky... Shows a couple of galaxies, which if the milky way is "typical" represent a couple of billion stars.
Suddenly 1 in 10 billion trillion odds doesn't seem so (and I apologise in advance for this) astronomical...
Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten trillion planets.
That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space.
So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are about a hundred planets per galaxy that also have those attributes within a percentage point. If you allow some wiggle room then you have tens of thousands or even millions.
We know conditions here on Earth varied significantly more than 1% over billions of years and life survived and even thrived.
But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.
The Drake Equation is a fun idea and all but I think it should go up there with Sagan's Nuclear Winter work as more thought experiment than reality.
It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.
In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.
Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.
I think there's a pretty compelling argument that could be made that matter assembling itself into conscious beings follows pretty naturally from life itself, given a long enough time horizon and assuming the properties of basic elements holds constant throughout the universe which seems pretty likely.
I’m no physicist/biologist, but I always find it odd when they look for water on other planets to see “if life could exist”.
Sure, maybe that’s a requirement for the type of life we on earth know about, but I don’t see why other elements couldn’t have also formed in just the right way to be able to reproduce, and maybe eventually “think”.
It's a matter of water being a great place for carbon based chemistry to occur. Why carbon? Because it is so dynamic. It readily forms complex molecules which interact in interesting ways.
Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.
FOH with that solipsistic nonsense
Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.
And thats just how life on earth happened to iterate in recent terms. For most of the history of life on earth, it was unicellular. It could have just as easily remained a planet of unicellular life for another few billion years if it weren’t for a few chance mutations that happened to be slightly more competitive over the background.
I think you fail to see the sheer probability just from the number of galaxies and the timeline itself where life can form and extinguish in even few million years. Every planet in the universe gets various amount of tries over eons
That’s hardly proof considering these examples all share a common ancestor. I ask you, can you communicate with a slime mold? Even the slime mold is more similar to ourselves than any potential life we’d find elsewhere, as we share a common ancestor.
What's so important about "sharing a common ancestor"? It doesn't say anything about the spread of different types of life that could evolve, considering we have a sample size of one, and it also says nothing about how difficult it is for any particular form to evolve intelligence.
I agree. There is a huge bias in our culture that we imagine a human supremacy. We are the top of the food chain we think. The masters of our world we argue, despite simple bacteria being superior in all environments compared to fragile sickly humans. We not only assume that aliens would think like us, we think they would even look like us with more or less the same body plan. We think they would have the same cultural sensibilites of exploration aboard a ship, of making treaties and even sharing technology. Even in this thread you get pushback from replies and downvotes from people who are almost offended that this would not be the case.
If you ever study evolution on the other hand, you would realize how fantastical these assumptions all are. No, life elsewhere if anything is far more likely to look like how it did for most of the history of life on earth: unicellular. People forget that even multicellularity, let alone an organism with an entire bodyplan, emerged from pure chance, and could have easily been wiped out or outcompeted for resources as soon as it came if it didn’t have sufficient fitness. How lucky it was for us that our ancient eukaryotic ancestors enveloped that first mitochondria. How different life would look today if that never happened and we never had such an energy source to actually support these later iterations, considering all life that exists today are directly descended from this single line. How supremely unlikely it all is to tread even close to the same path. How many potential paths are lost along the way and how many paths only emerged as a result of previous paths.
I know next to nothing about “space” but pfeeeew that zoom-out at the end…wow.
Fun to imagine someone or something out there mapping us as well. What a cool video. I think one of the best things about space travel will be the loss of ego we go through when we really understand how vast the world is.
Apparently psychedelics can cause the so called ego death. I wonder if it’s the same driving force: a realization of how vast and limitless the world is.
Humans are great at turning a new insight into a way to feel better about themselves compared to others that haven't had the insight. We are driven by our ego, so I find that very unlikely.
That was said when we first orbited the Earth. Right now many things - space travel in particular - seems correlated with vastly increased ego.
We’re so lucky to exist in a time where everything is so close together, as absurd as that sounds.
There will come a time when a civilisation will look up and see only darkness, due to the expansion of the universe.
It is not clear to me that the conditions of the universe at that point of increased entropy would be able to support life
Eventually there won’t be any life given no stellar body will be in range of a star to support life I guess?
I’m assuming gravity will keep solar systems together? But admittedly know little about it.
It depends, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
To think that it's only been a touch over 100 years that we've even had confirmation that other galaxies besides our own exist.
Prior to that it was thought that the entire visible universe was around 100,000 parsecs across (what we know now to be just the Milky Way.)
my God! it's full of stars! [1] I can't help but think that living and evolving under a starry sky has had a deep impact on our reptile brains and the process is still ongoing. First it was the simple act of looking up to a mysterious, clean and regular clockwork unfolding in the heavens. The fortuitous match of eye structure, atmospheric transparency to certain wavelengths etc. that created a permanent mental stimulus that was complex yet not beyond grasp. Astronomy and the development of Mathematics were closely intertwined in the dawn of civilization [2]. Then it was the invention of the telescope [3], one of our first sensory-extension devices, that marked the beginning of the modern science and technology era. Culminating into the satellite era (detached "eyes" lifted into low-Earth orbits) and the incredible ESA projects like Euclid (looking out at the furtherst reaches of space) and Copernicus [4] (looking back at us and our predicament). It does feel that the process of learning about the universe and our place within it is still in full swing. It is still a great time to be alive!
Small quibble: Credits for the soundtrack are missing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_2001%3A_A_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope
[4] https://www.copernicus.eu/en/about-copernicus/infrastructure...
I’m still loooking for intelligent life on this planet!
Can't you pass a mirror test and see yourself in the mirror? It is pretty good evidence for me, that intelligent life exists on this planet.
I'm confused by how much matter there is. Are those dots entire galaxies? It's just nuts. Thank you team Euclid.
Truly amazing what a gift to humanity. Inspiring to see such a wonderful zoom on a deep filed like image. Bravo to the ESA.
They've gone and created Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex
We still have a long way to go to beat this draw distance, but we are on our way. The day will come when we have "sentient" beings, living in a massive world created by us. And they will ponder the same things as we do now.
And we will remain invisible and out of reach, but completely observant, and influential in their world. After all, we wrote the program.
And they will study the code and discover their own "natural laws" and invent their own things.
And they will progress until they create a completely simulated world of their own.
I wonder at which level are we. How many sims down from the original program...
You would enjoy the short story "The Last Question" by Asimov: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
The more I learn about physics the more I am convinced this is a simulation.
In a way our universe is very lazy, at large scales where consciousness exists the universe is coherent, predictable. The smaller you get the lazier and fuzzier the universe gets to save computational work. The actual state of things is only computed on small scales when you measure them. The speed of light puts limits on how far humanity can travel to extend the bounds of the simulation. Maybe the expansion of the universe is yet another hedge at limiting how far human can travel. Also, as things are red shifted due to expansion you can run the simulation of far away places slower due to time dilation.
The speed of light and the plank length are both hard codes to bound computational work. The plank length to bound computation getting too complex in the micro scale and the speed of light to limit computation in the macro scale.
It is also very convenient that the closer we look at things the more we see that under the hood things are discrete which is very convenient for simulating.
Maybe every level of the sim increases the plank length and decreases the speed of light in order to deal with inefficiency of doing a sim within a sim? Maybe at the final level of the sim we end up with the truman show.
This is an interesting idea but personally I think the opposite - the universe is not lazy and all details matter at all levels.
Like imagine making a complete account of all world views of all people in all of history - all perspectives, and all the physical events of that history. There is almost infinite detail there. In a way, in the universe all the details of all the things matter, including at the physical level, otherwise you wouldn't get the diversity and complexity you get now.
Exponential slowdowns at each level ruin this hypothesis.
The documents I copied are not as sharp as the original, so the photocopier must not exist.
Photocopying has little to do with simulation of the physical world.
First of all, Bits != Q-bits. You can clone bits. You can't clone Q-bits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
Second, photocopies are static. The physical world is not static.
Why would their be exponential slowdown? Time can be relative, but superbroadcasting can help explain the loss of fidelity as we scale down. So you can't "Clone" but you can superentangle multiple copies in a degraded state.
What benefit do you get from this line of thought? You could also be a brain in a jar. What would you change about your life or behavior?
It's fun to think for the sake of thinking.
But I'm not a brain in a jar. That is not my experience.
The benefit I get is knowing that this is not all one "big bang"
We are so quick to laud our own achievements, but fail to give credit where it is due.
We build nuclear power plants, waste water treatment plants and the beginnings of quantum computers. And we congratulate ourselves for a job well done, after spending an unspeakable amount of resources on them. We maintain them with a constant labour force, regular maintenance shutdowns and a ton of money.
Meanwhile the sun keeps shining, the clouds keep raining and your mind keeps minding.
And they do it on zero budget. No off days. No staff. Automatically.
And with all this engagement, the energy remains the same.
I look at this and think "Huh, maybe I'm not the biggest deal there is."
600x zoom didn't seem to help from the 150x zoom. Wonder if we will ever be able to see actual planet surfaces or we need some other technology to do that, i.e, we should have small satellites every 10 light years. but this map is amazing and a good step forward.
Edit: Was just thinking that image does us tells us something i.e, there no large artificial structures or billboards anywhere we can see. Maybe I watch too much sci-fi but honestly would have expected someone to build some huge structure around a star or planet, would be disappointing if no one does.
For comparison's sake, this is the best image we made of Pluto (~0.0006 light years away) prior to sending a spacecraft right past it https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Pluto_an... and this is an image of what we think might be a gas giant 4 light years away https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Candidat...
> there no large artificial structures or billboards anywhere we can see.
I half suspect the aliens who can construct structures large enough to see from lightyears away are by far most likely to be building Dyson Spheres around stars which make them significantly less likely to be seen rather than something we'd notice.
There is zero way to optically resolve an exoplanet’s surface without something like a gravitational lens.
Can't we build a giant optical interferometer in space by sending multiple telescopes out there?
Possibly, but the challenges to do so are immense. Using the sun as a giant gravitational lens seems much more tractable.
Really? I wouldn't think the sun is nearly massive enough to do what would be required here. Stars visible near the edge of the Sun appear in slightly different spots from their actual locations. If there was a distant planet directly behind the Sun whose light were focused back to an image on our side of the Sun, you'd have to get really far back from the Sun to resolve the image, no? And furthermore, it's exceedingly difficult to orient such an apparatus to look in the desired direction; you are beholden to the orbital mechanics of your viewing satellite as it plods along.
Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology (recall the black hole images). It is well within our ability to set up a constellation of satellites, perhaps spanning a few of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
Yes, you'd need to get quite far from the Sun to use it as a lens - about 650 AU is where it starts becoming practical. It would also not be re-orientable, so any "telescope" launched to that location would only be able to observe a single target. (But, notably, it is far easier to send a probe to a far point in our own solar system than it is to send it to another star entirely.) There's a paper that goes into much more detail at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.06351
So why not use interferometry instead? Well, it has some significant drawbacks. For example: the Event Horizon Telescope used radio telescopes - and pretty much had to, due to how interferometry works: you need to be able to compare the phase shifts between the multiple telescopes, which means you need to be able to sample the signal faster than the radio frequency you're using and record it. The EHT records 64 gigabits per second for each telescope, and then all this data needs to be combined to compute the resolved image. This amount of data would be problematic for space-based telescopes - even on Earth, it was not practical to send multiple petabytes over the internet, so it was saved to hard drives which were shipped by truck instead. This isn't practical in space, so you would need to transmit the data by radio, which means you'd end up with some crazy ratio of thousands of hours of transmitting for every one hour you spend recording.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
> you'd have to get really far back from the Sun to resolve the image, no?
Yah, a few hundred AU.
> you are beholden to the orbital mechanics of your viewing satellite as it plods along.
Yah, any mission like this -- interferometry or gravitational lensing -- is going to be super long and hit very few targets.
> Whereas, multi-site telescopes spread across the Earth have already been demonstrated as a feasible technology
Yah, at radio frequency while pinned to a common rock. The wavelength of visible light is hundreds of nanometers and we're talking across massive distances and significant gravity gradients and even relativistic corrections. The "big" space interferometers currently being considered are in the mid-infrared (e.g. longer wavelengths) across baselines of hundreds of meters.
All of these ideas are really hard.
> Really? I wouldn't think the sun is nearly massive enough to do what would be required here.
You "just" need to get far enough away (~600AU). Interferometry is extremely difficult to pull this off with and it’s further complicated by the host star being so much brighter than the exoplanet.
See this recent Fraser Cain interview with Dr. Slava Turyshev:
https://www.youtube.com/live/lqzJewjZUkk?si=WWNdR1PESYzD0d4X
If light is hitting it, can you explain why not?
The naïve optical instrument will be diffraction limited. The resolving power of a lens, basically how "sharp" the resulting image will be, goes down as you decrease the size of the aperture relative to the focal length (that is, as the f-stop number goes up).
A telescope that could zoom into an exoplanet would have an f value of a kajillion or so.
You’d need a 90km aperture to get a one pixel image of an Earth-sized exoplanet at 100ly.
I don't know much about it, but my guess is that 0* photons from that planet make their way into any given telescope lens in a given day.
I dont know whats out there but holy fuck this is amazing
I couldn't have put it any better.
If we're alone in the universe, I'll eat my one and only hat.
The mosaic contains 260 observations made between 25 March and 8 April 2024. In just two weeks, Euclid covered 132 square degrees of the Southern Sky in pristine detail, more than 500 times the area of the full Moon.
This mosaic accounts for 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will capture over six years. During this survey, the telescope observes the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. By doing this, it will create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made.
So my question is, what comes after Euclid?
Will the next one capture better details further out (if further is possible)?
Kind of like James Webb compared to Hubble.
Well, there's the Vera Rubin Observatory with the LSST which will provide us with an exciting dynamic map of the sky.
Since it's apparently a 3d map (?) I'd be curious if they will re-run the scan and compare between the scans? Pure speculation my part, but that would be pretty interesting, surely.
You're not going to see like galaxies moving, only very very close stars.
But you would spot transient phenomena like supernovae.
Very impressive collage of images! Just one doubt - what are the pitch black patches?
Aliens, but it's classified, so they redacted those parts.
The geometric, sharp, shapes suggest these aliens are "stealth" ones. :)
usually a star in the foreground, or, aliens
Man I REALLY hope we solve Dark Energy/Matter in my lifetime. That'd be so cool. I put it up there with long term habitation on another world (moon or mars is fine to me!).
YouTube link for the same video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ZCsUfgLRQ
Really impressive work, thanks for sharing. The video, that is -- the astronomy is indistinguishable from magic and thus way beyond the reach of words like "impressive", obviously. I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more stuff" is an important next step, but godspeed nonetheless.
ETA: For those who love space but are similarly OOTL on the specifics of modern missions: this is from a telescope launched to the L2 point (next to Webb!) last July, and is currently a bit over 1/6th of the way through it's expected lifetime.
Details here: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid... and obv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29
In comparison to Webb, it's focused on ~visible light surveys of the medium to far range, whereas Webb was built for ~infrared investigations of very distant objects. It was budgeted around 1/4th the cost of Webb (and ended up being ~1/20th due to Webb's costs running from $1B to $10B...) See https://www.jameswebbdiscovery.com/other-missions/euclid/euc...
If you're looking for a new wallpaper, it would be hard to beat this 8000x8000 pic it took of the Perseus galaxy cluster, casually depicting 100,000 galaxies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft%29#/media... The discoverer of galaxies, Kant, would literally weep. We're lucky to live when we do!
> I do find it a little funny that physics is in such a jam that "look at more stuff" is an important next step
Observation is the most basic step of science. By viewing, we can find evidence of theoretical concepts or see something that conflicts those theories so they can be discarded or tweaked. It's not like there are experiments that could be used to test theories, so observing is all there is
Life on Earth is the same. If we are to get off Earth, we need to know what life to bring with us. We need to look a lot more, and much more closely at all the evolutionary products out there to make those decisions (if we arrogant humans can indeed even manage the intricacies of such an endeavor).
I agree wholeheartedly with all of your sentiments, but I don't think that Kant discovered galaxies or had much interest in them. That honor goes to Messier or Hubble, I believe.
Messier catalogued many objects, some of which were galaxies, but he did not know what they were. It was Hubble who first figured out (in the 1920s) that there were definitely separate galaxies.
https://lco.global/spacebook/galaxies/history-discovery/
That's quite a big existential crisis for so early on a Tuesday. Cool as heck though.
The other mind boggling part is, we've gone from having a limited, accurate, map of only our immediate solar system, to _this_ in ~270 years.
What knowledge of our universe is hiding behind future technology evolutions?
I can never truly wrap my head around the time component here, this is 400+ million year old light! in earth terms, that's when most life was still ocean-bound
I wish there was a standardized way to let folks who run a website such as this one know how much a casual passer-by viewer enjoys the byproduct of their work.
If you're in the EU (particularly Germany, France and Italy, who are the three largest funders), you can let your representatives know you appreciate ESA's work.
Thank you for reminding me! Just sent a couple of emails to my representatives!
Esa has social media accounts, pretty sure some intern will see if you ping them, I don't imagine they get much traffic
You used to be able to sign a guestbook
There is. It's called dwell-time
You might be staying there a long time because you're fuming, so: nope.
You are of course right that there are lots of potential motivations for spending extra time on the page. But it will likely be interpreted as enjoyment in the absence of other feedback mechanisms.
Damn it is an awful big place!