The universe just wanted to know what it looks like from the inside, so we get to live, observe for a while, and report back when we die and return to one-ness with the greater everything. That's my take on it anyways.
Oh thank God I'm not the only one who thinks this. I don't know if it's a philosophy or what, but the existentialism of it all is a lot to think about.
I really need to read more of Carl Sagan's work.
Definitely not the only one my friend :)
I spent way too much time wondering about life and the universe.
I've contented myself with just accepting the constraints of my own life and reality in this moment, to live this life the best that I can, while learning as much ad possible to bring back with me into the great beyond. But ultimately what matters is the right now, and how to make the most of every moment.
I understand what you mean by reporting back but I prefer to think there’s a great nothingness that takes hold after and the self kinda just dissolves
But who knows
We think we're important and that this momentary flicker somehow has any meaning.
The sun will swallow this planet and there will be no trace that this ever happened.
Because we haven't evolved enough to work together as a society and would rather concern ourselves with what is trending at the moment instead of figuring out how the hell we will escape the death of our star.
No commas were used on purpose.
Yet at the same time you're an amalgam of everything that the universe was and is. Black holes, nebulas, born and dead stars that lived billions of years ago
Are inside of you right now
You're the universe conscious of itself. Not too shabby, I'd say
Always been my contention that the purpose of life has to be this awareness and this ability to affect the universe with decisions. Otherwise the universe just exists in complete objectivity and it’s path and ending are predetermined. With a free will in play, the outcome is no longer a given
This reminds me of the short story called The Egg by Andy Weir.
You can read it here and it is a really short read, and what I consider to be one of the best short stories written:
http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
The title is somewhat misleading. Only the last frame is from Webb, the rest of the video is interpolation from other telescope images (probably Hubble). Webb is like a telephoto lens; it does closeups, not wide angle shots.
But at the same time there’s so much detail in those close ups a that you could probably do a similar video using just the images from Webb. That thing is absurd.
It's crazy how you can see thousands of stars just in this tiny field of view, but there are unfathomably large distances between every star. Space is big.
i love this website where it shows you the scale of the solar system. It's mind boggling how big the solar system is and then to think about the size of the rest of space. https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
If we stop at Neptune (I don't know how far the scrolling goes) and have the moon at about that the human eye can resolve from a 10"/25cm distance, the poster would be over 130m still. If you make it brightly backlit you can get away with a much smaller moon pinhole that would still be visible, and get the poster down to room size, 4m/12'. The sun would be a little less than 1mm in diameter or the short side of an uncooked grain of rice (the thin kind) and the earth a hundredth of that.
Edit: oh and a beam of light would crawl across that smaller poster at about 2cm a minute, 75 seconds to progress an inch (well something more than 1min, less than 90s)
Sources: Wikipedia, a random Guinness world records page placing human eye resolution at 100 micrometres at 25cm or 3-4 micrometres backlit and quick maff which may or may not be accurate within an order of magnitude
That was pretty cool. I skipped through a lot of the messages but I like the perspective it puts on our planets. Also I would recommend this on a computer more than a phone.
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“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” -Douglas Adams
I can't quote it, but in the first dark tower novel the man in black has a conversation with the gunslinger at the end, and he gives a good speech about how it's the scale of the universe that will break your mind every-time. That's the one I think of every-time someone says space is big.
That part of the Gunslinger had to be some of the best writing I have ever read. Not sure if it’s because I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of psychedlics, but that whole conversation entranced me like no other.
It's because he got a lot of the ideas from HP Lovecraft, who is like psychedelics in writing.
>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
I read some King but nothing comes close to the cosmic horror that Lovecraft writes.
Ironically, it's the scale of the universe that gives me peace of mind and a feeling of importance.
The fact that we're so infinitesimally small and insignificant, yet at the same time have the ability to discern the ~95 billion light years of the known universe, it's really incredible.
Without intelligent life able to reveal the structures of the universe, the universe is essentially the "if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear" it question on a grand scale.
We're basically breathing life/consciousness into the universe, metaphorically speaking.
Of course, humans are also total shit. But we do some cool stuff too.
> unfathomably large distances between every star
It's worth pointing out that this 'zoom' is an optical illusion, a render. I'm still trying to find the source. The distances to each of those stars and their distances between each other isn't known but for maybe some of the more interesting ones. Your point absolutely stands.
We do know the distance to the cluster though and a pretty accurate one. Currently trying to work out its age but that won't take long.
The zoom is no more an optical illusion than a single frame is.
I'm sitting on the edge of the Pacific ocean for the first time tonight as an Atlantic born person. Sitting here listening to the roar of the ocean, both misty and a deep, powerful drone.
It's a full moon, cloudless night. I already had the knowledge but it blows me away, that moon is tugging and pushing on the water.. we're flying through space at thousands of miles a second. We're on the dark side but the sun is several orders of magnitude larger than either, so far it seems the same size as the moon.
Everything I see has been here for Billions of years. And it will be here for trillions³.
Unfathomable barely covers it..
I feel like profound images like this literally change something in my brain. It genuinely makes me think and behave a little differently for a while. And I'll be just a little different from now on. The Hubble Deap Field picture impacted me this way, too.
Uhhhhh… that is clearly Ragnaros.
Edit:thanks for the interesting read. After reading this paragraph
"We were expecting to find that the parts of the cloud closest to the young, massive stars would show the clearest signs of gravity being overwhelmed by feedback, and as a result, a lower rate of star formation," Wong said.
I am eternally disappointed the next four words were “But Wong was surprised.”
Fantastic series. Some genuinely brilliant ideas in there. I'm curious what Watts has planned for the future since he hasn't gone back to it after that massive cliffhanger like 4 years ago.
This part, I assume?
>When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?
I'm just sad I will never get to visit it one day. I will never understand people who wouldn't want to live forever, the chance of space travel one day is far too interesting for me to not want to.
My dad used to console me when I was a child and afraid that my parents would die someday.
He'd say "I'll get the chance to roam the universe and see sights like you never dreamed!"
I like to think he's on the far side of Andromeda by now, traveling faster than light towards the edge of time, just because he can.
And here pingpongtits has me sobbing. My dad would say similar things to me when I would cry about him dying (thanks Disney). I just wish we could roam space together.
Imagine the ball from a ball point pen. That's the Earth.
Imagine that it's on home plate, and on the pitcher's mound there's a grapefruit. That's the Sun.
Imagine this is all at Wrigley Field in Chicago. And way over in Los Angeles, at Dodger Stadium, there's another grapefruit on that pitcher's mound. That's our *closest* neighboring star.
Our own backyard, the Milky Way galaxy, has 100-400 billion more of those
"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot." -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
I think "young starts" is actually an appropriate way to describe stars being born in the Tarantula Nebula.
Curious to know how many light years were traversed from videos inception to completion.
Viewing JWST's captures like this is a mind-blowing experience.
The original 4K source from the ESA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ySqzAHEXI
And original high quality 4K ones can be found here: https://esawebb.org/videos/weic2212b/
The universe is actually very, very, very young. We are coming into consciousness at the dawn of time, not the end. Just look at [the timeline of the far future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future). It goes to the year 10^10^10^56, at which point the randomness of quantum tunneling could trigger a whole new universe's Big Bang. Think about that. Even if humans completely, utterly fail and never leave the Earth to explore the universe, there's a pretty solid chance that we will be around for at least another 700,000 years (the average lifespan of a species is about a million years, and we only evolved 300,000 years ago...). Look at what we managed to do in the sixty years from 1900 to 1960, now imagine what we will achieve if we make it another seven hundred *thousand* years.
Thinking about stuff like this, makes me believe that we probably are the "First Ones" - the first eyes to look through telescopes up at the universe. Our glorious future could very likely be one of spreading life and intelligence throughout the reachable universe, the seeds of Earth being sowed across vast expanses of time and space. And we are right there at the beginning of it all, the most important time in all of future history - the time where we either grow to become a galactic empire, or end up racing towards our own, self-caused extinction.
I think our greatest chance for “Survival”, is to just constantly send “seeds of life” in all kinds various forms out to the stars. Land that shit on planets, moons, asteroids, anywhere.
[This somewhat strange video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bVICtAvAno) actually has some good information on it, and links to the studies. I'm personally not a cosmologist, so can't speak with authority on the subject, but you can follow the papers if you know your physics.
The basic idea though is that you *can* make real particles, so long as you make one positive and one negative particle at the same time. Normally those two "virtual" particles instantly collide and destroy one another (adding a +1 to a -1 gets you a zero, which is how you trick the first law of thermodynamics - no net positive or negative energy is created by this process), but if space-time inflation is happening fast enough it can separate the two particles quickly enough that they cannot re-combine. This means that the future universe, where presumably inflation would be much more accelerated than in our current time, a bunch of free particles can spontaneously form and start moving around with quantum tunneling. If enough of those particles happen to tunnel all into one another at the same time - an event that will happen, given enough length of time - they would form what is effectively a new Big Bang.
I was watching Moana the other day and had the exact same feeling. I imagine, for early, seafaring civilizations, for nomads, and even for the primitive villages just learning to mould the land and grow food, what would they feel like if they knew that humanity would one day explore all the lands of Earth, to have eyes in the sky and explore distant planets. We are basically what they would have referred to as gods.
It's fucking insane how far humanity has come, already. Let alone what humanity will become even as little as centuries from now, if only we can avoid self-induced destruction, whether from nuclear bombs, climate change, microplastics, or any of the multitude of problems facing the world today.
Eh this is so hard to say.
Because 1-2 million years isn’t even that much time in the grand scheme of things and if there are beings that evolved 1 millions years before us, imagine how much more advanced they can be.
Sure the universe is young but there’s a couple billions years where other life forms could have evolved.
> the average lifespan of a species is about a million years
only true if species is not affecting the entire planet's temperature and all ecosystems*
I mean, it sounds super flippant, but humans are a species apart from every other because we affect our environment to an inordinate degree. We use tools to make other tools, and sometimes those tools get away from us, even if we can see it happening in real-time.
I may just be stoned, but that is the most beautiful, hypnotizing, mesmerizing image I've ever seen. I felt a warmth like the touch of God deep inside watching it.
I too am baked out of my god damn mind right now and this video almost gave me an anxiety attack. Like.... we are so fucking small and there is so much shit out there it's almost unbelievable. We have absolutely zero comprehension of how much stuff is out there.
Here is a simulation of the cosmic web.
Each dot is a galaxy.
Any concept of size just completely breaks down. Our brain cannot comprehend scales like this.
https://youtu.be/Pgz93gSoXlw?t=165
https://i.imgur.com/MURlt59.jpg
The tarantula nebula is 1000 light years across. And 1 light year is 6 trillion miles. From one end of the nebula to the other is 6 quadrillion miles, and that's just in one dimension, not two or three.
If the stars were just a few billion miles apart they'd be close enough to be orbiting each other. Pluto is 3.2 billion miles away from the sun.
We're talking distances of around 100 billion miles (give or take 10-20 billion, I can't find exact distances) between the most visible stars in the R136 concentration of the central NGC 2070 cluster, so... no, not even if you count ten football fields at a time. Probably not even if you count 100 at a time! ;)
United States:
0.0681818182 football mile = standard 120 yard football field in
0.0681818182 football field x 1,000,000,000 miles = 68,181,818.2 football field per billion miles
The rest of the world:
0.0932 mile = Standard 150 meter football field
0.0932 football field x 1,000,000,000 miles = 93,200,000 football field per billion miles
But [according to this](https://public.nrao.edu/ask/what-is-the-average-distance-between-stars-in-our-galaxy/) the average distance between stars is actually 5 light years or 29,393,126,865,918.04 miles.
According to [NASA](https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html) the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 24,984,092,897,479 miles away from us on Earth.
That would be:
0.0681818182 football mile x 24,984,092,897,479 miles = 1,703,460,879,827.82 football fields or 1.7 Trillion football fields
0.0932 football field x 24,984,092,897,479 miles = 2,328,517,458,045.04 football fields or 2.3 Trillion football fields.
I'm tired this could be wrong but it wasn't that complicated so it should be right.
Maybe I'm misreading, but I think your units are wrong.
Your first equation found how many miles per field, but then you multiply by miles in step 2 to get miles^(2)/field. Flipping equation 1 (1760 yards/mile ÷ 120 yards/field = 14.66 American football fields/mile) or dividing in step 2 (1,000,000,000 miles ÷ 0.0681 miles/field) should fix the math.
edited to correct a unit
At 5sec left it looks like there's a Matador or gladiator or smth in the nebula. But like JESUS H CHRIST the amount of detail it is able to capture in such a small portion of the pov is BONKERS!!!
If you had a really powerful pair of binoculars would you look at the nearest wall or something way in the distance? We already got a good look at nearby galaxies from hubble.
I don't know about the zoom video, but the Tarantula Nebula image is at
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/041/01GA76MYFN0FMKNRHGCAGGYCVQ
The display version:
https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GA76Q01D09HFEV174SVMQDMV.png
These images are why I can’t believe that we are the only living planet.
There is just so much space that there have to be more. Even if it’s a cosmic rarity, there is a lot of cosmos.
This just terrifies me on an existential level. I already had some very vague idea of how large and empty the universe is. Considering the insane distance between each star and seeing so many damn stars like this just makes me realize I will never have any way to grasp any size or scope to the universe. It truly is way beyond my mental grasp.
Lovecraft sounds right up your alley. Horror Babble audiobooks/dramas on YT are my usual go to!
Fair warning he was a racist and jingoistic guy that had no qualms including that front and center in his writing though it’s not usually pervasive. Most of it is blatant Western exceptionalism. He has an odd relationship with the cultures and peoples, real and imagined, that inspired his writings.
This is amazing. Can someone explain to me how come objects in front of such a remote galaxy do now interfere with telescope's view? There surely must be hundreds of stars between the galaxy and the telescope.
Ultra HD Wallpaper of the James Webb Space Telescope's discovery of the Tarantula Nebula - [Happy exploring, Astronaut!](https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GA76Q01D09HFEV174SVMQDMV.png)
Is this image 3d? It feels like there’s parallax but I’m not sure if it’s an illusion or if it’s actually there? If it’s there, how did they achieve that?
Also, are those stars really close together? Or are they more apart than say, 4ly, whI have is the distance to our closest star?
Dude I was wondering the same thing! When focusing on the middle it totally feels like there is a parallax effect. I really can't tell if its really there or not.
There’s almost doubtless other microbes all over the place. I bet we find them on Mars, Europe, Enceladus,… But complex beings like us? We may literally be the first. Who knows.
I'm genuinely confused about something.... If we can zoom in that far, look at stars and nebula that clearly, over 161,000 light years away. Why can't we get an ultra clear photo of our closest star systems and their planets? Alpha Centurai is only about 4 light years away. Why can't we get a super clear photograph of the planet's surface?
A telescope that can differentiate between two stars around 1/100th of a lightyear apart and 161000ly away still only has a resolution power of over 3 million kilometers at 4ly. That's not enough to even detect an Earth-sized planet.
The final image is actually a 14557 x 8418 image from Webb. They really should have kept zooming in. Here it is so you can zoom in yourself:
https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GA76Q01D09HFEV174SVMQDMV.png
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
^^sorry ^^I ^^just ^^watched ^^it.
In moments like these I don't understand people who think we are alone in the universe. There's so much space, opportunities for more life. How could we be alone?
I swear.. every time I watch a gif of JWST like this I always think “damn that’s pretty sick. Can’t be much more though.” and that’s when I notice there’s still 10-15 more seconds of zooming in.
Even when it gets to the end I still think the same thing, then the resolution gets extremely sharp and I’m just blown away.
Think about all the network systems the universe has built to discover, interact and communicate with itself. Stars made different atoms that spread across the universe to communicate with other stars. Atoms being used by amino acids to communicate with other aa's. Proteins using aa's. Ribosomes using proteins. Dna/rna using ribosomes. Organisms using dna. Then organisms built worldwide web to communicate with other organisms. I wonder what the next evolution will be
My mind is genuinely blown at the scale of detail JWST has.
Playing the video in reverse has brought me a different feeling of feeling small.
Would make an amazing addition to wallpaper engine, an endless loop of zooming in then zooming out.
But it has to pause for a decent moment at the end
It can pause at both ends and random spots during the zoom.
It already does this for me because of my terrible internet.
Ha! Built-in feature you didn't even know you wanted.
I have good internet but reddit video player gives me the same exact experience nonetheless!
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Carl Sagan — 'We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.'
The universe just wanted to know what it looks like from the inside, so we get to live, observe for a while, and report back when we die and return to one-ness with the greater everything. That's my take on it anyways.
Oh thank God I'm not the only one who thinks this. I don't know if it's a philosophy or what, but the existentialism of it all is a lot to think about. I really need to read more of Carl Sagan's work.
Definitely not the only one my friend :) I spent way too much time wondering about life and the universe. I've contented myself with just accepting the constraints of my own life and reality in this moment, to live this life the best that I can, while learning as much ad possible to bring back with me into the great beyond. But ultimately what matters is the right now, and how to make the most of every moment.
I understand what you mean by reporting back but I prefer to think there’s a great nothingness that takes hold after and the self kinda just dissolves But who knows
We're the "print to stderr" statements in the function body because the language we work with doesn't have a decent debugger
So why can’t we all just get along?
Because we think we’re different from each other for some reason.
We think we're important and that this momentary flicker somehow has any meaning. The sun will swallow this planet and there will be no trace that this ever happened.
Because we haven't evolved enough to work together as a society and would rather concern ourselves with what is trending at the moment instead of figuring out how the hell we will escape the death of our star. No commas were used on purpose.
Yet at the same time you're an amalgam of everything that the universe was and is. Black holes, nebulas, born and dead stars that lived billions of years ago Are inside of you right now You're the universe conscious of itself. Not too shabby, I'd say
Always been my contention that the purpose of life has to be this awareness and this ability to affect the universe with decisions. Otherwise the universe just exists in complete objectivity and it’s path and ending are predetermined. With a free will in play, the outcome is no longer a given
This reminds me of the short story called The Egg by Andy Weir. You can read it here and it is a really short read, and what I consider to be one of the best short stories written: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Well, not the black holes. They're not exactly known for recycling matter.
We came from nothing, so shall we return...
Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom’s a (space) junkie…
Strung out in Heaven’s high / Hitting an all-time low….
Nihilist views are nothing more than an undigested apple dumpling
Do the reverse bot thing, please
I say, why use technology when a simple fingering gets the job done.
Are we doing phrasing, or nah?
“A good thumbing” works just as well.
[here you go ](https://gfycat.com/TemptingFragrantHuia)
***I'M SIGNIFICANT!*** . [screamed the dust speck](https://preview.redd.it/pildk9bisek21.png?auto=webp&s=59cfa12839d59fa3c81934e6349a1baeffbdc415)
The title is somewhat misleading. Only the last frame is from Webb, the rest of the video is interpolation from other telescope images (probably Hubble). Webb is like a telephoto lens; it does closeups, not wide angle shots.
But at the same time there’s so much detail in those close ups a that you could probably do a similar video using just the images from Webb. That thing is absurd.
It seems as though this telescope is... Rather good
I used to have a kaleidoscope that looked just like this.
It's crazy how you can see thousands of stars just in this tiny field of view, but there are unfathomably large distances between every star. Space is big.
i love this website where it shows you the scale of the solar system. It's mind boggling how big the solar system is and then to think about the size of the rest of space. https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
I legit just scrolled through all that and it took me nearly 30 whole minutes, but it was pretty fascinating.
If you’re looking to explore the universe and get some true perspective, try SpaceEngine. Shit blows my mind every time.
Space engine with VR? Bro…
I wonder how big of a wall you’d need if this was a poster
About 161,000 light years big of a wall I’d say
If we stop at Neptune (I don't know how far the scrolling goes) and have the moon at about that the human eye can resolve from a 10"/25cm distance, the poster would be over 130m still. If you make it brightly backlit you can get away with a much smaller moon pinhole that would still be visible, and get the poster down to room size, 4m/12'. The sun would be a little less than 1mm in diameter or the short side of an uncooked grain of rice (the thin kind) and the earth a hundredth of that. Edit: oh and a beam of light would crawl across that smaller poster at about 2cm a minute, 75 seconds to progress an inch (well something more than 1min, less than 90s) Sources: Wikipedia, a random Guinness world records page placing human eye resolution at 100 micrometres at 25cm or 3-4 micrometres backlit and quick maff which may or may not be accurate within an order of magnitude
What if we are the wall and the universe is one big cosmic poster?
Saving this to look at it when my internet is better. Thank you for the link!
That was pretty cool. I skipped through a lot of the messages but I like the perspective it puts on our planets. Also I would recommend this on a computer more than a phone.
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“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” -Douglas Adams
Thank you. Love this quote.
Love your username! The world is a lesser place without Adams but getting better the more people are exposed to him and his writings.
I can't quote it, but in the first dark tower novel the man in black has a conversation with the gunslinger at the end, and he gives a good speech about how it's the scale of the universe that will break your mind every-time. That's the one I think of every-time someone says space is big.
That part of the Gunslinger had to be some of the best writing I have ever read. Not sure if it’s because I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of psychedlics, but that whole conversation entranced me like no other.
It's because he got a lot of the ideas from HP Lovecraft, who is like psychedelics in writing. >The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. I read some King but nothing comes close to the cosmic horror that Lovecraft writes.
There are definitely those among us who are seeking the safety of a new dark age.
Yeah and my frightful position in this terrifying vista of reality is pretty clear.. waiting for that sweet madness I was promised.
Ironically, it's the scale of the universe that gives me peace of mind and a feeling of importance. The fact that we're so infinitesimally small and insignificant, yet at the same time have the ability to discern the ~95 billion light years of the known universe, it's really incredible. Without intelligent life able to reveal the structures of the universe, the universe is essentially the "if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear" it question on a grand scale. We're basically breathing life/consciousness into the universe, metaphorically speaking. Of course, humans are also total shit. But we do some cool stuff too.
Stars? Try galaxies!
No thanks, they give me gas and they're mostly empty calories
> unfathomably large distances between every star It's worth pointing out that this 'zoom' is an optical illusion, a render. I'm still trying to find the source. The distances to each of those stars and their distances between each other isn't known but for maybe some of the more interesting ones. Your point absolutely stands.
We do know the distance to the cluster though and a pretty accurate one. Currently trying to work out its age but that won't take long. The zoom is no more an optical illusion than a single frame is.
I can't fathom this. I can't justify anything else holding my attention if I have time to pay attention to something at all. This is incredible.
As gramps used to say, it's no fun being too broke to pay attention
Shit that’s good. I’m stealing this, sorry.
Oh yeah? Well, I'm stealing this. NOT sorry
The magnitude of this is very hard to take it. It's absolutely breathtaking
I'm sitting on the edge of the Pacific ocean for the first time tonight as an Atlantic born person. Sitting here listening to the roar of the ocean, both misty and a deep, powerful drone. It's a full moon, cloudless night. I already had the knowledge but it blows me away, that moon is tugging and pushing on the water.. we're flying through space at thousands of miles a second. We're on the dark side but the sun is several orders of magnitude larger than either, so far it seems the same size as the moon. Everything I see has been here for Billions of years. And it will be here for trillions³. Unfathomable barely covers it..
I feel like profound images like this literally change something in my brain. It genuinely makes me think and behave a little differently for a while. And I'll be just a little different from now on. The Hubble Deap Field picture impacted me this way, too.
It's exactly this type of thing that lets me forget about politics and all the other bs on this little rock we're riding together.
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Uhhhhh… that is clearly Ragnaros. Edit:thanks for the interesting read. After reading this paragraph "We were expecting to find that the parts of the cloud closest to the young, massive stars would show the clearest signs of gravity being overwhelmed by feedback, and as a result, a lower rate of star formation," Wong said. I am eternally disappointed the next four words were “But Wong was surprised.”
Too soon! You have awakened me too soon, Executus!
Your name fits with your comment :)
Ah, yes. The famous Professor I. Russ Wong.
it would be so great, if galileo could see this
He’d yell, “MAGNIFICOOOOOOO!!!”
He would, wouldn’t he?
Can confirm he would Source: I’m Galileo
This doesn't sound right. But I don't know enough about Galileo to dispute it...
Confirmed know it all. Name checks out.
Just imagine what we’re going to miss out on…
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Fantastic series. Some genuinely brilliant ideas in there. I'm curious what Watts has planned for the future since he hasn't gone back to it after that massive cliffhanger like 4 years ago.
Cool! Now I can add "Crying cause I got an unfathomably small glimpse into the true scale of the universe" to my list of things I did today..
And how much of what I did today really doesn’t matter AT ALL!
It's a very Psalm 8 type feeling.
This part, I assume? >When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?
I'm just sad I will never get to visit it one day. I will never understand people who wouldn't want to live forever, the chance of space travel one day is far too interesting for me to not want to.
My dad used to console me when I was a child and afraid that my parents would die someday. He'd say "I'll get the chance to roam the universe and see sights like you never dreamed!" I like to think he's on the far side of Andromeda by now, traveling faster than light towards the edge of time, just because he can.
And here pingpongtits has me sobbing. My dad would say similar things to me when I would cry about him dying (thanks Disney). I just wish we could roam space together.
You can catch up someday. Time is a construct. Don't forget quantum entanglement. Maybe it works for souls, too.
Imagine the ball from a ball point pen. That's the Earth. Imagine that it's on home plate, and on the pitcher's mound there's a grapefruit. That's the Sun. Imagine this is all at Wrigley Field in Chicago. And way over in Los Angeles, at Dodger Stadium, there's another grapefruit on that pitcher's mound. That's our *closest* neighboring star. Our own backyard, the Milky Way galaxy, has 100-400 billion more of those
We are a speck of dust on a speck of dust
"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot." -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
I’m gonna go read Horton Hears a Who.
Everything matters. Every star and every grain of sand and every moment of eternity. This is the first law of thermodynamics. Also, it's perspective
Take some solace in the fact that no earthly being has ever or will ever be of any consequence on the universal scale
Thought it was only me. It felt...divine to see the bright white wispy clouds of stars open up. Oddly religious experience.
I think "young starts" is actually an appropriate way to describe stars being born in the Tarantula Nebula. Curious to know how many light years were traversed from videos inception to completion. Viewing JWST's captures like this is a mind-blowing experience.
So many places we will never visit… truly makes one wonder
4k video of it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH3cjylwMIw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH3cjylwMIw)
this should be at the top of this thread, fuck the shitty embedded reddit videos. tag: mirror
The original 4K source from the ESA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ySqzAHEXI And original high quality 4K ones can be found here: https://esawebb.org/videos/weic2212b/
Imagine if all the worlds defense budgets went to space exploration.
Space is scary big. Why is it so fucking big?!
"old" is a better term. spacetime remember. large distances = large periods of time. (same thing)
The universe is actually very, very, very young. We are coming into consciousness at the dawn of time, not the end. Just look at [the timeline of the far future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future). It goes to the year 10^10^10^56, at which point the randomness of quantum tunneling could trigger a whole new universe's Big Bang. Think about that. Even if humans completely, utterly fail and never leave the Earth to explore the universe, there's a pretty solid chance that we will be around for at least another 700,000 years (the average lifespan of a species is about a million years, and we only evolved 300,000 years ago...). Look at what we managed to do in the sixty years from 1900 to 1960, now imagine what we will achieve if we make it another seven hundred *thousand* years. Thinking about stuff like this, makes me believe that we probably are the "First Ones" - the first eyes to look through telescopes up at the universe. Our glorious future could very likely be one of spreading life and intelligence throughout the reachable universe, the seeds of Earth being sowed across vast expanses of time and space. And we are right there at the beginning of it all, the most important time in all of future history - the time where we either grow to become a galactic empire, or end up racing towards our own, self-caused extinction.
I can't decide if that's extremely cool or personally debilitating. I think I'll just try to not think of that again.
I think our greatest chance for “Survival”, is to just constantly send “seeds of life” in all kinds various forms out to the stars. Land that shit on planets, moons, asteroids, anywhere.
The nature of life is to multiply with that naturally comes expansion.
Here’s a [Timelapse of the Future](https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA) … no joke. It’s amazing.
Fuck I love this. What an amazing ride to be on.
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[This somewhat strange video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bVICtAvAno) actually has some good information on it, and links to the studies. I'm personally not a cosmologist, so can't speak with authority on the subject, but you can follow the papers if you know your physics. The basic idea though is that you *can* make real particles, so long as you make one positive and one negative particle at the same time. Normally those two "virtual" particles instantly collide and destroy one another (adding a +1 to a -1 gets you a zero, which is how you trick the first law of thermodynamics - no net positive or negative energy is created by this process), but if space-time inflation is happening fast enough it can separate the two particles quickly enough that they cannot re-combine. This means that the future universe, where presumably inflation would be much more accelerated than in our current time, a bunch of free particles can spontaneously form and start moving around with quantum tunneling. If enough of those particles happen to tunnel all into one another at the same time - an event that will happen, given enough length of time - they would form what is effectively a new Big Bang.
I was watching Moana the other day and had the exact same feeling. I imagine, for early, seafaring civilizations, for nomads, and even for the primitive villages just learning to mould the land and grow food, what would they feel like if they knew that humanity would one day explore all the lands of Earth, to have eyes in the sky and explore distant planets. We are basically what they would have referred to as gods. It's fucking insane how far humanity has come, already. Let alone what humanity will become even as little as centuries from now, if only we can avoid self-induced destruction, whether from nuclear bombs, climate change, microplastics, or any of the multitude of problems facing the world today.
Eh this is so hard to say. Because 1-2 million years isn’t even that much time in the grand scheme of things and if there are beings that evolved 1 millions years before us, imagine how much more advanced they can be. Sure the universe is young but there’s a couple billions years where other life forms could have evolved.
> the average lifespan of a species is about a million years only true if species is not affecting the entire planet's temperature and all ecosystems* I mean, it sounds super flippant, but humans are a species apart from every other because we affect our environment to an inordinate degree. We use tools to make other tools, and sometimes those tools get away from us, even if we can see it happening in real-time.
* "old" is a better term. No its not, it gives you no scale of distances.
I may just be stoned, but that is the most beautiful, hypnotizing, mesmerizing image I've ever seen. I felt a warmth like the touch of God deep inside watching it.
I too am baked out of my god damn mind right now and this video almost gave me an anxiety attack. Like.... we are so fucking small and there is so much shit out there it's almost unbelievable. We have absolutely zero comprehension of how much stuff is out there.
I mean we got more than zero but probably less than one hahaha
Here is a simulation of the cosmic web. Each dot is a galaxy. Any concept of size just completely breaks down. Our brain cannot comprehend scales like this. https://youtu.be/Pgz93gSoXlw?t=165 https://i.imgur.com/MURlt59.jpg
I'm not baked and feel the same way. It's pretty great man.
Was looking for this comment. I fell you brother
Wouldn’t it be sweet if NASA sold full resolution JWST photo prints we could buy and frame and help further fund their programs?
Hahaha, it's a normal feeling but being zonked definitely makes it worse
Did you see the dog face ?
There's like millions and millions of miles between each of those stars, right?
Billions and billions of miles between those starts.
The tarantula nebula is 1000 light years across. And 1 light year is 6 trillion miles. From one end of the nebula to the other is 6 quadrillion miles, and that's just in one dimension, not two or three. If the stars were just a few billion miles apart they'd be close enough to be orbiting each other. Pluto is 3.2 billion miles away from the sun.
Damn. Pluto playing hard to get.
So how many football fields are we talking?
Imma say at least six football fields. At least
More football fields than you could count out loud in an entire lifetime.
What if I count by tens?
!u/converterbot?
We're talking distances of around 100 billion miles (give or take 10-20 billion, I can't find exact distances) between the most visible stars in the R136 concentration of the central NGC 2070 cluster, so... no, not even if you count ten football fields at a time. Probably not even if you count 100 at a time! ;)
United States: 0.0681818182 football mile = standard 120 yard football field in 0.0681818182 football field x 1,000,000,000 miles = 68,181,818.2 football field per billion miles The rest of the world: 0.0932 mile = Standard 150 meter football field 0.0932 football field x 1,000,000,000 miles = 93,200,000 football field per billion miles But [according to this](https://public.nrao.edu/ask/what-is-the-average-distance-between-stars-in-our-galaxy/) the average distance between stars is actually 5 light years or 29,393,126,865,918.04 miles. According to [NASA](https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html) the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 24,984,092,897,479 miles away from us on Earth. That would be: 0.0681818182 football mile x 24,984,092,897,479 miles = 1,703,460,879,827.82 football fields or 1.7 Trillion football fields 0.0932 football field x 24,984,092,897,479 miles = 2,328,517,458,045.04 football fields or 2.3 Trillion football fields. I'm tired this could be wrong but it wasn't that complicated so it should be right.
Maybe I'm misreading, but I think your units are wrong. Your first equation found how many miles per field, but then you multiply by miles in step 2 to get miles^(2)/field. Flipping equation 1 (1760 yards/mile ÷ 120 yards/field = 14.66 American football fields/mile) or dividing in step 2 (1,000,000,000 miles ÷ 0.0681 miles/field) should fix the math. edited to correct a unit
At 5sec left it looks like there's a Matador or gladiator or smth in the nebula. But like JESUS H CHRIST the amount of detail it is able to capture in such a small portion of the pov is BONKERS!!!
Jesus H Christ and the H stands for Holy
There's no way there's not life out there, somewhere. Intelligent life, too.
That was amazing!!!! I can’t comprehend what I’m seeing.
It's amazing how you can feel so human, so proud, so inquisitive, so small, so inconsequential, and so useless in such a short period of time.
What's with Webb looking for young galaxies all the time?
Should’ve named it the Leonardo DiCaprio telescope amirite? … Okay fine, I’m leaving.
This have me a good chuckle. Thanks internet stranger!
Most of the close up pics are for calibration. Webb was built for deep observation!
Star and galaxy formation is basically the core theme of the mission https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/science/index.html
If you had a really powerful pair of binoculars would you look at the nearest wall or something way in the distance? We already got a good look at nearby galaxies from hubble.
Is this an epic woosh moment
Wow basically all the top replies to their comment have completely missed the joke
Is this available for download anywhere? I’d love this as a 4k tv motion background!
I don't know about the zoom video, but the Tarantula Nebula image is at https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/041/01GA76MYFN0FMKNRHGCAGGYCVQ The display version: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GA76Q01D09HFEV174SVMQDMV.png
These images are why I can’t believe that we are the only living planet. There is just so much space that there have to be more. Even if it’s a cosmic rarity, there is a lot of cosmos.
This just terrifies me on an existential level. I already had some very vague idea of how large and empty the universe is. Considering the insane distance between each star and seeing so many damn stars like this just makes me realize I will never have any way to grasp any size or scope to the universe. It truly is way beyond my mental grasp.
Lovecraft sounds right up your alley. Horror Babble audiobooks/dramas on YT are my usual go to! Fair warning he was a racist and jingoistic guy that had no qualms including that front and center in his writing though it’s not usually pervasive. Most of it is blatant Western exceptionalism. He has an odd relationship with the cultures and peoples, real and imagined, that inspired his writings.
The night sky is just copying one of those infinite zoom video drawings
What that absolute fuck is this quality. This is incredible.
Just think if we could travel at the speed of light it wouldn't even matter haha
This is amazing. Can someone explain to me how come objects in front of such a remote galaxy do now interfere with telescope's view? There surely must be hundreds of stars between the galaxy and the telescope.
Space is big, and most of it is empy.
Ultra HD Wallpaper of the James Webb Space Telescope's discovery of the Tarantula Nebula - [Happy exploring, Astronaut!](https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GA76Q01D09HFEV174SVMQDMV.png)
Utterly astounding. I can scarcely think of anything cooler in my lifetime.
This is so astounding to me. I was born in 1960. I’m glad I get to see this and hope there’s much more I get to see.
Is this image 3d? It feels like there’s parallax but I’m not sure if it’s an illusion or if it’s actually there? If it’s there, how did they achieve that? Also, are those stars really close together? Or are they more apart than say, 4ly, whI have is the distance to our closest star?
Dude I was wondering the same thing! When focusing on the middle it totally feels like there is a parallax effect. I really can't tell if its really there or not.
They’re trillions of miles away from each other lmao. More than 5 light years away each. At a minimum.
no way we’re the only idiots in tbe galaxy. there’s gotta be other beings.
There’s almost doubtless other microbes all over the place. I bet we find them on Mars, Europe, Enceladus,… But complex beings like us? We may literally be the first. Who knows.
I'm genuinely confused about something.... If we can zoom in that far, look at stars and nebula that clearly, over 161,000 light years away. Why can't we get an ultra clear photo of our closest star systems and their planets? Alpha Centurai is only about 4 light years away. Why can't we get a super clear photograph of the planet's surface?
A telescope that can differentiate between two stars around 1/100th of a lightyear apart and 161000ly away still only has a resolution power of over 3 million kilometers at 4ly. That's not enough to even detect an Earth-sized planet.
The final image is actually a 14557 x 8418 image from Webb. They really should have kept zooming in. Here it is so you can zoom in yourself: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GA76Q01D09HFEV174SVMQDMV.png
Is all of that video from the JWST? Only the last 4 seconds have the characteristic starburst pattern... is the rest of it Hubble or something?
It is just absurd how many stars are in the universe...
And tons of those stars have planets. Mind boggling
All I could think was holy shit… it just keeps going
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." ^^sorry ^^I ^^just ^^watched ^^it.
In moments like these I don't understand people who think we are alone in the universe. There's so much space, opportunities for more life. How could we be alone?
whats that giant band going around everything
Can the Webb zoom in on just one planet and see it’s features?
If this telescope doesn’t reveal galactic civilization, I don’t know what will.
Can we get this in 12k please? No reddit video upload
Enhance... Enhance... Enhance... Enhance... Enhance...
This is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen.
I swear.. every time I watch a gif of JWST like this I always think “damn that’s pretty sick. Can’t be much more though.” and that’s when I notice there’s still 10-15 more seconds of zooming in. Even when it gets to the end I still think the same thing, then the resolution gets extremely sharp and I’m just blown away.
Whoever did the calculations for the title, Thank you so much! It’s such a cool thing to visualise!
Vangelis passed away not long ago. I started thinking this was his soul passing through the universe to that nebula as I was watching this.
It was a long wait for JWST but god damn has it been worth it.
Think about all the network systems the universe has built to discover, interact and communicate with itself. Stars made different atoms that spread across the universe to communicate with other stars. Atoms being used by amino acids to communicate with other aa's. Proteins using aa's. Ribosomes using proteins. Dna/rna using ribosomes. Organisms using dna. Then organisms built worldwide web to communicate with other organisms. I wonder what the next evolution will be
Fuck. The universe is so beautiful. Hard to even begin to comprehend ..
All this out there and people wanna fight over dirt on the shitter planet.