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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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
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 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 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 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...
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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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
No Man's Sky
Wondering is the what.
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.
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.
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.
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? ;)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One proof is that we are thinking, and so are dogs, cats and monkeys to a lesser extent.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
I’m still loooking for intelligent life on this planet!
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.
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.
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.
Truly amazing what a gift to humanity. Inspiring to see such a wonderful zoom on a deep filed like image. Bravo to the ESA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm confused by how much matter there is. Are those dots entire galaxies? It's just nuts. Thank you team Euclid.
Very impressive collage of images! Just one doubt - what are the pitch black patches?
Aliens, but it's classified, so they redacted those parts.
usually a star in the foreground, or, aliens
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?
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!).
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
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 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/
> 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 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 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!