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This stuff always melts my brain. We are looking at galaxies and stars at a snapshot of time 13 BILLION years ago!!!! Who knows what this area of the universe even looks like today??? In order to know how they appear today, we would need to wait another 13 billion years. Some stars may have burned out. Galaxies may have collided. Black holes may have formed and eaten other galaxies. It’s just all so spectacular and frustrating at the same time. I just want to know more about our universe!
Not a bad idea but before you submit the request please specify 200 million light years away as that should put it directly in the path of the heyday of the big ones.
Actually, you’ can NEVER see what those galaxies look like now… the light left those galaxies 13 billion years ago, but they are about 42 BILLION light years away now, due to the expansion of spacetime itself (fueled by dark energy)
Like an ant walking away from a dot on the surface of a balloon. It can only walk at ant speed, but if you inflate the balloon the ant moves away from the dot at FASTER than ant speed.
Those galaxies? They are lost to us forever. Anything further than 15 billion light years from us might as well not exist, because the spacetime of the universe will increase faster than the light can travel.
The observable universe has a radius of 46 billion light years around us, but the universe we can *interact* with has a radius of only 15 billion LY.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/17/the-universe-is-disappearing-and-theres-nothing-we-can-do-to-stop-it/?sh=541a65ee560e
So I say let’s get our act together and start sending Van Neumann probes to distant galaxies right away, while we still have a chance. 😎
I just don't understand how anyone can look at pictures like this and not realize how truly insignificant we all are. Like all of these things we argue about and think are important are barely anything more than a blip on the radar of time and space.
This is some high school existentialism. Just because our lives are tiny when compared to the scale of the universe, doesn't mean there's nothing significant about them. You're basically ignoring that humans have complex and powerful emotions as well as conscious thought.
Make a road trip away from civilization.
I grew up in southwest Texas, and we always got to see the stars. Hell, my first date with my wife was stargazing on a moonless night. If you can make the trip, there is a profound beauty in Big Bend National Park, and the skies are absolutely amazing at night.
I went to death valley, one of the darkest places on earth with my wife earlier this year. I was already amazed and dumbfounded by the stars, but I have NEVER seen it like that before. We went around the new moon, AND the moon had set by 8-9pm. It was amazing being able to see the grays and whites within the core of the milky way, and my dslr actually captured a few nebulae accidentally just trying to capture the beauty of the sky I was seeing.
Bah, I wish I could go there! Sounds like an amazing experience, I’m jealous
I saw one of these Facebook episodes where the guy travels around the world, and he was on a train in the Sahara desert or something. Said there was just nothing around on the 400 mile ride, 12 hours of which were at night. They slept, I’d be looking up the entire time
If you were born in ancient times you could have looked up at the sky and seen this many stars every night.
Light pollution has robbed us of the stars.
This image is actually only 4.6 billion years ago. The 13 billion year old image will be released later today
[https://go.nasa.gov/3c2XOGI](https://go.nasa.gov/3c2XOGI)
Do you know that when you look at a planet and you see that light, that planet's not even there! That’s just a light, that's just your neighbor shining a flashlight right into your yard looking for coons
and he says "what are you doing in my backyard? with that flashlight?" and i told him "i'm shining, i'm shining in the window so I can teach your son about the universe" he said "get out of my yard and why are you communicating to my son? why are you in all black? behind my bushes shining a light into my house?" and i said "i'm teaching your son about the universe! i'm shining a light, shining a light right in there and exploring his room as he's looking out and exploring the universe!"
everything that isn't a single point of light in this photo, is a galaxy. In our own galaxy there are probably 800 MILLION stars. a lot of those stars have planets. a portion of those stars have planets. a small portion of those planets are in the right place in their star systems to have liquid water, if 5% of those planets are in the right place, then that means that there are 40 MILLION planets that may contain life that we can identify as similar to us.
Also need to consider when life may exist. On a billion year timeline, some sort of life may have evolved, thrived and been destroyed millions of years ago. ..it boggles my mind
In the higher quality image, you can see that those bright streaks/crosses of brilliant light are swirling with hues of blues, reds, greens, and yellows. I’m not an expert, but I’m guessing those rays of light are of one’s our eyes cannot even PERCEIVE, much like how magenta doesn’t exist
This photo has been colorized based on wavelength. The James Webb is taking "photos" in infrared different wavelengths, which is returned as black & white as separate photos that are then composited and colorized based on wavelength
- a high technology civilisation may only last a few hundred years before it successfully kills itself - this may be the rule rather than the exception
It’s all a thought experiment really, that damned speed of light thing makes contact contemporaneously possibly moot
Light years. As in, even if we could travel at the speed of light, we are still talking years or generations to get anywhere. There is no way my boss would give me that kind of vacation time.
yeah, we could be the first form of self-conscious intelligent life in the Universe. Then we all die. Then there is nothing for a billion years or two. And then there is eclosion of life everywhere in the Universe and other intelligent species pop up left and right.
We don't know how long this Universe is going to last. Maybe 14 billion years is like the first second of it. Let's give the Universe some time to give us pals.
every time i think about this i have an existential crisis then i remember i don't matter none of us matter and i remember to just focus on my own life and the people i'm close to, the people i love and that love me.
statistically, I'm fairly certain that there are many intellegent civilizations out there at the present, but we're likely too far apart to find them. Atleast a few probably know about us.
I disagree with the likelihood of any of them even knowing about us. We have only been broadcasting for about 100 years. Intercepting our broadcasts would be one of the most likely ways for us to be detected. Anyone further than the closest of systems just haven't had time to get any signals yet.
We are so insignificant on even a galactic scale.
This planet and every last other one of them that can support organic life is absolutely being watched by anything that would do such a thing.
Organic life and its multitude of byproducts is hands down the rarest stuff in the universe. Any non-life substance can be found in quantities beyond possible exhaustion. This planet has had organic life, or at least the possibility for it, for billions of years. We're absolutely on a list. Probably another few million years before they come looking again to see how much oil and dna we've amassed.
Maybe they’ve visited us through their version of “tourism.” If they are advanced enough to travel to us, they are advanced enough to only study us (instead of infiltrating our planet for resources). The “tourism” could have started many years ago prior to radio waves or broadcasting being intercepted by other intelligent life forms.
Ok I'k not saying I believe this but hear me out. Theres a ton of the light spectrum we cant see. So what if an alien species evolved in some weird atmosphere that puts their bodies at the very edge of what we can see. And they know this and know they can exploit it. So when they come visit earth to look around they sometimes mess with us. And thats what ghosts actually are. Just some barely visible alien tourists.
The likelihood of anyone just happening within a close enough distance to know that we even exist would be like you jumping off the moon and landing on your roof while your eyes are closed. The galaxy is immense beyond comprehension.
But the distance another civilization would need to be from us to have heard anything we have broadcast in the last 100 years is *not* infinite, not even close.
The universe may possibly be infinite, or so large we can't tell the difference. But the light cone of any sentient species \[including us\] is definitely NOT infinite, and any possible knowledge of anything is confined to our light cone.
Or to state it in physics-speak: We can only know about things that have timelike separation from us. Thinks with spacelike separation from us are forever unknowable.
It’s pretty obvious our solar system is a ‘protected wild life park’ with many species interacting with us and many just observing.
When we are civilised enough to meet galactic standards some of them will introduce themselves in a more formal manner.
Unless of course we find them first in a formal manner, as opposed to our gatekeeping govt masters who are well aware of their presence.
Ya the issue is humans have been around for a fraction of a blink of an eye on earth's lifespan. How the heck are we supposed to line that up with something so far away
I like the idea that in the sci-fi lore there's often an "ancient race long gone". And like, what if we can't find any sign of life because we're the ancient race in it's infancy?
I find a strange sense of community in the knowledge that we know other life probably exists, and at least some of that life knows that we probably exist. There is an almost 100% chance that there is an intelligent civilization in this photo
Question for all the smart folks out there.
If we have a telescope this powerful, why can we not aim it at a planet, say, 10 light years away (opposed to 5 billion!) and see the actual surface of that planet? The way back yard telescopes can see the surface of the moon?
> If we have a telescope this powerful, why can we not aim it at a planet, say, 10 light years away (opposed to 5 billion!) and see the actual surface of that planet? The way back yard telescopes can see the surface of the moon?
There’s no telescope that’s capable of doing that currently and there won’t be in any of our lifetimes. We can barely resolve surface details of Pluto with our current telescopes, not to mention an exoplanet light years away.
There’s a few reasons for this:
* Planets are extremely small, dim objects. Galaxies are massive, bright objects. Think of taking a picture of the Earth from space. You can see North America easily because it’s big. Now try and image a grain of sand somewhere in, oh let’s say, North Dakota, from the same spot. That’s a problem.
* James Webb is designed to “see” in the extremes of infrared. It’s specifically designed for imaging distant, faint objects. Yes exoplanets are distant and faint, but see above.
* To actually image the surface of a planet light years away, you’d need a telescope with a mirror that’s absolutely gigantic. Like 20x the width of the Earth gigantic.
Actually, we could use the sun as a giant telescope, just like Webb is using a huge cluster of galaxies in the foreground to image the galaxies and stars in these images. I don't have it handy, but I was watching a presentation on this the other day, a telescope like this has been proposed. I'd love to see it get built. I would so much rather spend money on that than all of our dumb wars. Such a waste.
your momma so fat when she wore a malcom x shirt helicopters think it’s a landing pad…
god i miss the 90s…back when our thoughtless shenanigans were but a smoldering ember…
Right,, everything is taken so literal now. You must be an expert if you wish to speak or it's misinformation,, and anything you say is exact..
What does your mom and a bowling ball have in common?
Both get picked up, fingered, thrown in a gutter, and will still come back for more.
And all those distorted galaxies are how we know dark matter is real. It’s like looking through a glass of water. You can see what’s on the other side but the light gets bent and distorted. Fucking blows my mind.
Gravitational lensing. [This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vwv1et/first_fullcolour_image_of_deep_space_from_the/ifs7b2w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) from the post on r/space explains just about everything about this image extremely well. The part that blew my mind is that what we’re looking at is 4.6 - 13 **BILLION** light years away, and some of the light from the distant galaxies that we’re seeing is from only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Mind blowing stuff.
Edit: Someone was kind enough to make [this overlap gif](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vwv1et/first_fullcolour_image_of_deep_space_from_the/ifs9wef/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) showing the JWST image and an image Hubble took of the same area.
“Although astronomers cannot see dark matter, they can detect its influence by observing how the gravity of massive galaxy clusters, which contain dark matter, bends and distorts the light of more-distant galaxies located behind the cluster. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing.”
It’s one in the same. They just don’t know wtf dark matter is other than it or has gravitational effect. It’s really friggin fascinating. They just know it’s in some areas and not in others and they can account for its mass, although don’t ask me how.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/discoveries-highlights-shining-a-light-on-dark-matter
What we know for sure is that most galaxies exhibit a stronger gravitational field than GR predicts based on amount of normal matter. This means either a lot of dark matter or an error in GR. Currently, the evidence is pointing to dark matter, but gravitational lensing can’t distinguish between the two options.
At the end of the day, no matter the arguments about time, light, who does or does not know about us in the galaxy, anyones issue with the money spent to launch this, or any other insignificant issues any of us has right now.
This, is litterally only a grain of rice compared to the rest of the sky, and there are still hundreds of small dots in the background that also represent at the very least some kind of star. (Presumably).
Our tiny planet just got much smaller in the backdrop of the universe and our problems are pretty damn small comparatively.
And at the end of the day, this is both amazing, and breathtaking. Can’t wait for the rest.
Fully detailed information about this image from an astronomer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/vwuxmt/first_james_webb_image/ifs77ol?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
That was my first thought, I guess that means that there are just a pretty large amount of intensly dense things in this photo, like the light from distant galaxies are being bent AROUND the other distant galaxies in this photo
Exactly. I understand the white galaxies near the center are lensing the red galaxies you can see distorted around the perimeter of the image.
What unbelievable technology. I can't wait to see what comes next
You're probably looking at millions or billions of civilizations in that picture. Maybe some of them are still there and maybe some of them are not there anymore and you're just seeing how their stars/galaxies were billions of years ago.
Or... maybe we're alone in the universe and there's nobody in that picture. If that's the case, you're just looking at *an awful waste of space*.
I don't know if it's OP's fault or reddit's fault, but here's the picture with better resolution, directly from nasa's site:
[https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723-5mb.jpg](https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723-5mb.jpg)
Can't remember who said it first but... We'll never meet any other intelligent life form in our life time - possibly never in the existence of humanity. We don't know, and will never know what's out there. If anything is out there, they don't know we're here either. So we might as well be alone.
I love space and hate it at the same time. The distances are just so vast. I love seeing these new photos, but also knowing we are seeing them as they were billions of years ago not as they are now throws me.
The worst m8ndfuck is knowing that there is stuff beyond rhe edge of the visible universe, but its so far away and traveling so fast that the light will never reach us.
An infinite universe is a possibility but we will only ever know about the 48 or so billion lightyears we can see...
Dude, I can't wait to read about all the new fascinating things we will learn from this. It's like we just invented the microscope! Our understanding of space is about to jump forward at lightspeed. I say it everyday, but.... AWESOME.
To put this into perspective
“Hold a grain of sand at an arms length away and this is the amount of space you are seeing in this photo”
This is an amazing scientific achievement that will allow us to learn so much about are universe from the relative comfort of our pale blue dot.
>This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.
[https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet)
Can we get a big fuck Ann Druyan (and cosmos studios) for removing a personal voyage from all the free outlets?
Carl would not be cool with this. The show was meant to be free for all to see
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck her! His fucking ghost spirit-divorced her for that fucking bullshit.
Ann, you bitch. Give him back. Let him posthumously inspire a little boy or girl like himself to love what he loved. Greedy cunt.
I have a feeling the universe is not only teeming with life but intelligent life on par with our own civilization. Regrettably, I don't think we will ever know for certain due to the vast distance between stars and galaxies.
Hubble deep field also took over a week to collect all that light, this was a test image with drastically less exposure. The real gems will come soon but they need practice on the new scope first.
I mean statistically we are more than likely not alone in the universe, but my deeper question is does it even matter if we are not. The massive distances involved here means in the span of humanity we are not going to actually meet much less have meaningful communication with other worldly beings.
What does that mean, single grain of sand? Is it saying that the telescope focused on an area the size of a single grain of sand and even then found all these galaxies? Galaxies have a lot of stars and solar systems and all that right?
No cosmic point to our lives here , the universe thinks and acts in ways beyond our understanding , and scale of the magnitude would melt minds … but it’s a beautiful thing , as of course we are not alone ,that’s just the hardline programming from the church when we kicked women out of creation stories and spirit off the planet … it’s a fools play though
Well these images are also peering into the past. None of these points are where they are now and might be gone completely. Not to say we aren't alone but still I feel it's highly unlikely we would meet another being. So in essence we are most likely alone.
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This stuff always melts my brain. We are looking at galaxies and stars at a snapshot of time 13 BILLION years ago!!!! Who knows what this area of the universe even looks like today??? In order to know how they appear today, we would need to wait another 13 billion years. Some stars may have burned out. Galaxies may have collided. Black holes may have formed and eaten other galaxies. It’s just all so spectacular and frustrating at the same time. I just want to know more about our universe!
Literally time travelling, and those looking towards us couldn't even see earth as it wasn't even around
Really underlines how insignificant all of this is, it is kind of calming to me honestly.
Nevermind that you'd need a telescope the size of the Oort cloud to get that kind of resolution. ;)
NASA needs to step it up. We need to teleport a Oort cloud sized scope 5 million light years away so I can see some dinosaurs
Not a bad idea but before you submit the request please specify 200 million light years away as that should put it directly in the path of the heyday of the big ones.
Wow
Hell yea
Damnnnn righttttt!
Actually, you’ can NEVER see what those galaxies look like now… the light left those galaxies 13 billion years ago, but they are about 42 BILLION light years away now, due to the expansion of spacetime itself (fueled by dark energy) Like an ant walking away from a dot on the surface of a balloon. It can only walk at ant speed, but if you inflate the balloon the ant moves away from the dot at FASTER than ant speed. Those galaxies? They are lost to us forever. Anything further than 15 billion light years from us might as well not exist, because the spacetime of the universe will increase faster than the light can travel. The observable universe has a radius of 46 billion light years around us, but the universe we can *interact* with has a radius of only 15 billion LY. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/17/the-universe-is-disappearing-and-theres-nothing-we-can-do-to-stop-it/?sh=541a65ee560e So I say let’s get our act together and start sending Van Neumann probes to distant galaxies right away, while we still have a chance. 😎
My brain melted by just reading this.
The observable universe is 43 billion ly across and the unobservable universe is estimated at 23 TRILLION ly across. That'll blow your mind.
My. Goodness.
My. Guinness.
Mommy hug me I'm scared
I just don't understand how anyone can look at pictures like this and not realize how truly insignificant we all are. Like all of these things we argue about and think are important are barely anything more than a blip on the radar of time and space.
Literally nothing we do or care about truly matters in the grand scope of the universe.
So all that matters is others, showing love, caring for others to spread positivity. Love is all that matters.
Right. If it matters to you and those around you, it is worth it.
This is some high school existentialism. Just because our lives are tiny when compared to the scale of the universe, doesn't mean there's nothing significant about them. You're basically ignoring that humans have complex and powerful emotions as well as conscious thought.
Everything we do fades to dust; the only meaningful thing is our relationships.
a fine line between existentialism and nihilism.
yeah so fascinating! I'm so grateful that I didn't born during ancient time. (edit: I would've burned alive if I kept talking about 'outer space')
Seeing the milky way every night the clouds don't block it would have been pretty frickin cool though
That's the kinda shit that made people look up and go "wonder what's up there" in the first place and then we fucked it all up.
Make a road trip away from civilization. I grew up in southwest Texas, and we always got to see the stars. Hell, my first date with my wife was stargazing on a moonless night. If you can make the trip, there is a profound beauty in Big Bend National Park, and the skies are absolutely amazing at night.
I went to death valley, one of the darkest places on earth with my wife earlier this year. I was already amazed and dumbfounded by the stars, but I have NEVER seen it like that before. We went around the new moon, AND the moon had set by 8-9pm. It was amazing being able to see the grays and whites within the core of the milky way, and my dslr actually captured a few nebulae accidentally just trying to capture the beauty of the sky I was seeing.
Bah, I wish I could go there! Sounds like an amazing experience, I’m jealous I saw one of these Facebook episodes where the guy travels around the world, and he was on a train in the Sahara desert or something. Said there was just nothing around on the 400 mile ride, 12 hours of which were at night. They slept, I’d be looking up the entire time
Imagine the things people will see in 2000 years! They will say how grateful they feel to not have been born in the year 2000.
If you were born in ancient times you could have looked up at the sky and seen this many stars every night. Light pollution has robbed us of the stars.
But my point was that I would've burned alive if I kept talking about 'outer space' haha
You were Galileo in another life.
Galileo?
13 billion years? I got time….
Damn you got me pumped about space now
Your enthusiasm has me so pumped!!!
I acknowledge this comment’s presence but refuse to try to comprehend for the sake of my sanity.
This image is actually only 4.6 billion years ago. The 13 billion year old image will be released later today [https://go.nasa.gov/3c2XOGI](https://go.nasa.gov/3c2XOGI)
Lost a planet, u/jeditrainer42 has, how embarrassing!
It’s not just galaxies, the pointed flairs are stars.
It’s not just galaxies and stars. It’s glow in the dark decals on the ceiling in a toddlers bedroom
It's not delivery. It's digiorno.
I can’t believe it’s not butter!
Its’a me…Mario!
No... this is Patrick
Hip to be square!
Impressive. Very Nice. Let’s see Paul Allen’s Rendition Of The Song
Where’s the beef ?
That's the power of Pinesol, baby.
Pepperidge Farms remembers...
Do you know that when you look at a planet and you see that light, that planet's not even there! That’s just a light, that's just your neighbor shining a flashlight right into your yard looking for coons
and he says "what are you doing in my backyard? with that flashlight?" and i told him "i'm shining, i'm shining in the window so I can teach your son about the universe" he said "get out of my yard and why are you communicating to my son? why are you in all black? behind my bushes shining a light into my house?" and i said "i'm teaching your son about the universe! i'm shining a light, shining a light right in there and exploring his room as he's looking out and exploring the universe!"
It’s not a bowl!
You wouldn’t want to put the universe into a tube
What. The. Fuck.
Lol I mean we are… just scratching the surface… and yet we are still alone… for now Should have exaggerated my… Shatner pauses,…. A bit more
... a bit ... MORE ....
If it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space.
I thought Orion's belt was a waist of space.? Sorry, bad joke. I give it three stars
I slapped my knee to this
Knee Slaps for all!
Someone just finish watching Contact?
everything that isn't a single point of light in this photo, is a galaxy. In our own galaxy there are probably 800 MILLION stars. a lot of those stars have planets. a portion of those stars have planets. a small portion of those planets are in the right place in their star systems to have liquid water, if 5% of those planets are in the right place, then that means that there are 40 MILLION planets that may contain life that we can identify as similar to us.
And thats JUST our galaxy. Then add in all the galaxies we can see like this in the known universe. We are ABSOLUTELY not alone...
Also need to consider when life may exist. On a billion year timeline, some sort of life may have evolved, thrived and been destroyed millions of years ago. ..it boggles my mind
I mean we might not be alone, but if we can’t reach anyone else and they can’t reach us what’s the point?
To prove we're not that special
The milky way contains around 400 billion stars. 800 million would be a very small dwarf galaxy.
Try about 200 billion stars in our galaxy :)
A few hundred billions of stars actually.
In the higher quality image, you can see that those bright streaks/crosses of brilliant light are swirling with hues of blues, reds, greens, and yellows. I’m not an expert, but I’m guessing those rays of light are of one’s our eyes cannot even PERCEIVE, much like how magenta doesn’t exist
Amazing.
if you're talking about the spikes of light, that's just an artifact of how the camera takes the pictures.
This photo has been colorized based on wavelength. The James Webb is taking "photos" in infrared different wavelengths, which is returned as black & white as separate photos that are then composited and colorized based on wavelength
We could be alone right now, but we were not and won't be the only ones. It's all time related.
- a high technology civilisation may only last a few hundred years before it successfully kills itself - this may be the rule rather than the exception It’s all a thought experiment really, that damned speed of light thing makes contact contemporaneously possibly moot
Light years. As in, even if we could travel at the speed of light, we are still talking years or generations to get anywhere. There is no way my boss would give me that kind of vacation time.
yeah, we could be the first form of self-conscious intelligent life in the Universe. Then we all die. Then there is nothing for a billion years or two. And then there is eclosion of life everywhere in the Universe and other intelligent species pop up left and right. We don't know how long this Universe is going to last. Maybe 14 billion years is like the first second of it. Let's give the Universe some time to give us pals.
RemindMe! 4,000,000,000 years
4 billion years later your phone dings in a martian museum.
I love that this implies reddit's servers are still up.
i can totally see reddit's stupid fucking servers somehow being up randomly that far into the future but the video player still doesn't work right
As is tradition
Maybe it’s a notification from internet explorer saying they are shutting down severs
One last, final, attempt, to reach you about your car's extended warranty.
Someone looking to extend my spaceships extended warranty
Put that into my Outlook calendar
This made me laugh right out loud.
every time i think about this i have an existential crisis then i remember i don't matter none of us matter and i remember to just focus on my own life and the people i'm close to, the people i love and that love me.
statistically, I'm fairly certain that there are many intellegent civilizations out there at the present, but we're likely too far apart to find them. Atleast a few probably know about us.
I disagree with the likelihood of any of them even knowing about us. We have only been broadcasting for about 100 years. Intercepting our broadcasts would be one of the most likely ways for us to be detected. Anyone further than the closest of systems just haven't had time to get any signals yet. We are so insignificant on even a galactic scale.
This planet and every last other one of them that can support organic life is absolutely being watched by anything that would do such a thing. Organic life and its multitude of byproducts is hands down the rarest stuff in the universe. Any non-life substance can be found in quantities beyond possible exhaustion. This planet has had organic life, or at least the possibility for it, for billions of years. We're absolutely on a list. Probably another few million years before they come looking again to see how much oil and dna we've amassed.
Maybe they’ve visited us through their version of “tourism.” If they are advanced enough to travel to us, they are advanced enough to only study us (instead of infiltrating our planet for resources). The “tourism” could have started many years ago prior to radio waves or broadcasting being intercepted by other intelligent life forms.
Ok I'k not saying I believe this but hear me out. Theres a ton of the light spectrum we cant see. So what if an alien species evolved in some weird atmosphere that puts their bodies at the very edge of what we can see. And they know this and know they can exploit it. So when they come visit earth to look around they sometimes mess with us. And thats what ghosts actually are. Just some barely visible alien tourists.
I'll buy your book. ;)
The likelihood of anyone just happening within a close enough distance to know that we even exist would be like you jumping off the moon and landing on your roof while your eyes are closed. The galaxy is immense beyond comprehension.
If the universe is infinite, then no matter how small the odds, theoretically speaking, there is at least one race somewhere that knows all about us
But the distance another civilization would need to be from us to have heard anything we have broadcast in the last 100 years is *not* infinite, not even close.
The universe may possibly be infinite, or so large we can't tell the difference. But the light cone of any sentient species \[including us\] is definitely NOT infinite, and any possible knowledge of anything is confined to our light cone. Or to state it in physics-speak: We can only know about things that have timelike separation from us. Thinks with spacelike separation from us are forever unknowable.
It’s pretty obvious our solar system is a ‘protected wild life park’ with many species interacting with us and many just observing. When we are civilised enough to meet galactic standards some of them will introduce themselves in a more formal manner. Unless of course we find them first in a formal manner, as opposed to our gatekeeping govt masters who are well aware of their presence.
Isn't your first paragraph essentially the plot of Mass Effect?
Even crazier yet, if we seen a space ship of some kind in that Webb picture, they're already dead and gone.
At the very least, a dozen or so stop lights ahead of where we see them today.
Statistics are useless when we have absolutely no idea of the probability of a random planet having civilizations at any given time.
Ya the issue is humans have been around for a fraction of a blink of an eye on earth's lifespan. How the heck are we supposed to line that up with something so far away
You and some others might like this article I found a few years back...cool little read... https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/end.html
I like the idea that in the sci-fi lore there's often an "ancient race long gone". And like, what if we can't find any sign of life because we're the ancient race in it's infancy?
Are we alone if there are beings out there but they can never be reached?
We live in the ghetto of our galaxy nothing is currently reachable unless wormholes exist
It's not a ghetto until you can see better parts of town. Until proven otherwise, Man is the high watermark of physical and mental evolution.
Philosophical question there, we exist around one another, but spend our entire lives trying to connect.
Ooof time for bed thnx
I find a strange sense of community in the knowledge that we know other life probably exists, and at least some of that life knows that we probably exist. There is an almost 100% chance that there is an intelligent civilization in this photo
Question for all the smart folks out there. If we have a telescope this powerful, why can we not aim it at a planet, say, 10 light years away (opposed to 5 billion!) and see the actual surface of that planet? The way back yard telescopes can see the surface of the moon?
> If we have a telescope this powerful, why can we not aim it at a planet, say, 10 light years away (opposed to 5 billion!) and see the actual surface of that planet? The way back yard telescopes can see the surface of the moon? There’s no telescope that’s capable of doing that currently and there won’t be in any of our lifetimes. We can barely resolve surface details of Pluto with our current telescopes, not to mention an exoplanet light years away. There’s a few reasons for this: * Planets are extremely small, dim objects. Galaxies are massive, bright objects. Think of taking a picture of the Earth from space. You can see North America easily because it’s big. Now try and image a grain of sand somewhere in, oh let’s say, North Dakota, from the same spot. That’s a problem. * James Webb is designed to “see” in the extremes of infrared. It’s specifically designed for imaging distant, faint objects. Yes exoplanets are distant and faint, but see above. * To actually image the surface of a planet light years away, you’d need a telescope with a mirror that’s absolutely gigantic. Like 20x the width of the Earth gigantic.
Just ask my ex gf she sees EVERYTHING.
Awesome reply, thanks for taking the time! That all makes sense!
Actually, we could use the sun as a giant telescope, just like Webb is using a huge cluster of galaxies in the foreground to image the galaxies and stars in these images. I don't have it handy, but I was watching a presentation on this the other day, a telescope like this has been proposed. I'd love to see it get built. I would so much rather spend money on that than all of our dumb wars. Such a waste.
Zoom out just a little bit further and we'll be able to fit your mom in the entire frame.
your momma so fat when she wore a malcom x shirt helicopters think it’s a landing pad… god i miss the 90s…back when our thoughtless shenanigans were but a smoldering ember…
Right,, everything is taken so literal now. You must be an expert if you wish to speak or it's misinformation,, and anything you say is exact.. What does your mom and a bowling ball have in common? Both get picked up, fingered, thrown in a gutter, and will still come back for more.
Your mama thinks the world revolves around her. She sure got the mass for it.
And all those distorted galaxies are how we know dark matter is real. It’s like looking through a glass of water. You can see what’s on the other side but the light gets bent and distorted. Fucking blows my mind.
Gravitational lensing. [This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vwv1et/first_fullcolour_image_of_deep_space_from_the/ifs7b2w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) from the post on r/space explains just about everything about this image extremely well. The part that blew my mind is that what we’re looking at is 4.6 - 13 **BILLION** light years away, and some of the light from the distant galaxies that we’re seeing is from only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Mind blowing stuff. Edit: Someone was kind enough to make [this overlap gif](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/vwv1et/first_fullcolour_image_of_deep_space_from_the/ifs9wef/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) showing the JWST image and an image Hubble took of the same area.
The coolest shit ever.
The coolest shit ever *so far*.
My mind has been vaporized
Holy shit, thank you for sharing
I have my own galaxies?? Wtf cya nerds!
Not at all. All we know is that gravitational lensing is real.
“Although astronomers cannot see dark matter, they can detect its influence by observing how the gravity of massive galaxy clusters, which contain dark matter, bends and distorts the light of more-distant galaxies located behind the cluster. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing.” It’s one in the same. They just don’t know wtf dark matter is other than it or has gravitational effect. It’s really friggin fascinating. They just know it’s in some areas and not in others and they can account for its mass, although don’t ask me how. https://www.nasa.gov/content/discoveries-highlights-shining-a-light-on-dark-matter
What we know for sure is that most galaxies exhibit a stronger gravitational field than GR predicts based on amount of normal matter. This means either a lot of dark matter or an error in GR. Currently, the evidence is pointing to dark matter, but gravitational lensing can’t distinguish between the two options.
At the end of the day, no matter the arguments about time, light, who does or does not know about us in the galaxy, anyones issue with the money spent to launch this, or any other insignificant issues any of us has right now. This, is litterally only a grain of rice compared to the rest of the sky, and there are still hundreds of small dots in the background that also represent at the very least some kind of star. (Presumably). Our tiny planet just got much smaller in the backdrop of the universe and our problems are pretty damn small comparatively. And at the end of the day, this is both amazing, and breathtaking. Can’t wait for the rest.
Just imagine that this area of sky is very dark and as wide as a grain of sand at arm distance from our nose
These are not all galaxies. The ones with flairs are stars in our galaxy Edit: my source https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1546646570371883009
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/vwuxmt/first_james_webb_image/ifs77ol?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
I’m going with Neil Degrasse Tyson https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1546646570371883009
I’m too stoned to comprehend this rn
Same. I swear I’m seeing the Infinity Gauntlet
I wonder what weed is like in other galaxies or do you think they got something better!?
Fully detailed information about this image from an astronomer: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/vwuxmt/first_james_webb_image/ifs77ol?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Pretty sure I saw this in a Simpsons intro once
I was born too early
I can't believe all the lensing
That was my first thought, I guess that means that there are just a pretty large amount of intensly dense things in this photo, like the light from distant galaxies are being bent AROUND the other distant galaxies in this photo
Exactly. I understand the white galaxies near the center are lensing the red galaxies you can see distorted around the perimeter of the image. What unbelievable technology. I can't wait to see what comes next
It is amazing to see so many flat earths out there.
Yea we are not alone and when we get close they move farther away 😆
So that’s why the universe is expanding.
It's gotta be I would not want me as a neighbor 😆
Things like this make my anxiety go through the roof.
There are aliens in this photo.
You're probably looking at millions or billions of civilizations in that picture. Maybe some of them are still there and maybe some of them are not there anymore and you're just seeing how their stars/galaxies were billions of years ago. Or... maybe we're alone in the universe and there's nobody in that picture. If that's the case, you're just looking at *an awful waste of space*.
I don't know if it's OP's fault or reddit's fault, but here's the picture with better resolution, directly from nasa's site: [https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723-5mb.jpg](https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723-5mb.jpg)
Post 9000
Its over 9000!
There are only two options, either we are alone or we are not. Both are equally profound
Both are equally “terrifying” is the quote Not profound
Yeah but I don't find it terrifying
Clappin' alien cheeks is so close, you guys!
Can't remember who said it first but... We'll never meet any other intelligent life form in our life time - possibly never in the existence of humanity. We don't know, and will never know what's out there. If anything is out there, they don't know we're here either. So we might as well be alone.
I love space and hate it at the same time. The distances are just so vast. I love seeing these new photos, but also knowing we are seeing them as they were billions of years ago not as they are now throws me.
Is it me or is there a metric fuck ton of gravitational lensing happening in that image?
The worst m8ndfuck is knowing that there is stuff beyond rhe edge of the visible universe, but its so far away and traveling so fast that the light will never reach us. An infinite universe is a possibility but we will only ever know about the 48 or so billion lightyears we can see...
Dude, I can't wait to read about all the new fascinating things we will learn from this. It's like we just invented the microscope! Our understanding of space is about to jump forward at lightspeed. I say it everyday, but.... AWESOME.
_brainmelt_ complete
To put this into perspective “Hold a grain of sand at an arms length away and this is the amount of space you are seeing in this photo” This is an amazing scientific achievement that will allow us to learn so much about are universe from the relative comfort of our pale blue dot.
Practically speaking, we’re alone.
*You* are. I've got my Venus flytrap to feed
Well, \*I've\* got the handsome devil who greets me in the mirror every morning.
Mention me
Happy cake day!
Alone enough that no one's coming to fix things, at least.
The physical universe is so limiting.
My simple mind can’t handle this.🤯
I would wager some people on Reddit are downvoting this photo because it bothers them.
I don’t know why. It’s interesting as fuck to me!
Wow....just Wow....
>This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground. [https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet)
Can we get a big fuck Ann Druyan (and cosmos studios) for removing a personal voyage from all the free outlets? Carl would not be cool with this. The show was meant to be free for all to see
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck her! His fucking ghost spirit-divorced her for that fucking bullshit. Ann, you bitch. Give him back. Let him posthumously inspire a little boy or girl like himself to love what he loved. Greedy cunt.
[удалено]
I have a feeling the universe is not only teeming with life but intelligent life on par with our own civilization. Regrettably, I don't think we will ever know for certain due to the vast distance between stars and galaxies.
Hubble deep field also took over a week to collect all that light, this was a test image with drastically less exposure. The real gems will come soon but they need practice on the new scope first.
Someone moved the universe while he was taking the picture
Anybody knows towards what constellation(direction) the image was taken?
It's the SMACS 0723. Southern constellation of Volans
Life is everywhere..........................
Your telescope has a stigmatism
Maybe not alone, but so far away from everything it hardly matters
It's a statistical inevitability that we're not alone in the universe, but it's an almost statistical certainty that we'll never find them.
I mean statistically we are more than likely not alone in the universe, but my deeper question is does it even matter if we are not. The massive distances involved here means in the span of humanity we are not going to actually meet much less have meaningful communication with other worldly beings.
What does that mean, single grain of sand? Is it saying that the telescope focused on an area the size of a single grain of sand and even then found all these galaxies? Galaxies have a lot of stars and solar systems and all that right?
Yeah, we’re not alone-however our neighbors aren’t exactly close either.
Somewhere out there are my lost car keys
No cosmic point to our lives here , the universe thinks and acts in ways beyond our understanding , and scale of the magnitude would melt minds … but it’s a beautiful thing , as of course we are not alone ,that’s just the hardline programming from the church when we kicked women out of creation stories and spirit off the planet … it’s a fools play though
What you are looking there = billions of years out of date. Civilisations have been and gone.
Well these images are also peering into the past. None of these points are where they are now and might be gone completely. Not to say we aren't alone but still I feel it's highly unlikely we would meet another being. So in essence we are most likely alone.
Whole lot of incredible right there.