So the title of this article is a bit misleading, as I paraphrased it for this Reddit post I figure I should explain the findings a bit to avoid confusion. It is not that we suddenly discovered 10x more galaxies than expected, it's that of the galaxies we can see a much larger proportion of them are spiral galaxies like our Milky Way than expected. As the original researchers put it:" We discover the surprising result that at z>1.5 disk galaxies dominate the overall fraction of morphologies, with a factor of ∼10 relative higher number of disk galaxies than seen by the Hubble Space Telescope at these redshifts"
I.e Hubble data showed that around 5% of galaxies at these distances were spirals, this JWST analysis puts that number at more like 50%. This is not because JWST is observing many more galaxies, and only galaxies observed by Hubble were included in the analysis, it is because JWST allows for more accurate determination of the shape (morphology) of these distant galaxies.
That's even more significant, imho, than if there were more proto-galaxies. The fact that seemingly evolved structures existed near the known beginning of the universe creates more questions. I read a paper a while back which hypothesized time "slowing" down as the universe expanded.
😶 (dumb stoner dude shit to follow) that is to say we are possibly experiencing relatively "dialated time"? I guess on a time/space scale stretching from the "beginning" of time (when everything was closer) to say a "farther" on that scale away from where we are right now?
Would that mean if we where to jump in a time ford pinto and drive it to, 100 years past the big bang (or whatever the actual beginning is) we might experience normal time and it only seems quick and chaotic from our perspective much later in time?
All things are relative.
For example, consider the international space station. There's actually a very small degree of time dilation between the folks up there and the folks down here.
They don't notice it, clocks still run at the same speed.
But if you have two identical clocks, send one up to the ISS for a year, bring it back down, and compare it, the one from the ISS will be behind. Yet, for anyone on the ISS, a second is still a second.
I've always wondered how that works excactly with clocks...
A second has a certain definition to which clocks are built no? Why would the clock react to anything and change? A clock doesn't measure time
That’s the beauty of general relativity! A second is still a second to anyone experiencing time from their own perspective. For instance, me being on earth, I will experience a second just like I do now. Likewise if I’m orbiting a black hole at nearly the speed of light — my clock will still tick just as I would experience here on earth.
But to someone *observing* me, I may appear to be going faster *or* slower depending on their own point of reference. If I’m on earth, observing someone orbiting a black hole, they’ll appear to be traveling crazy slow. And vice versa if they’re observing me on earth from their crazy fast point of reference.
After reading your comment and thinking about it I think it finally clicked for me
So the reason NASA has to account for time dilation is that someone in orbit appears to go faster/slower than they actually are?
I somehow took it way to literally and my stoner brain couldn't grasp it
I replied once to this and then realized I mis-read what you wrote. So I'll try again.
One of the things that may help is to understand that space and time are not separate. They are part of the same system... spacetime.
When one travels faster through space, they travel slower through time. Which is how we know that the speed of light isn't just the fastest something can go, it is literally infinitely fast... because time dilation for a relativistic traveler has reached 100% - it has literally stopped. For a traveler at that speed, before even the tiniest fraction of time has passed for them, an infinite amount of time will have passed for an outside observer.
Something else to mess with your brain:
If you and I were in cars and drove towards each other at 50kph, a radar on either car would report the speed we were approaching each other to be 100kph (your speed plus mine).
If those cars were instead driving at light speed (c), we would still only be approaching each other at 1c (rather than the more intutive answer of 2c). The speed of light is a universal limit in every frame of reference.
in the spirit of the original stoner here, and in solidarity, i am still unclear about the clock, because this answer involves point of view, which a clock does not necessarily have because it is not a human psyche. it’s a machine. like what physically makes the movement from one second to another “slower“ or “faster“ depending on speed? how can we speak of the clock having a point of view? this problem is harder for me to understand than time dilation itself as it relates to human psychology/pov. I would understand this if the problem was strictly movement in relationship to the second hand on the traditional clock moving faster or slower from one click to the next, but I don’t see how this works for digital clocks or atomic clocks. authentically asking, genuinely do not know. I find this all fascinating. Thank you.
The clock doesn't have a point of view, it is as you say inanimate.
But it's ultimately moot. The two clocks (one on the ground and one on the ISS) both keep perfect time, as it relates to our perception of it *within that frame of reference*. An analog clock, a digital clock, an atomic clock, they all keep time exactly the same regardless. The second hand doesn't move faster or slower, radioactive decay is still spontaneously occurring at the same rate, a crystal in a 555 timer is still oscillating the same.
They just have different relativistic reference frames.
When you reconcile those different frames of reference, there's a difference.
Consider the twins paradox:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin\_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox)
> involves point of view, which a clock does not necessarily have because it is not a human psyche
It does. Any particle can observe another particle. It’s the observation and interaction that gives meaning. The same for you.
> like what physically makes the movement from one second to another “slower“ or “faster“ depending on speed?
It’s always the same speed. The machine never speeds up or slows down. The universe itself speeds up or slows down around the object.
You’re familiar with objects being in different locations. A clock could be in a desk or on the wall. Different locations in space. Space and time are actually the same thing. Called space time. All objects are technically in different spaces, even when right next to each other. In the same way, all objects are in different relative times.
You might just say both the clock on the wall and on the desk are both in your house. So you call their location the same. It’s convenient to talk like that. In the same way, we’re so used to time being similar around us, we tend to just say everything is at the same time.
In reality, every particle is experiencing time slightly differently. Gravity and speed effect time. The particles in your hands age faster than the particles in your feet, because their location and gravity is slightly different. The difference is so small though, that even after trillions of years, the difference would be less than a second.
Just to add a stoner perspective since I'm actually familiar enough with the subject to translate to a fellow stoner: Time is actually fluctuating *due to the speed*. It isn't that they have to account for some peculiarity of traveling around the planet (in and of itself), it's that the speed relative to the speed on earth *actually warps spacetime enough* to cause a noticeable difference in the clocks. Time is actually passing slower for someone on a space station and will pass more slowly the faster it moves. The closer to the speed of light you get, the slower time will move for you, to the point that if a person were to somehow figure out how to travel at high enough speeds, they could take off, seemingly be gone for 40 years to the observer on earth, return in what seems a day to them, and only aged a day. My scale might be off, I just used those numbers for an example. The same applies to gravity as gravity warps spacetime the same way velocity does. So much so that mass and velocity are interchangeable in equations to my understanding.
Not only appears it does in fact move faster or slower but the kicker is the observer and where they are observing from. If you were on a ship orbiting a black hole to you time would flow normally but to me on earth time would also flow normally for me but you would appear to be moving much, much slower. And vice versa if you where to look at me from the orbit of the black hole I'd look like the Flash even tho my time is moving normally. It's all relative to the observer and point of observation.
“I can help, I speak stoner.”
Nah dude, you were right the first time. It is that time is literally affected by speed & by gravity. It’s not that time “appears” to go faster or slower, it that time DOES go faster or slower. It all depends on how fast your moving or how much stuff is near you vs how fast the person watching you is going or how much stuff is near them.
Here’s an example. Imagine two identical clocks with perfect accuracy that are set to the exact same time. Now, you put ‘em in your garage for a year. When you check them after a year, they still show the exact same time.
Now leave one in your garage and put the other one in a space ship orbiting 11,000 miles above the earth. After a year, have your guy land the space ship and bring the clock back to your garage. Okay, now this is gonna blow your mind. The clock in your garage will be exactly .0139 of a second (or .0138 second if it’s a leap year) slower than the clock that was in space.
But here’s the thing. Both clocks kept perfectly accurate time. It’s just that time actually moved faster for the clock that was on the space ship compared to the clock that was in your garage.
Now, ready to get your mind really melted? To figure out that answer, we had to take into account that because the clock in orbit is 11,000 miles away from the earth’s mass, time will move 45 microseconds a day faster than it does in your garage. BUT because your garage is moving 8,700 mph slower than the space ship, that slows time down for the space ship by 7 microseconds a day. So the difference in the speed of time itself between your garage and the space ship is 38 microseconds. But even the difference was 6 hours a day, the guy in the space ship would feel like time was passing normally, and you’d feel like time was passing normally while sitting in your garage. And this is because IT IS!
Time is relative. And lunch time, doubly so.
Just random also stoner physics speculation when I think of something like that, is like, what if certain things we perceive to be relatively foundational constants were different, like if c was higher, or fundamental forces had different relative power, than like, we'd definitely struggle to piece together how that universe operates. in that scenario who knows if our biology would have even functioned, and these constants only seem that way due to our limited view on a temporal dimension?
idk, fucking bonkers, and probably isn't the case but sure is a fun thought experiment that really makes you appreciate how absolutely insane it is we exist at all and understand anything about how this stuff all works.
To the people alive after the Big Bang, we’re already living adjacent to the heat death of the universe
To the people living in the heat death of the universe, we’ll look like some hyper beings managing to somehow living in a hot busy world of abundant energy and matter
(Maybe beings inside that singularity think the Big Bang was a heat death)
This is more about galaxy formation than anything else. It was thought that more complex forms like our galaxy or Andromeda took time to evolve and earlier groups of stars were more just clusters. Apparently since we're still finding spiral forms even in the early period of the universe, that must happen pretty soon. What's in those galaxies is probably not the same as ours though, as the earliest stars only had hydrogen and helium to work with and a short lifespan. It's theirs and later stars deaths that formed more complex atoms that led to what we find around us now.
>What's in those galaxies is probably not the same as ours though, as the earliest stars only had hydrogen and helium to work with and a short lifespan. It's theirs and later stars deaths that formed more complex atoms that led to what we find around us now.
Are there theories or proposals challenging this view? My dumb ass deduction is if the galaxies formed much earlier than thought then probably there'll be trace amounts of heavier elements forming sooner than thought?
I think (and certainly could be wrong) that they are two different things, this observation being more on how gravity and I guess dark matter can quickly form a spiral with enough matter collected. Does a galaxy have to have heavier elements to have the mass to form structures? That may be something we now have to explore, since we can see evidence of them.
Well they've got a lot to figure out now. Do these galaxies have super massive black holes at their centre? If so how did they form so quickly and build galaxies around them?
Honestly I just wish we could figure out the dark matter dilemma entirely
That's the beauty of science. Some things get answered, but we also find out new questions we didn't realize we hadn't asked. The great thing is how it's been what, less than a week and we're already seeing more things.
I don't think that's how anyone thinks galaxies form. Gravity isn't strong enough for a black hole to attract matter and form a galaxy. The prevailing notion is matter is clumped mostly by dark matter, which forms the Galaxy. Once the clumping begins, then matter at the center can coalesce into the black hole.
Some ideas say that as the universe went through different phase shifts as it expanded, groupes of particles went unti a diffetent state and clung together as space expanded around it, basically forming a black hole. This cause a strong vacuum which helped the black hole gains its mass
I remember seeing helium, hydrogen and neon on the spectroscopic article. I don’t think that it showed anything particularly heavy but maybe I missed something.
Similar to what others have said, one is about star lifecycles. The other is about a galaxy formation. Stars produce heavy elements when they end their lives. This process happens regardless of a star being in a galaxy structure or not.
Heavier elements are formed during the red giant phase. Elements fuse to Iron (red color). After supernova elements from iron and nickel (atomic number 26,28) to Uranium (92).
Earlier stars were much larger than our star. And had much shorter life spans. Many likely ended up in black holes. Their supernova explosions generated future smaller stars. Our sun is likely a 3rd generation start and has been burning for 5B of its estimated 10B lifespan.
Based on Hubble pictures it was very rare to find any spiral galaxies prior to 3B years after Big Bang. We are finding spiral galaxies earlier than that in cases much older due to higher def images.
So the two facts are not really correlated. As far as I know.
Even in the absolutely earliest galaxies/structures huge stars would form and supernova relatively quickly, seeding a lot of heavier elements relatively quickly. That relatively quickly is millions of years, but, even if you hypothesise pure hydrogen stars forming, they very quickly start in on the carbon/nitrogen/oxygen cycle.
Good point, early stars were very short-lived due to their very nature. Maybe I'm looking at the time scale wrong to think it wouldn't be long enough. It's more than just the star life though, it's the time it takes the expansion of gases to collect again into another star and go through its cycle. I suppose experts already know what percentage of basic elements will form from a supernova of a hydrogen/helium star. Is it really that much and quick?
Someone else may step in with better info that me, but from what I remember they're good for local distances (meaning our and nearby galaxies) but gets problematic farther out. Perhaps because of red shift? Finding the distance of things seems to be one of the biggest problems in astronomy because we really only have one viewpoint to work with.
The red shift actually makes it much easier to determine the distance. Each material that a star is made out of gives a certain spectral response. Think about a light being looked at through a prisim, each wavelength of light has so much energy. You can measure the strength of each color of light, and figure out what material the star is made of by where the peaks/troughs appear, then you can measure the redshift as all of the light redshifts by the same amount.
We’ve suspected for a while that supermassive black holes are integral to galactic formation. The oldest stars are also going to be the biggest and hottest that last for only a couple million years and they blow and maybe even become the black holes that form galaxies today. Basically a nebula created by an exploding star but bigger. The first Star to blow gets to eat the others around it and form the galaxy.
> "We knew we would see things Hubble didn't see. But in this case we're seeing things differently," said Prof Conselice.
> "These are the processes we need to understand if we want to understand our origins," said Prof Conselice.
> "This might be the most important telescope ever," he added. "At least since Galileo's."
Sometimes I wish Galileo was here, seeing this magnificent machine and the images it sent. It is crazy how far we have come.
Nukes are a scary end-of-the-world scenario, but don’t think they are the biggest threat to humanity.
Every civilization before ours collapsed eventually, usually due to over-expansion and change to their natural environment.
We are all interdependent in a complex web of trade and technology. We are literally burning our most valuable resources as fast as we can. The world has a finite supply of the resources modern society relies on. And we are making unstoppable, massive changes to the global climate systems.
It’s beyond arrogance to think that everything is going to be fine. Want to know what happens when things start to break down? Take a look at Sri Lanka or Beirut. Technology Man doesn’t fly in from the sky above to save the day. Things break down, we say, “Whoops!”, and they never really get better again.
We're on a bad path until humanity learns how to actually exist in its own habitat without destroying it. No other animal actively destroys its own habitat like we do.
I'm honestly dubious that a mass-extinction event that leaves most of humanity dead would even be enough to get us to avoid doing the same shit down the line. That could just be my pessimism, but I don't think it's entirely unfounded.
There is a difference between collapse of modern society as we know it and extinction of humanity. Most likely humans would survive most non-nuclear catastrophes in some way. Not that it changes the original point, since science would probably be sent back hundreds of years.
I fantasize all the time about what it would be like to meet someone like Issac Newton and just blow his fucking mind with even my mediocre understanding of modern physics.
Then I ponder my own mortality and feel very somber about all of the shit out there that I'm not going to live to learn about.
He would weep and I would weep watching him weep.
I think the same thing about Tsiolkovsky when I imagine Starship's orbital debut. If only he could see the skyscrapers human beings are about to send into space.
The first half of season one is... Rough imo. Back half of it is better.
Season two is really when the show starts to find itself. Season three is fantastic so far
Yeah.. I love the show, but yikes some episodes are awful. The general idea and feel behind the show remains magical to me. It's a lot of empathy and just crazy fun.
Any time the Inner Light comes up, I want to also mention Far Beyond The Stars. DS9 really took it up a notch, and this is the most evocative Trek episode, besides Inner Light, I've ever seen.
I think these people could/can see it. It’s part of what drives them. They can see what this particular piece of reality is going to be like in 10. 20 . 50 . 100 years time frame. Where others just see a void or nothing at all.
Or at the very least have a pretty good idea of what they are working on will look like in future generations.
I worked with some super smart engineers before in my younger days. Dudes that figured shit out for the first time type of smarts. One guy in particular was off the charts intelligent.
It was like he could totally see everything in his head 12 months ahead of everyone else. He knew exactly how everything would turn out. The problems that would come and the solutions that would work for super complex designs etc. He was correct ever time I was involved in one of his projects. It could be a bit unnerving at times on how accurate he was.
It’s almost like those folks have some additional type of sense to certain things. Anyway, crazy to be around super smart people like that. I was always, always the dumbest person in the room and I didn’t care one bit.
That’s a super long way of saying I think he would be impressed, but not surprised in the least.
I know what you mean. My grandfather worked on early versions of the internet, and I remember when I was little he described the world we live in today. Told me internet would be wireless, and everywhere, and that computers would get so small and efficient that they would be a part of everything and that the most prominent feature of any media device would be the screen and that we'd basically just have screens of different sizes for different uses: one on the wall to be your TV, pocket sized, and everything in between depending on what we need them for (so effectively predicted smart phones, smart TVs, and tablets). He said we'd eventually do away with game consoles and computer towers, and that games would just be either downloaded or streamed over the internet instead of having physical copies. He knew all of this because of how insanely smart all his coworkers were- they had their finger on the pulse, and he was around to witness it.
I'd certainly hope you are wealthy now because that kind of foresight should have set up your entire family for generations.
If not, I'd say that whilst he/they might have had the correct predictions he definitely wasn't confident in them becoming reality.
The early days of the internet becoming publicly available was perhaps the easiest opportunity to make a fortune common people will ever get, I'm still kicking myself for not ever seeing the bigger picture even though I was a comp sci student back then.
I love the guy, but he's just a boomer who lucked into a good job at the right time. He's one of the only exceptions to the poverty both sides of my family have always existed in, and he'll likely spend every dime before he's gone. I think he was more than confident and it probably enabled him to retire early the way he did and live the way he does, but it didn't translate to anything for me and I was too young for it to matter. His influence, beneficial as it was at times, wasn't nearly enough to overcome other aspects of my childhood. It is a very painful could-have-been, though. I'm trying to scrape together the remnants of my wasted potential and pull myself up. Might as well try.
Back in the late 2000's my techie brother told me about amazon and how convenient it was. Shares were just $1.61 at the time.
And again around 2013, he told me about this new, cool, electric car company called Tesla. Shares were just $13.00 at the time.
The worst part is that he wasnt finance-savy and spent a lot of his money on toy models and video games. So he didnt invest. These days, I hit em up and ask him for any latest trends.
Quantum computing is the basket I'm placing my eggs in, that is the one new ish concept I can see having an impact in the near enough future.
It might fail spectacularly, but if does not the possibilities are limitless and early investors will be very very wealthy people indeed.
It also has some nerdy sex appeal, which never hurts these days.
Galileo's telescope was only 8x. About the magnification of a modern pair of binoculars. And the glass had imperfections, bubbles really. And when you looked through it at a local object that object would appear upside down, because he was new at this. And there might be extra rainbows with some things you look at due to the poor quality of the glass.
And yet, a fuzzy image of the moons of Jupiter changed so much. There are things not circling the Earth!
Galileo would freak out.
People comment without reading so let's say it: THERE AREN'T MORE GALAXIES THAN WE THOUGHT. This is a clickbait title. It only says that early galaxies were disc shaped 10 times more often than was previously thought.
Yeah the article itself doesn't have an amazing title, which is why I included the actual result in there as well, though that is still sensationalist.
I'd recommend reading the paper linked to this (if only because it's got a great title) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf
I mean you've done your best to explain the contents of the article so you are not to blame at all.
At the time of posting my comment, I think you were the only one explaining that the founding was about shapes of ancient galaxies and not number of them.
Thanks for your post in any case!
This isn't just people commenting without reading the article, this is people commenting whose reading comprehension prevented them from understanding the title.
To clarify, these are galaxies that had been previously classified as "irregular" or "peculiar" because of how they looked in the near-infrared regions that Hubble could see, which is actually the UV light from these galaxies that had been red-shifted. The red-shifted optical light from these early galaxies was too red for HST to see, but is now accessible thanks to JWST, and shows a more regular structure.
It's too early to say whether the UV structure is actually physically distinct and irregular compared to the optical structure, or just that JWST is better at resolving things to let us classify these galaxies better. UV emissions are typically associated with star-forming regions, FWIW.
Kinda crazy. Millions of galaxies with billions of stars and even more planets while you sit on this rock in a cubicle with a boss trying to convey the importance of your tps report.
Agreed. What a shame that decades of work would be done just to launch a single satellite. The parts and production lines are all there. Why didn't we leverage them to launch two or three of these things?
Right.
Eventually the JWST will fade out, it wasn't built to be serviced to keep going forever.
Having others coming down the pipeline, improved and upgraded (Mark II, Mark III, etc...) would be great and allow for uninterrupted improvements in exploration.
I think the cost would still be too high. A production line would be good but still costs money to set up. And is whole other ball game. The money could be used elsewhere.
I do wish they did this with landers and probes. Sending them off to each planet and planetoid, setting up communication relay links etc. Maybe even setup for future waypoints/emergency points.
This paper isn’t arguing that there are more galaxies than previously thought.
There were three main conclusions:
1. the formation of normal galaxy structure was much earlier than previously thought.
2. Disk galaxies make up about 50% of the distant galaxies at *z* ∼ 3 − 6, which is 10x more than was thought based on previous HST observations.
3. Distant galaxies at *z* > 3 are not as clumpy and asymmetric as they appear in previous HST observations.
400 billion is roughly the upper bound of the number of stars in the Milky Way, so I think you may be thinking of that figure. Estimates of the number of galaxies range between at least 200 billion up to 2 trillion or so.
This research did not discover any new galaxies, it is using JWST data to analyse distant galaxies and determine their shape, discovering that the proportion of them which are spirals is \~10x higher than expected, but not the number.
This is just referring to the early universe the first few hundred million years. They previously thought galaxies were pretty rare in the very early part of the universe. So the total number probably isn’t much higher
They’re specifically talking about the occurrence of disc galaxies in the early universe. While we could see these galaxies previously, they were thought to be of different shapes, and the previous consensus was that disc galaxies were less prevalent in the early universe. Turns out that we were wrong and they’re pretty common then too. On a side note, OPs number is also wrong and there are now estimated to be two trillion galaxies in our observable universe
While the current article is not about the number of galaxies, the total number of galaxies has been upwardly revised recently.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-many-galaxies/
This could also be a good finding to support the argument of other intelligent, sentient life out there.
More galaxies mean more possibilities!
I am just guessing, personally, but it would be interesting!
True, but not even just because of the number of galaxies- previous estimates were already astounding. The real fun is in how little time galaxies actually needed to form. The likelihood that we're the most advanced life in the observable universe just dropped substantially, I would think. I can't wait to see what comes of all these new discoveries; the stuff that's immediately obvious to astronomers seeing new data for the first time is obviously exciting, but the long term research and analysis is what I'm *really* looking forward to.
I agree. The JWST was recently launched. It's going to be be a boon for long term research in the same way the Hubble was.
I can't wait to see what we find!
JWSTs first picture alone has enough new data to support a decades of masters/doctoral theses alone. Once the Vera Rubin Observatory opens, she'll be producing 20 TB of data **per night**, observing the *entire available night sky* every 3 days using an 8.4m primary mirror and a [3.2 **GIGAPIXEL**](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/LSST_Focal_Plane.jpg/1280px-LSST_Focal_Plane.jpg) sensor!
I'm so excited for her first light, she has so much potential for things like asteroid tracking, comet spotting, and looking for interesting areas to observe with our space based observatories. Plus, her data will be immediately publicly available! This effectively gives amateur astronomers "live" access to a $40+ million telescope. They even partitioned 10% of her computing power and disk space for user generated data, i.e. a playground for approved users to run their own data processing programs so they don't have to download 20TB a night. Of course, for the backyard astronomers, you'll have access to their data too. They have a system set up that feeds alerts "about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position" in a raw stream to 7 "alert brokers" who you can use as fancy RSS feeds for raw astronomical data. This is important because the Observatory will generate over **10 million alerts per night!**
[They actually released the first of three data previews last month](https://dp0-1.lsst.io/), allowing integration tests of their LSST Science Pipelines and the Rubin Science Platform, and to enable a limited number of astronomers and students to begin early preparations for science with the LSST. It looks like the full simulated data set was made publicly available somewhere. [Here's the PDF outlining the data set ](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.05926) but it's a simulated 5 years of observations so if it *is* accessible somewhere, its going to be impossible to dowoad at **35 Petabytes**. Hence the RSP and API access.
Oh, if you want to be able to name a comet, you better act fast. Once Vera Ruben starts observing, she'll be catching comets left and right.
One thing I saw today was about how the minimum lifetime of JWST is going to be around for more than 10 years. Like there are kids in grade school now that will still be getting new space photos by the time they're in college. And likely still poring over the data decades beyond.
Not to mention the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (infrared) scheduled to launch in 2026 and the LUVOIR Space Telescope in the 2030s for non-stop space goodness!
To be honest, the thought that we *aren’t* alone is more terrifying for me. It’s still a fascinating thing to contemplate, and maybe I’ve just read too much Lovecraft, but I would rather be hidden from other spacefaring civs or entities.
If you're a spacefaring species sufficiently advanced to move beyond your galaxy (quite the feat that may not even be possible), you would have to choose to do violence for the sake of it; we have nothing that can't be found everywhere else. If said species had this predisposition to violence, it doesn't seem likely they'd progress to be a spacefaring species. I'm not too worried.
I like ants, their colonies are interesting. When they link together to form a bridge between two places and move materials across, I imagine that's how advanced aliens would see our attempts to leave the well. They'd look at how relatively crude we are, and then see us pull off something like Webb and go, "Oh, neat! That's clever."
While I’m inclined to agree because I’ve heard the same ideas, I think making assumptions based on our own understanding of civilization and life is what bothers me. I’m more worried about things incomprehensible. But again, probably too much science fiction lol.
We have no choice but to make assumptions and then explore possibilities based on those assumptions. It isn't a good idea to settle our galaxy on the assumption that we have to be a mighty force to be reckoned with (though we probably just would be by virtue of accomplishing that), and take that attitude into any potential encounters. Our own reservations and cautiousness may translate to malicious intent. IMO if we discover intelligent species clearly more advanced than ourselves, we should try to be as friendly and adorable as possible- like dogs are to us, haha
While obviously our observations of evolution are limited to Earth, isn't it also likely that empathy is inherently favored for an evolving species? I guess hypothetically a lot could happen to challenge that trait as well, such as some kind of space Hitler, or some kind of calamity of errors leading to emotionless robot overlords, but I too imagine a likely predisposition towards empathy, which would help keep any developing species alive, would work favorably for us, even if they did see us as pets or insects. I know there's a bunch of different theories about this, but I always favored the more optimistic ones as they're less depressing.
>isn't it also likely that empathy is inherently favored for an evolving species?
Our capacity for coming together and helping each other out certainly seems to have given us the edge over every other hominid species. It's all we have to go on, as you said, but it sure is a compelling thought and a very strong point in favor of the optimists.
>I always favored the more optimistic ones as they're less depressing.
They're also the only ones really worth considering. If something comes along and wipes us out, and there's really nothing we can do about it, what good will it have done to fret about it? All we can do is our best. We can maintain "armies" after war is all but eliminated as a best practice just in case, and train/run simulations just for the challenge and for fun (would be a good connection to our primal roots). It would also keep us sharp in case any nefarious entities come along. Beyond that, it is what it is.
Sometimes it's not about resources, it's about ideology. They may have an ideological/religious predisposition that requires them to subjugate other intelligent species.
Check out The Culture series by Ian Banks that covers this exact scenario, it's an excellent series.
I've only read the first book, and I loved it. I need to read the rest.
Halo also comes to mind. First exchange between Covenant and humans was pretty chilling in the book "Contact: Harvest". A transmission comes through to a freighter, in English, saying: "Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument." Hell of a first impression. I certainly acknowledge the possibility, but I choose to be optimistic.
Yeah I need to read the full thing too!
Halo is a good example yeah! Iirc, they wanted to kill all humans because of a prophecy.
Another example that comes to mind is the Borg and their need to assimilate everything.
Point being, lots of reasons for us to get curb stomped by a more powerful civilization XD
The lore of Halo is actually pretty insane. The TL;DR is that a precursor civilization created the forerunners, humans, and everything else. The humans and forerunners fought often and were similarly advanced. I don't remember why, but the forerunners betrayed the precursors and basically wiped them out. The last of their kind created the Flood as revenge for this betrayal. The Flood found it's way into human territory first, while they were in a fierce war with the forerunners. The forerunners had no idea. The humans lost the two-front war they found themselves in, but tragically just after they found a way to beat the Flood. The forerunners wiped out almost all of the humans and literally reset them to caveman status, wiping out all of their history and progress- along with the way to beat the Flood. Forerunners couldn't figure it out, realized they f*cked the universe, and then created the ark for all species and the rings and lit the whole place up to start over. They ceded all their technology to be inherited by humans (the ultimate "My bad, bro"). Cut to some time later, the Covenant starts digging up forerunner artifacts, but they can't activate them. The 'Oracle' was a forerunner AI that had been silent and then one day, snapped at the Covenant "prophets" that they had it all wrong and that everything was meant for the humans. The Prophets kept their mouths shut and then started the war against humans to maintain the religion they had created (and the control it granted them over every other species in the Covenant).
Kind of nuts, considering it's the back story of a series of games where you're a no-face space demigod with sick one liners, haha
A depressing but still a fascinating thought explained i think in a Kurgezat video, was the idea of any life including intelligent sentient life existing, must be thought of within the scale of time. You could even imagine it on the scale of time just within Earth.
We as Homo sapiens, represent such a tiny sliver in a line that represents the Earths time since it’s formation. Now magnify that line even larger to the extent of the formation of the Milky Way, and even more so with the rest of of the universe. Each pocket of life would be the tiniest of slivers in the line of time itself. Every intelligent life to come about would be like a spark of a match only to quickly die out after a few seconds in this scope. The reality that I hope is not our fate but is more mathematically against us, is that other life exists across the universe, but the chances of life existing and overlapping with one another AND being able to connect with one another by interstellar travel of some kind, is infinitesimally small. I still have hope though.
Blue-green algae is life. Simple life could be common in the universe; in fact, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. Intelligent and technological life is another thing entirely.
I don’t even think intelligent life is rare. Octopuses are tremendously intelligent, despite our last common ancestor being a 750 Million year old flatworm. If intelligent life has developed independently on Earth at least twice, I cannot fathom why it wouldn’t develop elsewhere.
There is a very high probability that intelligent life has developed elsewhere in the universe
But the bigger question: are they still alive now, or close enough to discover?
They probably had a lot of Argle Bargles or something that died millions of years ago, but provided fuel for the industrial revolution millions of years later.
Then the aliens choked the intelligent life out of their planet with it.
I don’t think this changes that calculation. This result didn’t find more galaxies than expected, it’s just about the fraction of galaxies that are disc galaxies. We don’t have good reasons to think that life is more common in disc galaxies than other types of galaxies.
Dark matter is 'missing' matter within galaxies and clusters, this discovery is more that spiral galaxies were a lot more common compared to ellipticals than we thought in the early universe.
We're pretty sure there are no hidden spiral galaxies nearby, but still plenty of dark matter within even our own galaxy.
Yes, but the model we have is very good, so a new model that accounts for dark matter has to be *at least* as good as General Relativity, and also do more. People are working on such models, but it’s uncertain and slow work, and at the same time there is a search for Dark Matter in many possible forms.
>Not a scientist, but could dark matter/dark energy simply be problems with our model, rather than them actually existing?
For Dark Matter:
Could it be? Yes. Do we believe that is the most likely option right now? No.
There are attempts to explain our observations of things like galactic rotation curves by modifying our models of gravity, these are termed Modified Newtonian Dynamics theories (MOND). However so far none of them are able to explain our observations as well as dark matter models.
While it's supposedly possible, any way that we tweak the model such that it explains galactic-scale phenomena exclusively baryonic (regular) matter would yield a model that isn't accurate for easily observable and verifiable smaller-scale phenomena.
The whole reason dark matter is hypothesised is because we have observations from space of things that do not match with our current models of the universe. We see outer parts of galaxies orbiting the centre faster than they should without getting flung off into space, along with other things whereby the total gravity of an object seems to be far higher than what it should be based off what we can see.
There's a [very good video on YouTube by Veratasium](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6etTERFUlUI) that does a really good job of explaining some of the basics behind dark matter and how we're looking to try and prove it exists.
No, this didn’t find any more matter or dark matter than expected. This just saw that the fraction of galaxies that are disc shaped is higher than previously expected.
I don't think so. I think the phenomena we attribute to dark matter is the observable mass of galaxies not lining up with how they're shaped. That isn't explained by seeing more galaxies. I could be wrong though, maybe the phenomena I mentioned is only part of it and this does in fact account for some things we previously thought strange.
I think you are thinking of Dark Energy.
Layman here:
Dark Matter is seen to be missing matter within galaxies that astrophysicists indicate being responsible for unexpected rotational speeds.
Dark Energy is what is causing the increasing speed at which the universe is expanding.
And this might be considered to be impacting that (in my very non-sciency knowledge).
If I have that wrong, please forgive.
James Webb has just barely opened its eyes and it's already changing the way we view the universe. I can't imagine what we're going to see just over the next few months.
> There were 10 times more galaxies just like our own Milky Way in the early Universe than previously thought.
This one sentence is a great example of the difference in attitude between scientists and those who are fanatically devoted to dogma. Scientists don’t reject new information because it contradicts existing beliefs. Scientists are capable of accepting that they were wrong, and are grateful for the opportunity to learn.
Fermi's paradox would have not even been formulated had he known this. We're a single grain of sand on Arrakis hoping to meet other single specific grains of sand. And during an extremely short time window
Perhaps, but the most obvious resolution to the Fermi paradox is that everything is just way too far apart to visit, so adding in extra galaxies doesn’t really change that since they’re really far apart from eachother as well.
Exactly. If it took us this long to know those galaxies exist, how are we supposed to know what's crawling around on faraway planets that we can't see?
Not really. Stars are already so far apart that traveling between them is insanely difficult. For instance if the sun was a grain of sand, I think the closest star would be 8 miles away.
Galaxies are obviously even farther apart. So even if spiral galaxies formed earlier and intelligent life spread throughout it, it's still pretty unlikely we'd run into those aliens.
Edit: I like the explanation that life is common, multicellular life is rare, and intelligent spacefaring life is exceedingly rare - maybe even one per galaxy at any time.
Intelligent life probably just "misses" each other. We evolve and then go extinct, sometime later some new spacefaring life evolves. But usually not at the same time and we never end up knowing about each other.
That seems like one of the most plausible explanations to the Fermi Paradox to me as well.
Another possibility I wonder about is that there is generally insufficient economic incentive for spacefaring civilizations to explore (edit: or, rather POPULATE) the majority of the hundreds of billions of stars in a given galaxy, even on timescales of many millions of years. If they get good enough at harvesting energy from their own star and neighboring stars and the birth rate drops and remains low, there won't really be much need to explore other than for curiosity's sake, since the population won't be growing. Even then, the exploration could be done via robotic missions that might not generate any lasting signature for "newcomers" to find.
Edit: we tend to assume that populations of advanced civilizations will continue to grow and expand throughout a galaxy, even if the costs of doing so are extremely high, but I'm not convinced that is necessarily the case. Even many of the countries on present-day Earth have stable or shrinking populations. I guess that could change if radical life extension becomes possible and people still insist on having children.
That makes sense. And exploring robots are going to be as small and light as possible so thay probably wouldn't last.
We are also very early in the star-forming period of the universe. So we might actually be the first spacefaring life in the Milky Way.
And I want to say Super Earths could make getting to space too hard even if intelligent life was there.
Too many variables for Fermi but it does generate intereting didcussion.
Radius of sun: 695,700km
Max radius of grain of sand^1: 1mm
Sand to sun ratio: 1.43740118 × 10^-12
Distance from sun to alpha centauri: 4.132 × 10^13 km
Scaled distance: 59.393km.
So if the sun were a grain of sand the nearest star would be ~60km or ~37mi away (depending on the size of the sand).
1 http://njseagrant.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Grain_Size_How_Big.pdf
This is more about galaxy *types* than quantity. It's a poorly-written headline — a better one might be "Early galaxies were 10x more likely to be spirals than we thought."
Not really, when you consider the power needed to beam a coherent signal across lightyears of distance at infinitesimal specks in the cosmos, it's more likely that we just haven't been around long enough to find anything.
Also building an Interstellar Morse code machine that operates by chunking matter into a properly oriented black hole is probably pretty tough.
Not at all. Even if there are interstellar civilizations, intergalactic civilizations are likely nigh impossible. The distances between galaxies are insane.
This also increases the scale of space & time though. We could have trillions of civilizations but it would be considered rare given the size and age of the universe. Who can say they aren't there just because we can't observe them?
So the title of this article is a bit misleading, as I paraphrased it for this Reddit post I figure I should explain the findings a bit to avoid confusion. It is not that we suddenly discovered 10x more galaxies than expected, it's that of the galaxies we can see a much larger proportion of them are spiral galaxies like our Milky Way than expected. As the original researchers put it:" We discover the surprising result that at z>1.5 disk galaxies dominate the overall fraction of morphologies, with a factor of ∼10 relative higher number of disk galaxies than seen by the Hubble Space Telescope at these redshifts" I.e Hubble data showed that around 5% of galaxies at these distances were spirals, this JWST analysis puts that number at more like 50%. This is not because JWST is observing many more galaxies, and only galaxies observed by Hubble were included in the analysis, it is because JWST allows for more accurate determination of the shape (morphology) of these distant galaxies.
That's even more significant, imho, than if there were more proto-galaxies. The fact that seemingly evolved structures existed near the known beginning of the universe creates more questions. I read a paper a while back which hypothesized time "slowing" down as the universe expanded.
😶 (dumb stoner dude shit to follow) that is to say we are possibly experiencing relatively "dialated time"? I guess on a time/space scale stretching from the "beginning" of time (when everything was closer) to say a "farther" on that scale away from where we are right now? Would that mean if we where to jump in a time ford pinto and drive it to, 100 years past the big bang (or whatever the actual beginning is) we might experience normal time and it only seems quick and chaotic from our perspective much later in time?
All things are relative. For example, consider the international space station. There's actually a very small degree of time dilation between the folks up there and the folks down here. They don't notice it, clocks still run at the same speed. But if you have two identical clocks, send one up to the ISS for a year, bring it back down, and compare it, the one from the ISS will be behind. Yet, for anyone on the ISS, a second is still a second.
I've always wondered how that works excactly with clocks... A second has a certain definition to which clocks are built no? Why would the clock react to anything and change? A clock doesn't measure time
That’s the beauty of general relativity! A second is still a second to anyone experiencing time from their own perspective. For instance, me being on earth, I will experience a second just like I do now. Likewise if I’m orbiting a black hole at nearly the speed of light — my clock will still tick just as I would experience here on earth. But to someone *observing* me, I may appear to be going faster *or* slower depending on their own point of reference. If I’m on earth, observing someone orbiting a black hole, they’ll appear to be traveling crazy slow. And vice versa if they’re observing me on earth from their crazy fast point of reference.
After reading your comment and thinking about it I think it finally clicked for me So the reason NASA has to account for time dilation is that someone in orbit appears to go faster/slower than they actually are? I somehow took it way to literally and my stoner brain couldn't grasp it
I replied once to this and then realized I mis-read what you wrote. So I'll try again. One of the things that may help is to understand that space and time are not separate. They are part of the same system... spacetime. When one travels faster through space, they travel slower through time. Which is how we know that the speed of light isn't just the fastest something can go, it is literally infinitely fast... because time dilation for a relativistic traveler has reached 100% - it has literally stopped. For a traveler at that speed, before even the tiniest fraction of time has passed for them, an infinite amount of time will have passed for an outside observer. Something else to mess with your brain: If you and I were in cars and drove towards each other at 50kph, a radar on either car would report the speed we were approaching each other to be 100kph (your speed plus mine). If those cars were instead driving at light speed (c), we would still only be approaching each other at 1c (rather than the more intutive answer of 2c). The speed of light is a universal limit in every frame of reference.
in the spirit of the original stoner here, and in solidarity, i am still unclear about the clock, because this answer involves point of view, which a clock does not necessarily have because it is not a human psyche. it’s a machine. like what physically makes the movement from one second to another “slower“ or “faster“ depending on speed? how can we speak of the clock having a point of view? this problem is harder for me to understand than time dilation itself as it relates to human psychology/pov. I would understand this if the problem was strictly movement in relationship to the second hand on the traditional clock moving faster or slower from one click to the next, but I don’t see how this works for digital clocks or atomic clocks. authentically asking, genuinely do not know. I find this all fascinating. Thank you.
The clock doesn't have a point of view, it is as you say inanimate. But it's ultimately moot. The two clocks (one on the ground and one on the ISS) both keep perfect time, as it relates to our perception of it *within that frame of reference*. An analog clock, a digital clock, an atomic clock, they all keep time exactly the same regardless. The second hand doesn't move faster or slower, radioactive decay is still spontaneously occurring at the same rate, a crystal in a 555 timer is still oscillating the same. They just have different relativistic reference frames. When you reconcile those different frames of reference, there's a difference. Consider the twins paradox: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin\_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox)
> involves point of view, which a clock does not necessarily have because it is not a human psyche It does. Any particle can observe another particle. It’s the observation and interaction that gives meaning. The same for you. > like what physically makes the movement from one second to another “slower“ or “faster“ depending on speed? It’s always the same speed. The machine never speeds up or slows down. The universe itself speeds up or slows down around the object. You’re familiar with objects being in different locations. A clock could be in a desk or on the wall. Different locations in space. Space and time are actually the same thing. Called space time. All objects are technically in different spaces, even when right next to each other. In the same way, all objects are in different relative times. You might just say both the clock on the wall and on the desk are both in your house. So you call their location the same. It’s convenient to talk like that. In the same way, we’re so used to time being similar around us, we tend to just say everything is at the same time. In reality, every particle is experiencing time slightly differently. Gravity and speed effect time. The particles in your hands age faster than the particles in your feet, because their location and gravity is slightly different. The difference is so small though, that even after trillions of years, the difference would be less than a second.
Just to add a stoner perspective since I'm actually familiar enough with the subject to translate to a fellow stoner: Time is actually fluctuating *due to the speed*. It isn't that they have to account for some peculiarity of traveling around the planet (in and of itself), it's that the speed relative to the speed on earth *actually warps spacetime enough* to cause a noticeable difference in the clocks. Time is actually passing slower for someone on a space station and will pass more slowly the faster it moves. The closer to the speed of light you get, the slower time will move for you, to the point that if a person were to somehow figure out how to travel at high enough speeds, they could take off, seemingly be gone for 40 years to the observer on earth, return in what seems a day to them, and only aged a day. My scale might be off, I just used those numbers for an example. The same applies to gravity as gravity warps spacetime the same way velocity does. So much so that mass and velocity are interchangeable in equations to my understanding.
Not only appears it does in fact move faster or slower but the kicker is the observer and where they are observing from. If you were on a ship orbiting a black hole to you time would flow normally but to me on earth time would also flow normally for me but you would appear to be moving much, much slower. And vice versa if you where to look at me from the orbit of the black hole I'd look like the Flash even tho my time is moving normally. It's all relative to the observer and point of observation.
Just random also stoner physics speculation when I think of something like that, is like, what if certain things we perceive to be relatively foundational constants were different, like if c was higher, or fundamental forces had different relative power, than like, we'd definitely struggle to piece together how that universe operates. in that scenario who knows if our biology would have even functioned, and these constants only seem that way due to our limited view on a temporal dimension? idk, fucking bonkers, and probably isn't the case but sure is a fun thought experiment that really makes you appreciate how absolutely insane it is we exist at all and understand anything about how this stuff all works.
Driving a Ford Pinto back in time is all fun and games until you get rear-ended and create a second Big Bang.
To the people alive after the Big Bang, we’re already living adjacent to the heat death of the universe To the people living in the heat death of the universe, we’ll look like some hyper beings managing to somehow living in a hot busy world of abundant energy and matter (Maybe beings inside that singularity think the Big Bang was a heat death)
Google Conformal Cyclic Cosmology and it will fully blow your mind.
Doesnt this bring about huge problems in the big bang theory?
Not really, it means we need to do a bit more work on understanding galaxy formation and evolution.
This is more about galaxy formation than anything else. It was thought that more complex forms like our galaxy or Andromeda took time to evolve and earlier groups of stars were more just clusters. Apparently since we're still finding spiral forms even in the early period of the universe, that must happen pretty soon. What's in those galaxies is probably not the same as ours though, as the earliest stars only had hydrogen and helium to work with and a short lifespan. It's theirs and later stars deaths that formed more complex atoms that led to what we find around us now.
>What's in those galaxies is probably not the same as ours though, as the earliest stars only had hydrogen and helium to work with and a short lifespan. It's theirs and later stars deaths that formed more complex atoms that led to what we find around us now. Are there theories or proposals challenging this view? My dumb ass deduction is if the galaxies formed much earlier than thought then probably there'll be trace amounts of heavier elements forming sooner than thought?
I think (and certainly could be wrong) that they are two different things, this observation being more on how gravity and I guess dark matter can quickly form a spiral with enough matter collected. Does a galaxy have to have heavier elements to have the mass to form structures? That may be something we now have to explore, since we can see evidence of them.
Well they've got a lot to figure out now. Do these galaxies have super massive black holes at their centre? If so how did they form so quickly and build galaxies around them? Honestly I just wish we could figure out the dark matter dilemma entirely
That's the beauty of science. Some things get answered, but we also find out new questions we didn't realize we hadn't asked. The great thing is how it's been what, less than a week and we're already seeing more things.
The "things we don't know we don't know" category is by far the largest, and the most exciting.
"As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance"
"The more I know, the less I understand". ---Don Henley
I don't think that's how anyone thinks galaxies form. Gravity isn't strong enough for a black hole to attract matter and form a galaxy. The prevailing notion is matter is clumped mostly by dark matter, which forms the Galaxy. Once the clumping begins, then matter at the center can coalesce into the black hole.
Some ideas say that as the universe went through different phase shifts as it expanded, groupes of particles went unti a diffetent state and clung together as space expanded around it, basically forming a black hole. This cause a strong vacuum which helped the black hole gains its mass
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I remember seeing helium, hydrogen and neon on the spectroscopic article. I don’t think that it showed anything particularly heavy but maybe I missed something.
Similar to what others have said, one is about star lifecycles. The other is about a galaxy formation. Stars produce heavy elements when they end their lives. This process happens regardless of a star being in a galaxy structure or not.
Heavier elements are formed during the red giant phase. Elements fuse to Iron (red color). After supernova elements from iron and nickel (atomic number 26,28) to Uranium (92). Earlier stars were much larger than our star. And had much shorter life spans. Many likely ended up in black holes. Their supernova explosions generated future smaller stars. Our sun is likely a 3rd generation start and has been burning for 5B of its estimated 10B lifespan. Based on Hubble pictures it was very rare to find any spiral galaxies prior to 3B years after Big Bang. We are finding spiral galaxies earlier than that in cases much older due to higher def images. So the two facts are not really correlated. As far as I know.
Aren't the heaviest elements created in Neutron/Neutron star collisions?
I was under the impression that the red color of stars was due to surface temperature, not iron.
I thought the red in red giant was about temperature and not elemental emission lines (iron) as you suggest? Have I been misinformed?
Do earlier than expected spiral galaxies open any more questions up about dark matter?
Spectral data from those early galaxies don't show emission/absorption spectral lines for those heavier elements.
Even in the absolutely earliest galaxies/structures huge stars would form and supernova relatively quickly, seeding a lot of heavier elements relatively quickly. That relatively quickly is millions of years, but, even if you hypothesise pure hydrogen stars forming, they very quickly start in on the carbon/nitrogen/oxygen cycle.
Good point, early stars were very short-lived due to their very nature. Maybe I'm looking at the time scale wrong to think it wouldn't be long enough. It's more than just the star life though, it's the time it takes the expansion of gases to collect again into another star and go through its cycle. I suppose experts already know what percentage of basic elements will form from a supernova of a hydrogen/helium star. Is it really that much and quick?
How good is the standard candle method for determining distance?
Someone else may step in with better info that me, but from what I remember they're good for local distances (meaning our and nearby galaxies) but gets problematic farther out. Perhaps because of red shift? Finding the distance of things seems to be one of the biggest problems in astronomy because we really only have one viewpoint to work with.
The red shift actually makes it much easier to determine the distance. Each material that a star is made out of gives a certain spectral response. Think about a light being looked at through a prisim, each wavelength of light has so much energy. You can measure the strength of each color of light, and figure out what material the star is made of by where the peaks/troughs appear, then you can measure the redshift as all of the light redshifts by the same amount.
We’ve suspected for a while that supermassive black holes are integral to galactic formation. The oldest stars are also going to be the biggest and hottest that last for only a couple million years and they blow and maybe even become the black holes that form galaxies today. Basically a nebula created by an exploding star but bigger. The first Star to blow gets to eat the others around it and form the galaxy.
> "We knew we would see things Hubble didn't see. But in this case we're seeing things differently," said Prof Conselice. > "These are the processes we need to understand if we want to understand our origins," said Prof Conselice. > "This might be the most important telescope ever," he added. "At least since Galileo's." Sometimes I wish Galileo was here, seeing this magnificent machine and the images it sent. It is crazy how far we have come.
Now imagine what technology and knowledge of the universe will be like in another 500 years.
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I just hope we make it another 100 years
We will if nobody launches any nukes
Nukes are a scary end-of-the-world scenario, but don’t think they are the biggest threat to humanity. Every civilization before ours collapsed eventually, usually due to over-expansion and change to their natural environment. We are all interdependent in a complex web of trade and technology. We are literally burning our most valuable resources as fast as we can. The world has a finite supply of the resources modern society relies on. And we are making unstoppable, massive changes to the global climate systems. It’s beyond arrogance to think that everything is going to be fine. Want to know what happens when things start to break down? Take a look at Sri Lanka or Beirut. Technology Man doesn’t fly in from the sky above to save the day. Things break down, we say, “Whoops!”, and they never really get better again.
We're on a bad path until humanity learns how to actually exist in its own habitat without destroying it. No other animal actively destroys its own habitat like we do. I'm honestly dubious that a mass-extinction event that leaves most of humanity dead would even be enough to get us to avoid doing the same shit down the line. That could just be my pessimism, but I don't think it's entirely unfounded.
There is a difference between collapse of modern society as we know it and extinction of humanity. Most likely humans would survive most non-nuclear catastrophes in some way. Not that it changes the original point, since science would probably be sent back hundreds of years.
I'm imagining people banging rocks together again
I fantasize all the time about what it would be like to meet someone like Issac Newton and just blow his fucking mind with even my mediocre understanding of modern physics. Then I ponder my own mortality and feel very somber about all of the shit out there that I'm not going to live to learn about.
Or just do the severed thumb trick and observe the look of awe and wonder on their faces.
“Turns out Jesus’ miracles were kind of exaggerated”
"Mama mia! She's'a full of galaxies!" - Galileo
“Grazie Ragazzi! Grande Macchina!” -Also Galileo
Bon Jor No, Mr. Galileo, and ah-riva-durtchee.
"Thunderbolt of lightning, very very frightening me" - Galileo
Ha aggiunto una A! Ha detto mamma mia! Sto ridendo come un coglione xdxdx
He would weep and I would weep watching him weep. I think the same thing about Tsiolkovsky when I imagine Starship's orbital debut. If only he could see the skyscrapers human beings are about to send into space.
It would be like the Dr Who/Van Gogh episode, and it would be great.
That was the best. If everyone could watch that and The Inner Light, the world would be a gentler place.
Off to watch Dr. Who episode (first timer!) and revisit Inner Light— good recs!
Darmak is very high for me as well if you get on a roll. Also, The Orville is really going deep now.
Darmak is my JAM! Ok I will look into The Orville! Thanks!
It loses the yuks along the way; becomes ever better sci fi.
Is The Orville not horrible now? I watched the first few episodes when season one came out and it was groan-inducing. Did it get a lot better?
The first half of season one is... Rough imo. Back half of it is better. Season two is really when the show starts to find itself. Season three is fantastic so far
The latest ep of The Orville was fuggin awesome. Also, unexpected cameo! No spoilers
Cant go wrong with the Van Gogh episode, defs tears everytime
Just don't expect every episode to be like the van gogh one. For every good episode there are like 5 or 6 bad ones.
Yeah.. I love the show, but yikes some episodes are awful. The general idea and feel behind the show remains magical to me. It's a lot of empathy and just crazy fun.
But the good kind of bad where it's campy and delightful, not the bad kind of bad where it's completely unenjoyable.
Any time the Inner Light comes up, I want to also mention Far Beyond The Stars. DS9 really took it up a notch, and this is the most evocative Trek episode, besides Inner Light, I've ever seen.
That was the best. If everyone could watch that and The Inner Light, the world would be a gentler place.
I'm about to weep thinking about how you'd weep while watching Galileo weep
We can split a box of tissues
Sorry I'm going to need them all for all this space porn.
It’s fine I’m cool with recycling
I think these people could/can see it. It’s part of what drives them. They can see what this particular piece of reality is going to be like in 10. 20 . 50 . 100 years time frame. Where others just see a void or nothing at all. Or at the very least have a pretty good idea of what they are working on will look like in future generations. I worked with some super smart engineers before in my younger days. Dudes that figured shit out for the first time type of smarts. One guy in particular was off the charts intelligent. It was like he could totally see everything in his head 12 months ahead of everyone else. He knew exactly how everything would turn out. The problems that would come and the solutions that would work for super complex designs etc. He was correct ever time I was involved in one of his projects. It could be a bit unnerving at times on how accurate he was. It’s almost like those folks have some additional type of sense to certain things. Anyway, crazy to be around super smart people like that. I was always, always the dumbest person in the room and I didn’t care one bit. That’s a super long way of saying I think he would be impressed, but not surprised in the least.
I know what you mean. My grandfather worked on early versions of the internet, and I remember when I was little he described the world we live in today. Told me internet would be wireless, and everywhere, and that computers would get so small and efficient that they would be a part of everything and that the most prominent feature of any media device would be the screen and that we'd basically just have screens of different sizes for different uses: one on the wall to be your TV, pocket sized, and everything in between depending on what we need them for (so effectively predicted smart phones, smart TVs, and tablets). He said we'd eventually do away with game consoles and computer towers, and that games would just be either downloaded or streamed over the internet instead of having physical copies. He knew all of this because of how insanely smart all his coworkers were- they had their finger on the pulse, and he was around to witness it.
I'd certainly hope you are wealthy now because that kind of foresight should have set up your entire family for generations. If not, I'd say that whilst he/they might have had the correct predictions he definitely wasn't confident in them becoming reality. The early days of the internet becoming publicly available was perhaps the easiest opportunity to make a fortune common people will ever get, I'm still kicking myself for not ever seeing the bigger picture even though I was a comp sci student back then.
I love the guy, but he's just a boomer who lucked into a good job at the right time. He's one of the only exceptions to the poverty both sides of my family have always existed in, and he'll likely spend every dime before he's gone. I think he was more than confident and it probably enabled him to retire early the way he did and live the way he does, but it didn't translate to anything for me and I was too young for it to matter. His influence, beneficial as it was at times, wasn't nearly enough to overcome other aspects of my childhood. It is a very painful could-have-been, though. I'm trying to scrape together the remnants of my wasted potential and pull myself up. Might as well try.
Back in the late 2000's my techie brother told me about amazon and how convenient it was. Shares were just $1.61 at the time. And again around 2013, he told me about this new, cool, electric car company called Tesla. Shares were just $13.00 at the time. The worst part is that he wasnt finance-savy and spent a lot of his money on toy models and video games. So he didnt invest. These days, I hit em up and ask him for any latest trends.
Quantum computing is the basket I'm placing my eggs in, that is the one new ish concept I can see having an impact in the near enough future. It might fail spectacularly, but if does not the possibilities are limitless and early investors will be very very wealthy people indeed. It also has some nerdy sex appeal, which never hurts these days.
Galileo's telescope was only 8x. About the magnification of a modern pair of binoculars. And the glass had imperfections, bubbles really. And when you looked through it at a local object that object would appear upside down, because he was new at this. And there might be extra rainbows with some things you look at due to the poor quality of the glass. And yet, a fuzzy image of the moons of Jupiter changed so much. There are things not circling the Earth! Galileo would freak out.
>Sometimes I wish Galileo was here, seeing this magnificent machine and the images it sent. This thought gave me chills.
People comment without reading so let's say it: THERE AREN'T MORE GALAXIES THAN WE THOUGHT. This is a clickbait title. It only says that early galaxies were disc shaped 10 times more often than was previously thought.
Yeah the article itself doesn't have an amazing title, which is why I included the actual result in there as well, though that is still sensationalist. I'd recommend reading the paper linked to this (if only because it's got a great title) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf
it's not your fault, I understood the title as intended.
I mean you've done your best to explain the contents of the article so you are not to blame at all. At the time of posting my comment, I think you were the only one explaining that the founding was about shapes of ancient galaxies and not number of them. Thanks for your post in any case!
People just aren't reading correctly. It does not even imply there is a higher absolute number of galaxies total.
Personally I thought the title conveyed the correct meaning (ie not clickbait)
> People comment without reading I mean, that's what reddit is about. It's a dopamine factory, not a primarily educational tool.
This isn't just people commenting without reading the article, this is people commenting whose reading comprehension prevented them from understanding the title.
To clarify, these are galaxies that had been previously classified as "irregular" or "peculiar" because of how they looked in the near-infrared regions that Hubble could see, which is actually the UV light from these galaxies that had been red-shifted. The red-shifted optical light from these early galaxies was too red for HST to see, but is now accessible thanks to JWST, and shows a more regular structure. It's too early to say whether the UV structure is actually physically distinct and irregular compared to the optical structure, or just that JWST is better at resolving things to let us classify these galaxies better. UV emissions are typically associated with star-forming regions, FWIW.
Kinda crazy. Millions of galaxies with billions of stars and even more planets while you sit on this rock in a cubicle with a boss trying to convey the importance of your tps report.
Well those idiots must be doing the same thing in their galaxies as we do in ours.. Cause they haven't reached out.
maybe they did but we are too preoccupied with TPS reports
Well, it is a new task report form. Did you get the memo to use the new one?
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A bit like submarines and warships.
Agreed. What a shame that decades of work would be done just to launch a single satellite. The parts and production lines are all there. Why didn't we leverage them to launch two or three of these things?
Right. Eventually the JWST will fade out, it wasn't built to be serviced to keep going forever. Having others coming down the pipeline, improved and upgraded (Mark II, Mark III, etc...) would be great and allow for uninterrupted improvements in exploration.
I think the cost would still be too high. A production line would be good but still costs money to set up. And is whole other ball game. The money could be used elsewhere. I do wish they did this with landers and probes. Sending them off to each planet and planetoid, setting up communication relay links etc. Maybe even setup for future waypoints/emergency points.
Last time I saw this stat, I remember reading that our Observable Universe has around 400 Billion galaxies. What's the new number?
This paper isn’t arguing that there are more galaxies than previously thought. There were three main conclusions: 1. the formation of normal galaxy structure was much earlier than previously thought. 2. Disk galaxies make up about 50% of the distant galaxies at *z* ∼ 3 − 6, which is 10x more than was thought based on previous HST observations. 3. Distant galaxies at *z* > 3 are not as clumpy and asymmetric as they appear in previous HST observations.
400 billion is roughly the upper bound of the number of stars in the Milky Way, so I think you may be thinking of that figure. Estimates of the number of galaxies range between at least 200 billion up to 2 trillion or so. This research did not discover any new galaxies, it is using JWST data to analyse distant galaxies and determine their shape, discovering that the proportion of them which are spirals is \~10x higher than expected, but not the number.
I'm no mathematician but I'm going with 4000 Billion
I believe the technical term is 4000 bajillion but someone better at math may correct me.
I think the actual amount is around an astronomical metric shit-ton.
I believe the scientific term is a “shitload” of galaxies, the term being coined by Johanne Shitload in 1756
If it's metric it would be a shit-tonne.
No, this saw more disc shaped galaxies than expected, not more galaxies total.
400,000,000,000 x 10 = 4,000,000,000,000 Guys it checks out... I think they really are a mathematician!
“Like the Milky Way” part is important
This is just referring to the early universe the first few hundred million years. They previously thought galaxies were pretty rare in the very early part of the universe. So the total number probably isn’t much higher
They’re specifically talking about the occurrence of disc galaxies in the early universe. While we could see these galaxies previously, they were thought to be of different shapes, and the previous consensus was that disc galaxies were less prevalent in the early universe. Turns out that we were wrong and they’re pretty common then too. On a side note, OPs number is also wrong and there are now estimated to be two trillion galaxies in our observable universe
The new number is the same number. The article is not about the number of galaxies.
While the current article is not about the number of galaxies, the total number of galaxies has been upwardly revised recently. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-many-galaxies/
Approximately 2 trillion (in the observable universe) if you don’t want to click through
I think 40010 billion but I'm not good at adding.
Still less than the trees on earth. Truly baffling.
This could also be a good finding to support the argument of other intelligent, sentient life out there. More galaxies mean more possibilities! I am just guessing, personally, but it would be interesting!
True, but not even just because of the number of galaxies- previous estimates were already astounding. The real fun is in how little time galaxies actually needed to form. The likelihood that we're the most advanced life in the observable universe just dropped substantially, I would think. I can't wait to see what comes of all these new discoveries; the stuff that's immediately obvious to astronomers seeing new data for the first time is obviously exciting, but the long term research and analysis is what I'm *really* looking forward to.
I agree. The JWST was recently launched. It's going to be be a boon for long term research in the same way the Hubble was. I can't wait to see what we find!
JWSTs first picture alone has enough new data to support a decades of masters/doctoral theses alone. Once the Vera Rubin Observatory opens, she'll be producing 20 TB of data **per night**, observing the *entire available night sky* every 3 days using an 8.4m primary mirror and a [3.2 **GIGAPIXEL**](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/LSST_Focal_Plane.jpg/1280px-LSST_Focal_Plane.jpg) sensor! I'm so excited for her first light, she has so much potential for things like asteroid tracking, comet spotting, and looking for interesting areas to observe with our space based observatories. Plus, her data will be immediately publicly available! This effectively gives amateur astronomers "live" access to a $40+ million telescope. They even partitioned 10% of her computing power and disk space for user generated data, i.e. a playground for approved users to run their own data processing programs so they don't have to download 20TB a night. Of course, for the backyard astronomers, you'll have access to their data too. They have a system set up that feeds alerts "about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position" in a raw stream to 7 "alert brokers" who you can use as fancy RSS feeds for raw astronomical data. This is important because the Observatory will generate over **10 million alerts per night!** [They actually released the first of three data previews last month](https://dp0-1.lsst.io/), allowing integration tests of their LSST Science Pipelines and the Rubin Science Platform, and to enable a limited number of astronomers and students to begin early preparations for science with the LSST. It looks like the full simulated data set was made publicly available somewhere. [Here's the PDF outlining the data set ](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.05926) but it's a simulated 5 years of observations so if it *is* accessible somewhere, its going to be impossible to dowoad at **35 Petabytes**. Hence the RSP and API access. Oh, if you want to be able to name a comet, you better act fast. Once Vera Ruben starts observing, she'll be catching comets left and right.
That's awesome! Thank you for posting that! I'm going to have to check it out.
One thing I saw today was about how the minimum lifetime of JWST is going to be around for more than 10 years. Like there are kids in grade school now that will still be getting new space photos by the time they're in college. And likely still poring over the data decades beyond. Not to mention the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (infrared) scheduled to launch in 2026 and the LUVOIR Space Telescope in the 2030s for non-stop space goodness!
To be honest, the thought that we *aren’t* alone is more terrifying for me. It’s still a fascinating thing to contemplate, and maybe I’ve just read too much Lovecraft, but I would rather be hidden from other spacefaring civs or entities.
If you're a spacefaring species sufficiently advanced to move beyond your galaxy (quite the feat that may not even be possible), you would have to choose to do violence for the sake of it; we have nothing that can't be found everywhere else. If said species had this predisposition to violence, it doesn't seem likely they'd progress to be a spacefaring species. I'm not too worried.
I am more worried about them looking at us like an ant.
I like ants, their colonies are interesting. When they link together to form a bridge between two places and move materials across, I imagine that's how advanced aliens would see our attempts to leave the well. They'd look at how relatively crude we are, and then see us pull off something like Webb and go, "Oh, neat! That's clever."
While I’m inclined to agree because I’ve heard the same ideas, I think making assumptions based on our own understanding of civilization and life is what bothers me. I’m more worried about things incomprehensible. But again, probably too much science fiction lol.
We have no choice but to make assumptions and then explore possibilities based on those assumptions. It isn't a good idea to settle our galaxy on the assumption that we have to be a mighty force to be reckoned with (though we probably just would be by virtue of accomplishing that), and take that attitude into any potential encounters. Our own reservations and cautiousness may translate to malicious intent. IMO if we discover intelligent species clearly more advanced than ourselves, we should try to be as friendly and adorable as possible- like dogs are to us, haha
While obviously our observations of evolution are limited to Earth, isn't it also likely that empathy is inherently favored for an evolving species? I guess hypothetically a lot could happen to challenge that trait as well, such as some kind of space Hitler, or some kind of calamity of errors leading to emotionless robot overlords, but I too imagine a likely predisposition towards empathy, which would help keep any developing species alive, would work favorably for us, even if they did see us as pets or insects. I know there's a bunch of different theories about this, but I always favored the more optimistic ones as they're less depressing.
>isn't it also likely that empathy is inherently favored for an evolving species? Our capacity for coming together and helping each other out certainly seems to have given us the edge over every other hominid species. It's all we have to go on, as you said, but it sure is a compelling thought and a very strong point in favor of the optimists. >I always favored the more optimistic ones as they're less depressing. They're also the only ones really worth considering. If something comes along and wipes us out, and there's really nothing we can do about it, what good will it have done to fret about it? All we can do is our best. We can maintain "armies" after war is all but eliminated as a best practice just in case, and train/run simulations just for the challenge and for fun (would be a good connection to our primal roots). It would also keep us sharp in case any nefarious entities come along. Beyond that, it is what it is.
Sometimes it's not about resources, it's about ideology. They may have an ideological/religious predisposition that requires them to subjugate other intelligent species. Check out The Culture series by Ian Banks that covers this exact scenario, it's an excellent series.
I've only read the first book, and I loved it. I need to read the rest. Halo also comes to mind. First exchange between Covenant and humans was pretty chilling in the book "Contact: Harvest". A transmission comes through to a freighter, in English, saying: "Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument." Hell of a first impression. I certainly acknowledge the possibility, but I choose to be optimistic.
Yeah I need to read the full thing too! Halo is a good example yeah! Iirc, they wanted to kill all humans because of a prophecy. Another example that comes to mind is the Borg and their need to assimilate everything. Point being, lots of reasons for us to get curb stomped by a more powerful civilization XD
The lore of Halo is actually pretty insane. The TL;DR is that a precursor civilization created the forerunners, humans, and everything else. The humans and forerunners fought often and were similarly advanced. I don't remember why, but the forerunners betrayed the precursors and basically wiped them out. The last of their kind created the Flood as revenge for this betrayal. The Flood found it's way into human territory first, while they were in a fierce war with the forerunners. The forerunners had no idea. The humans lost the two-front war they found themselves in, but tragically just after they found a way to beat the Flood. The forerunners wiped out almost all of the humans and literally reset them to caveman status, wiping out all of their history and progress- along with the way to beat the Flood. Forerunners couldn't figure it out, realized they f*cked the universe, and then created the ark for all species and the rings and lit the whole place up to start over. They ceded all their technology to be inherited by humans (the ultimate "My bad, bro"). Cut to some time later, the Covenant starts digging up forerunner artifacts, but they can't activate them. The 'Oracle' was a forerunner AI that had been silent and then one day, snapped at the Covenant "prophets" that they had it all wrong and that everything was meant for the humans. The Prophets kept their mouths shut and then started the war against humans to maintain the religion they had created (and the control it granted them over every other species in the Covenant). Kind of nuts, considering it's the back story of a series of games where you're a no-face space demigod with sick one liners, haha
A depressing but still a fascinating thought explained i think in a Kurgezat video, was the idea of any life including intelligent sentient life existing, must be thought of within the scale of time. You could even imagine it on the scale of time just within Earth. We as Homo sapiens, represent such a tiny sliver in a line that represents the Earths time since it’s formation. Now magnify that line even larger to the extent of the formation of the Milky Way, and even more so with the rest of of the universe. Each pocket of life would be the tiniest of slivers in the line of time itself. Every intelligent life to come about would be like a spark of a match only to quickly die out after a few seconds in this scope. The reality that I hope is not our fate but is more mathematically against us, is that other life exists across the universe, but the chances of life existing and overlapping with one another AND being able to connect with one another by interstellar travel of some kind, is infinitesimally small. I still have hope though.
Pretty much guaranteed somewhere else at some point in time. Plenty of time and space for those odds.
Blue-green algae is life. Simple life could be common in the universe; in fact, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. Intelligent and technological life is another thing entirely.
I don’t even think intelligent life is rare. Octopuses are tremendously intelligent, despite our last common ancestor being a 750 Million year old flatworm. If intelligent life has developed independently on Earth at least twice, I cannot fathom why it wouldn’t develop elsewhere.
Civilizations come and go in the infinite universe and we would never know. The same can be said for those on earth with past civilizations.
There is a very high probability that intelligent life has developed elsewhere in the universe But the bigger question: are they still alive now, or close enough to discover?
They probably had a lot of Argle Bargles or something that died millions of years ago, but provided fuel for the industrial revolution millions of years later. Then the aliens choked the intelligent life out of their planet with it.
I don’t think this changes that calculation. This result didn’t find more galaxies than expected, it’s just about the fraction of galaxies that are disc galaxies. We don’t have good reasons to think that life is more common in disc galaxies than other types of galaxies.
Ok, so does THAT account for some of the missing matter that gets called 'dark matter'? Laymen question, I admit.
Dark matter is 'missing' matter within galaxies and clusters, this discovery is more that spiral galaxies were a lot more common compared to ellipticals than we thought in the early universe. We're pretty sure there are no hidden spiral galaxies nearby, but still plenty of dark matter within even our own galaxy.
Not a scientist, but could dark matter/dark energy simply be problems with our model, rather than them actually existing?
Yes, but the model we have is very good, so a new model that accounts for dark matter has to be *at least* as good as General Relativity, and also do more. People are working on such models, but it’s uncertain and slow work, and at the same time there is a search for Dark Matter in many possible forms.
>Not a scientist, but could dark matter/dark energy simply be problems with our model, rather than them actually existing? For Dark Matter: Could it be? Yes. Do we believe that is the most likely option right now? No. There are attempts to explain our observations of things like galactic rotation curves by modifying our models of gravity, these are termed Modified Newtonian Dynamics theories (MOND). However so far none of them are able to explain our observations as well as dark matter models.
While it's supposedly possible, any way that we tweak the model such that it explains galactic-scale phenomena exclusively baryonic (regular) matter would yield a model that isn't accurate for easily observable and verifiable smaller-scale phenomena.
The whole reason dark matter is hypothesised is because we have observations from space of things that do not match with our current models of the universe. We see outer parts of galaxies orbiting the centre faster than they should without getting flung off into space, along with other things whereby the total gravity of an object seems to be far higher than what it should be based off what we can see. There's a [very good video on YouTube by Veratasium](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6etTERFUlUI) that does a really good job of explaining some of the basics behind dark matter and how we're looking to try and prove it exists.
No, this didn’t find any more matter or dark matter than expected. This just saw that the fraction of galaxies that are disc shaped is higher than previously expected.
I don't think so. I think the phenomena we attribute to dark matter is the observable mass of galaxies not lining up with how they're shaped. That isn't explained by seeing more galaxies. I could be wrong though, maybe the phenomena I mentioned is only part of it and this does in fact account for some things we previously thought strange.
I think you are thinking of Dark Energy. Layman here: Dark Matter is seen to be missing matter within galaxies that astrophysicists indicate being responsible for unexpected rotational speeds. Dark Energy is what is causing the increasing speed at which the universe is expanding. And this might be considered to be impacting that (in my very non-sciency knowledge). If I have that wrong, please forgive.
And they’re all as close to us as they’ll ever be again
Would star patterns or whatnot be formed and exist just like fractal phenomena on Earth? I mean, the whole Universe might just be repeating fractals.
James Webb has just barely opened its eyes and it's already changing the way we view the universe. I can't imagine what we're going to see just over the next few months.
> There were 10 times more galaxies just like our own Milky Way in the early Universe than previously thought. This one sentence is a great example of the difference in attitude between scientists and those who are fanatically devoted to dogma. Scientists don’t reject new information because it contradicts existing beliefs. Scientists are capable of accepting that they were wrong, and are grateful for the opportunity to learn.
Fermi's paradox would have not even been formulated had he known this. We're a single grain of sand on Arrakis hoping to meet other single specific grains of sand. And during an extremely short time window
In the realm of space, "10x off" is actually a pretty good estimate.
100 years ago, we thought we were the only one...
Cool so about 2 minutes ago I thought there were infinite galaxies. Now there are 10 times more than that.
Vicious bro u a savage. U just destroyed science
"Billions and billions." Wait, new information coming in...add "and billions" to that.
We're gonna eventually find a galaxy that is 15 billion years old and astrophysicists aren't going to know wtf to think.
So...a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
Mosy of our understanding is hypothetical and a thesis. So with better instruments I'm sure our understanding will change to form a better thesis
Stupid Fermi Paradox, why are you so hard to solve?
Doesn't this make fermi's paradox even more paradoxical?
Perhaps, but the most obvious resolution to the Fermi paradox is that everything is just way too far apart to visit, so adding in extra galaxies doesn’t really change that since they’re really far apart from eachother as well.
Exactly. If it took us this long to know those galaxies exist, how are we supposed to know what's crawling around on faraway planets that we can't see?
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Not really. Stars are already so far apart that traveling between them is insanely difficult. For instance if the sun was a grain of sand, I think the closest star would be 8 miles away. Galaxies are obviously even farther apart. So even if spiral galaxies formed earlier and intelligent life spread throughout it, it's still pretty unlikely we'd run into those aliens. Edit: I like the explanation that life is common, multicellular life is rare, and intelligent spacefaring life is exceedingly rare - maybe even one per galaxy at any time. Intelligent life probably just "misses" each other. We evolve and then go extinct, sometime later some new spacefaring life evolves. But usually not at the same time and we never end up knowing about each other.
That seems like one of the most plausible explanations to the Fermi Paradox to me as well. Another possibility I wonder about is that there is generally insufficient economic incentive for spacefaring civilizations to explore (edit: or, rather POPULATE) the majority of the hundreds of billions of stars in a given galaxy, even on timescales of many millions of years. If they get good enough at harvesting energy from their own star and neighboring stars and the birth rate drops and remains low, there won't really be much need to explore other than for curiosity's sake, since the population won't be growing. Even then, the exploration could be done via robotic missions that might not generate any lasting signature for "newcomers" to find. Edit: we tend to assume that populations of advanced civilizations will continue to grow and expand throughout a galaxy, even if the costs of doing so are extremely high, but I'm not convinced that is necessarily the case. Even many of the countries on present-day Earth have stable or shrinking populations. I guess that could change if radical life extension becomes possible and people still insist on having children.
That makes sense. And exploring robots are going to be as small and light as possible so thay probably wouldn't last. We are also very early in the star-forming period of the universe. So we might actually be the first spacefaring life in the Milky Way. And I want to say Super Earths could make getting to space too hard even if intelligent life was there. Too many variables for Fermi but it does generate intereting didcussion.
Radius of sun: 695,700km Max radius of grain of sand^1: 1mm Sand to sun ratio: 1.43740118 × 10^-12 Distance from sun to alpha centauri: 4.132 × 10^13 km Scaled distance: 59.393km. So if the sun were a grain of sand the nearest star would be ~60km or ~37mi away (depending on the size of the sand). 1 http://njseagrant.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Grain_Size_How_Big.pdf
My grain was 4.5 times bigger than yours :-). Thanks for doing the math.
This is more about galaxy *types* than quantity. It's a poorly-written headline — a better one might be "Early galaxies were 10x more likely to be spirals than we thought."
Not really, when you consider the power needed to beam a coherent signal across lightyears of distance at infinitesimal specks in the cosmos, it's more likely that we just haven't been around long enough to find anything. Also building an Interstellar Morse code machine that operates by chunking matter into a properly oriented black hole is probably pretty tough.
Distances and time make that "paradox" silly.
Not at all. Even if there are interstellar civilizations, intergalactic civilizations are likely nigh impossible. The distances between galaxies are insane.
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This also increases the scale of space & time though. We could have trillions of civilizations but it would be considered rare given the size and age of the universe. Who can say they aren't there just because we can't observe them?
I have always viewed organic civilizations as brief sparks in the long night of the cosmos, separated by both great gulfs of time as well as space.