Update: James Webb Space Telescope discovers candidates for most distant (and possibly "youngest") galaxies yet discovered

[CitizenVectron]

2 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

I think sometimes people also forget the vastness of the time the universe has been around when they point out that the likelihood of life elsewhere is very high.

 

Sure, the odds that life will flourish on another planet given how many galaxies, stars, and planets there are seems logically high. But to exist at the same time and in close enough proximity that we will ever observe them is significantly less likely.

 

Moreover, the energy required to even communicate at these distances is far beyond what we have, in terms of multidirectional broadcasts. People like to think of our "radio" bubble as being something like 80-100 light-years in radius. In truth...it's smaller than our solar system, in terms of being detectable. If you planted sensitive equipment at Pluto and pointed it straight at Earth, you would not be able to receive our commercial broadcasts. You could potentially detect things like EMPs from nuclear tests, really strong radar sweeps, etc. The inverse square law makes multidirectional broadcast communication impossible at interstellar distances, you really need lasers/masers at extremely high power.

 

There could be 50 sentient civilizations at our level within 100 light-years and we'd never know unless they pointed a message directly at us at the right time (and we were directly pointing a receiver at them).

[Uaarkson]

2 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

Moreover, the energy required to even communicate at these distances is far beyond what we have, in terms of multidirectional broadcasts. People like to think of our "radio" bubble as being something like 80-100 light-years in radius. In truth...it's smaller than our solar system, in terms of being detectable. If you planted sensitive equipment at Pluto and pointed it straight at Earth, you would not be able to receive our commercial broadcasts. You could potentially detect things like EMPs from nuclear tests, really strong radar sweeps, etc. The inverse square law makes multidirectional broadcast communication impossible at interstellar distances, you really need lasers/masers at extremely high power.

 

There could be 50 sentient civilizations at our level within 100 light-years and we'd never know unless they pointed a message directly at us at the right time (and we were directly pointing a receiver at them).

Damn, this is basically what I was going to post. We have to point our telescopes at a point in the sky and gather light for hours or even days just to see the faintest image of the brightest and most energetic events in the universe. Catching a signal from an alien civilization is just insanely unlikely. Not to mention, while life itself may be common, highly evolved sentient life capable of putting signals out into space is probably unfathomably rare.

[CitizenVectron]

It's hard not to be a bit nihilistic when you consider the scale of the universe. We're just a single atom in a single mitochondria in the human body of the universe. But also impossible not to be in awe. I wish everyone in the world could understand these images and our place in the universe...when in reality many can't even list two of their neighbouring countries, etc.

[CitizenVectron]

[marioandsonic]

[Kal-El814]

53 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

It's hard not to be a bit nihilistic when you consider the scale of the universe. We're just a single atom in a single mitochondria in the human body of the universe. But also impossible not to be in awe. I wish everyone in the world could understand these images and our place in the universe...when in reality many can't even list two of their neighbouring countries, etc.

 

So you're saying we're part of the powerhouse of the cell of the universe

[Comet]

On the finding life side of things, isn't the universe expanding at a rate that even if we manage to find how to travel at the speed of light 90%+ of the universe is outside of our grasp?

[Uaarkson]

14 minutes ago, Comet said:

On the finding life side of things, isn't the universe expanding at a rate that even if we manage to find how to travel at the speed of light 90%+ of the universe is outside of our grasp?

Yes. Our only hope of ever exploring anything outside our local group of stars relies on faster than light travel, or wormholes.

[Massdriver]

2 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

Moreover, the energy required to even communicate at these distances is far beyond what we have, in terms of multidirectional broadcasts. People like to think of our "radio" bubble as being something like 80-100 light-years in radius. In truth...it's smaller than our solar system, in terms of being detectable. If you planted sensitive equipment at Pluto and pointed it straight at Earth, you would not be able to receive our commercial broadcasts. You could potentially detect things like EMPs from nuclear tests, really strong radar sweeps, etc. The inverse square law makes multidirectional broadcast communication impossible at interstellar distances, you really need lasers/masers at extremely high power.

 

There could be 50 sentient civilizations at our level within 100 light-years and we'd never know unless they pointed a message directly at us at the right time (and we were directly pointing a receiver at them).

I'm glad you posted this. I think there is a lot of misinformation regarding how this works.

[Amazatron]

 

[Uaarkson]

You know, we really should have a Gritty react. For when Philadelphia inevitably invades D.C. to save the Union.

[Anathema-]

11 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Both possibilities are terrifying

 

what about the possibility that it's thousands of planets full of dinosaurs

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

46 minutes ago, Anathema- said:

 

what about the possibility that it's thousands of planets full of dinosaurs

[Nokra]

7 hours ago, Uaarkson said:

You know, we really should have a Gritty react. For when Philadelphia inevitably invades D.C. to save the Union.

 

[Zaku3]

8 hours ago, Uaarkson said:

You know, we really should have a Gritty react. For when Philadelphia inevitably invades D.C. to save the Union.

 

[Remarkableriots]

People Are Furious at Space Telescope's Homophobic Name Again

FUTURISM.COM

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With the James Webb Space Telescope in the news over the release of its incredible images, it's been easy to forget that it was named for a known homophobe.

 

[brucoe]

On 7/11/2022 at 10:53 PM, Ominous said:

But like we're the only intelligent life, right?

We're not classified as "intelligent". We're classified as "ironic."

[BloodyHell]

42 minutes ago, Remarkableriots said:

People Are Furious at Space Telescope's Homophobic Name Again

FUTURISM.COM

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With the James Webb Space Telescope in the news over the release of its incredible images, it's been easy to forget that it was named for a known homophobe.

 

 

 

NASA should just ignore this. Its not a defining trait. Its not like he was "the homophobe". He certainly wasn't the reason for the FBI's actions towards gays at NASA. He's exactly who most of our grandparents and parents were. 

 

I'm guessing most of NASA was homophobic for those decades. So was most of the military. We were regularly called homophobic things during basic, and hurled those insults at each other, and that was at the turn of the century.  Thankfully most of us moved on, but this isn't something shocking, or a reason to kick off the inevitable war this will cause. 

 

In the list of important things the left needs to fight for, this doesn't make the top 30. 

 

 

 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Man I sure hope people don’t read about the early years of nasa and who the chief rocket scientists were!

[Zaku3]

1 minute ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Man I sure hope people don’t read about the early years of nasa and who the chief rocket scientists were!

 

I did Nazi that joke coming.

[mclumber1]

#AllNASAadministratorlivesmatter

[Anathema-]

2 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

He certainly wasn't the reason for the FBI's actions towards gays at NASA.

 

No, he did that at the state department.

[Brick]

Micrometeoroid causes ‘uncorrectable’ damage to James Webb Space Telescope - National | Globalnews.ca

GLOBALNEWS.CA

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The $10-billion space telescope suffered damage to segment C3 of its mirror array, but its performance is still exceeding scientists' expectations.

 

 

[Best]

I've been keeping an eye on this from the beginning. I didn't know we had a thread on it but this shit is fascinating as hell!

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

JWST discovers candidates for most distant galaxies yet | Space

WWW.SPACE.COM

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The two galaxies, if confirmed, existed 300 to 400 million years after the Big Bang.

 

Quote

 

Astronomers have spotted what may be the two most distant galaxies ever seen hiding in early-release images from NASA's newest space telescope.

 

The James Webb Space Telescope's early science work includes a program called the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space, or GLASS. Through GLASS, astronomers are scrutinizing the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which is so massive that its gravity is able to distort the space around it and act as a gravitational lens to magnify the images of far more distant galaxies behind it.

 

Astronomers led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered the two candidate galaxies, called GLASS-z11 and GLASS-z13, in the first batch of data from GLASS. The galaxies' designations come from the fact that astronomers have measured their "redshifts" to be 11 and 13 respectively.

 

Redshift is a measure of how much a galaxy's light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe; the higher the redshift, the farther away (and the farther back in time) we see the source. The redshifts of 11 and 13 mean that we see these two galaxies as they existed over 13.4 billion years ago, just 400 and 300 million years after the Big Bang respectively. 

 

 

Regarding the age of one of the galaxies:

 

Did JWST Discover The Oldest Galaxy Ever Seen? It's Complicated

WWW.CNET.COM

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If confirmed, it might be the most distant galaxy ever, but it's not the oldest. That's an important distinction.

 

Quote

 

I don't want to poop the party for GL-z13, but I do want to exercise just a teensy bit of caution. In communicating findings with such certainty, there's potential for readers to lose trust in scientists if it turns out GL-z13 is something else entirely. Several astronomers I spoke with believe the data is quite compelling and the galaxy likely does reside a long (loooong) way away, but until there's confirmation, GL-z13 can't take the title of "oldest galaxy." 

 

And to some, even that title itself is a bit misleading. 

 

You see, GL-Z13 isn't really "the oldest galaxy ever" – it comes from a time when the universe was barely 330 million years old. The light from that galaxy? Well, yes, it's super old. It has traveled a long time to reach the JWST. But the galaxy itself, if confirmed, is probably the youngest galaxy ever seen, according to Nick Seymour, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Western Australia.

 

"At 330 million years after the Big Bang, it can't be more than 100 million years old at best," Seymour said. "Hence, this really is a baby galaxy at the dawn of time."

 

 

[Guest]

The time scales we are dealing with here are truly incomprehensible. Even just thinking about how long earth has been around, you could have had human level intelligent beings come and go that we would never knew existed. 

[CitizenVectron]

4 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

The time scales we are dealing with here are truly incomprehensible. Even just thinking about how long earth has been around, you could have had human level intelligent beings come and go that we would never knew existed. 

 

The dinosaurs could have had a civilization on the scale of our own, and besides radioactive records, there would be basically no way for us to know it ever existed. So...since the rise of multicellular life on Earth, we could have had 20 or 100 steam-age civilizations and we'd never know. Things just erode and disappear.

[Jason]

6 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

The dinosaurs could have had a civilization on the scale of our own, and besides radioactive records, there would be basically no way for us to know it ever existed.

 

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

The dinosaurs could have had a civilization on the scale of our own, and besides radioactive records, there would be basically no way for us to know it ever existed. So...since the rise of multicellular life on Earth, we could have had 20 or 100 steam-age civilizations and we'd never know. Things just erode and disappear.

Yup. Just think about how little we have of humans from only 10s of thousands of years ago.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

The dinosaurs could have had a civilization on the scale of our own, and besides radioactive records, there would be basically no way for us to know it ever existed. So...since the rise of multicellular life on Earth, we could have had 20 or 100 steam-age civilizations and we'd never know. Things just erode and disappear.

Hell the Greeks nearly discovered steam power back in the age around so-crates. Imagine where we’d be if they cracked that noodle

[Jason]

1 hour ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Hell the Greeks nearly discovered steam power back in the age around so-crates. Imagine where we’d be if they cracked that noodle

 

The Romans had a steam engine but viewed it as basically a desk toy. 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

1 hour ago, Jason said:

 

The Romans had a steam engine but viewed it as basically a desk toy. 

Yeah maybe that was it. Hellenistic era novelty that could have jump started the industrial revolution by ~1700 years

[mclumber1]

4 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

so-crates

 

[Anathema-]

Temporal linguistic semantics make my head ache.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

On 7/22/2022 at 4:17 PM, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Hell the Greeks nearly discovered steam power back in the age around so-crates. Imagine where we’d be if they cracked that noodle

 

On 7/22/2022 at 5:34 PM, Jason said:

 

The Romans had a steam engine but viewed it as basically a desk toy. 

 

On 7/22/2022 at 6:57 PM, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Yeah maybe that was it. Hellenistic era novelty that could have jump started the industrial revolution by ~1700 years

 

 

That would make the Hellenophiles even more insufferable than they already are!