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 creeping-deth87 wrote:

CadianSgtBob wrote:
Lies and CGI. The universe is not billions of years old, and I wish we'd stop spending taxpayer money on fake atheist "science". But I guess this forum's ban on religion only applies to Christians.

I really, really hope this isn't serious...

Seeing his other posts...alas your hope is likely unfounded.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Valkyrie wrote:
Can't believe the engineering behind this thing. Apparently the mirrors had to be so perfectly inline, a NASA spokesman said that if the mirror array was the size of the US, each segment would be the size of Texas and the whole thing would have to be perfectly flat to within 1.5 inches.

Sheesh. That's certainly insane level of accuracy.

tneva82 wrote:

 Valkyrie wrote:
Can't believe the engineering behind this thing. Apparently the mirrors had to be so perfectly inline, a NASA spokesman said that if the mirror array was the size of the US, each segment would be the size of Texas and the whole thing would have to be perfectly flat to within 1.5 inches.

Sheesh. That's certainly insane level of accuracy.

Indeed, and it make sit more impressive that everything worked remotely.

As an aside, there are a couple of videos on the Smarter EveryDay YouTube channel regarding the JWST that people might find interesting, like this one on how it works.

They also have a supersonic baseball cannon, which is cool - I don't think we'll see SSBC vs JWST, though.

Jupiter from the near IR camera.

Those black dots had better be monoliths!

 Flinty wrote:
And hopefully the interplanetary dust gods will be kind and not punch too many more holes in The thing

We hope!

One of the mind blowing things about that image is it’s scope. If you took a grain of rice and held it up at arms length, that’s the area of the sky photographed.

What I love about these images is that they're just TEST images, and they're already blowing Hubble out of the water. The next 20 years are going to have some amazing reveals.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Jupiter from the near IR camera.

Spoiler:

All these worlds are yours. Except Europa. Attempt no landing there.

Love this kind of stuff. It always fascinated me when I learned that--in terms of the universe--we're less than insignificant. Calling us specs of dust would be an insult to dust.

Consider the vastness of the galaxy: Most big sci fi universes, at their largest, are on the galactic scale. A galaxy is generally so immense that most humans cannot really get their heads around it. Now consider: there are quite literally countless galaxies with vast expanses of space between them.

When people ask me if I believe there's alien life, I usually respond something like: "well of course. Statistically speaking, it's nearly certain. However, humans will almost certainly go extinct before it could ever be confirmed."

statistically speaking it's almost certain, but statistically speaking it's also not certain at all.

https://youtu.be/PqEmYU8Y_rI

Hoping that no one minds, but I thought I would add another astronomy story that was in the BBC feed today about another new observatory tool for hunting neutron star collisions (not the Muse song…)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61911047

Quasistellar wrote:
Love this kind of stuff. It always fascinated me when I learned that--in terms of the universe--we're less than insignificant. Calling us specs of dust would be an insult to dust.

Consider the vastness of the galaxy: Most big sci fi universes, at their largest, are on the galactic scale. A galaxy is generally so immense that most humans cannot really get their heads around it. Now consider: there are quite literally countless galaxies with vast expanses of space between them.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

― Douglas Adams, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.'

 Flinty wrote:
Hoping that no one minds, but I thought I would add another astronomy story that was in the BBC feed today about another new observatory tool for hunting neutron star collisions (not the Muse song…)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61911047

I've got no problem with the discussion broadening. If it gets legs I'll just change the name of the thread to General Lies and CGI discussion

Quasistellar wrote:

All these worlds are yours. Except Europa. Attempt no landing there.

I literally just rewatched that.

In fact the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the JWST images was "My god, it's full of stars!"

I’m telling you, that Jupiter test image… just full of monoliths

 Dysartes wrote:

Quasistellar wrote:
Love this kind of stuff. It always fascinated me when I learned that--in terms of the universe--we're less than insignificant. Calling us specs of dust would be an insult to dust.

Consider the vastness of the galaxy: Most big sci fi universes, at their largest, are on the galactic scale. A galaxy is generally so immense that most humans cannot really get their heads around it. Now consider: there are quite literally countless galaxies with vast expanses of space between them.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

― Douglas Adams, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.'

Kurzegesagt have a great video on that: https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM

[Caution: Kurzegesagt videos may invoke intense existential dread about things that will happen in billions of years time and can’t possibly affect you. They’re fun like that.]

Eh, there's quantity and there's quality ya know? Like Earth is only the tiniest fraction the size of the sun, but the entirety of what happens within the space the sun occupies is less complex than what goes on in a banana.

I'm not sure of the odds of finding life, but I feel like a lot of people think of it and immediately assume intelligent or at least complex life. Looking at our own history any life we do find is overwhelmingly more likely to be monocellular, and the odds of it being intelligent near nil.

Even assuming intelligent life I feel like there's an assumption that they would be mysterious and struggle to understand our ways, yet there's really no reason to assume they wouldn't be aware of how culture works and be as intellectual about studying the differences as we would be.

Which is all to say the hype train about finding other life is through the roof and should it occur the experience will almost certainly be considerably more banal.

The cool worlds video essentially uses a sort of survivor bias esque explanation as a way to counter those who say there has to be other life in the universe. Basically, because life on earth grew so quickly and abundantly, we assume it would be the case on other planets.

On the flip side, who's to say that conditions in the universe don't exist somewhere that might facilitate lifeforms based on different chemical structures. Non carbon based life. I do like the fact that it's something science cannot effectively answer.

There have been further developments that extended the Miller-Urey experiment. That's the one where they mixed up the gases and water thought to be around in the early Earth atmosphere, then shocked the mixture with electricity ("lightning"). The experiment produces a gloop of amino acids very quickly.

The experiment always ran better in glass containers than metal ones, so recently the experiment was expanded to include volcanic glass - obsidian. As a result of filtering through the glass, it appears that RNA strands form spontaneously.

https://www.science.org/content/article/did-volcanic-glasses-help-spark-early-life

Now clearly there are lots more questions, and nothing actually crawled out the jar at the end, but the creation of pre-biotic molecules so easily is hugely encouraging.

I don't expect life to be abundant(not that we could realistically spot it anyway) but odds of earth being only one would have to be insanely tiny. At that point easier to believe life here was created intentionally but if no life elsewhere by whom and why bother for short period and then be wiped out as earth's fate is. Why would any non-lifeform create life here for very brief time?

Whats the precise location of Molech in the night sky...no reason...just thinking the long game...

I'm a science teacher so in the final week of term showed lots of videos on this, as it's so mind-blowing.

This is a great video on the aims behind and manufacture of the telescope, probs available in UK only:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00197px/horizon-2022-super-telescope-mission-to-the-edge-of-the-universe

What I found fascinating was the aim compared to Hubble: by looking 500m light years further, we can look 500m years further back in time.

This means we can look at the very first stars forming . We are on our third iteration of our solar system - we know a previous sun here has undergone a supernova because of the presence of heavy elements like uranium etc etc.

But with Webb, we can hopefully watch the very first stars switch on. That takes us back to, not just the dawn of matter, but of time. Thrilling, and I hope I get to see it.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'm not sure of the odds of finding life, but I feel like a lot of people think of it and immediately assume intelligent or at least complex life. Looking at our own history any life we do find is overwhelmingly more likely to be monocellular, and the odds of it being intelligent near nil.

How so? Even on Earth, we have crows, dolphins, all the apes (humans included - and that's actually a huge group), octopus, elephants - that's at least five different animal groups showing enough intelligence to evolve sapient species. Hell, look at all the different Homo species. If anything, intelligence seems pretty likely to arise, certainly nothing like lucky fluke.

Which is all to say the hype train about finding other life is through the roof and should it occur the experience will almost certainly be considerably more banal.

Watch them say something common sense like 'why are you still believing in fables invented by bored illiterate stone age goat herders thousands of years ago' or 'why you let 350 individuals hoard more resources than poorest four billion humans like a cancer cell instead of investing them into something worthwhile like science, culture, or healthcare' or 'why you're destroying your atmosphere with pollution, don't you know it leads to 7/10 new intelligent species going extinct' - less intelligent half of humanity would certainly make the experience not banal

Or say something like... you look delicious! We banned food additives centuries ago, but if free range animals add MSGs themselves its fair game!

 Irbis wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'm not sure of the odds of finding life, but I feel like a lot of people think of it and immediately assume intelligent or at least complex life. Looking at our own history any life we do find is overwhelmingly more likely to be monocellular, and the odds of it being intelligent near nil.

How so? Even on Earth, we have crows, dolphins, all the apes (humans included - and that's actually a huge group), octopus, elephants - that's at least five different animal groups showing enough intelligence to evolve sapient species. Hell, look at all the different Homo species. If anything, intelligence seems pretty likely to arise, certainly nothing like lucky fluke.

All your examples belong to a single phylum - Chordates- that have been around for about 500 million years, or 10% of Earth's history. The exact causes of the "Cambrian explosion" of life are still debated; prior to that Earth seems to have been home to microbes and a few examples of complex life, despite having an oxidising atmosphere for the previous 2 billion years, and almost another 2 billion years of evidence of life before that.

How long has intelligence (do you mean sentience, problem-solving or human-like sapience?) been around? It's hard to say, pretty much impossible in the fossil record, but we've been making tools and maybe fire for a couple of million years at most - 1/20th of a percent of Earth's history.

With only a single world to use as an example, it's very hard to say what hoops life has jumped through to get here. Not just oxygenation of the atmosphere, but availability/stability of carbonates in the ocean for making shells, availability of incompatible elements concentrated via "just right" plate tectonics that produce continental crust, increasing solar output over time. Or the presence of gas giants in the outer solar system, and dozens of other factors. Heck, even the availability of a mixed ocean/dry land surface.

Life seems content to have stayed simple for 3.5 billion years. It may be that complex life and intelligence is common, but only arises in a short period in each planet's lifespan (in another billion years, the sun will have scorched the Earth dry). That in itself is a partial answer to the Fermi Paradox.

 Irbis wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'm not sure of the odds of finding life, but I feel like a lot of people think of it and immediately assume intelligent or at least complex life. Looking at our own history any life we do find is overwhelmingly more likely to be monocellular, and the odds of it being intelligent near nil.

How so? Even on Earth, we have crows, dolphins, all the apes (humans included - and that's actually a huge group), octopus, elephants - that's at least five different animal groups showing enough intelligence to evolve sapient species. Hell, look at all the different Homo species. If anything, intelligence seems pretty likely to arise, certainly nothing like lucky fluke.

Watch the cool worlds video I linked. It might make you reassess your thought process on this.

 Momotaro wrote:

Spoiler:

 Irbis wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'm not sure of the odds of finding life, but I feel like a lot of people think of it and immediately assume intelligent or at least complex life. Looking at our own history any life we do find is overwhelmingly more likely to be monocellular, and the odds of it being intelligent near nil.

How so? Even on Earth, we have crows, dolphins, all the apes (humans included - and that's actually a huge group), octopus, elephants - that's at least five different animal groups showing enough intelligence to evolve sapient species. Hell, look at all the different Homo species. If anything, intelligence seems pretty likely to arise, certainly nothing like lucky fluke.

All your examples belong to a single phylum - Chordates- that have been around for about 500 million years, or 10% of Earth's history. The exact causes of the "Cambrian explosion" of life are still debated; prior to that Earth seems to have been home to microbes and a few examples of complex life, despite having an oxidising atmosphere for the previous 2 billion years, and almost another 2 billion years of evidence of life before that.

How long has intelligence (do you mean sentience, problem-solving or human-like sapience?) been around? It's hard to say, pretty much impossible in the fossil record, but we've been making tools and maybe fire for a couple of million years at most - 1/20th of a percent of Earth's history.

With only a single world to use as an example, it's very hard to say what hoops life has jumped through to get here. Not just oxygenation of the atmosphere, but availability/stability of carbonates in the ocean for making shells, availability of incompatible elements concentrated via "just right" plate tectonics that produce continental crust, increasing solar output over time. Or the presence of gas giants in the outer solar system, and dozens of other factors. Heck, even the availability of a mixed ocean/dry land surface.

Life seems content to have stayed simple for 3.5 billion years. It may be that complex life and intelligence is common, but only arises in a short period in each planet's lifespan (in another billion years, the sun will have scorched the Earth dry). That in itself is a partial answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Point of order: Cephalopods are not chordates.

My personal choice for “the Great Filter” is development of the eukaryotic cell; once you have complex multicellular life I think there’s probably a high chance of developing intelligent life, but as others have mentioned, life on Earth stuck with simple single cells for a very, very long time.

Well at least we think it stuck. Or there was other long time ago but time has erased evidence of it.

True, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but given the speed and extent at which multi-cellular life proliferated once it got going, it’s unlikely that there’d be no evidence if it had happened before.

 Azreal13 wrote:


Point of order: Cephalopods are not chordates.

You are of course correct - thanks.