100k Stars | Hacker News Reader

100k Stars

stars.chromeexperiments.com

471 pointsevo_9172 comments

When I am angry, frustrated and disappointed or depressed, I think of the pale blue dot every single time. It helps me put things into perspective. Our little knotted lives and our petty concerns are meaningless and inconsequential in grand scheme of things. Just let it go. Enjoy what little time we have here!

Totally agree. I bought a telescope as a hobby, but really, it also acts as a mental health booster. We are just specks of dust in an infinite galactic soup. I didn't expect this side effect when I bought it!

Telescopes are one thing, but there is an impressive amount of stuff out there in "plain sight" that is invisible because it is too far at the edge of the visible spectrum, or too dim.

I've been recently doing a project to photograph a lot of these massive interstellar objects in the perspective of landscapes to show how visually big they are. For example, here's a picture I took of the Rosette Nebula rising over Mt. Shasta. The nebula is visually bigger than a full moon, you just can't see it easily with the naked eye: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCO0CmnnVkA/

What a striking photo. Very impressive and a cool concept.

not really inconsequential at all.

I was visiting Chabot Space Center in Oakland several years ago and saw a large poster on a wall which had thousands and thousands of star-like dots filling the entire sky.

Except, they were not stars, they were galaxies. A poster of a small portion of the sky full of thousands and thousands of galaxies, each looking like a dot, as small as a star looks in the night sky, and each of those galaxies has billions of stars...

Something snapped in my brain that day and I went on from being somewhat religious/agnostic to a full blown atheist.

The crazy thing is the amount of stuff we are able to observe is constantly shrinking. As the universe expands faster and faster, eventually the stuff at the far edges is moving away faster than the speed of light so we will never get there or even know it exists without records.

Sounds like we're in a black hole.

Or in a video game where the background is an unreachable layer.

Ironically, I realized yesterday that if the universe was destined for the Big Crunch (until quite recently, this was believed to be a possibility), then we'd be literally living inside the event horizon of an universe-sized black hole!

A black hole containing all matter in the universe wouldn't be much denser than the current average density of the universe. Spacetime expanding sorta helps keep things from blowing apart.

It's an interesting factoid that blackhole mass isn't related to their volume but their surface area, so by adding mass they grow a lot faster than you'd expect and density goes down fast. Larger black holes are barely denser than water.

I was surprised by this and I don't think your sentence is entirely clear, but the ending figure seems to check out. I think it's more clear to say "the radius of a black hole increases sub-linearly with its mass" (specifically, the square root of mass).

Sagittarius A*, the closest black hole, is 4.1 million solar masses, so its Schwarzchild radius is 12.1 million km, so its density is 0.25 kg/m^3, which is about 1/5 as dense as air at sea level--much less than water.

A black hole made from Jupiter would have a Schwarzchild radius of 2.8 meters, so its density would be... denser than a neutron star.

Hang on, it’s been a long time since I studied physics at uni in the mid 80s, but isn’t the Schwarzchild radius just the boundary which marks the point within which even light cannot escape gravity? A black hole is a singularity, a point (if non-rotating) of infinite density. I didn’t think the mass of the back hole was evenly distributed within the Schwarzchild boundary (which is a mathematical boundary, not a physical boundary such as the surface of a body). Or have I missed something?

Depends on how you look at it.

If you look into holographic theory (which I prefer personally) then the entire mass of a black hole is represented as information on the surface of the black hole, explaining the relation between mass and surface not mass and volume. This solves some problems with the information theorem (no information can be lost) by presenting all information contained within a black hole on it's surface where it can be read, atleast theoretically. (Here information and mass would be considered equivalent)

To some extend, it still holds true if you just consider the mass of a black hole to be it's singularity and it's volume the volume that fills the event horizon.

edit: Also consider; if you placed an equivalent amount of mass in space that occupies less volume than the event horizon would, it would automatically be a black hole (and note; the schwarzschild radius is not necessarily the event horizon, the event horizon can be tighter if the black hole rotates)

The relevant figure is that the radius grows faster than mass^(1/3). What it does, because it grows with mass^(1/2).

If it grew more than linearly with mass, we wold see the same reducing density, just faster.

For extra mind blowing, do compare the Schwarzschild mass of the observable universe and its radius.

Spoiler: gurl ner abg whfg fvzvyne, gurer ner gurbergvpny erfhygf gung gurl unir gb or rdhny. Hasbeghangryl gur cncre vgfrys nffhzrq jnl zber culfvpf xabjyrqtr guna V unir. Ohg, guvf znxrf bhe havirefr pbafvfgrag jvgu gur fvzcyr qrsvavgvba bs oynpx ubyr ("n znff ragveryl jvguva vgf Fpujnemfpuvyq enqvhf").

So I quickly did a back-of-envelope calculation using [0] for source of mass and diameter of the universe.

Then I used the formula given in [1]: r = (2 G M) / (c^2).

    You have: (2 * G * 1.5 * 10^56 grams ) / (c^2)
    You want: lightyears
            * 2.3548373e+10

So about 23,548,373,000 ly of SR, while the radius of the observable universe is given as ~46,500,000,000 ly. So the ordinary-matter ratio is about half the density of a black hole. Not quite there, but still _much_ closer than I would have thought!

If we account for not just ordinary matter but dark matter (a ratio of 4.9% to 26.8%) the picture is different:

    You have: (2 * G * (1.5 * 10^56 grams + (1.5/4.9*26.8) * 10^56 grams) ) / (c^2)
    You want: lightyears
            * 1.5234355e+11

So the SR then would be about 5 times larger. But I have no idea whether dark matter would count towards the black hole mass and SR, and I don't know if anyone does.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius

(The scientific calculator I used, which is awesome every day is "units" btw: https://linux.die.net/man/1/units)

Yes, dark matter has mass, this is its defining characteristic: it seems to be a detectable mass, just doesn't interact electromagnetically.

In any case, it's important to note the Schwarzchild model is a spherically symmetrical ball. Mass in our Universe seems more or less uniformly dispersed (with some anisotropy). Without a center for mass to collapse, I suspect the black hole dynamics don't apply.

Hint: Caesar cipher

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/2/140218-black-...

I don't understand the relationship between awe at the grandeur of the universe and atheism. They seem orthogonal to me, each unrelated to the other.

There is a palpable difference between the universe described by many religions and the universe described by science. The former is all built from concepts rooted in human society such as father, son, judgment, commandment, obedience, sacrifice, punishment etc. The latter is built from eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable, reference frame, superposition etc. The former feels small, ordinary, familiar and manmade. The latter feels like we're fumbling for words to describe something that fundamentally transcends ordinary human experience.

BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind, e.g. ten commandments, seven days of creation. Even the supposed large numbers such as 144,000 never come close to what you need to describe nature such as the number of stars in our galaxy (around 10^11) or the number of atoms in a human body (order of 10^27). See physics constants for even better examples. Also, religions often describe reality using numbers that look suspiciously memorable in decimal notation. OTOH, nature never gives us round decimal-friendly numbers for constants. I think this also makes religion feel manmade and science authentic.

what's wrong, or inauthentic, about being man-made?

Man-made is relatable. It’s understandable. It’s comprehensible. All things that the universe, when considered in its entirety, could never be.

God was supposed to have created men not the other way around.

Nothing, but I suspect your concept of "religion" is not the same as the parent's. Some people think of religion is a valuable tool humans invented to help them govern their lives . To others, religion is a doctrine that teaches ostensibly facts about the nature of the universe. Typically these facts lead to conclusions such as "humans SHOULD do x, MUST NOT do y", etc.

Two completely different concepts, one word. So it's a bit confusing. But for someone discussing the second type of religion, saying it's "man-made" is definitely a knockout punch.

It's hypocrisy to claim that religion X is divine revelation only to turn out to be man-made.

I don't think there's anything wrong with religions that acknowledge (and even embrace) the man-made aspect.

The scale of numbers in some Buddhist works such as the Flower Ornament Scripture are unimaginably large (infinities for every infinite item).

You are projecting christian view a bit here.

Buddhism and perhaps other Indian religions have some really large numbers, e.g. http://allergrootste.com/big/book/ch1/ch1_7.html

Another large number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi#Origins

second that. it's so easy to be atheist in west in the midst of modern understanding of science and universe. but if you venture out to other religions and scriptures in countries like India you keep discovering more ancient scriptures with much larger sense of time and advanced thoughts like multiverse[1].. May be inadvertently but even some scriptures have approximated the age of earth to be 4.3 billion years which is not accurate but closer [2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology#:~:text=Every%....

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(aeon)

The word "religion" has a lot of baggage associated with it where it seems to invoke a stereotypical undereducated westerner who interprets ancient spiritual texts literally. There's a lot more than just that. Ancient Buddhist cosmology frequently uses metaphors to describe aeons, such as grinding mountains to dust by brushing it with silk cloth once per century, etc. They do the same with countable objects to describe the numbers of worlds and so forth.

I have the opposite experience you described. Contemplating the infinitude of reality draws me toward religion via logic. Through contemplation it seems to follow that there's something important happening with meaning beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps GP and GGP were "stereotypical westerners who interpreted ancient spiritual texts literally". I for sure was, having been brought up in particularly scripture-obsessed denomination of Christianity. But I'd argue that view holds true for all Abrahamic religions, which comprise the majority of active faiths on Earth. Religions based on the Bible tend to be half faiths, half community management handbooks. Despite promises of various forms of life everlasting, they're very much focused on micromanaging the profane, the mundane.

>stereotypical undereducated westerner

I take offense with this description. Take Christianity and Islam and you've got half the world's populations. Are those 3.5 billion people all stupid westerners?

Who said anything about stupid? I'm not sure why you dug that description up but I think it says more about your views than mine.

Atheism is about not believing in any God. That’s different than not believing in any religion.

Believing in god(s) and believing in religion is the same thing, is it not?

Nope. Religion is thinking you can SPECIFY god, and interpret it. Godel had some thoughts about that ;)

I'm not sure I agree. I think you're conflating religion with the broader term of spirituality, which indeed is not explicitly rejected by atheism. Religion as in theism / deism, however, is.

It’s not a matter of opinion, fortunately it’s a regular word in the English language that has an established meeting.

First definition I find of religion: "A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs."

Almost every atheist will reject religion, given what religion typically is and which is captured pretty well in the definition above.

We’re not debating the definition of the term religion, but take a look at the definition for atheism. That’s what we’ve been discussing, what does it mean to be atheist?

This reminds me of my favorite Richard Feynman quote:

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

"For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it."

Or, indeed, any religions.

gag, pet peeve of mine. Religion is, to quote TeMPOraL "Religions based on the Bible tend to be half faiths, half community management handbooks."

you can generalize that statement very far; religion is one of the key "technologies" which allows communities to scale past 5K people. Think "city".

Thus religion has a very different purpose than physics. It is about psychological health on a community and individual level.

The stories of physics, on the other hand, "eerie ideas such as force field, wavefunction, observable,..." don't really tell you much about how to handle things when your neighbor's barking dog is frustrating you.

(insert snarky comment about engineering a force field to solve the problem)

Even assuming that the bible is the literal word of deity, it is inconsistent to believe that the creation stories of genesis are descriptions of actual physical processes. because that is not why deity put those stories there. because deity was talking using a language which is 1.5-3K years old (let's agree to not argue dates, I'll accept the date you prefer), and words like "world" and "universe" meant something very very different back then than they do today. So if it is deity's literal word, then it must literally mean what it meant in the context of that earlier culture.

https://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2009/08/size-doesnt-matter-...

TLDR: Importance does not equate to size, just as space does not equate to mass nor mass to value (value being the particular distribution of elements within a mass).

Given the sheer scale of it all, statistically there must be uncountable ants, and human-likes, and gods, and gods OF gods. Do we understand 'em? Of course not. So we make up human-scaled stories about 'em. What would ants say about us?

> BTW: The numbers involved in each description are also telling. Those used by religions are often small and comfortable for a human mind...

That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies[1]

1. https://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/22-17.htm

It's certainly possible to have a religion that accounts for the grandeur of the universe, and there have certainly been many religious folks whose religious experience is heightened by their understanding of the cosmos, but I'd guess those folks have put a fair bit of their own efforts into such belief because IME the common teachings of the major religions imply that the actions of the humans that live in a tiny slice of history in a tiny piece of the cosmos are of major significance. I would argue that perceiving some of the grandeur of the universe may make it difficult for the most common teachings to really resonate without significant modification.

Also, for folks who are drawn to religion primarily due to "spiritual" experiences they've had with the religion -- where they experience a loss of self, a one-ness and connected-ness with others, and a distinct sense of clarity -- it may be that having a very similar experience in a non-religious context may lead to new beliefs about what that experience is or means.

It depends on what theism is to you. For many people [0] believe in God is tightly intertwined with the idea that this supernatural being has strong opinions about how life on Earth is to function. And it's hard to believe that when you look at the scale of the universe and how small our lives are relative to it all.

It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives. But it isn't a very "useful" belief, in the sense that it's a belief with no practical implication.

[0] certainly those who grew up in Abrahamic religions, I'm not familiar enough with other schools of thought to comment

> It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives. But it isn't a very "useful" belief, in the sense that it's a belief with no practical implication.

It would imply that God has limitations, which goes against the usual view (at least in abrahamic religions) of god being unlimited by definition. It would also invite the question of where those limitations come from. If that's not a practical enough implication, there would also be: dont rely on God for personal attention.

I think we're in agreement. What I meant by no practical implication was that if I'm an atheist and then I learn that there is in fact a God, but he's either too busy, limited, or otherwise uninterested in my life, then I can shrug off that information with no negative consequences. It doesn't matter to me if there's no God or if there's an uninvolved God, except as an academic question (ie no practical implication).

But if I'm an atheist and I learn that there's a God that cares about me or my behavior then I will likely have to change my lifestyle. Maybe I'll have to start praying, or giving charity, or stop stealing, or start dancing around a fire now and then so that the rain comes, or marry in a certain way, etc.

It's no surprise to me that the popular versions of God-belief out there describe a God that's very involved in Earthly affairs. Because otherwise, what's the point?

Many or most religions are concerned with what comes after life. To many people, that is the point.

Exactly. To my knowledge most religions teach that what comes after life depends, at least in part, in what we do during our lives. In other words, God is concerned with us and how we live on Earth. Which is remarkable, given how large the universe is and how apparently insignificant we are.

Why is it remarkable? The point is that (in Christianity), God is all-knowing, and doesn't suffer from the same limitations as humans, or ants.

> It's possibly to believe in God and think that God is too busy with the cosmos to be concerned with our tiny lives.

A counterpoint is this idea:

Imagine how much awe you feel on realising that the awesome scale of the universe is nothing to the even awesomer scale of God who can give personal attention to everyone's tiny lives throughout the entire universe!

Agreed. A religious person coming to terms with the magnitude of the universe either feels a humbling awe or struggles to reconcile the unbelievable idea that God made all this and is still interested in humanity.

Most religion is a way of explaining what can’t be explained through reason. Back in the day it was “Persephone is in Hades and Zeus is throwing angry lightning bolts” but now that we’ve figured out a lot of science, religion just talks about unfalsiable stuff like the creation of the universe and the afterlife. Not a stretch to imagine that those things are as imaginary as all the rest

It's not a direct relationship, but IMHO an indirect one.

Personally for me it is basically like this, that the Universe is so infinitely huge, somehow just calling it huge doesn't do it justice, wherein the concept of God or Gods as is defined by most Earth religions seems too tiny to describe an entity or a race of entities that could be the real God or Gods.

Moreover, even if the above mentioned entity or race of entities does exist, which created the Universe, I'm so infinitesimally tiny that they don't care about me, and certainly don't care about whether or not I pray to them.

In other words, the human concept of God or Gods is just one level above the humans. And, then if you add the fact that this one-level-above is also just a matter of faith and there is no evidence even of that, then the whole thing crumbles.

In other words, whether or not there is a God or Gods, has no bearing on me and my life and me and my life's decisions are not going to be bound by that.

Whether that is atheism, or being agnostic, or something else can be left undefined. It's more like, I don't care. It is simply that my life's decisions are not going to be in any way influenced by whether or not God or Gods exist, whatever the right word for that is.

BTW, the Hindu cosmology [0] does delve into such philosophical things, and perhaps my Hindu upbringing has something to do with my beliefs wherein asking such questions and pondering over them is allowed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology

It's more like, I don't care. It is simply that my life's decisions are not going to be in any way influenced by whether or not God or Gods exist, whatever the right word for that is.

And yet here you are, spending your time and energy making the decision to post on an internet forum about whether you believe God does or does not exist. Seems like you have been influenced and you do care.

If you truly didn't care (roughly the same level of care someone puts into their thoughts on unicorns and leprechauns), you'd spend exactly zero energy talking about the subject. Keep searching and testing for the truth my friend, it is out there.

Interestingly, I know many scientists who take a general theistic worldview (might I say universeview?) despite (or, I think, because of) this vast universe. But their perspective generally has little to do with organized religion and often in really just an intelligent creator, who may or may not share qualities with “God”.

Alan Watts talks about this idea in The Wisdom of Insecurity. I don't have the book to hand so this is the closest quote I could find:

“The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”

I'll try to answer your comment more directly. The other responses are good, but they're not exactly responding to your comment about the parent commenter's change from agnosticism to atheism upon learning the scale of the universe.

I've had a vaguely similar experience, but over a longer period, not a single "moment", and not entirely to do with the physical sciences.

They way I look at it is this: To ants, we are gods. We can provide an unimaginable bounty to them by simply dropping the remains of a sandwich. We can destroy their entire world with callous indifference. A step in the wrong place is all it takes to crush an anthill.

But do we care about an individual ant's good behaviour? No. Not in the slightest. I don't meet out punishment on one particular worker ant because it failed to respect the queen, or move enough seeds one day.

Simply put, we are so far removed from ants, so far above them, so much greater, that there can be no meaningful interaction of this type. The UN general assembly does not give a flying fuck about the misdeeds of a particular ant in some particular ant-mound in some particular forest, in some national park, in some country far away. Conversely, an ant can have no concept of the latest UN resolution's effects on international tourism and its side-effects, such as the likelihood of an increased number of dropped sandwiches in national parks. There is no though that an ant can possibly have that can encompass even a fraction of such concepts. They're simply too abstract, too advanced for such tiny brains.

Any God that could possibly have made a Universe as vast and complex as ours would be similarly far removed from us. We would be ants to such a God. Personal, individual communication of any type would be hopeless. A "relationship", as Christians like to say, would be absurd in the extreme. Ants don't have relationships with senators, or kings, or generals. It's simply unthinkable.

Science could study such a God, if it existed, but it wouldn't be entirely clear if it would be possible to actually gain a truly meaningful understanding. A superficial, surface knowledge, perhaps, but that is all. Prayer would certainly be an utter waste of time. Holy books could not have possibly be written or inspired by such a God. Rituals would be meaningless. Rites and celebrations would also be embarrassingly pointless.

I have had the same exact analogy of of God -> Humans -> Ants in my head for so long, that I can no longer remember if it was my own thoughts, or something I've read. I was literally taken aback when I read this comment. Did you read it somewhere?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLZW8Deq8vE

It's a pretty common analogy. I got it from https://youtu.be/rhFK5_Nx9xY?t=238

There are two basic reasons to give up on religion. Reason One: It's obviously silly. Reason Two: Some personal epiphany.

For a lot of people, Reason One just isn't enough. They need a story to go along with their revelation. They need to look at a picture of a galaxy, or watch their religious grandmother die slowly, or read about pedophilic priests, or whatever.

People are irrational.

I think it's because the more we learn about the universe in which we exist, the more and more apparent it becomes that we are not a special part of it, that there is so much more to it than tiny slice of space and time we happen to occupy. The universe existed long before us, and it will continue long after us. We are inconsequential. This is all pretty contrary to what most religions tell us.

Personally I have no reason to trust or believe what clergy say (they're as human as the rest of us and make lots of unverifiable claims), so all I have to go one is what we collectively discover about our universe.

This. I went to thinking the Universal God is more supreme than the Christian God

That's cool. I hope you can find and be satisfied with the materialistic explanation of the sheer awe you are feeling when you think about all these galaxies.

Jokes aside, atheism is a religion (as in fundamentalist belief system), and not a nice one either. Being agnostic probably keeps your mind more flexible [citation needed].

For me it worked in the opposite direction, the more I learned how all the World elements are connected, how laws of Physics made live possible, how those laws are connected with the logical rules that our World has to obey (like causality) the more I become convinced that all this had to be designed.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

―Edgar Mitchell

Thanks for sharing.

Jiddu Krishnamurthy’s 1985 UN speech also resonates here: https://youtu.be/qcga8ATBNh0

That's naive. Why would I let it go?

Firstly, contrary to Benatar, our lives are not "meaningless", even from a cosmic perspective. Our personal problems, concerns, relationships, and feelings are in no way less significant merely in the virtue of the size of the (multi)verse. Your feeling of pain is still pain, whether the universe contains billions of galaxies, or is just 10 light-years across. Same with joy, same with health, everything.

Secondly, our lives are certainly not inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The whole future of the Sun depends on whether humanity's descendants exist long enough to develop the technology to stop it from going nova and gather its energy. If Earth is indeed the only planet in the observable universe to contain life, then our lives are of tremendous significance. Either we live and hopefully, build grand Kardashev IV-utopia among the stars changing the universe completely, or we go extinct.

I mean... the second law of thermodynamics says we’ll go extinct no matter what we do eventually.

There’s no denying that the heat death of the universe is a pretty depressing idea.

> stop it from going nova

Somehow preventing our sun to swell into a red giant is also only a short term and meaningless problem in the grand scheme of things. You would have to prevent the heat death of the universe if you want human mankind to exist forever or accept that things will eventually come to an end.

One step at a time. First, we make our sun eternal. Then, we fix the universe.

Or flee to an alternate universe

Even if we assume we could somehow do this, I would recommend you to watch some Star Trek episodes with Q. Living forever can be even more depressing than to live one finite life.

And I'd wary against generalizing from fictional evidence. As much as I love Star Trek, it has one hell of a anti-life-extension, anti-transhumanism bent. Perhaps because it's a story about humans becoming a better people, and for it to be directly relatable, it has to involve humans like us - unmodded, whether by genetics or technology.

I mean you can use your own brain and think about the idea of living forever and the consequences it would have. The more I think about it, the more it becomes a depressing idea at least for me.

I've done that a lot, and I find it an optimistic idea. Sure, we'd need to refactor some things in society to root out the hidden structural dependencies on life expectancy being double-digit years, but other than that? I see mostly upsides.

(And in terms of boredom, because I'm guessing that's what you allude to by invoking Q: you can always decide to end your existence after you get bored with eternal life.)

It's about meaninglessness. Maybe it's just me, but things (including life) that are finite are valuable and special for me. Also in terms of Lord of the Rings I would rather be a human or hobbit instead of an elf. But I respect elves and get your point, it's just not for me.

Eternity is an overwhelming concept. It's easier to tackle it through mathematical induction.

Can you imagine a day in which you feel so fulfilled, so bored, that you say to yourself, "it's enough"; a day in which you wouldn't be interested in what tomorrow will bring? I can't. Hence, by induction, I'd prefer immortality.

I'm probably not going to change your mind, just sharing the elvish perspective.

Naive you are, if you believe life favours those who aren't naive

And, to nitpick: the sun will never go nova.

This method used to work for me, but i don't know lately it's barely even touch my feeling about the very vast universe, and how tiny and unsignificant we are.

Because the universe around us is unreachable, for a long time coming. It simply does not matter to our daily life that we are insignificant. We can observe, explore and expand knowledge. But never touch the surface of any other planet or feel the warmth of another star. Your neighbor matters more to your life than the Andromeda galaxy.

Not even the closest star changes or affects life on Earth in time scales relevant to us. For all intents and purposes we are an isolated microcosmos, save maybe some astronomic catastrophes unlikely to happen within humanity's span of existence (which isn't even a single million years yet).

Nobody's Life Matters

I don't know I've always found this line of thinking bullshit.

First the only thing you will eperience is your own life. The only things that should "matter" by definition is the thing you can have influence on and will be important for your life. Why something you can't have influence on (space) should matter in how I make decisions ?

I agree with the general, bigger line to not get too much stress about random stuff, but in that case I prefer the line of thinking that short term problem are usually meaning less compared to the duration of of your life, than trying to justify it by the fact that "a universe exists".

Sorry for the use of "bullshit" if you're the kind to be offended by that

Every-day-bullshit vs. the enormity of life or the enormity of the universe; Maybe even vs. the enormity of the day.

Whatever it takes to get there, as long as you can get there.

We contain multitudes too. Inconsequential, no - a node in the fractal seat of consciousness.

We made something similar a couple years ago that zoomed out from earth and showed you what you'd be listening to if you tuned into radio waves lightyears from the planet.

http://www.lightyear.fm/

...It's two years out of date but you get the idea!

Just add 2 to all of the numbers and call it a day!

This is just too fitting to not add here:

https://xkcd.com/1212/

The scroll wheel and navigation don't work at all on Firefox.

I really hope Chrome doesn't become the new IE.

Maybe the DOJ will make Google spin off their browser so the web doesn't become Google's own version of AOL.

Ten more years of this crap and Firefox will be dead.

Did you notice the domain name?

It works fantastic on mobile safari. There’s no reason for it not to work on fire fox

Safari and Chrome both come from the same original engine. It's more complicated than that (there's a lot going on under the hood), however Firefox shares no code.

Does that excuse it? Last time I checked firefox did support using the scroll wheel on websites.

Works fine on my Fox.

I opened it in Firefox Android (my default browser) and it worked. Then I checked with Chrome and it gets an extra rotation axis.

> I really hope Chrome doesn't become the new IE.

Too late.

Ironically we who fought IE6 are partially responsible for this: if we hadn't done that Chrome wouldn't had a fighting chance and we had all had to deal with whatever Microsoft prescribed insteas ;-)

On a more serious note: if we allow the Chrome monoculture to continue I guess it will prevent the next big breakthrough for the web just like IE6 held back the web for years.

For those who doubt: Do you really believe Google will allow their developers to waste time on the browser once they own the market alone or do you think they will finally remove ad blocking and then go to maintenance mode?

It is now our turn to fight again just like we did against IE6:

- relentlessly bug any organization who creates websites or libraries that doesn't work across all modern browsers

- keep suggesting regulators look into the massive market position abuse that allowed Chrome to become as dominant as it is

- keep poking at Mozilla to remind them fix Firefox (it is still awesome but sadly a shadow of it former self on the extension side)

- keep reminding developers that this is about professionalism and also too important to leave to PMs and execs.

Finally: remember, when we started the fight against IE6 it was in many ways superior, in some ways more than Chrome today.

For your prediction to come true, Chrome has to stagnate, and there are several reasons to believe it won't happen the same way:

- Google is well aware of Internet Explorer's history

- Automatic updates mean that there won't be an IE6 problem

- Google's own web developers will push for new APIs

Assuming that history will repeat seems too simple?

Chrome does not have to stagnate to become the new IE6, browser monocultures are bad, doubly so if sponsored by an adnetwork megacorporation like Google.

Besides, if all other browser engines die, why would Google continue to innovate beyond their own needs? This is already the case except they still have minor outside pressure to innovate beyond that but barely.

I'm assuming you are not a FireFox user, otherwise you often (particularly here on HN where "fancy stuff" gets showcased) run into stuff that does not work for you. I suggest you try FF for sometime, you may find that there already is a problem.

> "fancy stuff" gets showcased

Often I find it is just as much utter carelessness: using Chrome specific hack that offers nothing in return and not doing even the most trivial test in Safari and Firefox.

Imho very true, which is exactly why Chrome can be called the new IE indeed.

It can still stagnate by only improving things Google considers important enough. We'll get new API's, but they'll be Google's API's.

The problem of IE wasn't stagnation, it was the proprietary "features" it was implementing instead of following standards.

Chrome becoming the "new IE" doesn't mean becoming "bad", it means becoming closed and uncooperative. It means pushing it's own weirs APIs on the web while simultaneously refusing to implement other vendors' ideas. And that is exactly what Chrome has been doing for years.

All of the 3 points you mentioned are exactly reasons why Google has been so successful at taking over the web and will continue to be in the future.

- They know how IE died, so they've embraced the openness just enough to avoid any kind of backlash regarding new features,

- the automatic updates mean web developers can jump on new features immediately without having to wait for them to propagate, giving other vendors basically no time to catch up, and

- the fact that Google's websites account for a gigantic percentage of the web traffic and are unavoidable for most people, means that even if web developers want to wait for broader support of new features, Google's own websites can implement them immediately and force their users (==almost everyone) to Chrome.

You forgot:

-- keep reminding users that Google is literally an advertising company, that makes billions of dollars spying on everyone to sell hyper targeted ads.

Chrome is essentially spyware.

Yep. I forgot. So lets add:

Every letter you type into the address bar in Chrome goes directly to Google[0][1].

If they don't log everything you ever put into the address bar it is either:

- because of the goodness of their hearts (heh)

- because they haven't gotten around to it yet

- because the marginal privacy they could squeeze out from that isn't worth the complexity, storage and processing cost and the risk of getting caught red handed.

PS: If I sound annoyed, yes I am. There's no one you despise more than those you used to love but who betrayed you, right? ;-)

[0]: for autocomplete, but still true.

[1]: this is true for the default settings in modern Firefox as well, but there I can always easily flick a setting and get ny search box back. (Maybe you can do something similar in Chrome as well but I don't know as I only ever use it for compability testing and for websites that just doesn't work in ny other browsers, -and I only do that if I have to and typically after complaining to whoever I can get hold of, just like I did with sites that only worked in IE.)

> Every letter you type into the address bar in Chrome goes directly to Google

This can be turned off.

> Ironically we who fought IE6 are partially responsible for this

There is some truth to this, but in a different way: after IE6 was "beaten", it started falling behind in terms of features and the web dev community as a whole (myself included) started caring less and less about IE compatibility, I suspect partially because we disliked IE on principle.

Fast-forward to Chrome's launch and it felt in many ways like going from IE to Firefox. Devs started dropping FF support just like they did with IE, not entirely realising, that the situation was much different: whereas the first time, we were going from a worse closed browser to a better open one, we were now abandoning a worse open one for a better closed one.

I'm of course not blaming this on the web community. The open-source license of Chromium made the switch feel safer, but despite the code license, the decision-making process behind the browser is far from open. Now that I think about it, this is starting to sound familiar... Something about Embracing..and Extending, with a third E-word rising up at the horizon, but I can't make it out quite yet.....

The scroll wheel and navigation don't work at all on Firefox.

Looking at the source it's using three.js 62. That's from 7 years ago. This explains a lot.

What's happening is that back in 2013 Chrome and IE used the non-standard 'MouseWheelEvent' while Firefox used the at-the-time-non-standard-but-is-the-standard-now 'WheelEvent'. Chrome 31 switched from MouseWheelEvent to WheelEvent[+], but that came out in Nov 2013, so when this was written it required some additional code to do cross-browser mouse wheel events (jquery.mousewheel.js in this page's code). Presumably something in that jquery plugin is still trying to do browser API detection and fires the old Firefox wheelEvent rather than the new standard version.

It's a shame no one from Google went back and maintained the code for this really, but we all know how Googlers feel about maintaining old code. :)

[+] Around 2012/2013 there were actually three competing mousewheel events - mousewheel[1], MouseWheelEvent[2], and WheelEvent[3]. XKCD 927 applies here (https://xkcd.com/927/).

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/mou...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseWheelE...

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WheelEvent

EDIT: Looking at the source of the plugin it also checks for "DOMMouseScroll" and "MozMousePixelScroll". I'm glad we have a standard for this now. Jeez.

Thanks for debugging this! I'll see if I can fix it

Looks like the Wayback Machine first archived this in August 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stars.chromeexperiments...

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

That just represents when it moved from http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ with a link to http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars to its own subdomain. You can see it at https://web.archive.org/web/20130130122749mp_/http://www.chr...

Thanks! Looks like November 2012 then: https://web.archive.org/web/20120415000000*/www.chromeexperi...

On Chrome, the scroll wheel is reversed, which leads to a very unintuitive result.

It works for me on Firefox 81 on Debian 10.

Notes on implementation:

https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000st...

One of my favorite games, Elite Dangerous, has a fairly to-scale representation of the milky way in it: 400 billion stars.

One of my favorite things is to wander around the galaxy in the galaxy-map mode in VR in that game.

if you want to zoom out much further try https://celestia.space/

my favorite feature is drawing the lines of the constellations joining the stars in 3D (they look all different from the other side!)

It's a beautifully rendered visualization. Bravo!

Another application in a similar vein is Microsoft's amazing and now-open-source WorldWide Telescope, which also has "guided tours" and will let you drill all the way down to searching professional research on objects of interest.

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

The text box overflows beyond the screen on mobile.

And then if you select Desktop mode everything seems to get stretched in one direction as if it isn't correctly getting the aspect ratio

Feels broken - it doesn't react on the scroll wheel (Firefox).

> chromeexperiments.com

So? It doesn't mean it shouldn't work anywhere else if implemented properly. It has vibes from the "Best viewed with IE" era.

Should everything be built for the least common denominator browser? Where do we draw the line? And what's special about Firefox.. Should browsers like Opera Mini or others have everything work?

If firefox was missing apis to make features work than its fine. I don't expect webusb or webmidi sites to work on firefox. I do expect that the scroll wheel works though.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706016 ; it was built in 2012, before scroll wheel events were standardized.

Broken scroll wheel detection sounds like a sloppy job, not a problem with finding a common denominator.

Ahh, life.. it is odd, unique, and many other things.

It is fair to say one commonality among humans is that the thought of death is a frightening one to many, right? Being rid of existence for the rest of _eternity_ sure can be a powerful thought.

For whatever reason, it seems like this is often a one road thought. What I have personally heard much less of (and never once growing up in a religious setting), is this:

Is the thought of existing for the rest of _eternity_ not equally frightful?

Death is comforting. No more responsibility. Just nothing. It's bliss.

How are we ever going to navigate that? Is Google maps going to have all the stars aswell? Is it going to have all the roads on all the planets around all the stars?

Here is the 140-character JavaScript version of the Galaxy and stars:

https://www.dwitter.net/d/2342 (rotating galaxy) and also https://www.dwitter.net/d/631 (navigating through the stars)

Really shows the crazy scale. It puts all the planets on exactly the same plane though, dont think that is quite right.

And they excluded Pluto! Guess it's just a faint memory now :(

All planets are aligned within a few degrees actually. Pluto’s orbit is angled quite a bit if i recall correctly (which maybe was one of the reason to kick it out?)

The main reason is that Pluto is an outlier by size, and then we've discovered many more similarly-sized objects...

The fact the universe is largely "flat" always blows my mind in these sorts of wider views.

A memorable video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kwcokUFaqo

What you're you looking at here, in this wider view, is the galaxy, not the universe, FYI.

It looks like an ancestral duplicate. See https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=chromeexperiments.com

This is awesome, would love to see this with some better take on brightness. If you look at Sagitarius A* when zoomed out it’s super bright but then it disappears when you zoom in at the Sun. That clearly doesn’t add up.

Someone built our interview question :) Asking candidates how they would build a site similar to this (without necessarily all the bling) has been a great way to understand how they approach architecture problems.

Do you seriously ask this?

Really great! Could use increased sensitivity on the mouse scroll wheel.

Agreed. Also too bad mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work at all on (my) Firefox/Win10... then again it's a Chrome experiment so the fact that it works at all is nice.

This is amazing. Definitely something I will look at to relax when I feel stressed with this startup life.

Would also love to see a technical write up about how you implemented this. Great creative work!

User sayovard put the link above. Thought of letting you know. Good luck with your startup work.

https://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/casestudies/100000stars...

I feel like I should have paid for that experience, it was magical!

Also a very elegant use of the font Lora.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lora

I hope devs can add further zoom out so we can see a cluster of galaxies instead of just the milky way and that will be even more mind blowing for people to see.

Is the map accurate a few stars out of the sun? Star concentration seems to be higher near the sun. Or is that just something done for visualization purposes?

Wouha ! This visual universe magnifying lens is super fluid on my two years middle range Smartphone. I am amazed.

Looking at the title I first thought this was some success story about a project with 100k GitHub stars

I really feel the words of L. Krauss when he says that the universe is romantic, in the deepest sense.

It says Voyager is 17 light years away. That's a way off.

Idea and visuals are great, but needs some proofreading.

This almost gave me a panic attack even though i usually like this type of stuff.

Don't let the domain name misdirect you. It works really fine in Firefox ;)

nice... seems to work in Safari (Mac) despite being chromeexperiments.com

Well Blink [0] is based on Webkit [1], so Chrome and Safari share a fair amount of DNA.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Forking_by_Google

Blink and WebKit are not very similar anymore.

The fork was 7 years ago and since then Blink has been heavily changed including a whole new layout engine (LayoutNG), a new painting system, a redone compositing system, a prioritizing task scheduler and a bunch of other architectural differences.

Chrome has also used a different compositor backend, painting backend, and JS engine compared to WebKit since even before the fork.

That demos like this work on Safari is probably more about web standards, web platform tests, and where developers test than engine lineage.

It looks like this demo is at least 7 years old, so it would have had just as much chance of not working on modern Chrome as on Safari.

Works great on iOS Safari too, on my iPad Pro. Impressive.

OK, this is amazing. A mesmerising experience!

If you found that neat, then give Elite Dangerous a try. Its galaxy map is a bit similar to this, but you can click on any star to zoom into it. It contains a large set of of actual stars, and the rest is filled in using an algorithm that takes real physics into account.

Zooming in on the centre of the galaxy really gives you an feel for just how crowded that part of the galaxy is compared to where our solar system is located.

Funny you mention that - I had a particular urge to play Elite after seeing this!

Sweet

Can’t believe this doesn’t have full Lynx support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com