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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

It's impossible for me not to wonder how many species of life are in this photo, intelligent or otherwise, and things we can't even begin to imagine. The hostile environments, the ones blossoming with beautiful calm, and the frightening distance between everything in the photo where basically nothing exists, I'm having trouble even processing what I'm looking at here, it's just so... vast.

I'm excited to see what the other photos look like but even more, for what the next 10+ years of space photography might reveal.

If I could wish for one thing, it'd be some vast improvement in black hole photography. While I appreciate the recent achievements in even being able to capture a black hole on film, I imagine a photo as life-like as the simulated black hole in Interstellar would make it hard to not get emotional seeing such an incomprehensibly powerful object in great detail.

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Looking at this photo, I mean it is beautiful, but we can’t wrap our head around the maddening violence of space. It’s so hostile to life, and earth has us biased towards a peaceful outlook, but space is maddeningly violent and inhospitable. Imagine approaching a black hole and being spaghettified a great distance across where you have to endure many years of physical & mental torture before being destroyed at the event horizon?!

This actually just gave me a super dark thought, I do wonder if any "life" has experienced being pulled into a black hole over the last few billion years.

Yeah I mean time breaks down and you experience everything in slow motion and are stuck circling a black hole for what seems like an eternity. It’s unlikely to happen to anyone here on Earth, but you are right, there’s the likelihood of other life getting stuck in these things.

Depends on your solution to the Drake equation. But unless you think life is universally unique to earth, I’d say it’s quite likely. The universe is big, if there’s any more life, there’s a lot of it, and models predict there are lots of black holes out there in every galaxy.

> Imagine approaching a black hole and being spaghettified a light year across where you have to endure a thousand years of physical torture before being destroyed at the event horizon?!

This would only happen for very small blackholes, and even then from your point of view time would act normally.

Is there any evidence for time dilation though? My 1000 years number is a rough guess, and it could be shorter or even longer than that. I was thinking since physics breaks down that you would have to endure being spaghettified whilst still being able to feel and have nerves intact and thinking capacity.

Relativity means time slows down for an observer, not for the observed. You would see the universe around you rapidly speed up and eventually die.

> Is there any evidence for time dilation though?

Yes, but it's irrelevant.

> My 1000 years number is a rough guess, and it could be shorter or even longer than that. I was thinking since physics breaks down that you would have to endure being spaghettified whilst still being able to feel and have nerves intact and thinking capacity.

For an outside observer it might seem like a long time, but not for you.

Even if your brain is perceiving time normally, even if you’re not experiencing enough acceleration to be crushed yet, I really don’t want to think about the effects of a severe time-dilation gradient on the rest of the body.

You would have been cooked by x-rays before that happened.

According to this video, the spaghettification doesn't happen until the last few seconds/minutes, when you're close to the singularity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rTv9wvvat8

Assuming that a reasonable fraction of the planets have life, and then some non-vanishingly small number have intelligent life, this photo contains millions or even billions of planets with intelligence.

The Star Trek vision of the future is a handful of contacted races, all very distinct.

This.. this is nearly a continuum of possibility. Political systems? This image has them all, and every intermediate, outlier, and axis explored. Warfaring? There are more than likely a million battles being fought in this image, right "now". A trillion-trillion soldiers and weapons systems of every kind, and every kind in between. Flying tanks. Hover artillery. Underwater helicopters. Nanobots. Microbots. In-between bots. Every kind of bot.

The numbers are just... unimaginable. You could chart every aspect of these civilizations with smooth graphs, much like the Stellar classification chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification

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