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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

This image makes me feel a lot of emotions.

I don't know if its the same with others.

Just wow. The technical achievement is out of this world. Kudos to the whole team.

But the image is just..

Each of those points of light is a galaxy, we are looking at trillions and trillions of galaxies, across the entirety of the visible sky (this image is from an area equivalent to a grain of rice held at an arms length). It is terrifying to even fathom if we are alone or not.

Also, the Hubble Deep Field image took weeks. This took a mere 12.5 hours of exposure.

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You are not alone [1]. My emotional response to this image made my spine tingle and was almost tearful. Just trying to appreciate what I'm looking at will take me some time, appreciating all of the hard work and raw science that went into this less so.

As an 11 year old, watching the moon landing, I lived and breathed all things NASA and space related. Now, as I near retirement, I feel just as privileged to view this image in the same way.

[1] I wonder if the work of the JWT will impact Drake's equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

It absolutely will. One of the big advances in the past two decades was the discovery of exoplanets, and at this point we've discovered enough of them that we can get reasonable constraints on their frequency (along with sketchier constraints on Earth-like planets). That alone removed one of the major uncertainties in the Drake equation.

JWST will be able to make far better measurements of exoplanet atmospheres than any other telescope, so this should start to constrain how many Earth-like planets have atmospheres with biological signatures. These constraints will remove the next big uncertainty in the Drake equation.

Absolutely. The resolution of the spectral plots in yesterday's images was amazing.

Me too, and it really saddens me that I am mostly met with shoulder shrugs and rolling eyes by friends and family around, most of them with graduate university degrees too... I was really excited about the images releasing today.

It's inconceivable, looking at it gives me a feeling of derealization. God doesn't begin to explain it. We're some primates on a speck of dust why all of this then? To me it looks like a hall of mirrors. It's like looking at a procedurally generated image in a simulated universe.

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