Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwilim | Hacker News Reader

"Humanity's" distant past seems like quite a bit of a stretch here. I guess the word is there for clickbait factor

Yeah I was a bit annoyed at that one, generally I find ArsTechnica's clickbait not that bad but this one bothered me.

Like I get what they were going for, but unless we know that the matter that we are made of is there in this image than it is a scientific inaccuracy that I wish we did not actively spread.

Now I know that we are looking into the past here, but unless my understanding of space is wrong the only way this would actually be true is if our sun (and other related material) moved faster than the speed of light.

At least that is how I read the headline, that the image shown is (or would be) the material that makes us up now.

Using gravitational lensing I imagine it's possible to get an image of the earth from the distant past, though difficult to get everything lined up right. In a more trivial sense, you could take a mirror to the moon then take a picture of it from earth and you would have an image of earth from the mysterious past of a few seconds ago.

The way I read this was "The Webb telescope just offered a view of starbirth that sheds light on earths distant past," it's accurate in that sense (our star was born and we're not sure how exactly) and agree could have been worded better.

I think it is annoying because it's so arrogant. Ok fine technically you can say anything is humanities past in the sense that it's in the past, but it's presumptuous to act like we have ownership of something so wildly broad. I think it would still be presumptuous to connect it to us even if it was about the history of our own sun or to pre homo-sapien geology, this is just even more so.

    We are stardust, we are golden
    We are billion year old carbon
    And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

    Well, then can I roam beside you?
    I have come to lose the smog,
    And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning
    And maybe it's the time of year
    Yes and maybe it's the time of man
    And I don't know who I am
    But life is for learning

Thinking of those lyrics, and realizing Apollo 11 was just a few weeks before Woodstock, makes the "maybe it's the time of man" have a bit more punch.

79 and still alive... what a text.

I think "view of our distant past" would have perhaps expressed the idea the best in a less clickbaity way

Not really, it's believed the hydrocarbon clouds are a precursor to possible life formation, and that it's possible that's exactly how our solar system was formed in such a way to produce life on Earth, which is inarguably the precursor for humans. So to say this is looking at something that happened similarly in our (human) distant past is at least accurate based on our current understanding. A bit sensational, perhaps, but I wouldn't call it clickbait.

Then "life's past" would have been better ?

Yeah can't really argue with that, you're right.

I feel that it is disingenuous in the same way that it would be disingenuous to write an article about neolithic agricultural practices and title it "How Google Came to Be." Are these things causally related? Yes, they are. But that doesn't make them topically related.

More like "The History Of Technology" and discussing signs that ancient animals attacked each other with rocks.

Humanity is the amazing process of stardust into life.

Without heavy elements from collapsing stars we can't exist, so in a real sense the birth of these stars is a very early step in humanity's existence.

It's very romantic. The part that is a little meh is where it's equally true for every other process.

Is that so meh though? The same parent processes have created both stars and sea slugs.

It’s like saying we’re descended from the Big Bang. It’s a non statement because literally everything is.

It is interesting how every specific thing that happens has essentially zero chance of happening though- heh

It mainly talks in general terms about a beautiful image.

There's nothing about humanity's distant past or even the universe's past at all.

This is a filler article, at most.

Agree. I love space and space photography but this title is very clickbaity. Tiring

Has our society always run on clickbait or has the internet just made the fact visible?

Clickbait = temptation, if you want to get religious about it. That's what demons always do in the stories. They tempt. They assault the saint with powerful clickbait.

The immediate precursor are argubly sensationalist newspaper frontpages. Carefully chosen so as to sell the entire paper.

But only tabloids would fairly consistently cross the line that distinguishes a "vivid account" of something from something borderline false.

You could say that the internet, more specifically the need for "virality" engineered a race to the bottom that turned publishers into tabloid sites.

One thing about the internet is the globalness. Nothing's local anymore. All news, all advertising, is competing with a million others for your attention, instead of just a local dozen.

It's like having a hundred people in your living room all the time.

No. It has always been present, but there used to be a greater respect for accuracy and knowledge, and much writing offered to inform the reader than activate their emotions ('eg just offered a revelatory view' implying that this is somehow time-sensitive news).

If you want a clear but depressing example, visit a digital archive and contrast issues of scientific American from the beginning and end of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade it offered a serious presentation of science news/insights for a general audience (more accessible than an academic paper, but still requiring work to read, similar to a textbook). By the end of the decade standards had fallen considerably as their audience shrank and they went in the direction of greater 'accessibility' with more gee-whiz articles, columnists etc, and even introducing a larger body text font to reduce the content while maintaining the same page count.

It seems to me that the main drivers were popular access to the internet and a general drop in attention spans, along with the proliferation of cable TV channels during the same period, and the rise of '24 hour news' outlets like CNN and Fox News, both of which are cancerous. Television in general is trash, with an endless focus on effects and visual gimmicks designed to hypnotize rather than inform or educate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com