From one photo, we know there are at least one hundred billion galaxies | Hacker News Reader

From one photo, we know there are at least one hundred billion galaxies

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58 pointsFlemlord48 comments

Can you imagine being there when these images were first compiled and revealed? I would have gaped in disbelief, and then wept. From a minuscule patch of nothingness, bottomless infinity has been glimpsed. It's unfathomable. And it's out there, right now, part of our existence. How awesome and thrilling.

How humbling.

And this is where religion gets it all wrong, the claim that all that was made just for us is so totally off the wall that I find it hard to believe that religion is changing so slowly to reflect the reality as we know it today.

And this is where religion gets it all wrong, the claim that all that was made just for us....

Are you thinking about some particular religion, or religion in general?

Most western religions, judeo-christians + splinter groups up front.

Their continued over simplification of the cosmic truths that are literally staring us in the face make it difficult to engage in reasoned debate.

Have you read Thomas Aquinas in the original? Or even Maimonides?

There's a reason some minds stand the test of centuries, if not more. Those on the TV today are mere flickering quarks. Those whose names we still utter are galaxies of thought.

I think it's a mistake to dismiss, out-of-hand, the thoughts that lie at the foundations of Western civilization. Religious organizations have always been run by humans. Yet those structures also sheltered and promoted the arts and sciences for hundreds of years without a democracy in sight.

Consider: Your last statement is an example of itself.

Rejecting religion doesn't mean rejecting the religious.

Excellent point Robg, I take that back.

Thanks for the insight, seriously.

What I think is great about religion is its ability to inspire people to go over and beyond their normal view of the world and to use it as scaffolding to reach higher planes of thought or art. I think JS Bach is a great example of that, but there are plenty more, in just about all fields of human endeavor, including science.

What gets me though is the bigotry and the use of fear and other cheap and demeaning tactics that use religion as a control instrument for large numbers of people.

This is where I have a real problem with religion, my feelings are that if everybody would stop for a little while to pander to the humans that claim to have a wire to their variation on the 'invisible man in the sky' that we might be able to concentrate on the real problems at hand.

Imagine the amazing stuff that could happen if a truly enlightened man became a religious leader (say, a Pope in the spirit of the Dalai Lama or something to that effect).

A lot of damage has been done, now it is time to go fix things, and fix them without being shackled down by the past, but carrying along the lessons from that past.

"a truly enlightened man", IMO Jesus was that man (and more) - but I know what response that will get here.

The point is not that a great leader come forward but that we choose to follow and imitate the greatest goodness, wisdom, kindness, self-control and love that we encounter.

I'm fairly sure that if Jesus Christ would walk the earth today that he would not be one to make it very high in the ranks of the various churches in his name.

I don't doubt your word that he was an enlightened man but for some reason those tend to get wielded out at a pretty early stage, they'd upset too many holy applecarts.

He wasn't exactly best friends with the sanhedrin (sp?, the powerful self-serving hypocritical religious leaders) in His day either; they turned him over to the Romans to be crucified after all. Upsetting holy applecarts was pretty much his thing ...

A lot of very smart people believed in the supernatural (especially before Darwin).

That doesn't mean that there is any credible evidence to support the existence of the supernatural, though.

That's because you're looking for natural evidence to prove the supernatural. If such evidence existed, it wouldn't be supernatural.

And this is where religion gets it all wrong,

Not my experience.

The biggest thing that I have learned from my religion is that there is that in the universe that is mysterious, bigger than us, and incomprehensible. Hubble Deep Space provides excellent supporting data.

Interesting, what religion would that be ?

That sounds like a worthwhile variation on the theme.

I would prefer not to derail this great thread about Hubble with further talk about religion. I'll be happy to share my thoughts if you contact me off-line.

I had an identical reaction when I found this website.

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/

something similar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

Religion does not say "made just for us"; religion says that the Universe is one of the examples of the infinite creativity of the Creator.

BTW, new stars are 'born' continuously.

Depends on the religion.

The Hubble ultra deep field is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I would've wept with you.

I still think Douglas Adams explained it best.

"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."

In a strange way, I think it gets the point across better than a precise description like "one hundred billion galaxies" ever could.

This was the one for me: "To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered. Some invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts."

Like TP, he had an amazing penchant for explaining the unexplainable :)

TP ?

I'd guess Terry Pratchett.

Ah, ok, I was thinking along the lines of Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking...

Terry Pratchett is entertaining but he can't hold a candle to Douglas Adams. It's more like he's found a formula and markets the hell out of it (he's a good businessman though!).

Terry Pratchett is correct. The man has created an imaginary universe, interlinked and interweaved across dozens of stories. His definitions on quantum and time are interesting and amusing at the same time. His frustration at the limitation of language with regard to these subjects too: "It is very difficult to explain quantum in a language designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is". Apologies for the OT post :)

If our language (I'm thinking English, I'd be interested to hear of variations) is for telling people where the ripe fruit is, how come we don't have specific [common] words for so-unripe-it-will-give-you-indigestion, not-quite-ripe, ripe-enough, still-needs-to-ripen and so-ripe-you-can't-pick-it - they'd be very useful in foraging situations?

I guess /auf Deutsch/ they'd all just be compound words?

I could make some up in German. But that's not fundamentally different from placing adjectives in front of your words in English.

After thinking about it for quite some time, I've decided that, in my opinion, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the most important picture ever taken. While many argue that non-repeatable and awe-inspiring human events should be the root of "the most important picture," the HUDF shows that no matter how significant those pictures might seem, they are absolutely nothing on the scale of what really exists out there. A grain of sand on an infinite beach. I have never encountered any other picture that comes close to inspiring the simultaneous fear, awe, and wonder that this picture inspires. Thoughts?

> Thoughts?

Why does it inspire fear?

Because there are far more terrorists than originally estimated, of course! And many more children to be thought of.

Fear as in the flip-side of awe: the realization as to how insignificant you are, on some level.

What about the WMAP? It studied the CMB radiation and gives us evidence of the big bang, a flat euclidean universe, the amount and type of matter in the universe, and even more!

Sure, the ultra deep field is cool, but in importance the WMAP picture is waaay more important.

Based on my (limited) understanding of cosmology, this is only the number of galaxies in the observable Universe . The number of galaxies "outside" this region is effectively unknowable. Could someone who knows better clarify?

I don't necessarily know any better, but I think that we can probably estimate the number of galaxies in the entire (observable and unobservable) universe given the assumptions that the composition of the universe is generally homogeneous and that the big bang theory is correct. If this is the case, we can calculate an approximate number of galaxies from the combination of observed galaxy density and the extrapolated size of the universe based on the time since the big bang.

I'm not sure if you could find any larger assumptions?

Perhaps baryonic assymetry is only a local feature creating completely different structures in the observable universe. Perhaps past expansion is far accelerated or the acceleration increase and decrease over time. Perhaps "c" is not a constant.

The work of Barrett et al. "Undermining the cosmological principle:[...]" shows that minimal fluctuations in CDM does not necessarily show isotropy and homogeneity.

Add to this that observable matter is postulated to be < 5% of the universe and we don't really have a handle on dark matter. We don't even know for sure how many dimensions there are ... we're pretty clueless really.

Makes intelligent life seem quite likely

Perhaps, but the likelihood of a sufficiently advanced civilization who could travel through space/time to interact with us becomes much smaller when you consider our civilization as a whole is only a flash in the pan.

Yes but technology does not progress linearly. So to us it may seem so impossible by methods we possess, but it may be closer than we think to travel throughout the universe.

So a flash in the pan may be moot depending on the right technology.

For example captain Jack sparrow trying to locate a ship in the ocean may seem like a huge task, and today it would be too if we use the same method back then. But if that ship had a GPS tracker on it completely changes the way we look for the ship.

We/or they just have to discover the right trick.

I agree.

Imagine gathering the hundreds of people that worked on the Apollo missions and fitting them in the room that housed the project's main computers. They might all fit. Then tell them before most of them were dead they would be able to put all of those computers in their pocket.

Ok. Now imagine that we don't kill ourselves for the next thousand years. What are going to be able to do? What about ten thousand?

I'm going to state this, on behalf of all of humanity:

1) We're not alone. The universe is teeming with life much like this planet is.

2) What's technologically possible is bound only by the extent of our future imagination.

3) The planet will eventually be controlled by mild-mannered nerds like the ones reading HN. The internet planted the seed that will grow the tree whose fruits will destroy tyranny.

So it is written.

Thats an interesting bit. Thinking about numbers that is. But if you think about Singularity, it might seem like that might happen much sooner than you think.

You're free to state it, of course. But

1. While indeed we're likely not alone, I see no reason to think that the density of life in the universe is anything like as big as the density of life on earth.

2. What's technologically possible is clearly limited by the laws of nature, whatever they turn out to be. It could very well be that there simply is no way to travel faster than light, for instance.

3. I would be interested to know your evidence that the planet will eventually be controlled by mild-mannered nerds. (And: given your (1) and (2), isn't control of this planet rather a feeble goal anyway?)

Perhaps I'm just too much of a nerd, but I think it's important to believe things on the basis of evidence and reasoning, not on the basis of whether they feel good.

Travelling faster than light may not be the only way of getting around though.

Measuring your own time, you can get across the Galaxy as fast as you want to --- if you have enough energy. Of course you always stay below c, but the distance seems to shrink.

In "A Breif History of Time" Stephen Hawkins states that time travel isn't impossible. If you can travel in time, you can go faster than light -- in the sense that temporal relations (such as "faster") lose their absolute meaning. If I need to go 100 lightyears (and can travel at c), I'll transport myself back 100 years and hit start. To a by stander, I'd have gone there in zero time.

I think life is quite likely, because as soon as it was possible for it to form on this planet, it did. However, it took several tries and mass extinctions before civilization arose. On the other hand, the are several varieties of intelligent life, such as dolphins, octopuses, and crows, so perhaps intelligence isn't rare, but the right combination of traits needed for civilization are. ( communication, tool-building, etc...)

One thing I've always wondered about Hubble — if it's orbiting earth, scooping up protons for long periods of time, doesn't that mean it'll create a photo made up of the captures from every part of that small area....in the entire orbit? So two galaxies next to each other on the photo could be on the opposite sides of us really?

I really fail at cosmology…

They keep the telescope pointed at the same area of the sky of course. Stars (except for our sun) are so far away that both their real motion and their parallax motion (apparent motion of the stars due to us moving around the sun) appear very tiny. Hence the term 'fixed stars' from antiquity (as opposed to the 'wandering stars', which turned out to actually be planets one we got telescopes).

Parallax isn't going to cause much error here. We're about 8 light-minutes from the sun, but the telescope was trained on galaxies millions (edit: billions) of light-years away.

Edit: Proportionally, it's about the difference of the view between your two eyes, of the sun.

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