smelling the roses

[Mitch Cronin]

Got a second? ...

...if you do, try this thought:

If you take a dime and hold it up to a clear night sky, facing you, at arms length, so that it covers as much space as it can at that distance from your eyes, ....and now consider the number of those dimes you'd have to have to cover only that sky which is visible to you at that point in time.... and then you were to get a really superfabulous telescope and zoom in on that tiny space of darkness in the center of the D where it says D. G. REGINA, on that dime... and you zoomed your lens.... again... and again... you might find this sort of view...:

(That's the Hubble "Ultra Deep Field" shot http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/r...04/07/image/a/)

...Nearly every object in that photo is a galaxy... a galaxy contains billions of stars... can you imagine how many galaxies might be behind that dime? ...or, how many stars? ... and then, how many dimes? ... and we're up to a reeeeealy big number...times ten to the zillionth or so stars!

many of them could have planets with life.

Here's a galaxy about twenty five million light years from here... featured today on this site: Astronomy Picture of the Day

"The Pinwheel Galaxy" or "Messier 101" (M101)

Cheers.

[Moon The Loon]

Hey Mitch: That was deep!

Prior to Hubble being "fixed" for its incorrectly ground mirror(s), someone thought to point its deep-field telescope at a point in the sky where they "KNEW", for a "FACT" that nothing existed and they ended up with an image containing about a thousand galaxies that were not supposed to exist.

Truly amazing and only the very beginning of an explanation of the concept of infinity itself.

[Mitch Cronin]

Somewhere on that site I linked, you can get a high res version of that photo... Another thing that wows me is the notion that you're seeing billions of years back in time! All of those stars in all those galaxies have aged by up to 13 billion years (I think that's what I read) since they looked as they do in that picture!

[Don Hudson]

Thanks Mitch! A perfect post for a summer's day!

I wonder if there are other "pale blue dots" out there in those bhillions and bhillions of stars in bhillions and bhillions of galaxies...? Here's ours below, and what Carl had to say about our dot:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

You'll have to click on the image to enlarge it. "We" are the tiny pixel in the last vertical band on the right, about half way down...

[Canus Chinookus]

when you even come close to fathoming the incredible number of stars, many of which will have their own solar systems, you can believe that there's life out there. There's more than just a few scientists that think life is the rule, rather than the exception in the cosmos. Sagan certainly was one of them.

[Specs]

I would venture that given the infinite possibilities, no two of anyrhing are alike. If there is life it out there it won't be anything we will be able to fathom, recognize, or communicate with. (Not without a universal translator of course)

Some would even venture to say it would be a scientific disappointment if there was life out there. Ok - it's just me that says that but it really would be sad to know the possibilities have a finite limit.

[John S.]

".  . . .  To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Of course Carl neglected to mention the Mitchnick factor which, by all accounts, defies not only the laws of common sense and gravity but can actually distort time and reality.

Perhaps the reason Carl ignored this phenomenon is that he wants to spend his finite time on this speck of dust dealing with matters that are solvable.