Hubble images compared to what we had before Hubble was a much bigger difference than the JWST images just released compared to Hubble. JWST images are amazing if you know that it took significantly less time to get much sharper images but it is not like pointing to what used to look like an empty part of space and finding all those galaxies there.
I can somewhat relate as a lay person. An incredibly smart friend of mine (was one of my college professors and has a deep knowledge on a vast number of things) has been posting about this and it has helped me be in more awe of the images. Here’s some of what he has commented after posting the first JWST photo.
Blockquote
Each of those are galaxies containing billions of stars. That picture is what the telescope can see of the tiniest speck of the sky (about the size of a grain of sand that you hold on your fingertip at arm’s length from your eye).
Blockquote
I went to a Brian Cox lecture a few months back and mind was blown.
There are about 2 TRILLION (with a t) galaxies in the visible universe, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. And who knows how many galaxies of stars there are beyond the cosmic horizon (because the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, radiation from any galaxies past that visible horizon threshold will never reach us and we will never see them). And Cox painted a picture of our universe being only one tiny bubble in a veritable champaign glass of universes, which started getting almost mind bending-ly trippy.
1 Like
This is kind of where I sit on the “Where are they?” question.
Simple anaerobic life seems like it might be relatively easy to kick off, but complex life needs oxygen. The only reason we have free oxygen in our environment is that for some reason an anaerobic bacteria, the first cyanobacteria, eventually mutated to start pumping out O2 as a waste product. This seems like no big deal, but O2 was ridiculously poisonous to pretty much every other living thing at that time (google “great oxygen catastrophe”, it’s quite interesting). It’s miraculous that anything survived, let alone thrived, in this environment, and paved the way for multicellular life.
I think this confluence of events goes a long way to explaining “The Great Filter”. We truly are alone.
3 Likes
I am not at all convinced life is common in the universe despite the size off it. We still don’t know how it started at a time where we have figured out an awful lot of other complex things. I am ussuming we are alone as long as we don’t know how it started and haven’t found it anywhere else.
The problem with this is that it seems very unlikely that life will proceed from single-cells all the way to human-like intelligence. Even with humans, we dropped to a bottleneck of a few thousand individuals 70,000 or so years ago, the species nearly died out before we could achieve civilization. So if you’re saying abiogenesis is a once-in-a-universe event, you have to reckon with the fact that you’re saying we then went on to hit another millions or billions-to-one shot on our one try. This would make sense if we’re in an infinite-universes multiverse situation, then everything is going to happen eventually no matter how unlikely. But if we’re not, then it’s most likely that the emergence of simple life is relatively common.
In short oxygen is third most abundant element. Helium is inert and hydrogen is far less chemically reactive than oxygen so can’t do much of the stuff oxygen can do.
It reacts with damn near everything when it’s in gas form. O2 gas is only in the Earth’s atmosphere because it was produced by life, and it would go away if life stopped. If there’s a lot of O2 in the atmosphere on some exoplanet, you need to explain where it came from.
My dumbass guess has always been there is tons of life all over the universe on the millions or billions of earth like planets. And when it evolves to be so advanced that one entity can destroy the whole thing at a whim, that happens before they become advanced enough for interstellar travel.
That’s a good question. I was just parroting what I had heard, so have no good answer.
The aerobic (oxygen-using) pathway to ATP (energy) formation is much, much more efficient than the anaerobic (without oxygen) pathway.
This also requires the existence of something like mitochondria, which is another Great Filter-like important milestone on the road to complex multicellular life.
In our understanding of life sure, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be life based on things other than carbon and water
1 Like
Cool
2 Likes
I just assumed JJ Abrams was involved in developing the images.
1 Like
Shiny new telescope already got dinged.
Caught the second half of this NOVA the other day. Going back for first part now. I only vaguely remember the loose nut deal. How the hell did we ever get this thing up?
1 Like
2 Likes
Ah well, the ISS had a good run.
https://twitter.com/bbcworld/status/1551938019355201540?s=21&t=nXSs-T39d6whZTzxqzu-_w
I’m mainly surprised they hadn’t already done it.
I think the money was already budgeted.