Are We Alone?

[Turborama]

Run time: 03:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QArB6u3LXQ4   Posted on YouTube: January 08, 2010 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: January 09, 2010 By DU Member: Turborama Views on DU: 5884

 
(Best watched on full screen in HQ)

When you look at innumerable galaxies in space, does it leave you feeling more or less lonely?

Hubblesite press release: http://is.gd/5VTVD

Full resolution JPEG (6455x2848, 4.11MB): http://is.gd/5VU14

Galaxy History Revealed in This Colorful Hubble View

An American Astronomical Society Meeting Release

JANUARY 5, 2010: More than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this unprecedented, panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly. This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, was made from mosaics taken in September and October 2009 with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and in 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The view covers a portion of the southern field of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), a deep-sky study by several observatories to trace the evolution of galaxies.


Image: GOODS/ERS2 Field

The final image combines a broad range of colors, from the ultraviolet, through visible light, and into the near-infrared. Such a detailed multi-color view of the universe has never before been assembled in such a combination of color, clarity, accuracy, and depth.

Zoomable version and more info available here: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/01/

Several other versions here: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/01/image/

Location of GOODS-S/ERS in the DSS

[Speck Tater]

1. Beautiful and inspiring video. Thank you for sharing. nt

[sulphurdunn]

2. If Einstein was right,

and the velocity of light is constant, the universe could be teeming with sentient life forms that we may someday hear from the distant past but will never meet. There is a certain cosmological irony in that.

[OKDem08]

12. I don't really understand that.

Can you elaborate pls?

[HappyCynic]

14. Essentially...

Light and other forms of energy will have a limit to their speed. Any signals from most parts of the universe take many lifetimes to reach us, some potentially taking centuries or millennia. So, by the time we receive their signal, the species that sent the signal could be long gone.

[sulphurdunn]

17. Yes, and if they came in person

it would most likely be a one way trip. Even if they could reach 99.9% light velocity, time on their world would pass much, much faster relative to time on their vessel. If they returned, the world they returned to would be very different from the one they left behind.

[Rozlee]

29. I don't remember the program, but some scientist was talking about a theory

about "pulling" space from a starting point to the point of destination, so that light years could be circumvented. Sort of maybe using a wormhole or something to fold space between the two points. I know it'd be beyond us, but, maybe an advanced civilization could manage it. In any event, I once heard another theory that aggressive lifeforms usually either killed themselves off before they ever learned intergallatic travel, or they spent their scientific capital on warfare so that they never really sought to use it in space exploration. Well, for peaceful purposes anyway. So, the chances meeting with an alien lifeform that landed on our planet would be excellent that they'd be peaceful. Unless, of course, they had a cookbook.

[winyanstaz]

3. It makes me feel humble

The human race has been very arrogant in assuming we are the only planet with life.
It is time to try to take our rightful place as one of very many instead of as the only one.
We are so very tiny and we have been very careless with our home, this beautiful Earth.
As I also believe we are all aspects of the Divine..for me...it is also very awe inspiring indeed.

[AllenVanAllen]

4. We are precious and insignificant.

I love this quote from the film Contact:

Alien ~ You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.

Thanks for posting! :hi:

[tclambert]

5. The picture might have been better if the flash had gone off.

But the Vogon galaxy has a strict "No Flash Photography Allowed" policy. Stupid Vogons.

[zbdent]

27. and lousy poetry ...

I hear it's being played in secret torture sites in the Middle East ...

[baldguy]

6. If we are, it's an aweful waste of space.

[liberation]

7. The magnitude of the universe is such, that it is a certainty that we are not along

as a species we are pathetic, because we are the first self aware species in our solar system.... and yet we decided to just continue gracing at our navels, and waste our lives doing silly things like working ourselves to death to make other people richer. We based all our existence around hoarding useless crap and shiny metals. The kind of stuff which is completely irrelevant in the big scheme of things.

Since we decided to not only not leave our planet and explore the universe, but to actually actively trash it as to render our home almost inhabitable in the short term... we are doubleplus stupid. Such level of idiocy prevailing among our species leads me to believe that it is actually a good thing no alien race has made contact. I don't think it would take them long to decide to wipe us out and take over this wonderful planet, it is not as if we deserve or made a good case for our existence. It is cruel, but honestly.... history is filled with examples that lead to the conclusion that is much better to be the "discoverer" than the "discovered."

[peacetalksforall]

10. The stupidty and idocy I dwell on is hate and killing. We all get to see images of 'soldiers'

and 'invaders' and 'barbarians' and we mistakenly excuse it all and chalk it up to history, yet we redo killing, invading, and barbarian acts every day. The only thing that changes is the costume and technology.

I can't bear knowing how stuck we are. And how willing we are to stay stuck.

I don't feel that lonely when I know there are other people on the planet who reject and oppose killing, invading, and barbarian acts of believing they can rule the rest of us. I feel desparation that there is not enough love in everyone's genes to know we can connect with all our co-habitants.

Though I'm impressed with what we learn about our universes, it is as nothing if we don't understand why we continue to destroy and take and imprison.

Perhaps we are an experiment - 'genes' from different universes who were dropped off here see if we could get along. We are a living experiment, just like the rat and ant and human experiments we conduct.

All attention is placed on reproduction between 'off' partners - and based on prejudices of some people, all is focused on gender, race, wealth, royalty, status, tribes, geographical boundaries, heritages. We should focus on reproduction between 'hearts and souls'. do our hearts and souls match? How do we test for it since we don't know ourselves very well. We believe stuff like there will always be war. We believe a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense when thought about in the context of xxxxxxxxxx number of universes.

The beauty of our planet is the water and our potential. We've blown it and caused ourselves trouble over the water with more to come.

[V_Byl]

24. I feel the same...

It seems the only reason we ever left the planet was the cold war, and then to build some spy satellites (and well, DirecTV, lol).

I wonder what it would take to ignite a real passion to look outside our planet and actually explore space?

[CLANG]

8. I see that and feel a tremendous loneliness

Where are our saviors? If they exist, they are far, far away, and we are running out of time.

[sulphurdunn]

15. A savior is as close as the reflection in your mirror.

[junkyardbob]

19. Bob Dylan

Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters.

[Sander]

30. In Every Cubic Inch of Space - Walt Whitman

Our savior? He/She/It is all around us. We simply need to become aware, listen, and heed.

"To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle."
Walt Whiman

I like to paraphrase him:

God is in every hour of the light and dark. He is in every cubic inch of space. He suffuses the very air we breath. He is in us and we are in Him. He speaks to us through those magical "ah-ha" moments.

[Confusious]

35. No one is going to save you

We have to save ourselves.

This is one of those frustrating American ideas. I can fuck around as much as I want, Jebus or space aliens are going to save me, because I'm special.

[Aristophrenia]

9. If we could look in the opposite direction with as much ease

we may find the same galaxies within as we do without.

Space is our purpose - not God - humans have always explored and traveled, striven for understanding - perhaps now some of you can understand the passion of "Trekies".

[GrantDem]

11. +1

:thumbsup:

[StarfarerBill]

13. We're not alone, I think.

But it may be that sentient life is so uncommon, there could only be a few civilizations of any social/cultural/technological level in our galaxy besides our own.

Besides continuing to yearn for contact, this should teach to care for our own kind more; we're a rare and precious thing that this universe has wrought.

[Rozlee]

16. What really bothers me is all the signals that we've sent into space from TV

and radio broadcasts. If aliens can pick up those signals, they've seen everything we've ever broadcast from Hitler strutting around, to Bush mangling the English language, and to Sarah Palin and Teabaggers. I'm willing to bet the farm that we live in the low rent district of the Milky Way. If I were an alien, I'd want to keep the riff raff on this side of the universe, too.

[Cartoonist]

28. SP & the TB's

Fortunately, even at the speed of light, those images won't reach anyone anytime soon, and I'll be too long gone to be embarassed by them.

[TheEuclideanOne]

18. Unfortunately, even if we transport 20,000 light years away, we find SPACE BEARS!

Apparently, the only life form is Space Bears, as demonstrated by one of the worst movies of all time, Savage Planet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqWVw-upnvQ

Words can not express just how bad this movie is, but all I can say is that it became one of those movies that is so bad it is alot of fun to watch. On a semi-related note, I googled Savage Planet recently and one of the first links was to DU. Pretty cool to see DU coming up in non-political topics.

[wroberts189]

20. And now for something completely similiar....

knr

Galaxy Song - Monty Python - The Meaning Of Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44DlSj6bnn4&feature=related

alternate

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



Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,

And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

[Goldstein1984]

34. Thanks for that!

I just opened up my iTunes and I'm probably going to be listening to "Monty Python Sings" all day.

[wroberts189]

44. Your welcome. It always cheers me up ..in these times. I hope it does for others...

On edit the whole "meaning of life" movie has messages that hit even harder today then they did when the movie came out.

The part where a bunch of oppressed office workers turn their building into a pirate ship and tear down and plunder Wall street with file cabinets as cannons... amazing.

[susanwy]

21. When will we ever learn?

Contrast this video with

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x421407

Why do we spend so much of our energies killing instead of exploring?

[Enthusiast]

22. I look forward to the day

we get a message from somewhere else. I hope it happens soon.

[RedCloud]

23. Andromeda will kill us all and nothing will remain of the Milky Way. Then ???

Super-galaxies will keep moving further apart until the light no longer reaches other galaxies.

And yet I feel from an anthropological perspective, who are we, who have barely crawled out of our caves to issue such final reports on this universe without knowing other dimensions or multiverses?

Further still do we expect aliens to have eyes, ears, etc.? I think sense organs would be by the billions in a universe and maybe they are "itching" to tell us something, but our "itch" collectors only get scratched and the message lost in our fingernails.

I bet new galaxies will pop up from unknown underparts of this universe.

[V_Byl]

25. Great video, great thread...

Just thought I'd add this video on YouTube, the known universe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

[onehandle]

26. We're not alone, but none of them have ever been here. nt

[gorfle]

31. More Lonely.

As our science evolves the scale of our universe becomes clearer, and it is staggering. If the speed of light is insurmountable, we are doomed. If the speed of light is insurmountable, we will never have meaningful communication with any other life forms in the universe. They are simply so far away that communications could take thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years - if they are possible at all.

We need a revolutionary discovery in physics or we are utterly alone no matter how populated the universe may be.

[and-justice-for-all]

32. I never have thought we were alone in the Universe...

Life is out there, intelligent life too, because the odds are in its favor.

[midnight]

33. This is so promising. Thanks for sharing...

[Goldstein1984]

36. One word: Goosebumps

I kicked off my science education in 1980, the year Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" was released. It was before a person could own their own library of videos, so I put a cassette tape recorder by the television and recorded every episode, which I listened to over and over between the times PBS would rebroadcast the series.

Long before I saw the first Hubble Deep Field photograph, I was well aware of how big the Universe is. I cannot know, but I believe that we are not alone in the universe. I believe that Life is probably a law of nature: Where appropriate conditions exist, life will evolve.

But if we are alone, if we are what Carl Sagan called the Universe's way of becoming conscious and asking questions about itself, what a pitiful job we are doing as a species. So few of us have dedicated ourselves to understanding; so many of us represent the seeds of our own destruction--an end to what may be the Universe's only chance to know itself.

[ihavenobias]

37. K & R, very cool. n/t

[ChiciB1]

38. A Total Mind-Walk For Me!! I Wish I Had More Time In The Day To

delve into all of this, it's so fascinating and I know so little about it! Considering that MOST political news is so depressing for me these days, I should probably just switch over!

Unfortunately for me, I'm an addict when it comes to politics! My need for knowing what's going on in D.C. seems essential because it affects my daily life, and I can't tear myself away from that!

There are times when I think following politics could cause me to have a real heart attack because of all the stress!

At any rate thanks for posting, I find the information awesome and wonderful! Once a devout Catholic I don't know if I'm an agnostic or atheist these days! Seeing science like this makes me wonder even more.

[wial]

39. to me it looks like cottonwood seeds scattered on the wind

and like my avatar said, we must have faith in a seed. however, it's not so great for the individual seeds. How many intelligent species survive their own germination? Either not too many, or they'd be here, or we're the first in this particular galaxy, as Fermi pointed out. Or else a few, but they long ago learned to let new species sink or swim because helping the bad ones was like helping a cancer, and all indications are we're one of the bad ones. It must be agony to be one of the good ones, having to hold back, if that hypothesis is true.

So I'd go with "more alone".

[GreenStormCloud]

40. Yes, there is somebody there. No, we will never meet them.

There are billions upon billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars. (Borrowed from Carl Sagan.) That is so many that there has to be other intelligent technological life somewhere, somewhen. But visiting around is a different story. In that aspect, we are forever alone. And that is a good thing for the diversity of life.

Let us suppose that travel from star to star was possible. One star would have developed the ability long before us, while we still had dinosaurs. That star would have colonized other stars, who would have then sent out colonies, until the entire galaxy would be filled with that species of intelligence. We humans would never have had the chance to develop beyond lemurs.

[Desertrose]

41. How can anyone look at this and not think out of the box?

What we think we know about the universe(s) is the "tiniest possible" fractal of what there is to know....oh right...fractals are infinite.
:)

Really inspiring and exciting images!

[penndragon69]

42. There's No intelligent life here!

That would explain why more advanced civilizations have avoided our little orb that
sits out on the Galactic rim.

The only reason they allow us to exist is as a future food source for their own gourmet meals.
What, you think an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs? It was really just harvest time
for the livestock that was living here!

Sleep well kiddies!
The Harvest is coming soon!

[Johnny ramone]

43. Wow !

I'll never look at my little finger the same way.

[EnviroBat]

45. Not so much alone, I feel less significant.

I guess it makes me feel sad about how little of a purpose we aspire to have. In all of this vastness, there has got to be more to the life we've been given here than what we are doing with it.

breed
work
create
destroy
die

[Tripper11]

46. Same feeling for me EnviroBat

I just felt extraordinarily humbled. I know that there is something more out there. If it's just us, then we're fucked. And I don't think we're fucked.

[EnviroBat]

48. I sincerely hope that we're not fucked...

I just wish so much that they could reach us. Or that we could reach them. In such a grand experiment, why were we placed so impossibly far apart? Is the ultimate challenge set before us to advance in our technical and cognitive abilities to bridge the gap of time and space, ultimately making contact? As a race of beings, or lives and trajectory would be so fundamentally altered with the discovery of other life out there, that it would lift us from the quagmire of our own self-induced coma of human existence, and give new meaning and value to everything we are.

I can hope...

[coti]

47. Now that's perspective.

And so much closer to truth.


Absolutely blows my mind.


No, we're not alone.