For Those Who Insist We Are Alone

I know many here have heard all the agruments and numbers about the possibility of earth being the only planet in the universe which has any life, much less "intelligent" life.
I offer this article for your examination.

www.slate.com...

I have heard "one picture is worth a thousand words". If this is true, I challenge someone to convience me we are alone.
The article does not raise this question; I am using it to raise it myself.

a reply to: teamcommander

No, you're never alone...you will always have parasites and bacteria in your digestive system, so cheer up! You're not alone!

Seriously though, this gives me hope. To think that we are alone in the universe is probably a form of denial when faced with so many possibilities.

a reply to: teamcommander

What does the article surmise? A quote please, or the picture worth 1,000 verbs. Here is my favorite picture from Mars which seems to show we at least weren't alone at some point. (found by BuzzDungue, imagined by funbox)

I have never seen anyone 'insist' that we are absolutely alone in the universe...

Now perhaps I am missing something, but I see alot of people ask for definitive proof that we are not alone, but I hardly think that is the same thing.

a reply to: teamcommander

Every time I see that picture I feel so insignificant yet amazed.

Thanks for bringing it back into the light.

a reply to: teamcommander

I wonder what that picture will look like taken a hundred years from now.

a reply to: Aleister

I guess some times a few words would not hurt.

What happens when you take a 2.4-meter telescope, launch it into space, and command it to stare at one spot in the sky for a solid 14 hours, taking data both in visible light (like our eyes see) and infrared?

What you’re seeing here is a view of thousands of galaxies. Thousands. Sure, there are some stars in our own Milky Way punctuating this picture here and there but they are few, and just stomped flat by the number of whole galaxies you’re seeing.

And just in case I have not yet crushed your puny human mind, this image represents a tiny fraction of the entire sky; perhaps only one ten-millionth of it. That means there are hundreds of billions of galaxies like these scattered throughout the Universe.

You will just have to look at the hi-res image to get the best views.

a reply to: Aleister

I fail to see what this picture is showing. I believe we are not a lone but it has always been in the back of my mind that what if we ARE alone, Kind of a scary thought. But I think it will be a while before we are 100% sure we are not alone.

originally posted by: Snarl
a reply to: teamcommander



I wonder what that picture will look like taken a hundred years from now.

A hundred years is less than the blink of an eye in real universal time.
The perspective won't even change very much by then.

a reply to: teamcommander

I love the Deep Fields, and lament that Hubble doesn't make at least one of these a month. In the 1990s I was at a conference with the people who had initiated and imaged the Deep Fields, and meeting them was like meeting a rock star or movie star for other people (although I don't recall their names, so I guess not the same), the beauty in those pictures, let alone the science....why not one a month??? Or even longer exposures of the black areas within the pics themselves??? Give me the Hubble for a few weeks and things will be a poppin'.

a reply to: Shepard64

Keep in mind that we are lokking at "perhaps" one ten-millionth of the "currently visible" universe.
Take a moment to do the math.

a reply to: Aleister

Views like this make me want a craft with "warp drive" on steroids.
I think it would have Warp 20 as a coast setting.

originally posted by: teamcommander

originally posted by: Snarl
a reply to: teamcommander
I wonder what that picture will look like taken a hundred years from now.

A hundred years is less than the blink of an eye in real universal time.
The perspective won't even change very much by then.

I'd wager the resolution improves by a factor of a thousand. I'd wager we'd be seeing objects well beyond the accepted 13.8B LY limit.

What I'd really like to see is the direction those galaxies are drifting in. I'd also like to see what changes there may be to any gravitational lensing effects.

ETA: A hundred years may be a blink, but my eye doctor told me I was developing cataracts by noting changes over a period or three or four days.

a reply to: Snarl

I'd wager the resolution improves by a factor of a thousand. I'd wager we'd be seeing objects well beyond the accepted 13.8B LY limit.

No, because the light will not have had time to reach us yet. It is tantalizing, isn't it: we know that there is an entire universe beyond the "time horizon" in all directions, but we will never be able to see it!

originally posted by: DJW001
a reply to: Snarl

I'd wager the resolution improves by a factor of a thousand. I'd wager we'd be seeing objects well beyond the accepted 13.8B LY limit.

No, because the light will not have had time to reach us yet. It is tantalizing, isn't it: we know that there is an entire universe beyond the "time horizon" in all directions, but we will never be able to see it!

Just had a thought.
We are seeing light which left these "sources" a long time ago, right.
How many more "sources" are just, say, a hundred light years further away than these ? And in which direction?
I have always thought of never as being a very long way away.
Who knows what might show up in the next hundred or thousand years.

originally posted by: DJW001
a reply to: Snarl

I'd wager the resolution improves by a factor of a thousand. I'd wager we'd be seeing objects well beyond the accepted 13.8B LY limit.

No, because the light will not have had time to reach us yet. It is tantalizing, isn't it: we know that there is an entire universe beyond the "time horizon" in all directions, but we will never be able to see it!

And I'd wager Snarl's somewhat right, in that we'll figure out a way to beat the light race and see further out. Just because it seems impossible as set-in-stone law of physics, and at the mercy of current technology now doesn't mean we won't find a kick-ass cheat code in a century or two.

We are not alone.....
Have we been or have had contact....jury's still out.

One would have to be very egotistical to think we are the only life out there.

a reply to: teamcommander

WOW...this picture is too much for the human mind to really grasp...trying to comprehend the distances to each of these galaxies..how wide each are...how far away are the faintest....this has to be the most incredible photo ever!

originally posted by: Snarl

originally posted by: teamcommander

originally posted by: Snarl
a reply to: teamcommander
I wonder what that picture will look like taken a hundred years from now.

A hundred years is less than the blink of an eye in real universal time.
The perspective won't even change very much by then.

I'd wager the resolution improves by a factor of a thousand. I'd wager we'd be seeing objects well beyond the accepted 13.8B LY limit.

Not really. At least not with a visible/near-IR telescope like Hubble.

Due to the redshift, they'd have to keep looking at lower and lower wavelengths of light, deep into the infrared, then millimeter radiation before ending up in radio.

See Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

a reply to: teamcommander

I've never met anyone who insists we are all alone in the universe. Even highly religious people believe that beings exist in the spirit realm, which is evidently a part of the universe, or a higher dimension that we cannot as of yet directly access.