Another way to feel really small
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Sunday, 6th December 2009 at 5:55 pm
This one’s not quite as easy as the last way I gave to make you feel small because you don’t have Carl Sagan’s soothing voice narrating but it’s definitely something to think about.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo (left), one of the most famous photos taken by the space-based telescope, was taken over a period spanning from September 2003 to January 2004. During that period, the Hubble telescope pointed its cameras to a tiny region of the sky that appeared to be dark. Eleven and half days of exposure time demonstrated that the region of the sky, smaller than a 1mm by 1mm piece of paper would look if you held it at arm’s length, was anything but dark.
An estimated 10,000 galaxies stare back at us as they looked 13 billion years ago, less than a billion years after the beginning of the universe.
Take a minute to think about he consequences of an image like this. If there are 10,000 galaxies (not stars, galaxies!) in a tiny patch of the night sky, how many galaxies must there be in the universe? How many stars? How many planets around those stars? How many conscious creatures looking back at us through their own “Hubble telescope”?
Turns out many people have pondered this question before and one man, Frank Drake, even developed an equation to estimate how many civilizations might exist outside our solar system. Carl Sagan does a great job of explainig this equation here.
To get a good idea of how small a region of the sky we’re taking about, check out the video below. It starts off with the night sky as it might look like on a typical winter night in the Northern Hemisphere–with the three stars in Orion’s belt figuring prominently in the top left corner– and zooms in to the tiny patch of sky where the Ultra Deep Field photo was taken. Makes it really hard to believe we’re the only intelligent creatures in the universe though it’s far from definitive proof. I wonder how people will react if we ever received evidence of alien life?
Apparently the Catholic Church, for one, would be cool with it.
Long term memory or short term memory? Would you rather know who you are, or where you are?
I recently finished reading a book called “The Head Trip”, by Jeff Warren, a Toronto based thinker. It is quite a great read, I highly recomend it. Jeff takes a personal voyage through the scientific states of consciousness ( or “the wheel of consciousness”) and tries to obtain them all in a personal, but scientific method. A large part of his voyage is his quest for the lucid dream (which seems to be one of the hardest and most fascinating). The quote of the brain slicing patient makes (“like waking in a dream…everyday alone in itself”) reminded me of Laberge and Llinas’ report where they proved, “wakefullness and dreaming are largely equivilant states.” Jeff explores memory within sleep and the disfranchised….
Well, I think you should just read it. I’m going to again.
OOps this above response was for Brain Slicing. Sorry I’m an 18th century man.
OK now here’s a real resonse to “Another way to feel real small”. I’ve heard there are gold records on the Hubble, in case aliens have a turn table. They’ve put mostly classical music on it (good move Nasa, I’d rather aliens know us for Mozart than Mariah). But there is one rock tune out there, and it’s Chuck Berry. He’s so infectious, that Chuck Berry.