Hubble Deep Space Field Images rendered into 3D
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAVjF_7ensg

Seriously one of the most awe inspiring things I have seen in my lifetime. Considering the scale of what's going on in it, I'm absolutely awestruck. Amazing thing, science is.

Simply Amazing. It's a pity there are scores of people out there spouting garbage to their children like the earth is 10,000 years old.

Right? But to me it's not even about that with what this is. This is just amazing that there is SO MUCH out there that is "undiscovered" by humanity. I mean you think of the human race as being really advanced and then you see something like this and it makes our entire species seem like it's back in the stone age.

What really makes me sad is that theres like a 0.00000000000000000001% chance that we will even see any of those things in our lifetime. Sucks hard. You know how awesome it would be to see extraterrestrial life? I mean there are BILLIONS on galaxies in that picture with BILLIONS of stars per galaxy. We are but one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy out of the entire universe, there's no ******* way there isn't life out there.

Sorry for the rant too, but this video just made me think so much about everything for a good hour or so. (Not high >.>)


EDIT: Another thing to wrap your brains around is that the light in that picture is 13 BILLION YEARS OLD. That means that that image of that galaxy is taken a mere 700 million years after the creation of the universe. Viewing that image is basically like using a telescope to look directly into the past for a history of our universe. If they go just a tiny bit further, they can see exactly what happened during the big bang. How nuts is that shit?

I think that picture actually gives me hope as to how much we actually know. Sure, there are places in the universe that we haven't seen nor will we probably ever see it, but the very fact that we can build a telescope to see something like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is a monument to the accomplishments of man.

Well yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. We know a LOT for what our species considers knowledge. Like comparing back in the BC times and everything to now is absolutely ridiculous, but then you go and show something like this and it's just like "Hooooooollyyyyy shiiiiiiiiiit :O" We know an awful lot, but when you look at something like this it just seems that we might posses like 1% of the knowledge of the universe.

Wow, so beautiful and breath taking.

When I was in sixth grade (about 12) I was outside and I watched this mentally slow kid throwing rocks into the sky. I was curious as to why he was doing that so I asked him, he replied I'm hitting the sun. There was no way for me to explain to him any thing different, so I just walked away. In life there are many people like him, just with different things and just as impossible to change their mind.

thinking about the shear scale of the universe is a complete and utter mind ****. there was a video i saw once that showed the scale of the planets in our solar system, and then zoomed out to bigger and bigger stars. the biggest star made our sun look like a little spec.

i agree that there must be some form of life out there, but i seriously doubt theres anything advanced enough to travel from galaxy to galaxy. even traveling at light speed, which would be impossible for any object to achieve, it'd take millions of years to travel from one galaxy to the next. plus the fact they'd have to actually know theres life here, first before traveling that far.

im sure they may be super advanced beings that have colonized several planets over the course of thousands of years, but im sure it'd take billions of years for a lifeform to expand across a single galaxy. by which time you'll have millions more species because of how they would evolve to the conditions of each planet.

just think, if humans were somehow able to colonize mars, we'd have to evolve to adapt to the extreme conditions. the new colony on mars would develop new technology to fit with the environment, before long they wouldn't be humans any more.

Except we'd probably just terraform Mars.

I won't make it but I've always wanted to live to see our entire solar system colonized.

On the topic of this, as some pointed out there must be intelligent life out there somewhere but then, there is also a good chance hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of advanced civilizations have existed and have simply died off.

Awesome. How insane is it that a photon can be traveling at the speed of light for 13.5 billion years... that is so much god damn distance traveled. Even the closest galaxy to us is ~80,000 light years away, which means it would take 80,000 years, traveling at the speed of light to get there. That gives me very little hope that we will ever get to truly "explore" space.

Agreed. I think it's pretty logical to assume that if there is other intelligent life out there, then there has to have been intelligent life that died off as well.

What does that even mean?

Yeah, for all intents and purposes, with out a radical change in how space travel is thought of, it seems like we're pretty much stuck in this solar system. With terraforming techniques we could live on Venus and Mars too, but I can't even imagine what it would take to make Saturn or Jupiter habitable. Can you imagine how much space there is in this system though when compared to just Earth?