James Webb Space Telescope begins historic mission

[ovrszd]

But you do raise one of the great philosophical questions of mankind. What happened before the BB? Why did it happen? And many other questions we can only ponder but never really answer. The one that always gets me is the one of stepping through the scale of the universe. I am in this city on this continent on the earth in this solar system... etc until you get to "in this universe". But then what? What is the universe in? And then then next logical question of what is THAT in? And you get the idea of infinity. This is where people speak of God and multiverses and many other things that nobody can know. You can "believe" but you cannot know. But I've got my shop and my tractor and I am happy for that, so who cares?

Years ago I was watching Carl Sagan (sp?) talking about this very thing. He discussed the concept that we cannot definitively know what is out there. It might be that the BB was created by God and this is it. It might be that the Universe and BB is simply a by product of something much larger. It might be that our entire Universe is simply inside a Petri Dish in some laboratory and hasn't even been discovered yet by a much larger Universe, etc., etc.

Following the God idea. It's my belief that when we know these answers human life here on Earth will no longer be required. People say we shouldn't mess with Mother Nature. But I say if we have the ability to some day have all the answers, that ability was given to us by God and is the intent.

I'm still trying to grasp the idea that we are trying to look at more recent activity rather than older activity. Everything seems to be in reverse. Like looking in a mirror. Sort of......

 

[oldballs]

Good to see you posting Richard. ... about something of interest to you. Seems like the longer we're on TBN, the less we post. But I still read many threads just out of curiosity.
Cheers,
Mike

 

[oldballs]

I guess, if I really understood it or could explain it, I'd be God Himself............Not. Although there are reasonabale proofs of His existence and His divine wil, most of us just wonder about it for this life and the next.

So....I just have Faith in Him beyond my reason.

Cheers,
Mike

 

[ruffdog]

It is just unfathomable the size of the universe when you start doing the math. Then, when you start understanding the scope of it, a person wonders WHERE ARE WE? Where can something so big exist?

 

[/pine]

The space telescopes are great and they get a lot of publicity...but...IMO what is just as amazing as the expanse of the universe is the world (other universe) that is not so easy to see or photograph and that is the subatomic world...who knows what it might actually looks like?...It's likely a lot busier world than we think...!

Just on a related note...many have at least heard of "The String Theory"...there is an adage that tries to explain (in layman's terms) just how big a single "string" is...
It goes something like this:...IF you took a single atom and blew it up to the size of the known universe...a single string would be about the size of a tree on the planet Earth...! (remember, you are starting with a single atom)

 

[JasperFrank]

Its good to dream about things. Yet, in the last 50 years or so, we have found out a few discouraging things about space travel, other planetary colonization and space communication.
Given an N size of one, Earth, the possibility of life, as we have defined it, is a certainty, cause we have it here. The possibility of life else where, is also a possibility, but it is a very, very, very, small one. Its so small, that a normal distribution would, likely put any other life, well outside of our reach, and more importantly, outside of any realistic time frame to understand it.
The "Has to be other life," is in a sense a false argument, if the target or signal is even a few million light years away.
I use to like Carl Sagan's concepts, but as I've got older, it seems he was very good at fueling imagination and selling books to dreamers. Ya gotta make a living.... somehow, and he focused his on SETI.
SETI has never found a radio signal of any kind. We've been to Mars and not found anything that remotely looks like a fossil. The likelihood of finding evidence of life in the outer planets, just gets less likely.
Then you have to look out side our solar system. This means life, as we define it, had to originate independently. It can't survive interstellar space for even our closest solar system, Alpha Centauri, which IS only 4.3 light years away, but any mass from that Solar system getting to ours, is still a million year plus, journey, given the speeds of typical bits of rock that some how just managed to be ejected from that gravitational well and captured by our solar system.

 

[oldballs]

To me, all this search for SETI with no finding of such, just proves how special and wonderful our planet really is. That doesn't mean that we should abandon SETI. Probably a lot of good things (technological) have come to mankind from such research...and it keeps a lot of high tech guys off the street.

 

[JasperFrank]

The one shinning light to come out of SETI was the implementation of distributed data analysis using a home computer's spare time at night or as a background program. I took part of that search, and downloaded and up loaded many units. Of course then super computers, got so much better and cheaper to buy time on, and Paul Allen kicked in some big money, for a supercomputer time lease, and they ran thought their entire data set in a few months. Finding nothing and confirming that no one else did either.
But the distributed analysis tech was very interesting, and still is valid to look for patterns in other data sets for research that is not well funded. You have to vet these new background programs though, cause its a great way for a scammer to set up a bot.

 

[BravoXray]

The one shinning light to come out of SETI was the implementation of distributed data analysis using a home computer's spare time at night or as a background program. I took part of that search, and downloaded and up loaded many units. Of course then super computers, got so much better and cheaper to buy time on, and Paul Allen kicked in some big money, for a supercomputer time lease, and they ran thought their entire data set in a few months. Finding nothing and confirming that no one else did either.
But the distributed analysis tech was very interesting, and still is valid to look for patterns in other data sets for research that is not well funded. You have to vet these new background programs though, cause its a great way for a scammer to set up a bot.

I ran Seti@home on a couple of my computers for a few years. Berkley is using the same platform to run other analyses like protein folding.

 

[Diggin It]

To me, all this search for SETI with no finding of such, just proves how special and wonderful our planet really is.

Or it proves we're the worst of the worst and were cast out as far as possible from everything else beyond range of any hope of contact ever again.