Euclid finds complete Einstein Ring in NGC galaxy

Who said anything about being depressed? It’s a fact, we are insignificant in the universe. Less than a rounding error. I am simply acknowledging it.

It doesn’t make me feel like anything, other than trying to imagine the universes’ vastness - in an attempt at futility. I don’t think my mind (or any human mind) can ever truly fathom it.

The image in question is likely a blow up of a point in the sky that’s 1mmx1mm, about the size of a grain of sand, and it is rich with many many galaxies, way more than we can see - if you account for the vast and infinite depth. The Milky Way is said to have 400 billion stars. So if there are a 1000 galaxies present in the image, that’s trillions of stars in a square mm of the sky.

I think it’s pretty darn empowering to think your life’s problems mean that less, one part in numbers so large I can’t even pronounce. Don’t you think?

"Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better." -- David Deutsch

The existence of one is usually an indicator of more, especially when the sample size is low.

If we were the only “rational” beings (all of past, present, and future), that would clearly be some feat!

However, if we’re to bet on our limited evidence that this is true, we’re likely not to flourish as we might.

Just remember, there are more stars than sand, and more time than not.

We are surely not the first observers of this reality (however “rational” or not), and likely not the last.

That is just a massive ego trip, no? Very similar to scientists of old who posited that humans were special amongst the other animals in having intelligence. Well turns out all animals are intelligent just the same way, we simply lack the communication skills to understand one another much. Every time someone makes an argument like this I can't help but feel it's like a child saying they're the best at something because they haven't seen anyone else better.

Until proven otherwise, I think of humanity as The Ancients in the universe, and we have just gotten started.

I actually feel like it goes to say whether we are significant or not is irrelevant - your life is the only life you’ll ever experience, and it is of penultimate significance to the universe you will ever experience.

I'm with you on this. Until proven otherwise I'm going to assume that we're very, very special, maybe even the point of the whole thing, that all of it is necessary just so we can be here. More of an excuse to not mess up what little we do have control over.

> The other might be more humbling: how significant are we? Or, as a statement instead of a question, we are the only significant thing of which we know.

We may assume that we are the only intelligent life in the universe and that life on our planet is highly significant. Humanity itself faces a great challenge in finding its way. We are currently in a dark period of our evolution—one where we have mastered a great deal of technology to make our lives materially comfortable, yet we have not mastered the "demons" within our minds. We fail to control them as individuals, and even less so as societies. These demons were instilled in us by natural evolution, serving us well until the Neolithic age. But in the modern era, they have become our greatest enemy. At this point, the biggest problem facing humanity is human nature itself. We stand on the brink of destroying our planet in numerous ways. Humans have already caused one of the greatest mass extinctions of large animals in Earth's history.

One argument supporting the theory that Earth is the only planet with advanced life is the growing realization of how many rare conditions must be met for life to emerge. In the past, scientists believed it was enough for a planet to be located within the habitable zone of its star. We are now beginning to understand that this is merely one of the most basic requirements among many others.

Earth itself has come close to losing all its life on multiple occasions—such as during the Snowball Earth period—despite the Sun remaining stable and the planet still being within the habitable zone.

One crucial factor for sustaining life is a planet’s internal magmatic activity, which must be powerful enough to generate a stable magnetic field. This field protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by solar winds. Additionally, it seems that magmatic activity played a key role in warming the planet during its early years when the Sun’s radiation was weaker. In fact, the gradual increase in solar radiation over billions of years appears to have offset the decrease in Earth's internal heat, maintaining the planet’s temperature within a range suitable for life to thrive.

However, Earth's prolonged and vigorous magmatic activity appears exceptional, likely because a colossal collision with a rogue protoplanet—the event known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis—not only formed the Moon but also injected an enormous amount of thermal energy into the young Earth. This impact created a long-lasting magma ocean phase, effectively resetting the planet's internal heat and driving rapid mantle convection and differentiation. Such enhanced magmatic activity contributed to the early formation of a stable geodynamo, which has sustained Earth's magnetic field and, consequently, its atmosphere over geological time.

For all we know, Earth may be unique in the universe, but we are far from certain enough to make such a claim.

The other possibility is that intelligent life exists elsewhere, but the barriers imposed by the speed of light—combined with the unimaginable vastness of the universe—may render it impossible for advanced civilizations to find or communicate with one another. Who knows? Perhaps the universe was created by some form of intelligence that ensured life could develop, but only in such rare and distant pockets that no two civilizations could ever reach each other, or even communicate.

EDIT: expanded the paragraph about the big impact hypothesis.

You probably found a video discussing Olbers's paradox <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox>.

The CMB is uniform, so if you go back far enough that is true (and apply a blueshift). Amospheric disturbances would smear out a lot of it though, so no points like in analogue thermal noise.

And that’s simply the part of the cosmos that is not obscured by our own galaxy. we are seemingly quite lucky to be positioned where we are in it

Strangely enough the analogies that scale earth's orbit to ~centimeters and nearby stars to ~kilometers actually makes me think we're not that far from other stars! Once you scale it back up and start thinking about travel times measured in ~generations I'm humbled again.

Are you describing a video by codyslabs by any chance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk

I guess I shouldn’t have that expectation. Perhaps it’s because on Earth we see nearby objects aligning with each other because they have been shaped by similar forces, or because they influence each other. But perhaps galaxies don’t interact with each other enough to result in any kind of alignment.

> why would you expect galaxies to NOT be randomly oriented?

Well that depends on what your intuition about randomness is, doesn't it?

Flipping a coin is not random, but you can't tell me the answer before it happens.

Similarly, galaxy orientation is not random, but predicting the world we perceive is perhaps not so easy.