<i>This makes me feel small, sad, and alone.</i><p>One man's opinion.<p>For me, I am grateful I live in a time when I can use a human invention to view images, taken by another human invention, of galaxies 13.5 billion light years away that probably no longer exist and be educated enough to sit down and calculate in terms of miles just how far those specks of light have traveled.<p>Aristotle, Caesar, DaVinci, Newton, Kepler, Napoleon, Faraday and Einstein never saw what I have seen from my desktop.<p>Sad? No. Privileged.
"Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is."<p><a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Ga...</a><p>And, really, this picture is just a fraction of a fraction of the down payment on the concept of <i>big</i>: This is merely an illustration of how big one galaxy is. <i>There are eighty billion galaxies.</i> [1]<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe</a><p>---<p>[1] Tune in tomorrow for a new estimate, of course.
"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and more steadily we reflect on them; the starry heavens above and moral law within. . . The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a little time provided with vital force, we know not how. The latter on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense--at least so far as it may be inferred from the purposive destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaches into the infinite." (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788)
Try this if you want to feel really small AND really big at the same time: <a href="http://htwins.net/scale/" rel="nofollow">http://htwins.net/scale/</a><p>WARNING: You may become nauseous, dizzy and afraid if you sit playing with this for too long.
Am I the only one that sits and thinks "wait, I can barely get my local AM station to come in clear enough to be understood - how could any signal possibly be distinguishable beyond 1 lightyear?"
This kind of stuff always blows my mind away.<p>How insignificant we all are, in the grand scheme of things.<p>(Then my mind overflows when I ask myself the question of "what the hell <i>is</i> the universe?")
Pale blue dot feels like an apt comparison --> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png</a><p>If you don't know yet, that's what earth looks like from just beyond Pluto's orbit.<p>Also interesting to note in these discussions is the Hubble deep field image. These 3000-ish galaxies are covered by a quarter at arm's length when you look into the sky --> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HubbleDeepField.800px.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HubbleDeepField.800px.jpg</a><p>We are indeed small and insignificant, but alone? Doubtful at best.
"...there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way."<p>This 200ly sphere does not equal detectable radio signals from Earth. SETI is looking for radio signals from the stars, yes, but they are looking for a focused and high-energy attempt from ETs to contact someone by beaming at specific stars. Radio "leaked" from regular transmissions typically does not carry a signal over interstellar distances.
I'd like to see this plotted on two dimensions, where the horizontal axis is the year, starting when radio emissions began, and the vertical axis is the number of non-sol star systems that are within the bubble at that time. Binary or trinary systems would count as 1 system, not 2 or 3. This function would obviously be monotonically nondereasing.<p>I wonder if wolfram alpha could rise to the challenge.
Is the milky way really large or is 200 years a really short time?<p>Galileo was born only about 164000 days ( ~ 4 million hours ) ago.<p>And that's already over twice as long as 200 years.<p>It makes me sad when I think about how a life time is a mere thousand months.
Even more discouraging than the size of the bubble is what the bubble's cross-section looks like:<p><a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2004#comic" rel="nofollow">http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2004#c...</a>
But maybe, just maybe, our industrial and scientific development is producing an occasional side-effect of some kind of as yet-unknown faster-than-light wave which has made it much further out, and significantly more advanced civilizations have the ability to detect it.<p>Sort of how an archaeologist can look at the surface of earth in a sat. photo and determine there was once human activity in a location based on ground disturbances, etc.
It would be interesting to know how much of the Milky Way SETI has scanned so far. In other words, if someone else out there was running their own version of SETI, how long before they would be likely to find our little radio broadcast bubble?
This reminds me of the opening scene of “Contact” (1997), the movie adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel by Robert Zemeckis:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGyq7d62oPQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGyq7d62oPQ</a>
To put the blue dot in perspective, its unimaginably beyond the scope of our current technology to travel that far. Pluto by comparison is 13 light-HOURS away and it takes about 10 years to get there. At that rate, it would take approximately 150000 YEARS to reach the same distance to reach the perimeter of that blue bubble. And blue bubble is almost insignificant in relation to our galaxy, which is one of about 100 billion galaxies!
Sadly, it would not be possible to discern manmade radio transmissions from further than a few light-days/weeks.<p>Also, as communication capacities increase, more and more of that is moving into cables and not radio transmitters. High-power Earth-Satellite and Earth-Earth transmitters are being replaced with low-power point-to-point wireless links. The power of radio traffic leaking off the Earth is not growing very much, if at all.
To me this is really inspiring.<p>I look at that and think 'Wow, our presence is already felt that far/wide and we've barely started to walk'. Incredible.
Oh, it's a blog entry! There really should be a noscript warning, I thought it was something like <a href="http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/" rel="nofollow">http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/</a> at first.
Cool! .. and all this discussion reminds of a line from Calvin and Hobbes - "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
It's odd how you look at that and go "hunh" but then realize, wait a minute who took the picture of the Milky Way Galaxy?<p>It's a graphic of course but still you forget what you're looking at and how far away and how big it is.
You should cheer up that we are living in the Slow Zone. That should make us unaffected by the "Straumli Perversion" and other Powers from the Transcend and messing with the Beyond for quite some time.
Sure-fire way to feel small, sad, and alone: typekit.com<p>Seriously, the page was completely empty until I unblocked that scripts on that and his main site.