"U.S. UFO probe" and " The Most Important Image Ever Taken"

[mia]

It's hard to come away from watching this video and not think of the possibility of UFOs.


The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken

One of my inspirations for starting this website came from the profound experience I had when looking at the Hubble Deep Field images for the first time. I felt I was looking at the most important image humanity had ever taken.

It was important because for the first time, I got a real feeling for just how immense the universe actually is. It's absolutely mind-blowing if you stop to think about it, that by looking at a patch of sky that appears to have nothing in it, and you stare at it long enough, you see an image full of galaxies.

To fully convey how I feel about the Deep Field images, I composed the following video:


http://www.deepastronomy.com/hubble-deep-field.html

[XemaSab]

1. This weekend I was out on the Channel Islands doing some stargazing with a friend

Just looking at the sky with my 10x binoculars was like looking at a bunch of cells through a microscope... there were stars EVERYWHERE. :o

[mia]

2. It must have been a wonderful experience.

A long time ago I saw a beautiful black night sky filled with stars. We were sailing to the Bahamas from Miami. It was the only time I ever saw comets.

[XemaSab]

4. It was sort of like the deep field photos on a smaller scale

There's a LOT of stuff up there. :o

You can see more stars in the desert, by the way. :)

[SpiralHawk]

22. The Channel Islands actually belong not the USA, but to Mexico

Little known reality. Somebody forgot to put them in the Tready of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War.

Shhhhhhh. Don't tell anyone...

[Ghost Dog]

27. That's interesting.

First time I heard of them (the California ones, not those off the coast of France) - actually, saw them, was while contemplating a satellite image of the recent California fires.

Prime real estate, I thought, mentally comparing with the situation of Vancouver Island.

Hmmm. Belong to Mexico, you say. Uh huh. No chance of any petroleum or similarly lucrative mineral deposits around there, then?

(BTW, for deep space contemplation, parts of the Canary Islands here in the North Atlantic serve just fine!)

We are, of course, not alone. Neither in time nor in space (if such a distinction makes any sense).

[LeftCoast]

30. Actually, there IS petroleum out there

Worse yet - Bush has been trying to get his nasty little paws on it too. So far we've been able to defeat all of his attempts, but they keep trying.

[Ghost Dog]

40. Ah. So more openess may be in order (or out of order) then.

Ho hummm. What can I say? Other than to refer readers to history and to continue to suggest, when I observe an opening, that one way to move forward from this sorry state of affairs may involve, at the very least:

FREEDOM FOR CALIFORNIA!!!

(Californians would, surely, deeply admire and profoundly respect the (I presume) (relative) virginity of these islands) - should I add :sarcasm: or at least :cynicism: ?) (add missing clausal closing bracket)) <-- if you follow me.

ed. Damn. It was a missing opening bracket. Why do I still think in Pascal (joke for ancient programmers)? So. (() too late.

[gateley]

3. Absolutely awe-inspiring. Thank you! Rec.

[WillyT]

5. Kicked, Recommended, And Definitely Bookmarked For Sharing With Others !!! - Thank You !!!

:bounce::kick::bounce:

Onedit:

[Old and In the Way]

6. Only a fool would think we are the only planet hosting intelligent life.

Thanks for the link....it really is breathtaking in the sheer expansiveness universe and how Hubble has captured a view of space 78 billion light years from Earth....just incredible.

[Occulus]

7. Also consider this:

The space taken up in the sky by the Hubble Space Telescope is about equal to the space a period takes up at the end of a sentence in a book or magazine.

That small. And that large.

[Old and In the Way]

10. You have probably seen this, but it puts everything in perspective.

Mankind seems to be the fulcrum point between the cosmically large and the cosmically small....

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/

[Stuckinthebush]

8. I can't wait to show this to my 10 year old

and tell her again how I wanted to be an astronomer when I was her age and this is why.

Thanks.

[Speck Tater]

9. I'm utterly shocked

that anyone could think a few dots of light in an image are more important that Britteny's latest DUI! Where is your sense of perspective?

[Old and In the Way]

11. One more vote...with all the other noise on greatest page, it would be nice

to quietly reflect on the "bigger picture".

[dave29]

12. In the words of Carl Sagan

"Is there intelligent life on earth?"

[The Doctor.]

13. "Shine on You Crazy Diamond"

If you think about how many planets we've been discovering already, and not that far away, there can be no doubt.

[Islander Expat]

14. How can people see this and not see that life on Earth came from somewhere else?

Its the "island effect", they've already proven it with the Mars microbes recovered from Antarctica, the planet has been bombarded with matter containing life forms from the cosmos since the day it formed. As soon as the Earth cooled enough, the life forms hitchhiking on the cosmic debris started to bubble and ooze.

[Basileus Basileon]

32. And so where did those come from?

Had to start somewhere.

[Islander Expat]

41. Please, answer the questions in the order that they appear on the page

don't skip around or you might miss something

[jgraz]

15. It has the opposite effect on me

Once you begin to grok the immense distances involved, it seems ludicrous that any civilization would expend the resources necessary to visit us.

[Duppers]

17. but you've no idea what kind of resources could be ..

at their disposal. No?

Given such things as antimatter & hypothesized worm holes, who knows!

[jgraz]

19. That raised another point: why would someone so advanced care about us?

And even if they did, would someone so advanced allow themselves to be seen so often when they clearly have no interest in direct communication with us?

[skids]

21. Thousands of tourists...

...take their cameras into the woods to go take snapshots of birds. I have no doubt they are sometimes seen by the birds.

Does that help?

(not an ET advocate, mind you, but I like to keep an open mind.)

[crikkett]

25. they'd come for our precious bodily fluids

And I hear that earthlings have the greatest sex in the solar system. (Torchwood reference)

[Ikonoklast]

29. Good point.

Why would I take the time to try and communicate with the residents of the anthill out near the woodpile?
They can't comprehend my level of existence, and I already know that they are ants, doing ant-things.

[jgraz]

33. The part that doesn't make sense is the frequency of the sightings

Either they view us as ants, so they don't give a shit if we see them, or they do care if we see them. If the former, there should be many, many, more sightings than there are. If the latter, it seems unlikely that anyone who has the technology to cross galactic distances wouldn't also have the technology to maintain absolute secrecy.

As it stands, the frequency of these sightings has a Bigfoot, Loch-Ness-Monstery feel to it.

[Milo_Bloom]

34. Think of it a different way.

1 "real" sighting can cause a flood of phony sightings either because people misinterpret what they see OR they want to be important so they try and fake it.

Let me use crop circles as an example. For thousands of years, every once in a while an actual simple circle would appear in crops (in medieval times it was considered a mark of demonic interference and a bad omen for that years crops). But if you fully research the history, you will find the "reports" of these date back to the origination of crops AND is a fairly worldwide occurrence, albeit quite rare. Once people figured out how to replicate and complicate what is probably a very simple, natural, phenomena involving ball or plasma lightening discharge, any potential to actually research a natural explanation was gone. Now you have 1000's of these created each year looking more and more complex and silly.

However, just because we now have 1000's of "sightings" caused by people faking it, doesn't mean that once every few years there isn't some natural phenomenon causing a small, simple, circle to appear in crops.


In the case of UFO's to dismiss all the sightings, even those caught by deep space telescopes and satellites, just because a multitude of weirdos want to jump on the bandwagon doesn't make sense. As for their ability to maintain secrecy, that presumes that they are attempting to maintain secrecy. In the same way that a camera person shooting nature may just stand far enough back so as not to disturb the habitat, they can be "spotted" and the camera person probably doesn't care all that much.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

35. That's great logic.

Because thousands of people fake it, some of them must be real.

:rofl:

[Milo_Bloom]

38. Uhh, no.

That isn't even close to what I said. Please read again more carefully.

[Duppers]

45. he never does

just ignore him. :)

[Duppers]

44. we study ants and insects, don't we?

nt

[cynatnite]

46. We're the 'Wild Kingdom' to them....

For them, it's comparable to our studying the mating habits of baboons. We're weird little animals who can't comprehend the freckle on our nose, but we're interesting as hell to watch.

We're Pavlov's dog to them.

Alien A: Let's watch what happens when we shine unexplainable lights from the sky down on them.
Alien B: Morans.

:evilgrin:

[Johonny]

36. I agree

I think if you read Peter Ward's rather good "Rare Earth" you might conclude life might be abundant in the Universe, but complex life is probably very rare in the Universe.

[slay]

16. Nice choice of music and having Carl Sagan in there - very cool

Thanks for posting this. :)

[Peace Patriot]

18. Nifty! Thanks! The Hubble image that WillyT posted above looks very similar

to your dense, colorful image of the leaf at quark level. The Hubble image should maybe be added to the end of your sequence, the other end of which is the image of the quarks.

[symbolman]

20. Funny

I almost woke my wife up two nights ago, it was probably the third most intense clear night of my 54 years here in Hawaii...

Who says that they have to come from Stars? :)

Yeah, it hit me the other night, that if you stood there long enough it would eventually ALL fill IN with nothing But LIGHT .. Sure, it would take a while, but wouldn't it be Worth It? :)

[IDemo]

23. Makes me wish I had continued my pursuit of astronomy a billion light years ago

Well, ok, only 35 years since taking astronomy in high school and for one semester in college.

I think Carl Sagan was pretty convinced of there being extraterrestrial intelligence, just not in the likelihood of it being interested enough in us to visit, anymore than we would venture off a footpath hundreds of miles to look at an anthill.

[Ghost Dog]

28. But, maybe for some technically- or otherwise-enabled culture

intergalactic travel could be just as simple as, for example and by way of analogy, the Internet.

You know: something, somewhere becomes fashionable, and the URL is published everywhere really cool mins are to be found. All you have to do is click on it, and you go there...

Would be kind of anarchic, I know. But, you know, not entirely unnatural...

[livetohike]

24. Thank you for this!

:hi: I have sent it to my nieces - one is 14 and loves astronomy. We're all hoping she pursues it.

[LibertyLover]

26. Years ago I was staying in a lodge on the edge of Ngorogoro

Crater in Tanzania. I awakened to see my mom sitting on the balcony just looking up. So I joined her and was blown away by the stars. For the first time in my life I actually saw the Milky Way and understood how it got its name. I had lived all my life in suburbs of New York City, in Chicago and now outside of Washington DC and Baltimore so light pollution, not to mention other kinds of pollution were things I lived with. But in Africa I learned what darkness is and what the stars are.

[Basileus Basileon]

31. It's hard to come away from that video and believe that aliens would visit Earth.

Such solipsism. What are the odds any alien species would find us? What are the odds they would travel the distances--distances that would make a lifetime of travel at lightspeed look like the distance between a proton and its electron--just to show up, show off to a few bubbas, and zip away?

[Fire Walk With Me]

37. Ooh, thanks for the link.

I'm in agreement. The ultra Deep Field images are the most important that we've ever taken, above the first images of Earth from orbit and the Moon.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

39. Humbling and comforting. But, not because of UFOs.

The sheer immensity of the universe argues against UFOs. At least in the way we think of them. As the video presents it, we are on what amounts to a speck of dust on huge desert. And, that speck of dust is circling a grain of sand on a massive beach among billions of other grains of sand, which in turn is but a speck of dust among billions of other speck of dusts in this universe, which may one of trillions of other other universes.

Not to mention that on our tiny speck of dust we humans are just one species of life among at least 1.6 million other species.

Which brings up the question, why would anyone bother with us?

We are only important because we tell ourselves we are.

[Ghost Dog]

42. Forget not the importance of the telescope (and camera) themselves

(as means to discover and to convey such information to our own brains).

Man/Woman the creative artists, the toolmakers, indeed.

[proud patriot]

43. Great Video

I love pondering the size of the universe

[bridgit]

47. It's always lovely to hear other calmer minds & voices speak about the rest...

of what's really going on, too late to k&r, but there it is :kick:

[frogmarch]

48. Beautiful video, mia.

Thanks for posting it.

Although I think it's possible that intelligent life exists on other planets, I can't help but wonder what the odds would be that an extraterrestrial civilization would exist at the same time as ours. We humans have been around for a mere blip - if that - in the vastness of time. What would be the chances of an ET civilization - especially a technologically advanced one - existing when we do?

[Disturbed]

49. Thanks for posting this.

Not many things are awesome but that is!