just nitpicking, i know, but the photo above took
3 months to capture. the bbc reported that it took 4 months. They began shooting the image in september last year, and wrapped it up in mid january. Wht strikes me is that this is a photo of "one" spot from within a 3D sphere, from our vantage point. i don't know the dimensions of the area photographed, but you have to consider that there is as much evidence of life in all of the other directions this could have been taken in. In 3 months, does all of the light coming from the furthest reaches of the universe show up on the film? Have we seen the outer edge of the universe now? can we then measure it? Does any one know what direction this camera was pointed? toward the center, out from center, laterally? I'm flabbergasted. Evidence of life from a purely overwhelming statistical stand point, I think. But, as Bruce says, it's all so goddamn far away that it doesn;t really matter.
For all intents and purposes, we are alone. Imagine our society in 2500 years, assuming we don;t destroy ourselves or collapse back to the stone age. the growth of technology is exponential. we've all imagined what is to come in the distant future, and first among them is star travel. it seems a relative certainty that some other civilzation would have acheived that level of technological acheivement. However, we are a relative needle in a haystack to them, and again....does it matter? would they have found us?? maybe there's intelligent life in MOST of the systems we can see in tis picture. Why would a civilization from so far away bother with us at all? There might be everything they are looking for in their local galaxy.
I think we will not be the first space faring people, but at the same time, I think we will stillhave to bootstrap ourselves out there. If there was a local starfaring people, we would already have been enslaved or colonized.
Quote:
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The Hubble Space Telescope's NICMOS and new ACS cameras took the image. Staring nearly 3 months at the same spot, the HUDF is four times more sensitive, in some colors, than the original Hubble Deep Field (HDF).
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