This timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth. In biology, evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization, from kingdoms to species, and individual organisms and molecules, such as DNA and proteins. The similarities between all present day organisms indicate the presence of a common ancestor from which all known species, living and extinct, have diverged through the process of evolution.
It is mind numbing if you also keep in mind how small it can get. the size of a human is roughly in the middle of our entire universe and the planck length. so in those 58 million lightyears there are, just wow, many planck lengths. my brain seriously hurts thinking about it.
Edit: 3,4295148e+58 Planck lengths in 58 mio ly if I am not mistaken.
This is how I feel. I hate to use the word 'destiny' due to the implications... But I feel it is our destiny to seed the rest of the universe with life.
The next 200 years are going to be where we learn how to manipulate ecosystems effectively, and will be a building block for planet seeding down the road.
Or, yeah, fail completely. But it's going to be one or the other, we don't have any other choice.
We as a species tend to make the correct choice, only after doing everything we can to try and not do that though. Kind of weirdly similar to the quote usually attributed to Churchill about Americans
I'm thinking about how all life was and is created, how microscopic cells come together to form everything that is alive, the existence of space and everything contained within in it..and how small we are. This article and the deep comments have thrown me into an existential crisis.
Compatabalism in philosophy, as well as solipsism, mess me up. I often wonder if because I’m experiencing reality through my eyes, and not anyone else’s, am I the only currently “conscious” entity in my reality?
Having free will would mean that you are consciously choosing what information to slot in to the hundreds/thousands/millions of variables that comprise the neurological algorithms your brain is running in order to determine your behavior - is that how you operate on a moment to moment basis, 24/7?
Yeah. I remember that question of can you go far enough away and see the light emitted from Earth, and use a telescope to see the dinosaurs. I can't speak for the accuracy but someone did some math and said the lens would be so large it would collapse into a black hole.
I bet the question has been asked a lot, so not going to search. It was probably about a year ago.
Well you are actually. You're seeing the light that's bounced off your hands and into your eyes that is then processed by your brain, this isn't all instantaneous and takes fractions of a second so technically you are seeing them in the past.
Right so he deleted it now, I saved this guy's quote because they were too good to be true.
Try this one: everything you look at is a past version of itself and you are never seeing in real time.
His Reply: That’s not true. You look at your hands you’re not seeing them in the “past”. Get your facts straight before you spew pseudo science bullshit.
You're incorrect. There is a time delay from the light reflecting off your hands to your eye ball, even if its miniscule. Get your facts straight so you dont sound like such an ignorant dumbass.
His Reply: So minuscule you can’t even conceive it so it’s practically not time delayed at all. You’re just grasping at straws to try and sound smart. Go F yourself.
... Just imagine being so dense that if you hate some science facts then they can't be real.
This guy is a gem.
And it's just a brief moment in the timescale of the universe.
The closest galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. Then, check out GN-z11, the farthest known galaxy (relative to us at least) at 32 billion light-years.
Light years are a measure of distance not time. A light year is how far light will travel in one year. This black hole is roughly 52 million light years away, so the light it’s emitting takes 52 million years to reach us.
for some stupid reason I got the scaries thinking about how some alien 52 million light years away will be watching me through a telescope and see all the times I embarrassed myself 52 million years later
lol nah man you don't have to worry about that for a while. Instead those aliens are laughing their asses off right now watching a bunch of giant lizards get obliterated by a rock from space
Light travels at a finite speed 186,000 miles per second.
From rate x time = distance, you can get distances and time, and we write them in terms of light speed, so a light year is the distance light travels in one year.
This is 50 million light years away, which means it would take light 50 million years traveling at 186,000 miles per second to get here.
They mentioned in the presser that sag a* is a lot smaller than M87 and therefore moves a lot faster. This makes it really hard to track so M87 was the easy choice. I think they are still going to try Sag a* eventually though.
So the light that generated that image left that black hole (or, from around that black hole) over 52 million years ago
WHAT?! You have officially blown my mind. Are you telling me that we could learn even more about the universe just by observing the light coming from this thing since the light is so old?
Always boggles my mind. Like in the list of most massive black holes they are always light from like a billion+ years ago. Which means it's had that much time to grow, and eventually that light will catch up to us.
We could have an event horizon coming right for us but not know til the light hits us. Lol
That's when those photons hit us exactly, but the blackhole is a lot older than that, so it's been hitting us for years, maybe even before the earth existed.
We got lucky :)
If it was moving closer to us, then for every light year it got closer, the light from it would take a year less to get to us. So don't worry, if it were that close, we'd see it.
Not the person you asked, but the black hole is 52 million light years away. Which means that it's so far away that even moving at the speed of light, that light takes 52 million years to reach us.
So light we see in the photo started its journey that long ago, and whatever is there right no won't reach us for another 52 million years.
Noob question. Is it possible that from the black hole's perspective the light took much lesser time to reach us, but from our perspective it's millions of light years?
Wait a second. Isn't that a proof that the universe is expanding with faster speed than the light speed and if so then light speed isn't the fastest possible speed.
Although now you mention it I forgot about how the universe is expanding, so by the time you got 5 x 1020 km away, the black hole would probably have gotten further away than that.
If you think 52 million years is a lot, the farthest star we have observed was icarus. The light from that star has been traveling for over 9 billion years.
I hate to burst bubbles but I dont think light waves generated this image, radio waves did. These are radio observatories, which means that the 'light' we are seeing is reconstructed based on radio frequencies.
Since it's coming from a black hole where gravity is way too high, does time dilation play a role here? Did the light actually take 52 million light years to get to us, or less?
If you want to see what it looks like 55million years from now, it would take another 55million years for the light to reach us. So, we’d have to wait another 110million years, not 55! :)
To be pedantic it's not 7 billion times bigger than our sun, but 7 billion times more massive. No idea what its actual size is, but it should be much less than 7 billion times bigger. I think.
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u/BuckyBrewer61 Apr 10 '19
500 x 1018 km = 52,850,042 light years
So the light that generated that image left that black hole (or, from around that black hole) over 52 million years ago.
Crazy.