This is not a statement that I'm currently well adjusted or that my situation is good. I'm talking about the whole thing. The parts of it that directly affect me are such a small part of the universe that it doesn't make sense to hold them against the bigger picture.
So, the Andromeda galaxy is the most distant thing that can be seen with the naked eye. (There aren't many things 2.5 million light years away that you can see, not even if you squint) I'm writing a story in which someone is in their back yard looking through a telescope. It seemed a natural thing for them to be looking at.
So I looked up what it looks like through an amateur telescope. Someone took a crappy YouTube video of just that, which was helpful. The side bar had a link to Deep Universe: Hubble's Universe Unfiltered which is just some guy with a PHD and geeking out, and therefore awesome. Would be more awesome if he didn't have to explain a lot of things I already know, but that's understandable because it would be a good deal less awesome if I didn't understand what he was talking about.
Around 27 minutes and, say, 15ish seconds in (it felt long to me, but nowhere near that long) he mentions galaxies 13 billion light years (ish, in an expanding universe it's more significantly more complicated than that) away. As he repeatedly mentions in the video, that means the images are therefore of 13 billion years in the past. Travel time and all that.
The universe is, we think, less than 14 billion years old.
Let me do an aside here.
As a classicist what I think of as recent, modern, and/or newfangled is at odds with how a lot of people view the world. Shakespeare isn't just recent, it's cutting edge. Chaucer is really really new, Beowulf still has that new epic smell.
As someone who's interested in astronomy (never as a career or a calling, sweet Jesus am I glad there are astronomers out there taking awesome pictures) I have ideas about what constitutes a short period of time that are at odds with humanity as a species.
Ok, that's the whole aside.
So if the galaxies in question are that distance and thus that age (not verified at the time of the video some six years ago) then we're talking about things less than a billion years after the universe was created (we think.) "Less than a billion" is also known as "hundreds of millions" and that means, "A really fucking short time."
Moving away from what we thought in 2011 to what we think now as defined by shit I can find on the internet, the oldest observed galaxy is 400 million years after the big bang.
400 million years and there was already a fucking galaxy formed. That's more than a hundred million years less than it took to go from, "Proto eye that all eyes come from," to, "Here are your glasses, Chris."
And even moreso if you want to talk about eye creation in totality rather than proto-eye to modern-eye.
So, in less time than it takes to create an eye, in way less time than it takes to create a vertebrate (about 13% of the time it takes to create a vertebrate), a galaxy had been created.
From nothing to "Whoa, there's a galaxy here," on a scale of time that's really fucking short when compared to life on this planet.
I fucking love the universe.
And the current record holder for earliest galaxy is only holding the record because it's basically sitting on the limit of how far Hubble can see. When we get something better up there we're going to find more.
Something better is scheduled for 2018 and is looking like when all is said and done it'll cost 10 billion dollars.
That's cheap. We should make more of them.
The F-35 program is projected to cost $1,508 billion. (Otherwise known as 1.508 trillion, but I wanted standard units.)
So if we spent ten times what the something better costs, it'd be less than six percent of what we're spending on a fighter jet program. We're not really planning to get into a major air war with any powers capable of fielding fifth generation fighters.
And the thing is, spending that ten times wouldn't merely get us ten something betters. A fair amount of the cost of a project is designing, testing, redesigning, retesting, and so forth. You don't need to do that after the first one so we'd either get more than ten something betters, or have money left over.
The depressing part is that no one ever appropriated 10 billion dollars for the something better. They appropriated way too little and that worked out about as well as you'd expect. You can't build solid awesome and shoot it into space for 1.6 billion. Can probably do "really fucking cool" and launch it into space on that budget, but not solid awesome.
Usually when things at NASA can't be done on an impossible budget and time frame, appropriations stop, the project is scrapped, and nothing comes of it.
I have a suspicion that the only reason the James Webb Space Telescope hasn't met that fate is that congress wants one example of a NASA project they didn't kill. Though they've still got a year to change their minds and ax it.
Like I said, this part of the universe has a lot of downsides, but this is such a small part of the universe that it doesn't change the fact that I fucking love the universe in general.
So, the Andromeda galaxy is the most distant thing that can be seen with the naked eye. (There aren't many things 2.5 million light years away that you can see, not even if you squint) I'm writing a story in which someone is in their back yard looking through a telescope. It seemed a natural thing for them to be looking at.
 |
| Andromeda is this one. |
So I looked up what it looks like through an amateur telescope. Someone took a crappy YouTube video of just that, which was helpful. The side bar had a link to Deep Universe: Hubble's Universe Unfiltered which is just some guy with a PHD and geeking out, and therefore awesome. Would be more awesome if he didn't have to explain a lot of things I already know, but that's understandable because it would be a good deal less awesome if I didn't understand what he was talking about.
Around 27 minutes and, say, 15ish seconds in (it felt long to me, but nowhere near that long) he mentions galaxies 13 billion light years (ish, in an expanding universe it's more significantly more complicated than that) away. As he repeatedly mentions in the video, that means the images are therefore of 13 billion years in the past. Travel time and all that.
The universe is, we think, less than 14 billion years old.
Let me do an aside here.
⁂
As a classicist what I think of as recent, modern, and/or newfangled is at odds with how a lot of people view the world. Shakespeare isn't just recent, it's cutting edge. Chaucer is really really new, Beowulf still has that new epic smell.
As someone who's interested in astronomy (never as a career or a calling, sweet Jesus am I glad there are astronomers out there taking awesome pictures) I have ideas about what constitutes a short period of time that are at odds with humanity as a species.
Ok, that's the whole aside.
⁂
So if the galaxies in question are that distance and thus that age (not verified at the time of the video some six years ago) then we're talking about things less than a billion years after the universe was created (we think.) "Less than a billion" is also known as "hundreds of millions" and that means, "A really fucking short time."
Moving away from what we thought in 2011 to what we think now as defined by shit I can find on the internet, the oldest observed galaxy is 400 million years after the big bang.
400 million years and there was already a fucking galaxy formed. That's more than a hundred million years less than it took to go from, "Proto eye that all eyes come from," to, "Here are your glasses, Chris."
And even moreso if you want to talk about eye creation in totality rather than proto-eye to modern-eye.
So, in less time than it takes to create an eye, in way less time than it takes to create a vertebrate (about 13% of the time it takes to create a vertebrate), a galaxy had been created.
From nothing to "Whoa, there's a galaxy here," on a scale of time that's really fucking short when compared to life on this planet.
I fucking love the universe.
And the current record holder for earliest galaxy is only holding the record because it's basically sitting on the limit of how far Hubble can see. When we get something better up there we're going to find more.
⁂
Something better is scheduled for 2018 and is looking like when all is said and done it'll cost 10 billion dollars.
That's cheap. We should make more of them.
The F-35 program is projected to cost $1,508 billion. (Otherwise known as 1.508 trillion, but I wanted standard units.)
So if we spent ten times what the something better costs, it'd be less than six percent of what we're spending on a fighter jet program. We're not really planning to get into a major air war with any powers capable of fielding fifth generation fighters.
And the thing is, spending that ten times wouldn't merely get us ten something betters. A fair amount of the cost of a project is designing, testing, redesigning, retesting, and so forth. You don't need to do that after the first one so we'd either get more than ten something betters, or have money left over.
The depressing part is that no one ever appropriated 10 billion dollars for the something better. They appropriated way too little and that worked out about as well as you'd expect. You can't build solid awesome and shoot it into space for 1.6 billion. Can probably do "really fucking cool" and launch it into space on that budget, but not solid awesome.
Usually when things at NASA can't be done on an impossible budget and time frame, appropriations stop, the project is scrapped, and nothing comes of it.
I have a suspicion that the only reason the James Webb Space Telescope hasn't met that fate is that congress wants one example of a NASA project they didn't kill. Though they've still got a year to change their minds and ax it.
Like I said, this part of the universe has a lot of downsides, but this is such a small part of the universe that it doesn't change the fact that I fucking love the universe in general.
I feel you on all of this. A lot of the universe is really incredibly cool.
ReplyDeleteSeed of Bismuth said..
ReplyDeleteall the sci-fiction I've read, all the essays on how different mind might think, then the sad and angry realization that a species that spends as much as we do on defense. instead spends it on sciences is probably the most unrealistic of all.
I was originally going to say Vulcan's but even they aren't that species anymore; thanks j.j. abrams