Exactly. When I'm feeling stressed and overwhelmed, I like to envision zooming out of myself on Earth to our solar system and beyond to remind myself of how small I am, along with my stressors.
For over a decade I've been holding my breath believing that our computational power would eventually cross the line on the graph where the likelihood of identifying life on other planets (even with a conservative expectation that it exists)—due to the amount of data processed—would be extremely high. I figured a discovery like that would be unifying and humbling, but that we would miss the message because we (global we) imploded into some irony fueled blackhole by destroying ourselves.
the cookie popup here has no options for opting out of tracking, just a link to install an extension that opts you out of tracking, that's a first for me and seems completely bonkers
Here you go:
https://lofar-surveys.org/public_hips/LoTSS_DR2_high_hips/
Note that the map is in radio (150MHz) but you can toggle to other ‘maps’ with different wavelengths.
At 150MHz, most emission is synchrotron emission originating either from supernovas and as such is a proxy for star(forming) regions of a galaxy, or originates from (plumes of accelerated particles from) the region around a galaxy’s super massive black hole.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 28.6 ms ] threadReminds of Carl Sagan’s, “Pale Blue Dot”
https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g
For over a decade I've been holding my breath believing that our computational power would eventually cross the line on the graph where the likelihood of identifying life on other planets (even with a conservative expectation that it exists)—due to the amount of data processed—would be extremely high. I figured a discovery like that would be unifying and humbling, but that we would miss the message because we (global we) imploded into some irony fueled blackhole by destroying ourselves.
This video slowly fades between visual and radio: https://youtu.be/SBHzK7-xWyI