Mysterious green blob sighted by Hubble Telescope.

[Genx87]

Possible this is a new galaxy being formed?

 

[AstroManLuca]

what gets to me is that I wonder what these places look like right NOW. The cool part about looking 'further' into space is you look at older and older light so we see what the universe looked like then....
...but the downside is we don't know what it looks like now.

Makes me wonder if the areas we look at actually are teeming with life everywhere right now and we don't know it. And they look into their versions of telescopes and say "OH wow, there is this planet that looks like it might form with life as its a decent distance away from a star and early analysis shows that glacial asteroids are bitch smacking the surface....so there is potential for organic life!"

Little did they know that if you fast forward 4 billion years...here we are 😛

And they are probably there as well lol

It's an interesting thought, but I'm going to be super pedantic here and point out that any planets we could see would no more than a couple hundred light years away.

 

[Connoisseur]

the light from that green blob took 650 million years to reach us. So we're seeing how it looked 650 million years ago. It definitely looks much different now, 650 million years later. So yea, I do wonder what it looks like right now.

Dude i'm not making fun of you. I'm just saying that the fallacy in that argument is you have to define "NOW" based on your perspective. You can't fast forward the light 650 million years to see how the blob is "NOW" without changing your perspective... at which point the relative age of everything else around you changes.

Bottom line, it's impossible to see the age of something 650 million light years away without actually advancing the age of the universe 650 million years from one's perspective... I think...
I wish relativity would go away.

 

[Aharami]

Hence the word: wonder. Like you said, we'll never know what something up in the sky looks like right now

 

[Connoisseur]

Hence the word: wonder. Like you said, we'll never know what something up in the sky looks like right now

Sure you do. Just look up at the sky. 😛

Short of someone inventing a physics-defying method to travel faster than light (wormholes?), it's not a matter of wonder. The universe is what it is from your perspective. NOW is what it is from how you see things from your perspective at this moment. Sorry, i'm not trying to argue with you. I actually find it strangely cathartic that there's no sense in wondering how things would look like from an imaginary "absolute" perspective.

::EDIT:: also makes me feel better that we would get advance warning if an alien race were to transmit a signal from their planet that they didn't much like ours and wanted to have a good ole' fashion xenocide.

 

[UncleWai]

that's nibiru, colliding with Earth on Dec 21, 2012

 

[x-alki]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/

 

[techs]

that's nibiru, colliding with Earth on Dec 21, 2012

Time to stock up on hookers and blow.

 

[coloumb]

what gets to me is that I wonder what these places look like right NOW. The cool part about looking 'further' into space is you look at older and older light so we see what the universe looked like then....
...but the downside is we don't know what it looks like now.

Makes me wonder if the areas we look at actually are teeming with life everywhere right now and we don't know it. And they look into their versions of telescopes and say "OH wow, there is this planet that looks like it might form with life as its a decent distance away from a star and early analysis shows that glacial asteroids are bitch smacking the surface....so there is potential for organic life!"

Little did they know that if you fast forward 4 billion years...here we are 😛

And they are probably there as well lol

yup. Now only if we could have a transport device like in the movie "contact" - we could see what it looks like "now" rather than what it looked like a long time ago. 🙂

Interesting - we are looking into the past whenever we look up into the sky at the sun or moon... 🙂

 

[Connoisseur]

yup. Now only if we could have a transport device like in the movie "contact" - we could see what it looks like "now" rather than what it looked like a long time ago. 🙂

Interesting - we are looking into the past whenever we look up into the sky at the sun or moon... 🙂

I dunno how to do the shifty eyes but we're really NOT looking at the past. If you invented a warp-drive/hyper-drive/hyper-jets/wormhole-generator, according to anyone else's perspective (outside of your ship), you would have time traveled 650 million years into the future in order to see the "current" version of the blob that you saw on earth from 2010.

Ford Prefect was surprisingly correct when he said "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Time (and therefore the past and present) can only be measured locally.