The Single Most Important Image Ever Taken By Humanity
 

Hyperbole? Maybe. Awesome? Definitely.

Orion kicks ass! That mofo was always walking over me in A-stan.

Awesome stuff!! Very interesting!!

The most important image ever taken will be one that proves the existence of life outside of Earth. Until then, they're great advances and wonderful discoveries... but one day, we'll catch a glimpse of life from somewhere else, and it'll blow all these other pictures away. :)

Sure knows how to make you feel small and insignificant though eh? :D

Well, one of the things this image shows is how unlikely that is to happen. The universe is such a huge place that there can be millions of active civilizations, and we still won't likely ever discover any of them. For us to even discover their existence, 1) we need to develop the technology to clearly see planets far away in other solar systems, possible all the way across our galaxy, which we're VERY far from doing and 2) the civilization needs to have existed at the right point in time (if it's on the other side of the galaxy, it's about 52,000 light years away). On top of that, it means that by the time we see the civilization, in the extremely unlikely circumstance that we do, that civilization will probably be long gone.

The unlikelihood that we'll ever discover other intelligent life in the universe is summed up pretty well by the current estimates of the Drake Equation, which say that the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which we might hope to be able to communicate is a whopping 2.

There's TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONS of life out there. It's just dwarfed by how absolutely massive the universe is.

SecretMethod70, give us time, we have only been at this for a few thousand years. we just figured out how to travel by air about a hundred years ago. Imagine the discoveries in science and physics if we can last another 100,000 years or so. I believe that we are just beginning to understand a little about our surroundings.

Well, if we can manage to spread out enough to the point where we become a permanent fixture in the universe, then perhaps we might eventually manage it. But 1) it's extremely unlikely that we'll reach that point, unfortunately, because that would require inhabiting other planets in other solar systems and 2) it doesn't remove the requirement that another race would need to survive long enough itself, and do so in the right location at the right moment in time.

It's not that it's impossible, it's just extremely unlikely. That said, I'd like to discover alien life just as much as the next guy.

I knew there was nothing out there.............xoxoxoo

Just when you least expect it........wham! You get the telephone call. "Send more Chuck Berry!"

I know I had seen this link here before, and it is most likely a repost, but I think the most important image ever taken was not the uncomprehendable knowledge that the universe is HUGE beyond imagination, but that what makes up everything in that space is made up of tiny particles known as atoms. As fantastic the thought that the universe is so expanse that it boggles scientific understanding, what is even more astounding is that what comprises the everything also creates the nothing; atoms.

That is why, in my opinion, the single greatest image ever taken was that of the first visibly seen atoms by scanning transmission electron microscopes in the late 1960s, which proved that atoms are the quintessential building blocks of all matter and space.

If you would allow, here I quote Richard Feynman's view on quantum theory from his Lecture on Physics. He introduced it as such:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is... that all things are made of atoms-little particles that that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.


Awesome. :)