Re:The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of huma...
by ninjanomnom on Friday July 14, 2023 @09:22AM
(#36723626)
Using gravitational lensing I imagine it's possible to get an image of the earth from the distant past, though difficult to get everything lined up right. In a more trivial sense, you could take a mirror to the moon then take a picture of it from earth and you would have an image of earth from the mysterious past of a few seconds ago.
Re:The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of huma...
by Melkor765 on Friday July 14, 2023 @02:06PM
(#36727697)
The way I read this was "The Webb telescope just offered a view of starbirth that sheds light on earths distant past," it's accurate in that sense (our star was born and we're not sure how exactly) and agree could have been worded better.
Re:The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of huma...
by tracerbulletx on Friday July 14, 2023 @04:43PM
(#36729657)
I think it is annoying because it's so arrogant. Ok fine technically you can say anything is humanities past in the sense that it's in the past, but it's presumptuous to act like we have ownership of something so wildly broad. I think it would still be presumptuous to connect it to us even if it was about the history of our own sun or to pre homo-sapien geology, this is just even more so.
Like I get what they were going for, but unless we know that the matter that we are made of is there in this image than it is a scientific inaccuracy that I wish we did not actively spread.
Now I know that we are looking into the past here, but unless my understanding of space is wrong the only way this would actually be true is if our sun (and other related material) moved faster than the speed of light.
At least that is how I read the headline, that the image shown is (or would be) the material that makes us up now.