In this galaxy, there’s a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don’t destroy the one named Kirk.
– Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy
Ol’ Doc McCoy may or may not have gotten his numbers wrong, but what he said ranks upon one of the most important thoughts ever spoken.
I was reminded of that quote earlier because I was doing some work on Fusion Patrol. I’ve been preparing a video with an interview with Ben and me and, because it was Fusion Patrol related, I tossed the most recent Fusion Patrol opening titles that I had onto the beginning of it.
What became immediately obvious was that the old, vintage credits, rendered in Adobe After Effects, were of a grossly lower video resolution than the footage being produced even by our iPhones, and so I set upon a project to develop an updated version at HD resolutions.
My first thought was to simply recreate the originals based on a new screen resolution, but I remembered that the old credits had been designed specifically for online videos – back in the day when bandwidth was slow and video codecs were considerably more inefficient. I had intentionally made the old credits simple to reduce artifacting and bandwidth usage.
I decided I would return to the constant theme that appeared in all the “TV” credits for Fusion Patrol: astronomical pictures from NASA.
I chose to use the single most incredible photographic image ever captured by mankind – the Hubble Ultra Deep Field [HUDF] image. Have you seen it?
The Hubble telescope looked at a tiny patch of sky. Image holding a piece of paper, 1mm square at your arm’s length. That’s how small of a piece of the sky the image is of, and it was chosen because there was nothing there. It’s a picture of the darkness that lies beyond our galaxy… and what did they find?
This:
Look at this picture for a while and marvel and the most amazing thing you’re ever likely to see. Click on it to see it much bigger. I can stare at this picture for hours and marvel at it.
On a very dark night, with the unaided eye, they say you can only see about 2,000 stars; 8,000 if you could every star visible from Earth (which you can’t because the Earth is in the way of some of them) but that’s not true when you get above the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s why we have the Hubble space telescope.
While you’re standing outside, if you stuck a little 1mm square of paper on thumbnail and then stretched out your arm in front of you, you’d be looking at approximately the amount of the sky being pictured in this photo – and it was chosen by the Hubble scientists because it is an empty patch of sky.
Look at that picture again. Virtually everything you see is a galaxy. 10,000 of them! You are staring through a tiny hole in the light pollution of the stars of the Milky Way galaxy into the abyss of the universe beyond. The farthest away are approximately 13 billion light years away.
This is the third time Hubble (and the most detailed) time Hubble has conducted this experiment in different locations, and each time is the same. The even distribution of matter throughout the universe is part of our understanding of the Big Bang, hard through it is to conceptualize unless you grasp that space/time itself is expanding rather than just the matter within.
Our galaxy has an estimated 200-400 billion stars, and you’re looking at 10,000 more galaxies. The estimate, based on these pictures, is that there must be between 100-200 billion galaxies.
In the face of it, we are unimaginably insignificant.
…and yet “…in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us.” We are also incredibly unique.
“Don’t destroy the one named [insert your name here.]”