so its around 4 times its diameter in distance from us? Thats close. Good thing the universe is expanding instead of contracting.

Er … no.

It’s about 4,000 times its diameter away from us.

I’m going to investigate authors on both sides, and leave aside ad hominem (as several here cannot seem to do), and attempt to dig as deep as I can, leaving aside arguments from authority unlike kuhnigget.

So, you reject the expertise of the world’s leading biologists, right? What is your basis for this radical approach?

Good luck with understanding Dembski’s writing, BTW, as he has specifically tossed his word-salad to confound the lay reader into thinking he might have a point. Particularly his “complex specified information” concept. See if you can work out what that means without having to resort to an analogy.

Also BTW, if you are going to go throwing accusations around (ad hominems and arguments from authority), how about you back up those claims with specific examples, huh?

Sam H (17) said:

And while I know that ID is ideologically inclined, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t totally false.

Every claim made by the ID authors that we can objectively detect design has been shown to be false. This is not to say that we might be able to detect it at some undertermined point in the future, but none of the methods proposed by e.g. Bill Dembski are real – all of them are arguments from analogy (which rely on extraneous information that we already possess), false dichotomy or some other fallacy of reasoning. Dembski’s “deductive filter” explicitly excludes the set of all hypotheses no-one has thought of yet for no justifiable reason. Furthermore, he constrains his range of hypotheses in such a way that any combination of chance and natural law is excluded as a possible answer.

What we can detect is manufacture. And there’s no sign of that in biology.

Yes I’m sympathetic toward them due to my Christian longings and upbringing, but it don’t mean that I can’t attempt to objectively investigate the evidence.

But why do you not accept that this process has already occurred, and the answer is – overwhelmingly – that ID is a load of rubbish?

All of the arguments made to support ID have been shown to be wrong. All of them, without exception.

ID is by nature a philosophy,

What makes you think this, when the Discovery Institute went to such lengths to tell people like you that it was genuine science?

If you consider ID as a philosophy, then you can find plenty of aspects that simply cannot be refuted, but that are – pretty much by the same token – intellectually sterile. I.e., they result in mere navel-gazing, not any actual progress towards anything.

but it doesn’t mean it can’t become a scientific theory.

As expounded by Behe, Wells, Dembski et al., no, it cannot ever become a scientific theory. Perhaps a form of ID that looks a lot more like Theistic Evolution (TE) may eventually have some scientific basis, but this is mere idle speculation.

If a possible intelligent cause was to be determined in creating an organism,

How? How can you – in principle – detect “design” without requiring information that tells you “artificial manufacture”?

the characteristics of said designed object could be used to produce a theoretical extrapolation of the designer’s own characteristics.

I agree in principle, but this is again mere speculation.

But theorizing design is indeed shaky,

That’s putting it mildly.

so the pursuit of naturalism must come first UNLESS unviable by the weight of the observable, hard evidence.

If evidence for biological design were ever to come to light, then biological design would be known to be a part of nature. End of.

“Naturalism” is merely a vaguely scary and bugbear-ish label applied by the creationists to investigations that deal with facts rather than fantasy. Reality is the only reliable arbiter of truth when it comes to our ideas about how the world functions.

I don’t think absolutely strict naturalism should be a rule of science when & where required (emphasis on previous 3 words):

Again, it sounds like you’ve fallen for the propaganda. What exactly do you mean by “naturalism” and how can a set of investigations that demand real evidence in order to draw conclusions ever seriously consider the supernatural? Surely “we don’t know yet” is a far more honest answer than “god did it” when you have no evidence to indicate the god even exists? How can the not-natural (if you’ll pardon a rather clumsy expression) ever have a serious place in improving our understanding of the world?

when it does it leads to your own “God-of-the-gaps” arguments.

I’m not sure I see what you’re trying to say here. How does “naturalism” ever lead to GOTG arguments?

IIUC, GOTG is the insistence that god operates in the areas that science has yet to elucidate. And, as science advances, those gaps get smaller. At heart, it is an argument from ignorance: for instance “evolution cannot explain X, therefore god did it”. This is a fallacy, because it assumes that science will never explain X. It also rejects “we don’t know yet” as a valid answer.

As for Occ’s razor, just remember that if the evidence were to suggest an external agent, then that external agent is the simpler hypothesis.

To some extent, and provided it is not in clear conflict with well-established laws of nature. So what?

Thus far, all of the millions of pieces of evidence that support evolutionary theory point to a purely natural – indeed an inevitable – process.

It doesn’t matter if some yet-to-be natural explanation possibly exists and so we should bet on it, cuz a designer necessitates it’s own explanation – IT MATTERS WHETHER OR NOT THE HYPOTHESIS WORKS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. Nothing is simple if it doesn’t work.

If I have understood you correctly, then you are missing two key points:
1. If evolutionary theory were wrong in any substantial or gross way, we would already know it by now. The core of the theory has been around for 150 years, and has been tested very thoroughly. Therefore, we can conclude that this core of evolution is at the very least a good approximation to how biology really works.
2. ID does not work right here, right now. If you parse through all of the fallacies amd strawman attacks on evolution, ID boils down to nothing more than “someone somewhere designed some stuff in biology, somehow”. ID has no ideas about when it happened, how it happened, or (officially at least) who did it. It was designed to be sufficiently vague that it could include YEC, OEC, TE and everything in between.

To expand slightly, if evidence were ever to come to light indicating that biological organisms on Earth were deliberately designed, we would already know that evolution was that designer’s toolkit.

Furthermore, consider this: if one accepts ID with all its vaguenesses, the concept of multiple designers makes a damn sight more sense than the idea of a single solitary designer. How else, for instance, to explain the platypus? Or the Ichneumonidae? Or the diversity of eyes? Or the human pelvis? Additionally, the competing theory of Incompetent Design is also a better fit for what we know of biology than the ID that is expressed by the luminaries of the Dscovery Institute.

The actuality is we never see what we habitually think of as a “snapshot” confined to a particular instant of time that “preserves the moment” for galaxies, or anything else for that matter. Whenever we look at images of galaxies we are only recording all the photons that arrive within the span of the cameras’s exposure. Galaxies are huge and so we are compelled to see features within them that are considerably displaced in time.

Suppose, for example, that UGC 12158 happened to be oriented nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight: we’d be viewing photons that launched off of its background arms up to 140,000 years EARLIER than those that sprung from its foreground arms. All galaxy ‘snapshot’ images are necessarily ‘distorted’ in this way – they are ‘smeared out in time’. Considering that a galaxy like this probably gives forth a supernova at rate of perhaps a few times per century (say), the number of these relatively extremely brief events over the course of 140,000 years can exceed a quarter of a million such blasts! But because we can only sample each part of the galaxy at a time, we must still wait about a half century, on average, to witness them.

But even a camera taking a SUFFICIENTLY SHORT exposure of a friend is similarly smeared out in time, albeit to a far lesser extent: an image recording a portrait of your friend shows her ears to be slightly ‘younger’ (from the point of view of your friend) than the tip of her nose (if she is facing you), by the time it takes light to travel those several inches that separate them. Instead of a displacement on the order of 100,000 years, as with edge-on galaxies, the time displacement between the background ears and foreground tip of the nose (say, a depth-distance of roughly 10 centimeters) in your friend’s image would amount to only about 30 billionths of a second.

Of course, ordinary cameras operate with exposures that last a great deal longer than that, typically with exposures lasting around a relatively humongous hundredth of a second. So what you get is an image that records your friend’s ears and nose smeared over the course of that 1/100 second exposure, with all of those overlapping photons, whenever they leap from distant ears to nearby nose, contributing to the image.

With a typical shot of a distant galaxy, however, an hour-long exposure (say) is only about one part in 876.6 million of a hundred thousand years. But if the 100,000 light-years of depth-distance with typical edge-on spiral galaxies the size of our Milky Way were equated with the ten centimeter depth-distance between the ears and nose of your friend, and you scaled up the 1/100 of a second exposure time typical of ordinary point-and-shoot photography in typical human portraits accordingly to match, astronomers would have to keep their telescopic camera shutters open and scrupulously trained and focused on the target galaxy for roughly 100,000 years. (That’s the crude order-of-magnitude figure I come up with…you are free to check the math for yourselves).

It’s a good thing that stars in distant galaxies are bright and that cameras have been developed that come equipped with photo-sensitive means to record light over a modest amount of time that doesn’t unduly press the patience of beings who live, typically on average, about 660,000 times longer than an hour-long exposure. (And some exposures, such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Fields, have been constructed out of exposures totaling DAYS). If circumstances had dictated either that our lifespans were significantly shorter and/or we had evolved a lesser visual capacity as well as engineering dexterity than we have, our ability to eke out information about a universe filled with a froth of galaxy clusters might never have entered our ken…and we would then by now be even more ignorant than we are.

But one thing that bothers me. A photo, for want of a better name, (maybe it is very appropriate as we are talking about photons from a distant past), of this galaxy, being perpendicular to the trajectory of those photons that terminate their life in our sensors, are arriving at about the same time. True those from the central bulge will arrive somewhat sooner, (we’ve already missed them), as the “top” of the bulge is slightly closer, maybe by quite a few thousand light years. So we actually get an updated view of that bulge, or at least the peak of it.

This brings me to my central question. It concerns the “Bar” and the “Globular” bulge shapes. I wonder if some so-called globular bulges could actually be barred bulges viewed end-on? That is of course only with those galaxies that share our Milky Way’s plane and/or point of view. It would present a rounded globe (bulge) that we are familiar with. How could we be sure otherwise? Maybe in some considerable time we could determine it from rotational views, but that is going to take quite a few (thousand) years.

Conversely, maybe the barred version is actually depicted by the same mechanism, ie, the distortion of the “photo”, not unlike the distortion we see everyday in movies where the wagon wheels of speeding wagons go oval, when we know that they have to be circular, (excluding Mac Sennett police cars which DID have eccentric wheels!), and it is a function of “time” and not a common “now”.

Any other thoughts out there?

Ivan.

http://www.bautforum.com/

or searching for similar notions on there assuming you haven’t already done so.

You may be interested in checking out these wikipedia entries on :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring

Einstein rings & on :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens

gravitational lensing. I’ll also just add to that that gravitational microlensing has been used to detect certain planets around distant stars and also “MACHO” objects in our Galaxies outer Halo region.

I think we know UGC 12158 is not a reflection of our Milky Way because of various differences in the galaxies such as the size and spiral arm structure & perhaps via UGC 12158′s spectrum versus the calculated spectrum our Milky Way would show – & also because we’re pretty sure the universe doesn’t work that way and doesn’t mirror objects like that without distorting them – eg. Einstein rings and galactic lensing.

For instance, to have a reflection of the Milky Way we’d need the light to be reflecting off some other larger object or material-like giant mirror or sheet of water / ice / metal which we have no evidence for and no reason to think exists. So nice idea but almost certainly not the case.

@35. Joseph G : Thanks – that’s great to hear & much appreciated.

How do we know that some of these things aren’t reflections? By that I mean, for example, how do we know that this UGC 12158 isn’t the actual Milky Way from ~400 million years ago or its reflection? That make any sense?

. . . told ya it was a dumb question.

So true, though! As vast as the universe is, and as incredibly tiny a part of it as we are, we can still remember that we are a part of it. And to be a part of something so huge and beautiful makes one feel rather special in its own way.

Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ken Croswell link. His book “The Life of Stars” is at this local cafe I frequent (they have all sorts of assorted books in there). I’ve spent hours flipping through it while having coffee

Conceivably, right “now”, super-advanced inhabitants of UGC 12158 with unimaginably ultra-embiggening telescopes are viewing the emergence of plants and animals from the seas to colonize the land…and that one of the evolutionary outcomes of those intrepid amphibious vertebrates would in 400 million years later build telescopes to discover the supernova that excited the astronomers residing in UGC 12158 only last month or last year or anytime within roughly the last 100,000 years, depending on where they are situated in the galaxy with respect to the supernova’s location…if they’re there, they saw it too.

Our Milky Way is a substantial spiral containing 200 to 400 billion stars, and exoplanet research suggests that most stars possess a family of planets. And if UGC 12158 is as much as 40% larger, it could easily contain a trillion stars. How many planets in this glorious spiral we see right there in this image have been graced with life? Then consider that of the zillions of photons that constantly arrive from the stars of this galaxy to our little planet, some are briefly diverted and must come from the reflected glints of warm ocean-bathed worlds…or even the equivalent of alien tears.

In other words, for all we CAN discern so far, this might as WELL be a view of our own home galaxy 400 million years ago. Or put it this way: How many other ways does the universe come to look at itself, and how many times has it happened in our own galactic backyard? Aside from the entirely irrelevant issue of size, on this particular metric, our galaxy really ISN’T any different from UGC 12158. Nor is it really any different from all those other spirals sprinkled about in the distant background…

These are the kind of images that give us our sense of perspective, and ‘quicken the pulse’ (as Sagan would say) to lift us out of our childish conceits and selfish cynicisms. We may be terribly small in the immense scheme of things, but we are no less fantastic for being a part of it all.

Thanks again Phil! And thanks again HST! Made my weekend!

I guess I can use google in a pinch, but you never know what you get with google…

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/mucol.html

For Mu Columbae & see :

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/aeaur.html

For AE Aurigae whilst this :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2419

Globular cluster nicknamed “the intergalactic wanderer” and also known as Caldwell 25 would also have a staggeringly great view of our Milky Way Galaxy especially when at its furthest distance and most extreme vantage point. If there are any planets there (which is, alas, probably unlikely), methinks they’d have a unique night sky indeed!

Well there is at least the example of this Expelled Star – HE 0437-5439 – which was formerly an Expelled stellar duo :

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/expelled-star.html

Which was originally catapulted out of our Galaxy by an encounter with the Supermassive Black Hole at the core of our Milky Way and has had quite a remarkable odyssey.

From there :

… Most of the roughly 16 known hypervelocity stars, all discovered since 2005, are thought to be exiles from the heart of our galaxy. But this Hubble result is the first direct observation linking a high-flying star to a galactic center origin. … [SNIP.] … The stellar outcast [ HE 0437-5439] is rocketing through the Milky Way’s distant outskirts at 1.6 million miles an hour, high above the galaxy’s disk, about 200,000 light-years from the center. The star [ HE 0437-5439] is destined to roam intergalactic space. [Brackets added.]

Meanwhile the book quoted from in # 26 was indeed Croswell’s ‘The Alchemy of the Heavens’ – an excellent book which I’d highly recommend btw. – and from Croswell’s website this article deals with some known intergalactic wandering stars :

http://kencroswell.com/VirgoIntergalactic.html

and this article :

http://kencroswell.com/MWEdgePlanets.html

explaining why the outer outskirts of our Galaxy may well be barren probably also applies to the galactic Halo region too.

Hope these links are enlightening and enjoyable for folks here.

“On the edge of the galaxy, at about 5 o’clock, there’s a peculiar spiral galaxy looking blotch.”

To me it looks like a combination of two things. The “spiral arms” I think are part of UGC 12158 and the yellowish central bit looks like an edge-on spiral galaxy way in the background.

Imagine being on a planet of a rogue star, outside a spiral galaxy, able to see it like that with the naked eye. Will Andromeda look like that from Earth in a couple of billion years, filling half the night sky? (If there’s anybody to see it.)

There are a couple of possibilities for worlds having such views :

1. Stars and accompanying planets in orbits around the Galactic Halo, a vast component of our (& all spiral) galaxies. Stars inthe halo have galactic orbist taking them far above and below the galctic plane. Notable examples include Kapteyn’s Star and possibly also Arcturus although the latter may be part of the thick (or old) disk) stellar population as well as the globular clusters. These tend to be ancient and thus metal-poor stars.

2. Stars stripped from galactic disks by mergers with other galaxies – the process of galaxies approaching disrupts thedisk and willthrow many stars out into intergalactic space. These stars will include thus younger, metal-richer population I type stars, ones like – and one day perhaps including our Sun.

3. “Runaway stars” ejected from the galaxy(ies) by gravitational encounters with extremely massive stars or via asymetrical supernovae which often kick pulsars & companion stars out at high velocity. Examples of runaway stars incl. sverela known pulsars plus Mu Columbae, 53 Arietis and AE Aurigae. While, again, this can mean metal-rich (thus likely planet boasting) types of stars are involved, there is a likely problem here in that ejection mechanism would likely destroy or at bets severaly disturb any planets or proto-planetary disks.

Furthermore while not quite the same thing, it is interesting to imagine what the view from a star on the outskirts of the Galactic bulge might be like. Unless I’m mistaken (& I may be) such stars are more metal-rich than the halo component* but less so than the bright new stars of the galactic disk although there are questions about how the higher radiation levels and rate of supernova, etc ..will affect their potential habitability.

————-

From Ken Croswell’s Alchemy of the heavens (?) book :

The Main Galactic populations :

1. galactic Halo – the outer sphere of stars in which the restof tehgalaxy is embedded.

2. central Galactic Bulge – inner core sphere of stars around the central supermassive Black Hole.

3. Thick Disk – older disk stars in wider more eccentric orbits, merges with the halo and thin disk & intermediate in metallicity age, etc.

4. Thin disk – youngest stars & most metal-rich stars making up the spiral arms – divided into two sub-groups – our Sun and most of the stars in our nght sky are of this population.

(From memory.)