> A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme.

I don't find that to be useful at all.

Yes of course, all the suffering on Earth is nothing but a footnote in 0.000000001 font size as far as the universe is concerned.

But that's irrelevant. We live on Earth, so what happens here is actually 100% of what matters. Everything else is inconsequential.

Things can be meaningless on a cosmic timescale and still matter a great deal on a human one. Most of us will never influence the universe, but we'll influence our families, friends, coworkers and even future generations, that's enough...

Just don’t think about all the suffering you or I could ease with the money we spend on a “good time.”

We’re not the good guys. We rationalize the inescapable selfishness placed there by ages of evolution.

One of the first gravitational wave detections by LIGO was I think the merger of two black holes or maybe a black hole and a neutron star. It was over a billion light years away I think but was so energetic that it conveted approximately 5 Solar masses into energy in about one second. That's ~10^48 Joules. In 1 second that is ~10^48 Watts.

For comparison, the Milky Way has an estimate of 5x10^36 Watts so we're talking about the energy output, very briefly, of roughly a trillion Milky Way galaxies.

The other that gets me is amgnetars. These are neutron stars with an insane magnetic field. The strongest detected exceeds 1 billion Tesla, making is 30 trillion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. Get too close and it would flatten atoms and ultimately break molecular bonds and rip electrons out of your body. Google seems to think that happens at ~1000km, which is pretty close to get to a neutron star but still, that's a magnetic field.

These things are quite rare and quite unstable. If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong, which means that the gravity is overcoming the strong nuclear force but also the electric repulsion.

> A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme.

I don't like that our culture has developed statements like this.

Every single action you make on planet Earth is more consequential and impactful than the countless parsecs of worthless unobtainable space dust that astrophysicists and science promoters like to glaze over.

Space is nothing compared to the unfathomable amount of synaptic connections in your brain, or the impact you can have on someone's life by hugging them.

Let's piss away all the small blue dot sentiments. They're old and pointless.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

There is a pretty significant chance that ours will be a starfaring civilization and that our children will reshape the very heavens.

The star is also pretty insignificant compared to the whole universe to be honest. Almost everything is at that scale.

And I mean okay, alien intelligence life must be very smart and not contact us because we are so evil and petty and self involved etc. And every single living species we encounter is also the same. Why are we grandstanding these aliens? They are likley sipping coffee in their corner of universe and wondering man why do we keep doing all this nonsense when we are so insignificant etc. That is far more likely to me than aliens who know we exist but willingly stay away because we are humans.

It's really the plastic straws that are the problem. That and avocado toast. And in 1-2 billion years when the Sun has heated up the Earth such that it's uninhabitable anyway (or 100 years at the rate we're going), we can at least feel comfort in all the shareholder value we've created along the way.

its eating the cats, its eating the dogs, its eating the all the things...

Good point, clearly a solar system with too many liberals and no second amendment.

While the sun has nothing to the with the rest, >500g a week of red meat is linked to intestinal cancer[1][2] and the billionaires should be paying more taxes if you asked me

[1]https://www.wcrf.org/preventing-cancer/topics/meat-and-cance... [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...

It happened sometime between whenever we observed it and 2600 years ago. It's equally valid to say that light travels from there to here instantly (but takes twice as long on the outbound trip) or the reverse. Taking the average is just a convention.

Hence why the articles title - which is based on when the light cone of the event reaches us - is actually the better way to think about it. At least there's no "depends how you feel like defining the speed of light today" in it.

To me, the fact that we can look at it is what's neat here. People have been theorizing how things work/behave in the universe, and we are finally starting to make observations to test those theories.