this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Ackshully, "galaxy" (or rather, "galaxias") means "Milky Way" already, it's just a translation. It was less ambiguous when the only galaxy we could see was the Milky lights that covered a lot of our sky.

Of course, we realize there's more than one galaxy now, so the meanings have diverged.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

And we didn't realize there was more than one galaxy until the 1920s (I think?)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

We didn't even suspect?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

There are people alive today who will tell you the moon is a hologram. Never respect human intelligence more than you have to.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

May I suggest reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos? Or watch one of the TV shows.

While your average human is about as smart as a brick, there are so many minds throughout history that were able to pull humanity out of our dark caves and into space.

What we need, to survive as a species, is to nurture people, give them (proper) education, and more will come up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

I grew up on Sagan. I'm not saying we should accept anything the way it is or not take inspiration from our achievements, just that we should not be prideful or expect any greatness from anyone.

We're currently smarter than we've ever been in a lot of ways, but I find the smarter you are it only changes the kinds of mistakes you make.

I do agree that humans increase in value the more you value them, and vice-versa. Society should be structured around maximising "human capital", so to speak.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Just looking at them, they appear fairly similar to nebulas within our own galaxy. It took sophisticated spectroscopic measurements to realize they're actually much further away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Thanks, and now I know the difference between a nebula and a galaxy.