Inking a comic about the glorious variety that is life. Published weekly from Aotearoa 🇳🇿 New Zealand

Progress

A Triangle-person is looking at the sky using a pretend telescope made out of curled hands. A small circle shows what they see - just blackness with a pinprick of light. Subtitle: "Does scientific progress have a limit"? The same person is holding a small telescope to their eye. They see a planet with ears - Saturn. Subtitle: "Surely it has to stop somewhere?" Now they are sitting in an observatory at a large telescope. They see moons of Saturn. "But every time I think - this is it!" Next they stare at a computer screen, Hubble telescope hovering over them. They see a star and next to it a dot of light - an alien mega planet. "The science lurches forward by an order of magnitude." Finally, they sit at a flat-screen monitor peering at it and wildly gesticulating. Above them there is a schematic of a number of telescopes placed far out in space, using Sun as a gravitational lens. They see an alien Earth, and there is some city lights visible on the dark surface of the planet. "It's hard not to be in awe!"

A Triangle-person is looking at the sky using a pretend telescope made out of curled hands. A small circle shows what they see - just blackness with a pinprick of light. Subtitle: “Does scientific progress have a limit”?

The same person is holding a small telescope to their eye. They see a planet with ears - Saturn. Subtitle: “Surely it has to stop somewhere?”

Now they are sitting in an observatory at a large telescope. They see moons of Saturn. “But every time I think - this is it!”

Next they stare at a computer screen, Hubble telescope hovering over them. They see a star and next to it a dot of light - an alien mega planet. “The science lurches forward by an order of magnitude.”

Finally, they sit at a flat-screen monitor peering at it and wildly gesticulating. Above them there is a schematic of a number of telescopes placed far out in space, using Sun as a gravitational lens. They see an alien Earth, and there is some city lights visible on the dark surface of the planet. “It’s hard not to be in awe!”

Instrument Aperture Resolution km @ 100 ly
Eye 7mm 60 arcsec¹ 275 billion km
Galileo’s telescope 15mm 10 arcsec² 50 billion km
19th century observatory 1m 1 arcsec² 5 billion km
Hubble space telescope 2.4m 0.05 arcsec 230 million km³
Solar gravitational lens⁴ 1.45 million km 0.000000001 arcsec 5 km

¹ Assuming full dilation with night vision adaptation when looking at a bright object.

² Atmosphere interferes with obtaining a clean image.

³ This is sufficient to resolve some giant planets as points of light by using a coronagraph (a star-blocking device) - e.g. see HR 8799 b, c and d.

⁴ Sun’s gravity bends light, so in principle it can be used as a giant lens. This is obviously untested and the values are rough estimates of what might be possible - but we should be able to resolve geographic or weather features on Earth-sized exoplanets (city lights are my dramatization 😛)

#science