Hubble Headlines

- NASA sets Hubble mission launch date - (more)
Thursday, 7, 2007 Science Daily


Save the Hubble.com
- Hubble News-
Hubble around the world, every now and then, the latest news.
Updated - 06/07/07

- Save the Hubble -
Created, written and
published by
Fernando Ribeiro


Views of a vast Universe
Today featuring:
Help is on the way!

"NASA has targeted Sept. 10, 2008 for the launch of the fifth and final space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope." 7, 2007 Science Daily (more)

Dear Hubble fan, this web site has been up and running for almost 4 years now. It went online just 8 days after Nasa made it public there wouldn't be another service mission and therefore Hubble would be, very much literally, left to its own devices...
We've spent a lot of time, effort and resources. Thousands upon thousands of people visited this site. I've answered questions, given interviews, written letters. More than five thousand people, from all over the world, have signed the petition which has been sent to Nasa and to the American Congress. We have not given up on Hubble. We have not given up on the science it makes. We have not given up on the wonders it unveils. We have prevailed!
Hubble will be saved and it's going to begin on Sept. 10, 2008. We've been here before, we'll be here then.
Long life to Hubble!

Fernando Ribeiro - Save the Hubble.com

Send us your ideas, questions or opinions => What do you think about it?

Save the Hubble.com was first uploaded in 1/26/2004, just ten days after the cancellation of SM4. For four years I’ve kept this site up and running. Well, sometimes crawling more than running but anyway, I’ve kept it. During this time Hubble never ceased to amaze me. I do believe it is the greatest scientific instrument ever made, for a number of reasons. I feel that if we could see with the eyes of God, we would see what Hubble shows us. Hubble Space Telescope connects the general public with the infinite wonders of the cosmos and makes us feel part of a bigger universe.

These four years brought many changes into my personal life. I fought depression, got married, built a house, changed jobs, and did an internship at the Smithsonian Institution in DC.

During all this time Hubble touched me in more ways than I could possibly tell. I’ll just mention one of them. For years I’ve kept an image of the M81 galaxy as my wallpaper. As a professor who has to deal with hundreds of students and all sorts of problems, looking at the magnificent M81 every time I turned on my computer helped me keep things in proportion.

One day, after staring at the picture for a long while, I realized the enormity of what I was seeing. That galaxy was 95,000 light years across and I could see the whole of it in a glance. That set in motion a train of thought that would change the way I saw the universe. Here it is:

If light takes almost a hundred thousand years to cross the galaxy, I thought, so does information. That would render information leaving one end of the galaxy almost useless, if that end would need, for instance, help from the opposite extremity. If people from Earth needed help from people from Planet X, located on the other side of the Milky Way, and asked for it, it would take some 180,000 years for the answer to arrive. All that is pretty much obvious but then I asked myself how the mind of God would work with such a constraint and THAT was puzzling!

Now let’s begin by agreeing on the following points:

  1. God exists (in whatever form you choose Him/Her/It to be).
  2. God is everywhere; He/She/It is omnipresent. God only makes sense (not that He/She/It has to make any sense at all) if we conceive He/She/It as expanding and existing in tandem with the universe. From the very instant of the Big Bang on.
  3. God knows everything; He/She/It is omniscient, but not necessarily into the infinite future what would be the point? (again, not that there has to be a point anyway)
  4. The laws of nature, His/Her/Its laws, that are valid for us are also valid for Him/Her/It.

Very well, God is everywhere and knows everything, fine, but what does He/She/It do with His/Her/Its knowledge? How does He/She/It integrate all that information across the universe? How does He/She/It act on the entire universe based on that information?
The speed of light ( C ) must impose a limit for how fast the information travels from one point to another point in God’s mind. God is everywhere and knows everything but not simultaneously. What the mind of God is learning here on Earth will take at least 90,000 years to reach the mind of God located on the other side of the Milky Way and 2.5 million years to reach His/Her/Its mind around the galaxy of Andromeda.
Let’s imagine that a hypothetical Andromedan civilization could be suffering from deadly global warming. If we consider C as the speed limit of the universe, it would be pointless for me to pray for them at the present. Although the local portion of God’s mind, here with me on Earth, would know about my prayer instantly this information would only arrive in God’s mind at Andromeda long after they were extinct.

My troubling conclusion was: even if God is expanding together with the boundaries of the universe, even if He/She/It is bigger than the universe itself, He/She/It can only act locally, based on local knowledge, over finite amounts of time.

After coming to these conclusions I talked to several friends, from physicists to doctors to mathematicians (I don’t have many religious friends, unfortunately). Those discussions led me to the following possibilities:

  1. God can do anything but not simultaneously everywhere.
  2. Time is not valid for God. He/She/It knows, 2.5 million years in advance, that the human species will evolve on Earth, that I’ll be born and eventually pray for the Andromedans and He/She/It acts accordingly.
  3. Space is not valid for God. He/She/It exists in a multidimensional, folded space and exists everywhere at the same time.
  4. The speed of light ( C ) is not the speed limit for information to travel.
  5. God exists in some sort of permanent quantum entanglement state. Every part of Him/Her/It is instantly affected by changes in any other part of Him/Her/It, regardless of distance. Then God would not only “play dice” but be part of the game He/Her/Itself. (I am no physicist so that’s just wild speculation; please check the link to learn more about quantum entanglement and the impossibility of transmitting useful information faster than light)
  6. If any of those is valid for God, then they would eventually be valid for us, since we share the same set of natural laws, even the unknown ones. That does not imply we would become God in the same way that learning aerodynamics does not change us into birds (but lets us fly nevertheless). That sure does give us something to look forward to…

Whatever the truth is, if there is one truth after all, it must be amazing, extraordinary. We are, in fact, dealing with very real things: space, time, C and the immemorial human belief in God (again, in whatever form you choose Him/Her/It to be). If those cannot coexist the way we imagine them, then something has to give. Would it be God? Would it be C? Would it be space? Would it be time? Would it be causality?

Well, at the end of the road of my humble campaign to Save the Hubble I wanted to share with everyone who supported my efforts, either by visiting the web site, by signing the petition or by writing to me, my transformed views of the infinite universe.
I hope and believe that Hubble Space Telescope will continue to represent the best is in us humans: the curiosity, the ingenuity, the sensibility, the perseverance, and the courage to surmount astounding challenges.

Godspeed SM4, Godspeed Hubble.

Fernando Ribeiro

More News

The Hubble Space Telescope has sent back the
best view yet of a picture-perfect galaxy known as M81

"The amazing detail in this image took our breath away," Andreas Zezas, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a news release unveiling the image. "We can see individual stars like tiny grains of sand." June, 6.

UK opens a new window to the universe!

The UK's Royal Observatory takes us to the stars with its new state-of-the-art planetarium.aving Hubble, a groundbreaking documentary about the telescope,
please visit, get to know the project and contribute
. May, 25.

Making movies and Saving Hubble
Saving Hubble, a groundbreaking documentary about the telescope,
please visit, get to know the project and contribute
.

Need a 100 reasons to Save the Hubble? Just click here
This is a fantastic display of what Hubble can do (and does) for mankind.
Just imagine what Galileo would do if he could see these images! Click on them
and marvel! If Hubble is not worth saving, then I don't know what is.


Now you can search the web for more Hubble news (or anything else!) with:

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Hubble Image Trivia

The CCDs of the Wide Field Channel (WFC)



The WFC features two 2048 × 4096 pixel CCDs based on a commercial design manufactured by Scientific Imaging Technologies (SITe). The configuration of the ST008A chip, specifically designed for ACS, has the serial register along the 4096 pixel edge, to reduce the number of pixels which can be involved into a radiation damage event. This chip is designed to be buttable along only one edge making the 2×1 mosaic possible.

(from The Johns Hopkins University)

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Save the Hubble past editions

06/07/2007 (Go!)
07/03/2006 (The First Brazilian)
03/31/2006 (What's up ?)
02/13/2006 (What does 2006 keep?)
12/20/2005 (The Intelligent Design)
11/12/2005 (Why not the Moon?)
09/11/2005 (Tribute to 09/11)
08/05/2005 (Fernando's art show)
07/05/2005 (Bob Tubbs interview)
05/18/2005 (Hubble's First Light)
05/06/2005 (Taxpayers of the World)
05/03/2005 (The Hubblecast)
05/01/2005 (Balls-of-steel Griffin)
04/29/2005 (NASA'S new Admin.)
04/27/2005 (Kari Stausmire)
04/25/2005 (Hubble's15th anniv.)


Editions of 2004 (great stuff!)

© Fernando Ribeiro - SavetheHubble.com - 2004 - 2007