if the Aliens
are Repubs
WE're what's
for Dinner.

After so many years thinking of galaxies as being held together by the gravitational tug between stars, it has not been easy for me to shift gears and think instead of stars as decorative sparkly trim, not structural I-beams of a galaxy's architecture. Mysterious unseen stuff, this dark matter, but the evidence for its existence is pretty strong.
Minor correction -- half of LIGO is in Hanford, yes, but the other half is just outside of Livingston, Louisiana (not Alabama). There is also a junior version of LIGO, called Virgo, in Italy. I sometimes wonder if the European astrophysics mavens were thinking of Galileo's famous Leaning Tower gravity experiment, when they decided to site Europe's premier gravity lab just ten miles from Pisa.

There is no such thing as "seven billion light-years ago," only "seven billion light-years away."

But when did that light start?

Because we are in a simulation and these are the limitations of our firmware. The brain is a coping mechanism designed to filter out chaos and the only way it can do so is by relating everything experiential to itself. That's what I heard from Dr. Psilocybin at least.

You can't teach a dog calculus. It follows that there is some limit to human capacity for comprehension. Maybe we're bumping up against it.

@4) you have no poetry in your bones.

I didn't realize you were speaking poetically! Pedantic correction retracted.

An fitting joke for the discussion:

https://youtu.be/WZy02_OFErk

@4, @11, @13 Astronomers do not directly measure the age of nor the distance to most of the objects they observe in the universe-- they measure red shift.

Red shift can be expressed equivalently as distance or age via mathematical transformations, and these are all understood to be equivalent expressions by working scientists, but most of them don't bother with the extra maths and just use red shift directly when talking to each other (not least because the transformations introduce extra uncertainty, and a working stiff can't be distracted all day by arguments about models of inflation and discrepancies in measurements of the Hubble constant)