I just want to dwell a little bit on the raw awe that the Webb telescope pictures evoke in me. We built a thing, we spent 20 years building a thing, and we flung it over a million kilometres away, and the thing we built takes … pictures of infinity. Pictures of 13 billion years in the past, pictures of the birth and death of stars, galaxies colliding, snapshots of other worlds. Lightyears of distance, aeons of time, glories almost beyond imagining.
This is a thing humanity can do. We can pool imagination, we can pool resources, we can devote decades of our lives, to building a camera that can photograph infinity. We can reach out, fling a piece of ourselves, our ingenuity, our dedication, our collaboration, our imagination, and create a lens so that we can see, we can touch …
There are people who say that pictures like this make them feel small, so tiny in comparison to the vastness that’s out there, but we touched that vastness. We took its picture. We put our palms on the panes of infinity. We flung a tiny tiny fragile machine, a collection of mirrors and motors and shields and fuel, out into the absolute vastness of space, more than a million kilometers distant, and took a picture of a dying star orbiting its partner two thousand lightyears away.
I mean, yes, we are tiny, we are incomprehensibly tiny, and so is everything we do and everything we build. But all that shows is that something so tiny can still do that. Can reach that far. Can witness that much.
We are incomprehensibly tiny and an incomprehensible miracle, that we can be so tiny in all this vastness, that everything we witness in these pictures aligned in such a way that we could form, and that in response, as tiny as we are, we can think and imagine and create on a scale that can … witness the universe right back. Touch it. Focus its light into an image of a billion, thirteen billion years ago. Share that image with a billion other minds.
We can see wonders. Absolute wonders. On a scale to beggar meaning. What more purpose do we need than that?
Sorry. Just. Sometimes science does something that just … wraps a whole fist around your heart and just goes … this is what wonder is. The wonder of the universe. And the wonder of us. This is what wonder feels like. This is what awe feels like.
This is what it feels like to be tiny. This is what it feels like to be infinite.
I love the stars so much.
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