The Big Picture.

I never got an email from the celebrated astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, but I’m told he signs them, “Look Up!” Good advice, especially if you live out West, as I do, where the skies are less polluted and the stars put on a show almost every night. But as Dr. Tyson would likely remind us, we can see, with the naked eye, only a tiny, tiny fraction of the stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, not to mention the entire universe.?

So I was struck by the jaw-dropping images recently released by the folks manning the James Webb Space Telescope (the J.W.S.T.). The latest photographs give words like “amazing,” “breathtaking,” “astounding” and “awesome” real meaning. For me, these pictures are simply mind-blowing.?

NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Webb telescope was launched from French Guiana on Christmas Day, 2021, but took several months to fully deploy, as computers adjusted its eighteen primary mirrors remotely, a million or so miles in space. So far, it’s been successful beyond all expectations. As Jane Rigby , NASA’s top scientist working on the J.W.S.T. told David W. Brown in a recent The New Yorker interview, “We are finding galaxies further back than we knew were possible. We’re seeing back in time to about three hundred million years after the big bang. The elevator pitch we used when J.W.S.T. was sold was that we’ll see the baby pictures of the universe. And we will definitely do that.”

For reference, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, so those “baby pictures” Dr. Rigby describes will show a universe without planet Earth, which is only about 4.5 billion years old. For further reference, the average person alive on Earth today can expect to live just 77 years. Which means that in our brief sliver of existence, we living humans may be lucky enough to see “the big picture” for the first time.?

Astronomers say the Webb telescope is just getting started and predict that it will be answering some very important questions in the years ahead, like “Are there other planets that could support life as we know it?”?

“The really cool thing about living now is that we can get some real answers to those questions,” Dr. Rigby says. “We’ve always been wondering, since there have been humans: Are we alone? But we’re within a generation of having the technology to just go find out. Not even a generation. One or two decades.”

Seeing how big the universe is or learning if there is life on other planets can make the individual existence of each of us Earthlings seem small and insignificant. Maybe even meaningless. But I don’t see it that way. If our personal experience as sentient beings in the universe is only destined to last seven or eight decades, I think we should try our best to use our time wisely.

The way I see it, we should learn everything science has to teach us about our place in the cosmos, but we should also try to make our own small corner of the universe better for having lived in it.?

These are heavy thoughts for a Tuesday morning, but you really can’t look at those Webb images and not think about the universe and your place in it. Big picture stuff. So I’ll get up tomorrow morning and head to the Prosono office, as I do every day, and work with my colleagues and our clients to try to make our world a better place...remembering, as we do, that the universe is vast, but our time is short.