The Edge of Forever

Since before the dawn of civilisation, men have gazed up at the twinkling lights in the night sky and wondered at them. We have always been enchanted and mystified by the stars. They are beguiling and beautiful, unimaginably violent, and yet the origin of all life. They are disquieting; disturbing yet fascinating.

Disturbing because, at a glance, they remind us of how absurdly petty our societies and lives truly are. Once we know we are in fact looking up at gigantic burning balls of hydrogen, fantastically distant stellar furnaces cooking away, and that the light reaching our eyes is incredibly ancient, it is difficult not to feel disquiet along with awe. To be reminded of our smallness, that we are standing on a spinning mote of iron and rock orbiting a fairly unremarkable middle-aged yellow dwarf, in an outer spiral arm of a fairly unremarkable galaxy which is itself careening through the universe on no special trajectory, and all with no apparent purpose, is a reality both wonderful and terrible. We are, to all intents and purposes, lost: lost somewhere between immensity and eternity.

How easy it is, even comforting, to cast our eyes down again, back to the prosaic world of grubbing for resources; the struggle to find our next bit of cake or crack. Easier by far just to ignore the truth; that directly above your head—other than the gossamer-thin film of Earth’s atmosphere—there is nothing between you and the stars. That when peering up at the night sky, you are confronted with a type of boundlessness which the human mind is not properly equipped to fathom. Easier not to dwell too long on the truth, that all the religions and philosophies of men pale to nothing alongside the majesty of the stars. The cosmos baffles us as much as it enthralls us.

To live in the age of the James Webb Space Telescope is to be extraordinarily privileged. I for one count myself lucky to be alive in a time when we are approaching the answers to some of the richest astronomical mysteries. Primordial questions such as, how old exactly is the universe? How deep do the heavens stretch? What dynamics are at play? Are we alone? JWST holds the promise to answer many of these grandest of questions. To live in the age of JWST is to be less baffled; to become slightly less lost.

The recent release of a very small number of the first full resolution images from the JWST have certainly lived up to expectations. The science proper has not really begun; these are little more than test shots, and yet they are the best images humanity has ever captured. Comparing them to Hubble or Spitzer’s best efforts shows just how much more detail JWST is able to produce. It is orders of magnitude more impressive. 

Just the single image of the Southern Ring Nebula alone is enough to inspire wonderment. It is stellar wreckage. A splash in the cosmic pond. Yet as mesmerising as it is, pictures like this will be among the JWST’s least amazing feats. As the Southern Ring Nebula sits a mere two thousand light years away, it is effectively in our back garden. Webb, as an infrared telescope, will be capable of seeing the oldest, most stretched out infrared light. Once it is finally unleashed to take very long exposures for Webb’s highly anticipated ultra deep field images, the instrument they call MIRI will capture the first galaxies ever to ignite in our universe. To be able to cast humanity's view out into the uncharted reaches and deepest depths of the cosmic ocean, to see those first stars, drifting endlessly in the great immeasurable dark, is an achievement without parallel. 

For those who are familiar with Carl Sagan’s landmark 1980 documentary series Cosmos, you will have noticed that I have ‘borrowed’ more than one of his turns of phrase already in this article. I make no apologies; he was almost as much of a poet as he was a scientist. Here is a great passage:

“The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we have learnt most of what we know, recently we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows that this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is within us, we are made of star stuff, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

The almost equally august twentieth century physicist, Richard Feynmann, talked about “the inconceivable nature of Nature.” The images sent back to us from JWST confirm all of these notions and more. Sagan waxes lyrically about being inextricably “drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies.” That the galaxy and galaxy clusters we observe seem as “perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed.” He is preaching to the choir—as far as I am concerned, I need no convincing. His words ring effortlessly true to my mind. 

The James Webb Space Telescope is absolutely something for humanity to be proud of. We can take pride in the fact that some of our forefathers were bona-fide geniuses. That their insights and hard work have been built upon, generation after generation. From the scientists of antiquity, like Euclid or Aristarchus, to the giants of the Enlightenment, like Kepler or Newton, we have been able to decipher the clockwork of the heavens, to plumb the very depths of time and space. That these titans among men dragged civilisation, often kicking and screaming, out of its long dark sleep of ignorance and superstition, is a heritage of unfathomable value. Incredible as the JWST design and engineering teams are, we and they owe everything to our ancestors. 

Humans are extremely good at making tools. Along with language it is among the talents we possess which set us apart from the beasts. From the earliest napped handaxes, to Galileo’s earliest ground lenses, we seemingly can’t stop making better and better tools. James Webb Space Telescope is the pinnacle of this obsession. It is quite simply the finest tool ever created. A tool whose products all of humanity can share. It will bring us to the very precipice of creation; we will see the edge of forever.