Imlisanen Jamir
The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope portrayed a tiny speck of sky, which could be covered by a grain of sand if held up with one’s hands to the heavens.
The telescope’s enormous power—eighteen giant mirrors, reporting from a million miles away— just 12.5 hours of observing time reveals in that space thousands of galaxies, some clustered together, some swooping and swirling. Even the tiny smudges in the image are galaxies.
On July 13, NASA released four more images, showcasing the range of the telescope: the spectrum of an exoplanet a thousand light years away, in which can be read its chemical composition (and the fact that it has clouds!); the nebula of a star’s explosive death; the best ever image of the galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet; and a close-up of the Carina Nebula, a “stellar nursery.”
This is one of those Big Science Moments, the kind that revolutionizes a field and galvanizes the public. A mission 30 years in the making, the telescope offers scientists unprecedented views of the early universe, galactic and stellar evolution, and planets around other stars in our galaxy.
The search for life beyond Earth is usually confined to our own galaxy, the only space within which we’d have a chance of detecting it. If life is rare, maybe we’re alone within the Milky Way, but these JWST images invite us to zoom out and out and out. The Deep Field image doesn’t offer new information about the size or age of the universe, but it makes the vastness visible.
Instead of 100 billion stars in one galaxy, now we’re talking about roughly a quadrillion stars (a number so big it feels like nonsense, you see why we need images to make sense of it). Even if life is extraordinarily rare, rare times a quadrillion still seems like it should end up meaning the universe is home to more than just us.
But sit with another possibility: What if we are alone? What if there’s no other life at all? What is the value and meaning of all these galaxies and almost uncountable stars, still, then?
The question of life in other galaxies will probably never be truly answered, not in our lifetime nor humanity’s. We may find microbes on another planet, or not. We may, with JWST or another powerful telescope, see the traces of life in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, or we may not; this kind of evidence would hardly be conclusive of anyone running around out there.
We may someday pin down the odds of life’s arising, its frequency and predilections, and we may be able to apply those principles to galaxies beyond our own. But humans will never travel to the far reaches of the universe on display in JWST’s images, will never know them with our own eyes or our feet on their ground.
We can gaze at the images captured by our telescopic emissaries, and we can treasure life on Earth and be awed by the cosmos all the same. If we want aliens, the most alien kinship would be with the facets of the universe that don’t have to do with life at all.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
