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Our place in the stars
The line, delivered by the protagonist Joseph Cooper, rings truer today than it did eight years ago when the Christopher Nolan feature-length was released in theaters the world over.
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An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars, which is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. (AFP/NASA)
O
ne of the most memorable quotes from the 2014 sci-fi film Interstellar is: "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."
The line, delivered by the protagonist Joseph Cooper, rings truer today than it did eight years ago when the Christopher Nolan feature-length was released in theaters the world over.
Back then, there was no once-in-a-century pandemic that had killed more than 6.3 million people, no war between the West and a revisionist power, no disruption to the global supply chain and no threat of millions potentially going hungry.
Wars over territories and spheres of influence and the scrounging for basic needs such as energy and food are exactly what Cooper meant by looking down and worrying about our place in the dirt.
Yet even at this dark moment in history, when what we care about the most is how to muddle through and survive, there can still be a glimmer of hope for humanity.
And that even at some of the bleakest moments, humanity — if and when it decides to pull together —can still summon the strength to achieve wonders.
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas Day last year and the big reveal of some of its stunning first images on Tuesday were major achievements that again highlight the best of humanity.
The design of the space telescope, the biggest that we have thus far, and the fact that it has to be launched and maneuvered into an orbit position 1 million miles from Earth behind the shadow of the moon, were the results of an engineering marvel that Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo Galilei could only dream of conjuring up.
And for this, the credit goes to scientists and engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency who have worked tirelessly in the last two decades.
What's more impressive is the idea behind making this large telescope: What if we can engineer a telescope, especially one equipped with an infrared scanner, so large and so powerful that we can peer back in time, to catch some of the first light that came soon after the Big Bang, the moment when the universe was still in its primordial soup, when new galaxies were still in their early cosmic dance?
What NASA unveiled on Tuesday with the first early James Webb Space Telescope images was nothing short of spectacular, a stunning vista of distant colliding galaxies, gas-giant exoplanets and dying star systems. And with more data coming in, we can expect to get more answers regarding how the universe was built in the first place. With this, we may get answers to the most fundamental question: Where did we come from?
Also with the power that the telescope has, we can get visuals and data on some faraway exoplanets and provide another fundamental question: Are we alone in the universe?
