The Webb Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 includes thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects observed in the infrared to date. The light in this image is 4.6 billion years old. Credit NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI.
By Anne W. Semmes
It’s a momentous moment with the extraordinary success of the James Webb Space Telescope providing us with images from the depths of the universe that seem able to look back almost to the beginning of time! With its mirrors, if kept safe from cosmic debris, it will surely extend our understanding of the cosmos, with images from “near-Earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.”
Watching the making of this telescope at Nova, I rejoiced along with the scientists to see their joyous exuberance as they watched the success of their telescope unfold a million miles away, with some of those first images so colorful and strange that compared them to art. by Salvador Dalí!
But that was last week and now the Webb Space Telescope has fallen off the radar. To get my hair cut at the weekend I asked the hairdresser what she thought of these pictures. “What telescope,” he asked. I guess the only humans who walk on the moon or mars will get the attention of this hairdresser.
And this year marks 53 years since July 20 that the first two men walked on the Moon, in 1969. In the following three years, another 10 men did. And by 2025 more humans could walk on the moon as part of NASA’s $93 billion Artemis project. Well-named Artemis in Greek was Apollo’s sister, and this time women will be part of the crew.
Thanks to the Retired Men’s Association Speaker Series, I was introduced to a wonderful book, “The Mission of a Life – Lessons from the Men Who Went to the Moon,” which explores the reflections of “50 years of lunar retrospective” of some of these 12 moonwalkers and 12 others who have seen Earth from the Moon from their orbiting spacecraft. “From that mystical perch,” writes author Basil Hero, “their minds were reset with an altered view of happiness and the value of time and, above all, a new appreciation for our home planet.”
And now a favorite quote from the British scientist Fred Hoyle, dated 1948: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, becomes available, once the isolation of the Earth becomes clear, a new idea as powerful as any in history. letting go.”
This photograph is “Earthrise”, taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 as a member of the Apollo 8 crew, while orbiting the Moon 10 times, he took the iconic Earthrise photograph which he said changed his life.
But it’s the reflection of astronaut Jim Lovell, also in orbit on that Apollo 8 mission, that is the most mind-blowing to me, thanks author Hero. Seeing that “rise of the earth”, Lovell had concluded: “We don’t go to heaven when we die, we go to heaven when we are born”. feeling in those words,” replied Yale Divinity School Dean and Professor of New Testament Greg Sterling. “There was a sense that he was already in heaven during his lifetime in a way that other human beings were not.. .”
It was another quote that led me to some fascinating reflections from a group of scholars assembled shortly after that first walk on the moon in the book “Men in Space: The Impact on Science, Technology and international cooperation”. The quote is from the late physicist Freeman Dyson who I had the privilege of knowing. He writes: “I foresee a time, a few centuries from now, when most heavy industry will be transmitted to space, with most mining operations perhaps transferred to the Moon and the earth preserved for enjoyment of its inhabitants as a green and pleasant land.”
Dyson was an environmentalist who feared the “three great forces of technology, the forces of armaments, population growth and pollution”. He adds “For 24 years nuclear physicists have been saying ‘one world or none’… The Earth has become too small for feuding tribes and city-states to exist.”
Dyson predicted that “The emigration to distant parts of the solar system of substantial numbers of people would render our species as a whole invulnerable.” But he adds: “I don’t think the planets will play the main role in the future of man. On the one hand, they are mostly uninhabitable. On the other hand, even if they are habitable, they won’t add much to our habitable space. If we get colonize Mars, Mars will soon resemble Earth, with parking lots and income tax forms and everything else.”
It’s certainly not an acceptable vision for Elon Musk, who appears in Basil Hero’s book as drawn to Mars, with a long-held dream of “launching a miniature experimental greenhouse containing food and crops to see how it would adapt to the Martian environment.” ” To get there, Musk developed the Space-X rocket. What Musk has driven is that “humanity’s time on Earth was running out.”
The late physicist Stephen Hawking reveals himself as a kindred spirit who believed: “With climate change, asteroid strikes overdue, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious.”
Surprisingly, I found another man I knew in that book, “Man in Space”: Sidney Hyman. Sidney lived across the street from my young family during our year in Washington, DC. He is listed in the book as a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, but he was an author, lecturer and sometime presidential speechwriter for JFK and well aware of Kennedy’s role in launching the space race to put a man in the moon
In the book Sidney writes about Christopher Columbus, “admiral of the ocean”, after having discovered five islands in 1492, not knowing about that continental mass that would become America. “Some man then living,” he writes, “could foresee how the discovery of the New World would so profoundly change practically all existing relations in Europe, that practically nothing would ever be the same again…” That the consequences of this Columbian discovery included ” the ‘poetic’ fact that it was the American children of the New World … the first to succeed in putting a man on the moon.”
Sidney believed it was an open question whether “the population pressures of the Earth can be relieved by the immigration of rockets into the heavenly Mayflowers that will colonize the moon, Mars, Venus, or points beyond. . . . Therefore, it is natural for imaginative and deeply concerned men to invoke other planets of the solar system, as the New World was invoked to solve the population problems of the Old World.”
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently captured this unique view of Earth from the viewpoint of the spacecraft in orbit around the Moon. The large tan area in the upper right is the Sahara desert. Image credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University.