The opening scene of the 1997 movie “Contact” popped in my head while clicking through the imagery sent back from the James Webb Space Telescope this week. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s worth looking up the three-minute opening scene on the Internet. Starting with a close-up of Earth, the camera travels outward like it’s a probe being launched to explore the depths of space, but always looking back towards Earth. We see Jupiter fly by, then Saturn, an asteroid field, more planets, the edges of the solar system, the Milky Way, and then we are surrounded by a twirling nebula filled with dust and starlight.
My favorite part of this scene is the audio accompanying it. During the close-up of Earth, the soundtrack is filled with blaring 1990’s music and television shows, all playing at the same time, an overwhelming amount of noise and distraction. As the camera takes us away from our planet, the soundtrack drifts along with us through time, playing distinctive pieces of music and news clips from each decade – bouncy 80’s music, 70’s disco, Nixon saying he’s not a crook, the news announcing Kennedy has been shot, the Beatles, Elvis, the Andrew Sisters, newsreels from WW2, radio shows from the 1930s. Each decade gets simpler and less noisy until we finally reach the dawn of the radio and a few voices floating into space. After that, it’s absolute silence as the camera moves outward through the universe.
It’s hard to wrap my mind around the images the Webb Telescope is capturing for us this week. In one photo, a group of galaxies called “Stephans Quintet” is described as not really a quintet after all, as one galaxy is a mere 40 million light-years away from us, while the other four are 290 million light-years away. Another image shows us previously invisible stars being born, in a region only 7600 light-years from Earth.
While 7600 light-years seem slightly easier to think about, it means the stars in the photo I just looked at were born around 5600 BC. I decided to see what was happening on Earth around that time. According to Wikipedia, “evidence of cheese-making in Poland is dated c. 5500 BC” and pottery shards from Tbilisi show “evidence that grapes were being used for winemaking c. 5980 BC.”
It’s easier to imagine one of my very distant relatives taking the time to invent a way to make something tasty to drink and eat from old grapes and goat’s milk than it is for me to imagine stars being born in the universe, even if I now have an actual photo of it happening.
Projects like the Webb Telescope remind me how hard we work to continue to learn and grow as a human race. We live our lives so quickly when compared to the universe around us. What seems important to us during this time would barely show up as a line of red sand in the Grand Canyon walls or a growth ring in one of the giant Sequoia trees firefighters are trying to preserve in Yosemite this week.
Still, that doesn’t mean our lives are insignificant. It just means we need to make the most of the short time we have while we are here. And when the day is done, to find a few minutes to sit on the back porch on a dark summer night with someone we love, staring up at the bright stars overhead with a mixture of wonder and awe, knowing we will never be able to truly understand it all, but we can still be glad to be here now and be a part of it.