James-Webb Extends Our Field of Possibilities by Allowing Us To Dream, in Billions of Years.
This will give us the means to understand our raison d'être to life on Earth.
The popular and worldwide success of the first pictures from the new James-Webb telescope tells us a lot about the state of the world. This telescope, launched by an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou space center in December 2021, is first of all a beautiful example of a very high level of scientific cooperation between countries that have chosen to give science its full place.
It is an opportunity to show that democracies when they want, are always at the forefront of the most extreme science.
This telescope, the largest ever sent into space, positioned 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, allows us to observe and photograph, with an accuracy eight times greater than all previous attempts, galaxies located 13 billion light years from Earth. And not only photographs visible to the naked eye, but also in infrared containing infinitely valuable information.
Many people may have thought that there was a better use for the few billions that this project cost. I don't think so.
Beyond the immense poetic vertigo that these first images provoke, beyond the awareness of the unity of the human species, of the importance of a long time, of the vanity of our quarrels and our follies, one takes oneself to dream, with the specialists who study them, of what one will learn on :
The Orion nebula. This cloud is visible to the naked eye, as large as 4 times the Moon, within the Orion galaxy and which contains a real nursery of stars, the closest to us, at 1,350 light-years.
Stephan's Quintet. This grouping of galaxies is made up of billions of stars, located 290 million light-years away, in the constellation of Pegasus.
The chemical composition of the gas giant planet WASP-96b, which would have much to tell us about the chemical composition of our solar system.
All this will help us to understand how galaxies, stars, and planets are born and die, how life can arise or disappear somewhere, in particular on the extraordinary and improbable equilibrium conditions that made it possible for life to emerge, and to be maintained, in billions of forms and organisms, on this planet.
It will also allow us to have a more precise idea of what the universe was like some 700 million years only after the theoretical beginning of the universe, and perhaps even earlier, during the first fractions of the first second of the universe. And also of the possible existence of other universes simultaneous or previous to ours.
Finally, it will allow us to better understand under what unlikely conditions a consciousness could have developed enough, in one of the 10^22 (10 followed by 22 zeros) stars that form the universe, to ask itself these questions, even if the answers are still out of reach.
This gives us first of all an answer to the question of what is the raison d'être of life on Earth, and the importance of protecting it: we are only here to make our world as liveable as possible, for as long as possible, for generations of human beings best trained in the requirements of reason, capable of working together, with the rest of nature, to build enough collective knowledge, and perhaps even collective consciousness, to elucidate this raison d'être, and to pierce what some call the Mystery.
Yes, our raison d'être is to give ourselves the means to understand our raison d'être. Is it little? It is gigantic!
And it is true for humanity as well as for each of us: to understand our reason for being and to realize it. It is even, I believe, the characteristic of humanity to have enough faith in itself and in reason to think that, even if it does not know it yet, its reason for existing, individual and collective. And that it is necessary to protect absolutely the life, the intelligence, and the conscience, to find it. Even if this reason of being, ultimately, could not be of the field of the reason …
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