The Webb Space Telescope image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 includes thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects seen in the infrared to date. The light in this image is 4.6 billion years old. Credit to NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI.
By Anne W. Semmes
It’s a milestone with the extraordinary success of the James Webb Space Telescope, providing us with images from so deep into the universe that it seems able to look back almost to the beginning of time! With its mirrors, if they remain safe from space debris, it is sure to expand our understanding of space with images from “near-Earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.”
Watching the creation of this Nova telescope, I rejoiced with the scientists, seeing their joyous exuberance as they saw the success of their telescope unfold millions of miles away, with some of these first images so colorful and strange that they were likened to the art of salvador dali!
But that was last week, and now the Webb Space Telescope has fallen off the radar. For a haircut this weekend, I asked the hairdresser what she thought of these photos. “What telescope,” she asked. I guess the only people who walk on the moon or mars will get the attention of this hairdresser.
And this year marks 53 years from this July 20, since the first two men set foot on the moon in 1969. Over the next three years, 10 more men did. And in 2025, more people may be walking on the moon as part of NASA’s $93 billion Artemis project. The aptly named Artemis in Greek was Apollo’s sister, and this time women will be part of the crew.
Thanks to the Association of Retired Men’s Speaker Series, I was introduced to a wonderful book, “The Mission of a Lifetime – Lessons from the Men Who Went to the Moon,” which explores the reflections of a “50-year lunar retrospective” from some of these 12 moonwalkers and 12 others , who saw Earth from the Moon from their orbiting spacecraft. “From this mystical position,” writes author Basil Hero, “their minds were rebooted with a changed view of happiness and the value of time, and above all, with a newfound respect for our home planet.”
And now a favorite quote by the British scientist Fred Hoyle from 1948: “Once a photograph of the Earth taken from outside is available – once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes clear – a new idea as powerful as any in history will be unleashed .”
One such photo is Earth Sunrise, 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 Earth Sunrise photo, which he says changed his life.
But the reflection of astronaut Jim Lovell, also orbiting on the Apollo 8 mission, is the most impressive to me, thank you, author Hero. Seeing this “ascent of the earth,” Lovell concludes, “We don’t go to heaven when we die, we go to heaven when we’re born.” “That’s a powerful statement, and I don’t know anyone who has put Lovell’s words into feeling those words,” replied Yale Divinity School Dean and New Testament Professor Greg Sterling. “He felt as though he had already been in heaven in 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 scientists gathered shortly after that first moonwalk in the book Men in Space – The Impact on Science, Technology and International Cooperation. The quote is from the late physicist Freeman Dyson, whom I had the privilege of knowing. He wrote: “I foresee a time, a few centuries from now, when most of the heavy industry will be out into space, with most of the mining operations perhaps transferred to the moon, and the earth will be preserved for the pleasure of its inhabitants like a green and pleasant land.”
Dyson was an environmentalist who feared “the three great forces of technology, the power of weapons, population growth and pollution,” “We are in danger of destroying all that is beautiful on this planet through our accumulations of poisonous mess.” He adds: “For 24 years, nuclear physicists have been saying ‘One world or none’… Earth has become too small for squabbling tribes and city-states to exist.”
Dyson predicted that “the emigration to distant parts of the solar system of significant numbers of people will make our species as a whole invulnerable.” But he adds, “I don’t think the planets will play a major role in the future of man. For one thing, they are mostly uninhabited. On the other hand, even if they are habitable, they will not greatly increase our living space. If we can colonize Mars, Mars will soon look like Earth, complete with parking lots, income tax forms and all.
Certainly not an acceptable view of Elon Musk, who is portrayed in Basil Hero’s book as drawn to Mars, with a long-held dream of “launching into the air 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 drives Musk is that “humanity’s time on Earth was running out.”
The late physicist Stephen Hawking has been revealed as a kindred spirit who believes: “With climate change, delayed asteroid impacts, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious.”
Remarkably, I found another person I knew in this book, Man in Space – Sidney Hyman. Sydney 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, professor, and sometime presidential spokesman for JFK, and was well aware of Kennedy’s role in launching the space race to put a man on the moon.
In the book, Sidney writes about Christopher Columbus, the “Admiral of the Ocean,” who discovered five islands in 1492 without knowing about this continental landmass that would become America. “Could any man then alive foresee how the discovery of the New World would so profoundly alter all existing relations in Europe—that almost nothing would ever be the same again…” That the consequences of this Columbian discovery included the ” “poetic” fact that precisely the American children of the New World … will be the first to succeed in sending a man to the moon.’
Sidney believed that the question was open whether “the pressure on the population of the earth could be relieved by rocket immigrations on the celestial Mayflowers, who would colonize the moon, Mars, Venus, or points beyond. . . . It is therefore natural for imaginative and deeply concerned people to refer to other planets of the solar system, as the New World was called to remedy the population problems of the Old World.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently captured this unique view of Earth from the vantage point of the spacecraft in orbit around the Moon. The large tan area in the upper right corner is the Sahara desert. Image credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University.
Add Comment