“I just thought I’d throw myself a curve ball” said Jim. “Something straight down the line but unusual.”
“Yeah, I know. I do that. Just to be weird or whatever.”
“No. Being weird is different.”
“Straight down the middle isn’t being weird?”
“It is but in a non-weird way.”
“I like the way you define everything according to your own dictionary. No I think it’s adorable.” said Sally.
It was their first actual meeting, like at a cafe or something and the possibility of falling in love was a calculated risk. They had both calculated it. Sixty eight percent was the mean average between the two of them.
“So the guy says - ‘Go in peace’ and gives me this like special blessing sign, like from the angels or something, like God. And I walked on, feeling peaceful.”
“Great story. And that’s why you want to ride all over the world and discover the real people.”
“Not just the real people, the real weird people, in a weird way but a nice way. Like people who are actually nice. Like whoever it might be. Discover the weird people of all the lands and ride my bicycle.”
“Can I go with you?”
“Sure.”
“It’s ok, my parents won’t let me. I have to finish high school.”
“You could runaway. Be a runaway.”
”I’ve thought about it.”
“Me too.”
“You’re doing it. Bum.” she punches him in the arm and takes a hit of her espresso.
Teenagers. We were once one. Or still are. Or will be.
It’s a time of great change. A child into an adult, which is what graduation is all about, right? What other cultures accomplish with a naming ceremony or a ritual of baptism or by keeping vigil in the forest for 21 straight days, we call it high school graduation. Then we send our children out into the world as adults. Come what may.
I suspect humanity as a whole is going thru a similar phase shift. Control, alt, delete, to use a keyboard analogy. Growing up. Becoming human. We can’t live like spoiled brats anymore, bossing everyone around like they don’t have any sense themselves and abusing our planet.
People who have never really thought much about their own humanity may soon find themselves wondering about it. People who were never big on the big questions of life, may find themselves thinking big thoughts, now that we’re seeing things 13 billion light years away. “Whoa.”
The possibilities of life, which had been reduced to the size of a planet, a nation, a personal space really, about the circumference of a pizza, have been flung wide open. Like a teenager graduating from high school.
Now we know that we are smart enough to build a space telescope and deploy it a million miles from earth where it can observe the endless cosmos all the way to the edge of time, when the universe was new. The light from that universe has taken 13 billion years to reach us. We know that we can work together as a team - twenty thousand people from around the world working together built this telescope over the course of 2 decades. It also demonstrates that Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of the largest military contractors in our country, can build something useful, not just weapons systems. These are all good signs.
If you’re really into it you can check out the official NASA YouTube video of the big grand opening world wide watch party as it unfolded Tuesday morning.
So far we’ve seen a cluster of galaxies 4.6 billion light years away acting as a lens to focus on even older galaxies even farther away that we have never seen before.
This image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 was released from the White House where President Biden was presiding over the space telescope opening in order to get maximum political benefit. He made a few remarks. When the scientist guy said we would find exoplanets, possible habitable planets orbiting other stars, the President responded, “Whoa.” Which was exactly what I said. I think that should be noted.
I mean what would happen to mankind’s view of itself if we found life on other planets? “Whoa.” that’s what would happen. “Must be God was experimenting on other worlds too. He just didn’t bother to tell us. Yeah that’s it.”
From the Guardian’s coverage of the grand opening I purloined these pictures: Stephan’s Quintet, a tight cluster of five galaxies, with an active black hole. You can’t see the black hole because it’s black and it’s eating all the light,
The Carina nebula, rendered in such detail that researchers were able to discern bubbles, cavities and jets blasting out of newborn stars, along with hundreds of stars they had never seen before.
Webb’s instruments, 100 times more sensitive than those on the Hubble, can deliver images that have three times the resolution. The scientists are super excited. This will enable us to know more about what we don’t know about than we ever did before. That’s science. Pushing back the frontier. Like teenagers graduating from high school, choosing which way to go in life, making it make sense, one way or the other.
“The job now is choosing which stars to look at and which planets to take images of, not whether the telescope is capable or not of doing it. It’s more than capable of doing that kind of science, superbly well.” said Prof Gillian Wright, director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh and principal investigator for the mid-infrared (Miri) instrument on Webb.
And just like that we find ourselves billions of light years away from home looking around for life forms, analyzing the chemical ‘signature’ of galaxies we’ve never seen before as if we’d been flung out into a world much too large for us to comprehend but comprehending it anyway. Like a teenager graduating . . . well you know what I mean.
music from :: 1:25:00-1:35:32
a flash fiction and the opening of the universe