Last week, NASA released the first imagery from the James Webb Space Telescope, the more powerful successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope.
The images provided us with previously unseen views of surrounding galaxies, nebulae, and space anomalies near and far. They allowed us to look back billions of years and view the universe as it was in its infancy, giving scientists unimaginable mountains of data to mine and digest, data that may lead mankind to a deeper understanding of creation and even life itself.
Among the treasure trove of information released from the Webb telescope last week was an analysis of the atmospheric composition of exoplanet WASP-96b. The gas giant closely orbits a Sun-like star located roughly 1,150 light years from Earth. Despite orbiting closer to its star than Mercury orbits the Sun, Webb showed that WASP-96b’s puffy atmosphere carried the unmistakably clear signature of water vapor, that essential ingredient for life as we know it.
And, to think, it was only 53 years ago—on July 20, 1969—that mankind first set foot upon the moon.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar exclusion module, they left hefty imprints—both upon the lunar surface and upon human civilization—that persist until today. The landing served as the exclamation point on a dizzying era of technological development that changed the scope of human history. As Dr. Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) from “The Big Bang Theory” mused, when observing the reflector left by Armstrong on the moon’s surface: “It’s the only definitive proof that there are human-made objects on the moon placed there by a species that, only 60 years before, had just invented the airplane.”
In many ways, the landing also served as a unifying moment, reminding us of the human endeavor to achieve not as individuals or as nations, but as a species. The moon landing portended the end of the “space race”—a competitive enterprise in which the cosmos was viewed as a frontier waiting to be exploited for nationalist purposes. That race between the United States and Soviet Russia gave way to cooperative space exploration efforts, including the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the International Space Station, the International Space Exploration Coordination Group, and more. Despite national and corporate competition for satellite launches and the recent inauguration of the Space Force, the gifts of the heavens now appear to belong to all humanity, rather than the nation that discovers them.
As humanity moves forward in its quest for knowledge, one wonders what we can do to create pivotal moments to bring humanity together for other, essential purposes, such as sustainability, food security, liberty, and more.
—Rabbi Josh Knobel