Watch "Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine" 🤯
Totally Gaga for the humans behind the James Webb Space Telescope
Dear Beautiful Humans,
Meet our ancestors—the Pillars of Creation!
You might remember one of these early images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), currently on location one million miles away from home, and snapping photos as it looks for the birth of galaxies, exoplanets, and signs of life beyond Earth. The photo of Pillars of Creation (above), is a small region within the Eagle Nebula, and a star-making factory (see the red glow points?) 6,500 light-years away and our ancestors. The light-years away is what gives this telescope time machine powers, but watch the doc because it’s mind-blowing and I just cannot explain it.
According to an astrophysicist on the show, all humans came from this luminous gaseous matter found in Pillars. We share the calcium in our bones with it, and other what-nots that escape me. What a radical new idea of what it means to be human! To contemplate ourselves beyond lineage and ancestry and world history. It’s a good time to go there don’t you think?
Treat yourself to an injection of wonder, something to remind you that humans are absolutely remarkable beings (hey, you’re in here too); that we are able to come together and perform miracles of invention. Watch “Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine” on Netflix. It came out late July but it could be what we need right now.
OK—let’s slow down and consider this:
1. A group of humans conceived of a telescope the size of a 3-story building and as long as a tennis court . . .
2. . . . and spent 20 years developing this incredibly high-risk, problem-riddled scientific marvel.
2. Then, they figured out how to fold this giant telescope, origami-style, into a rocket…
3. … and launched that rocket one million miles into outer space…
4. … where the origami telescope unfolded itself—while suspended in the cosmos (!!).
5. This high-risk project succeeded, and soon we received photos of the first-ever galaxies, which meant essentially traveling back in time to explore the origin of the universe, the history of humans, and to ask the questions: What are we? and Are there others like us out there?
WTAF right? I mean is there no limit to what humans can do? In a good way?
Watch “Unknown” and pair it with PBS Nova’s Ultimate Space Telescope documentary. Tell everyone you know. We need to remember there’s so much more to humans than what makes most of the daily and evening news.