Several years ago, my son and I set up a telescope on the roof of our home to watch a solar eclipse — just the two of us, a small tripod, and the moon sliding in front of the sun. At some point we looked down and noticed the light coming through the leaves of a nearby tree. It was making dozens of tiny crescents on the driveway, in the same shape as the eclipse itself.
I thought about that moment recently while watching the Netflix documentary Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, about the James Webb Space Telescope. Since 2022, Webb has remained nearly a million miles from Earth, four times farther away than the moon, in a spot where the earth’s and the sun’s gravity cancel each other out.
While the idea of an infrared telescope began in the mid-1990s, Webb itself wasn’t launched into space until late 2021. During its monthlong journey to its destination, the massive structure unfolded itself in the vacuum of space, surmounting hundreds of potential points of failure.
Its five-layer sunshield is roughly the size of a tennis court; its primary mirror is made of 18 separate segments, which had to align to a fraction of a hair’s width. A single failure could have ended the mission. Every calibration and alignment had to be just right.
It took three space agencies, thousands of experts, about 10 billion dollars, and more than two decades of work to get it there. In July 2022, the first image from the telescope was released: a glimpse of a patch of the universe, the size of which is roughly equivalent to a single grain of sand if you were to hold it at arm’s length. That grain of sand contains thousands of galaxies, some whose light has been traveling for 13.2 billion years. More images soon followed.
As I sat there watching the documentary, I found myself thinking, So what?
It wasn’t a rhetorical question so much as real interest: What did we actually learn? Did we discover something unknown, or did we simply confirm what we already suspected: that we are staggeringly small, on a planet that isn’t even a rounding error against everything else that’s out there? Was the knowledge worth the effort, money, and risk it took to get the Webb telescope up there in the first place?
Perhaps the real discovery isn’t what we found, but what it reveals about how curious we are. We walk around with minds capable of reasoning their way to the edge of the universe, inquisitive enough to ask what happened 13 billion years ago, and disciplined enough to build a machine to go find out.
At the same time, we’re just tiny specks in a remote galaxy, here for a very short, very specific stretch of time.
These two things don’t add up to me. If we’re so small, how is our curiosity as expansive as the universe itself? Why should a cosmic speck care about or need to know what’s all the way out there?
Instead of trying to make sense of it all, I remind myself that I get to choose my perspective. Some days I need a broad perspective to recognize that whatever’s bothering me is rather insignificant in the grand scheme of things, against 13 billion years of light. Then I can let it go.
Other days I need a more focused view, like the one from our roof: the crescents of light scattered across our driveway, my son next to me, a moment both small and significant.
It’s a little bit Albert Einstein and a little bit “Dust in the Wind.” Both perspectives are true. The trick isn’t picking just one; it’s knowing which lens the moment calls for.
As we near the end of another year, many of us start to make lists of things to fix and goals to pursue. Before you write your own list, maybe sit with these questions: From what distance have you been looking at your life? Are you so close that the small stuff — minuscule things that often turn into nothing — fills the whole frame? Or can you see the macro view, pulling the lens out far enough to see what really matters?
I don’t have the answer, but here’s what I do know: We’re only here for a short time. It really is to your advantage to love as much as you can, to have as much fun as you can, to do as little harm as you can, and to do as much good as you can, with whatever precious time you get.
You can help the person in front of you today, making their day a little better, while also contributing to something bigger than yourself.
Do both, and you may discover that life, though short, is all the more meaningful and rich.
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