Week 101.
Some unkind individuals have now and again suggested that Elder Advice is old. Not 13.1 billion years old mind you, but still, it gave him comfort this week to glimpse something that was.
If you have not yet seen the images from the James Webb Space Telescope, I urge you to stop whatever you are doing - and given you are reading Elder Advice you know it must pain me to say that - and go to https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery. Immediately. And for the rest of the day. Elder Advice can wait.
The James Webb Space Telescope , a partnership of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, was launched Christmas Day 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, South America. Following a complex deployment sequence, it underwent months of commissioning during which its mirrors were aligned and its instruments calibrated to the space environment. The first images and spectroscopic data were released this week. They shed light, literally, on the origins of the universe. With light emitted 13.1 billion years ago. And those images are … Elder Advice is at an uncharacteristic loss for words.
In fact, Elder Advice has resolved to never again make earthly use of the word “awesome” and to admonish every teenager who utters it in his presence. That will keep him busy. Possibly for the next 13.1 billion years.
Nor will you hear him ever complain again that Star Trek’s: “To boldly go” … etc. is the most egregious split infinitive of our age. It most certainly is, but that now seems so trifling. Given the “bold going” of the James Webb Space Telescope programme.
The picture above is Elder Advice’s favourite of those released this week. It is the charmingly named “Stephan’s Quintet” in the constellation Pegasus. But awesome imagery is not the only outcome of the Programme. Webb data reveals that the exo-planet WASP 96-B, a mere 1,150 light years away, has the clear signature of water including evidence of haze and clouds that previous studies could not detect. “Mother Earth” or, as I suppose terrestrial idiots require she must now be known, “Birthing Person Earth”, may not be the only place in the universe with life as we know it. A 2020 study that analyzed Kepler data estimated there may be 6 billion such places.
Elder Advice’s head hurts. For once, in a good way.
The complexity of the James Webb Space Telescope programme, which has engaged 20,000 people, in 29 countries, over 3 continents, is mind-numbing. Elder Advice imagines those 20,000 hunched over their work surfaces for decades, deftly employing the Frobenius method of solving differential equations. Or some such. A vast collection of genius all concentrating methodically on the innumerable challenges associated with positioning and operating a telescope at L-2, 1.5 million km from Earth. The kind of focused and unflappable minds we associate with NASA Mission Control. Who, as the flaming wreckage of the Challenger plummeted toward the sea 36 years ago, could be heard to say: “Obviously a major malfunction” - the very definition of understatement. Who, with grim determination, set about the task of ensuring no such malfunction ever occurred again.
The identification of L-2 is a related tale of astonishing competence and achievement. It is one of the 5 Lagrange Points in the sun-earth system, where the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object, like the James Webb Space Telescope, to move with them.
Those points were first identified by a self taught mathematician and physicist, Joseph Louis Lagrange, in his 1772 paper with the unforgettable title: Essai sur le Problème des Trois Corps.
Let Elder Advice repeat that date: 1772.
So it can be said that the James Webb Space Telescope programme is the culmination of 250 years of human effort.
Elder Advice?
What is the matter with us?
How can we be so many light years from solutions to challenges of far less magnitude and intricacy? How can the creatures who are capable of such herculean feats as the James Webb Space Telescope progamme, throw up their collective hands and despair at the task of solving earthly issues?
Climate change mitigation. Debt, deficits and inflation. Polarized information eco-systems, identity politics, the decline of civic engagement and institutional trust. Even the relatively trivial natural gas-dammerung, which threatens to force Germans to choose between eating and heating this winter, and the unreliable supply of drinking water to indigenous communities in this country.
All these problems seem beyond our capacity. Instead of badly needed remedies, talk of them unleashes a torrent of excuses. “Intractable”, “confounding”, “insoluble”, “perplexing” - a vocabulary of defeat which has persuaded many that we are now circling the drain as well as the sun.
The essence of the James Webb Space Telescope programme bears repeating: 20,000 determined people, in 29 countries, over three continents and as many decades. Proof, if more proof was needed, that the defining characteristic of humanity and the reason for its success is not biology, but community. The human story is not about survival of the fittest; it is the story of communities. Living and working together is what has enabled a weak, slow, wingless, clawless, and armourless species to survive and thrive.
And to boldly go …