Largest scale | The Press

For almost a year, the telescope James Webb provides the world with images of the Universe that are revolutionizing our knowledge. This new telescope, built at a cost of 10 billion dollars, and to which contributed the Quebec astrophysicist René Doyon, new recipient of the most prestigious distinction awarded by NASA^⁠1successor to the famous telescope Hubble.

The telescope James Webb gives us images 100 times more precise than Hubble, by including wavelengths – infrared, invisible to the human eye – that had previously eluded us. It is so powerful that it would theoretically be possible to detect the presence of artificial light emitted on an exoplanet in a distant galaxy – much like the light we produce in cities at night – in short, to discover the existence of other forms of life.

There is nothing more outdated than galaxies, you will tell me, and you will of course be right. They are several billion years old, were there long before us, and will be there long after, the human adventure representing on the scale of the history of the Universe a tiny parenthesis. “The end of man will not be the end of the world”, as Daniel Bélanger sings. And yet every week, the telescope James Webb makes the news with discoveries that can be followed in real time^⁠2. Here, in early June, the telescope discovered organic molecules in a galaxy 12 billion light-years away, the most distant ever observed, whose image forms what scientists call an Einstein ring^⁠3. And last week, the telescope provided data about the atmosphere of a rocky Earth-like planet, poetically called TRAPPIST-1c, orbiting a Jupiter-sized red dwarf.

This discovery follows the identification of traces of water vapor found on another planet, GJ-486b, located very close to us, “only” 26 light years away. To tell the truth, we don’t yet know if the water emanates from the planet or from the star around which it traces its orbit, but the very fact that we are wondering about such a distant object just looks phenomenal.

We must appreciate the path traveled since the time of Galileo, four short centuries ago, who through his telescope saw the rings of Saturn for the first time.

What I particularly like about this adventure is the perspective it offers us on ourselves. There is a real philosophical dimension to space exploration, which reminds me of Voltaire’s tale, Micromegas, published in 1752, where an extraterrestrial giant, coming from a distant solar system, arrives on Earth after a long journey in space. At first, he sees nothing except a few whales, which to him are tiny fish wriggling in a puddle of water. It takes time and great efforts of attention to see the microscopic creatures that move on the surface of the globe: humans. Listening, he is surprised at what these strange microbes are saying, at what they claim to know, they who behave as if the Universe belonged to them. Above all, he is surprised by the quarrels that divide them: between French and English, between Christians and Muslims, between rich and poor, there is war. The giant does not understand that we are ready to cut each other’s throats for territories which for him are nothing more than vulgar heaps of mud.

It is still unknown the extent of what the telescope James Webb will reveal to us. Often, the greatest discoveries, like the greatest lessons, are the ones we least expect.

Take the adventure of Travel 1a space probe launched in the late 1970s, equipped with a primitive computer with a strength comparable to that of an old modem, and which continues its journey through outer space – at a distance of about 24 billion kilometers, the probe is today the furthest human object from the Earth^⁠4. After delivering the first high-resolution images of Jupiter and Saturn at the turn of the 1980s, Travel 1 had to turn off his camera before continuing on his way. But the program manager, Carl Sagan, has an idea: he wants to take advantage of the probe to take a picture of the Earth. After two years of preparation for this selfie giant, as the probe passed Pluto’s orbit, the photo was finally taken on February 14, 1990.

The rest of the story is fascinating, because once the photo is printed, the head of the analysis, Candy Hansen-Koarchek, cannot identify the Earth. The subject of the photo cannot be found, and it is first believed to be a technical error^⁠5. And then suddenly, after new efforts of attention, exactly like the giant of Voltaire arrived on Earth, the person in charge distinguishes something tiny on the image, a small dirt, hardly a speck of dust, which she scrape it off. However, the speck of dust does not stand out, because it is part of the photo: it is the Earth. The image is less than one pixel, it’s a tiny pale blue dot, one of the most famous photos in the history of space exploration, the Pale Blue Dot^⁠6. And it is on this little point of nothing at all, barely visible, that we embarked.

This photo is perhaps one of the most beautiful things that space exploration can give us: the awareness of our fragility. During the summer holidays, while I will contemplate the sky in search of planets and shooting stars, I will try to remember that sometimes a little distance is enough to reconnect with the essentials, and to understand that some quarrels don’t really matter when you relate them to the grandest scale.

5. The story is told in an exciting documentary: Voyager probe: on the way to infinity (The Farthest)PBS, 2017, directed by Emer Reynolds.