A Midsummer Night's Dream
Summertime is when many of us take a break, look at the stars and dream. While looking skyward, I started thinking about space.
Did you know that Voyager 1 has now been in space for over 43 years? It is further from Earth than any other man-made object, at a distance of 152.2 AU (22.8 billion km, or 14.1 billion miles) from Earth.
Actually, it was already the farthest man-made object from Earth all the way back in 1998. Then, in 2012, it became the first spacecraft to move into interstellar space. There, it detected the intensity of cosmic rays and measured the interstellar magnetic field. It should have enough energy to continue to send data back to Earth until 2025.
That is really far to go. But it’s not the farthest we can see. Thanks to the Hubble Telescope, we’ve been able to view the wonders of the universe, 10 to 15 billion light-years away.
The furthest star it has shown to us is Icarus, billions of light years from Earth.
Ironically, it is named after the myth of Icarus, the son of Deadalus, a master craftsman - an ancient builder of technology. In this literal legend of aeronautical engineering, Icarus uses his manufactured wings to soar to the greatest heights.
(Of course, the story belongs to an age when technology’s limits were much lower. The lords of the manor didn’t want their slaves and servants thinking too much about ways to rise above. For a more in-depth conversation on that topic, I recommend my conversation with science fiction author David Brin.)
When we create technology to help us connect the dots of the data all around us, we also create new questions for ourselves. For instance, the Hubble Telescope has helped resolve some long-standing problems in astronomy, while also raising new questions. Some results have required new theories to explain them. We can investigate the age of the universe, whether the universe is expanding or how black holes work. It also contributed to many advances in aerospace engineering, around the performance of systems in low Earth orbit (LEO).
Fantastic, but we’re not stopping there. Hubble will be joined shortly by the James Webb Space Telescope, which has four key goals:
search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe after the Big Bang.
study the formation and evolution of galaxies.
understand the formation of stars and planetary systems.
study planetary systems and the origins of life.
Those are not small objectives. We may spend much of our time using technology to share cat videos and blast away at monsters in video games… but at least we’re using part of our collective intelligence to explore the deepest questions.
The recurrent pattern? Looking at stars feeds our imagination. It is a source of never ending questions and a challenge to expand our mind.
If you’re ever feeling uninspired this summer I have one suggestion: look up.