As if things aren’t bizarre enough. Wait. Let’s talk about the 14,300 pound telescope in the room, more accurately in outer space. The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25th of last year, right there I’m worried. Did they have to shoot it off on Jesus’s birthday? In a few months if everything goes as planned we will be getting pictures back of things no human has ever seen before. The sales pitch on the Webb is that it will enable us to look much closer “to the beginning of time and to hunt for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies.” Put that in your noggin and try to smoke it. And smoke will come out of your ears if you try to process things like “the beginning of time.” This whole idea of poking around the universe gives me the heebie jeebies. Those images the Hubble sent back years ago shook me to my core and the Webb will make the Hubble look like a kid’s toy. The Webb is already a million miles from Earth, just like some of our politicians. Bada Boompf! And I really don’t like the timing of this as we are entering our 3rd year of the pandemic. I know this telescope was years in development and it just coincidentally blasted off now. Navigating Covid has been exhausting, do we really need to see what the bowels of the universe look like? We haven’t been able to get our crap together to deal with this virus. And what are we going to do with this information? Well we have a couple of ways we can go with this. We will be reminded in ways never seen before how insignificant we really are and come together as humans realizing what a short dance this is, or we will flip out at seeing what is out there, trying to comprehend that it never ends, that it is beyond our grasp. Of course there will be some people who just shrug their shoulders and think “eh, no big deal, nothing I can do about it.” I don’t think we need this on our plates right now, or maybe it’s the perfect time to go where no man or machine has gone before. Wait a minute, isn’t sending this telescope deep into the unknown going to elicit the same response one gets when pressing too hard on their belly button or going too far into any orifice? Grab your ankles because in a few months the Webb Telescope is going to give you that feeling as it penetrates way into the universe.

Gunga, galunga,
Garry