The Starry Starry Night over the Karoo shone more brightly this week. We felt as if every eye in every dorp could see what the James Webb Telescope had seen; had shown us. Not only the eyes of the rich and pampered or the educated and privileged. Every ...
To minds that can scarcely fathom a year from a light year or a million seconds from a billion hours, let alone 13.8 billion years – the distance the telescope dubbed a “cosmic time machine” has been able to see back into the distant past – how far away is forever?
One image, countless dots; one dot, countless galaxies. All in a pin prick if you or I look up at the sky at night. If one pin prick of seeming nothingness reveals world upon world, galaxy upon galaxy, mystery upon mystery, how even smaller we are than we were only last week. The rheumy eye of the petrol attendant in Hobhouse looked heavenward after filling up the tank of a Gauteng-registered 4×4 and waited for the rumble to roll away towards Wepener so the stillness could fall again; so he could once again find that spiritual connection with infinity, as free as the sea. Just me and the sky, me and the stars, my God must be there, he may have thought to himself in the private space between man and universe.
As night fell on a world in which the great scientists and space explorers had engineered a way for us to see much further than we had ever seen, one of the first things to dawn on us all was that, though we can now “see” further than ever before, all the way back to time before time, beginnings before beginnings, and that we were seeing light emitted even in Biblical times, the worlds beyond worlds and galaxies beyond galaxies were only the tiniest shaft of light into the vastness of it all.
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