800,000 Galaxies and the Wonder of Being Insignificant
The James Webb Space Telescope has just dumped 1.5TB of data onto the internet, creating a searchable database containing imagery of nearly 800,000 galaxies. Eight hundred thousand. Let that sink in for a moment while you’re sitting there with your morning coffee, worrying about whether you remembered to put the bins out or if your teenage daughter will actually clean her room this week.
Someone in the comments perfectly captured what I’ve been feeling since this news broke: “I feel incredibly small, but filled with wonder.” That’s exactly it, isn’t it? There’s something profoundly humbling about being confronted with the sheer scale of the universe, yet simultaneously exhilarating. It’s like standing at the edge of the Southern Ocean down at St Kilda pier during a winter storm – you’re reminded just how tiny you are, but there’s something magnificent about that realisation.
What really gets me is that 800,000 galaxies is apparently just a drop in the cosmic ocean. The comments were full of people discussing how there are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies out there, and many scientists believe the universe might actually be infinite. Infinite. My brain can barely wrap itself around the concept of 2 trillion, let alone infinity. It’s like trying to comprehend the full scope of Melbourne’s public transport delays – theoretically possible, but practically beyond human understanding.
The whole thing reminds me of that famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image from years back, where they pointed the telescope at what looked like an empty patch of sky and discovered it was teeming with galaxies. Here we were, thinking we were looking at nothing, and it turned out to be everything. It’s a perfect metaphor for human arrogance, really – we assume that what we can’t immediately see doesn’t exist or isn’t important.
But here’s what struck me most about the online discussion around this discovery: the mix of genuine awe and existential anxiety. One person mentioned how the idea of an infinite universe upset them because it implied there might be another version of themselves out there who made different life choices. That’s both hilarious and deeply relatable. Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s probably a version of me who chose to stick with Windows instead of switching to Mac, or who never developed a proper appreciation for a good batch brew.
Yet there’s something beautiful about our collective smallness. Another commenter pointed out that the very fact we can feel wonder about this vastness makes us, in our own way, vast too. That’s the thing about human consciousness – we might be specks of dust in an infinite cosmos, but we’re specks of dust that can contemplate infinity, create telescopes to peer into the depths of space, and feel genuine awe at what we discover.
The timing of this data release feels particularly poignant given the current political climate. While we’re down here arguing about tax cuts and culture wars, scientists are quietly expanding our understanding of existence itself. Someone in the discussion mentioned their concern about science funding being slashed, and how careers of brilliant, dedicated researchers might be destroyed. It’s frustrating that we can achieve something as magnificent as the James Webb Space Telescope, yet constantly have to fight for the resources to continue pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.
There’s also something wonderfully democratic about this data dump. Unlike so much scientific research that gets locked behind paywalls or buried in academic journals, this is just out there for anyone to explore. You can literally browse through 800,000 galaxies from your couch. It’s the kind of thing that would have seemed like pure science fiction when I was growing up, yet here we are, living in the future without really noticing it most of the time.
The whole experience has left me thinking about perspective. We get so caught up in our daily dramas – the mortgage, work stress, whether the Demons will ever win another premiership – that we forget we’re floating on a rock through space, surrounded by an infinite cosmos filled with wonders we’re only just beginning to understand. It doesn’t make our earthly concerns irrelevant, but it does provide a useful reminder about what really matters.
Maybe that’s the most valuable thing about projects like the James Webb Space Telescope. They don’t just expand our scientific knowledge; they expand our capacity for wonder. In a world that often feels increasingly cynical and divided, there’s something profoundly unifying about collectively gaping at the cosmos and realising we’re all in this cosmic adventure together.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of my evening getting lost in a database of 800,000 galaxies. The dishes can wait – the universe won’t.