It’s easy to feel small; inconsequential. To look skyward, especially in the quiet of night, and behold the terror of unfathomable emptiness, the endless expansion. It is always the past in the present—the light that reaches us as a matter of time. The light from our sun takes almost eight minutes to reach Earth. If I could live billions of years off-world, I could see light travel from Earth’s sun as it is now, then as a red giant, a white dwarf, a planetary nebula. How many visible stars are just ghosts made of light?

The close mundane: a plate of silken scrambled eggs, ants shuttling on a line, raindrops on asphalt. How to make sense of galaxies in the deep field image that look like single stars? If the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light-years across, and one light-year is 5.8 trillion miles, how long does it take for the numbness to kick in, for numbers to lose meaning? It is 3,044 miles from my home in Seattle to Boston and 2,773 miles to Baltimore. Each is a six-hour nonstop flight. I can understand a ten-hour great circle flight to Amsterdam. What is a trillion miles?

The human brain has more connections, more synapses, than stars in the sky. Eighty-six billion neurons; 100 billion stars in the Milky Way; 1,000 trillion synapses. There are seven quintillion grains of sand on Earth. Right now, nearly eight billion humans are breathing, blinking, and replicating cells. In their enormity these numbers become just numbers. I get lost in a maze of my own making. The grains of sand, the neurons, the people. They become meaningless.

In the deep field image, the eight-pointed gems are stars too close for wonder, everyday stars like the everyday miracle of a sunrise. The miracle of birth. The importance is in the curvature of galaxies, the array of colors, the glimpse into thirteen billion years, near the point of the beginning—or the end—of whatever this existence is. The atoms in my body buzz with heat and bounce off each other in their own expanses of vacancy. Tiny moments of empty space. What feels like terror and numbness is awe, the sublime, wrapped in surrender. I've come to accept these moments of insignificance, dust motes caught in the light, letting the vastness envelop me, letting it swallow me whole.

Italian translation available:

Dopo aver visto la prima immagine in campo profondo dal telescopio James Webb

Translation by Jenne Knight

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI