As I’m sure most of you are aware, the James Webb Space Telescope launched into space this past Christmas. The telescope is truly a marvel of engineering, and with luck, we should be seeing breathtaking new imagery from it before the year is over.

With its massive array of gilded mirrors and a sunshield protecting its eyes from blinding solar radiation, Webb looks to scan the skies in infrared. Unlike visible light, infrared is able to penetrate clouds of cosmic gas and dust. This combined with the size of its massive mirrors will enable Webb to look farther (and further back in time, as a consequence of the finite speed of light) than any manmade instrument before it. We will be able to collect data from eons which were previously too old, too faint, too far away to detect. Our understanding of the universe will march one step closer to the truth; perhaps we’ll even upend our decades-old conceptions of physics, currently rooted in the magnificent yet incomplete predictions provided by general relavitity and quantum mechanics.

This begs the question: why?

Why?

This question has been answered to death in the context of the national budget, scientific interest, technological advancement, etc. Allow me to put forward my take with a minor tangent.

Our current knowledge of the universe seems vast. We measure the age of celestial bodies; we understand chemical compositions of atmospheres, and we predict the future evolution of our solar system to millions of years with intricate gravitational simulations. In that sense, we get the sense that our personal lives are too small, that the universe is too overwhelming. As a certain dude once said, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

Webb peers back in time over 13 billion years. I don’t even know more than 3 generations of my own family (as is often the case with immigrant families, genealogical records are hard to come by). For me, five years ago feels like eons; ten years might as well be ancient history.

Ancient History

Our current scientific understanding places the evolution of anatomically modern humans to around 100 thousand years ago. A baby caveman, if magically transported to modern society, would grow up and absorb our culture and technology just as well as any of us. They would grow up to laugh at our memes, follow our sports, shake their fists at our politics, drink our soda and eat our hot cheetos, admire our sunsets just as any of us would.

Conversely, any one of us would be well adapted to live in ancient times. If we grew up as a hunter-gatherer in a stone age tribe, or a serf in a medieval manor, or a disciple of an ancient Greek philosopher, we would do just fine. It is hard to grasp just how vast history is, even if it is only an unimaginably tiny slice of the deep time that Webb will attempt to peer into.

We know so much about our world and yet so little. We know the existence of stellar mass black holes billions of years ago from gravitational wave measurements, and yet we can scarcely imagine what life was like for ordinary folk just a few generations removed from us.

Our knowledge of ancient history is that of kings and emperors who inscribed their accomplishments in monuments of stone. But we forget the daily lives of most people; few of us have any imagination of what ancient peasant’s favorite joke was, even if we imagine that humor bound together lives of commoners then just as they do now.

The Funniest Joke In The World

Most of us would consider laughter to be vital for our lives. We cherish the moments when we are around family and friends, clutching our guts in paradoxical pain as we laugh uproariously to a joke or story that beckons tears from our eyes. The same story repeats over and over. The joke has probably been told in some form by someone else; perhaps it has been a staple all throughout history. From ancient texts and graffiti, we can gather that Sumerians laughed at farts and Romans laughed at dick jokes. We’ve been insulting yo mama for a hundred thousand years.

Human experience is so deep yet so shallow. We rarely have any original thoughts or ideas (everything is a remix, as Kirby Ferguson puts it), and yet our collective billions have upended our biosphere and transformed our planet into a playground for our society. Our biomass together matches that of all the worms on our planet, which is astoundingly impressive if you consider the difference between our trophic levels.

Most of us will die without having made history, and as Webb makes history, one wonders what the citizens of the past would make of it, both kings and peasants.

Meaning

So, why? Some of us point to God; indeed, throughout history, we’ve seen a staggering roster of religious icons, deities, angels, devils, spirits, energies, all in an attempt to explain the world we live in. We want to understand.

In a way, Webb looking for answers in deep time mirrors the way we look to religion to understand our place in the cosmos. And it mirrors too the way that ancient peoples would’ve looked for answers. A shaman, sat under a tree, ponders why the stars move, ponders how the birds know where to go when they travel south for the winter.

Through the centuries, we’ve slowly seen more and more, understood more and more. The movement of stars is scarcely a mystery anymore. And yet we still feel like we don’t know.

Fscking Computers, How Do They Work?

As of the time writing this, I am a college student at UC Berkeley, studying computer science. I would say I’m good with computers, and my generation is often described as the most tech-savvy generation ever. And yet, we know nothing about them.

Indeed, for most of us, computers are best described as magic, and some of us are just better at casting computer spells than others. Some of us don’t even know how to cast the turn-on spell, much less the open-web-browser spell or the all important Google-spell. Some more advanced users can cast some truly advanced magic with their Pythonic curses or their greppish-charms.

Almost none of us, myself included, can describe with detail how a computer turns on. What happens when we press that magical button? How do the electrons flow? Where do they go? And if we’re talking about physically touching a button and turning it into a loading screen then we’re all about the electromagnetic force.

And suddenly we’re talking about how electron interactions are mediated by photons; we’re talking about how the photon field is being constantly distorted with our every movement, and even in spite of it.

And how does this fit together with gravity? (At the moment? Unknown! It’s horrible!)

Hell, how the fsck DOES a computer turn on?! We actually don’t know. Not even Linus Torvalds. We need quantum gravity. Webb help us.

It Doesn’t Really Matter, And That’s What Makes It Fun!

I’m currently working on making an embarrassingly simple x86 operating system. There is no filesystem, no shell, no userland, no multithreading. For all intents and purposes, it’s useless. At least it doesn’t need systemd, am I right?

And I’m having fun. It’s just like how I feel when I imagine Webb finally scanning the starry skies from L2, or when I read a fascinating account of the lives of a rennaissance baker and his pet dog. I was born barely two decades ago and I know nothing, and yet, slowly but surely, I’m transforming that nothing into slightly less than nothing. That’s what makes it fun. That is why we do.