Putting aside the usual woes, which are as woeful as ever this week, let’s just take a moment to talk about what the Webb telescope is going to do for us, and why scientific investigation of the universe is such a happy and soothing thing for many of us.
I think it’s true enough that the early era of manned exploration of space was undertaken for the wrong reasons and was difficult to sustain because of it. I don’t think the current era of vanity billionaire trips to the edge of space is going to change that. There isn’t going to be a space hotel in 2025 and neither Elon Musk nor anyone else is going to be landing human beings on Mars in 2029. If human beings are going to routinely travel in space and live beyond this planet, it’s going to take more technologies than just a big booster rocket and it’s going to take some sort of major change to our current political and economic environment to make that a sustainable and meaningful shift. It’s certainly not going to be the way to escape climate change: even the most catastrophically damaged Earth is a more favorable subject for planetary-scale engineering than any other planet or moon in this solar system. We’re not going to munch through other worlds while we throw our own away like the wrapper on a fast food burger.
But robotic probes and telescopes, both space-based and terrestrial? Those give us knowledge and vision that isn’t just scientifically transformative, but spiritually meaningful. They’re worth whatever they cost, which in the grand scheme of government expenditures in the US and EU is not very much.
The Webb’s initial images are aesthetically gorgeous, but the structural detail they reveal is also going to be meaningful no matter what the instrument is pointed at.
What I think is even more important is the detailed breakdown of Wasp 96b, where the suspicion that there was water in that exoplanet’s atmosphere has become a confirmation. It’s not a planet we could live on—it’s a hot gas giant—but to see a lot of water in that atmosphere is a good indicator that there’s a lot of water elsewhere.
That data is as important as it is because I think it is really the only way we’re going to get confirmation of three things about the wider universe: that there are a substantial number of exoplanets capable of supporting life as we know it, that there are exoplanets that have atmospheric indicators that suggest there is life as we know it, and that there are exoplanets whose atmospheres show signs of intelligent life with global-scale technologies that are familiar to or comparable to the technologies we know.
There’s a huge literature on the Drake Equation, the formula that offers a way to estimate how many planets with intelligent, technologically-capable, communicating species might exist in the universe or even just in the Milky Way galaxy. Originally it solved for N, the number of intelligent species, but many analyses pointed out that it was really solving for the number of species capable of communicating with us (on purpose or accidentally) that had a lifespan where they were doing so in the same temporal window that we were looking for that signal.
There are a lot of ways to speculatively think about why N might be effectively zero or why it might be very large indeed. It might be effectively zero even if life is common throughout the universe and intelligent life is a large subset of that number because other intelligent species don’t make technologies or they don’t make technologies that are like our technologies to the point that whatever communications they produce we wouldn’t recognize as such.
The most hopeful resolutions of the Drake Equation tend to come from the kind of people who assume there is a natural, universal progression of technologies that any intelligent species would follow and that sapience is a natural outcome of evolution in any ecosystem—the people who see human history in those terms. I’m not one of those people. I think we understand very little about the fitness landscape that pushed hominims towards sapience, we haven’t really fully digested just how close we came in evolutionary terms to all hominims going extinct and our particular form of sapience disappearing, and we know unbelievably little about what the course of technological development for Homo genus species might have been in total because all we have until relatively recent times is evidence of the longest-lived tools. If homo erectus had a tool kit that was primarily built from wood, plant fibers, hides or other short-lived materials, we’ll never know anything about it: all we will ever know is what they made from stone.
So many analyses of our technological past are made from the perspective of people eager to promote our present as a pinnacle of technological, economic and sociopolitical achievement. But they usually use the thinnest temporal slice imaginable—no more than the last century—to make claims that are supposed to stand alongside a million years of human evolution.
Once upon a time, many humans who thought about the stars, the planets and Earth believed in geocentrism, that we were the center of the universe. With the rise of early modern science, we moved—with some difficulty—to heliocentrism, to understanding that we were but one planet among many revolving around our star. In 20th Century astronomy, we began to fully grasp the immensity of the universe and to realize that our star was one of many stars in our galaxy, and that our galaxy was one of many galaxies. With that, we began to understand that our star wasn’t in any sense typical and neither was our galaxy.
With exoplanet research, we began to understand that while planets are common, solar systems that look just like ours might not be. The conditions that form planetary systems seem considerably more varied—though there’s also the issue that our current research techniques struggle to detect rocky planets that are close to the size of our own planet.
At each step, data has helped us to revise our assumptions that we are at the center of things, whether literally or figuratively, that we represent the normal or expected case of the universe at large. We need the data to kick us out of that habit because we’re not very good at simply imagining that what we believe to be true, want to be true, assume to be true, might be false. Many Eurocentric world histories can suspend for one tiny moment the assumptions they make about human evolution and history that end up leading to the rise of Europe and the advent of modernity as inevitable, normal and progressive, but all the other branching ways to think and guess at history get quickly shut off as unprofitable or difficult or speculative.
That influences how we think about sapience, too. We’re only really learning just now to think more richly and imaginatively about sapience, consciousness and mind as a spectrum rather than a sharp divide that separates humans from animals. We’re on a planet with at least four or five species that are near-sapient by any standard we might name, but we’re the only one that has a global technological civilization. The version of the Drake Equation that’s solving for “intelligent species” rather than “communicating right now species” could solve for a huge number but we’ll never know it from Earth-based or near-Earth observational instruments. I can’t imagine any instrument located in another solar system that could look at ours and detect the existence of dolphins on Earth.
The hopeful solutions to the Drake Equation are trying to think of ways that we could go beyond our anthropocentrism just as we’ve gone beyond imagining the universe to revolve around our planet, just as we’ve gone beyond thinking that the distribution of planets in our solar system is the norm. I am on the side of that hope. I think we might do better with some efforts at detection—SETI—if we were better at imagining the range of things that might be true about human history and the range of possible kinds of sapience that our own world is showing to us.
But the Webb, and whatever its future cousins and descendants might be? That might just land the piece of data in our laps that makes us rethink, whether we’re trying to or not. About a quarter of next year’s observations will be of exoplanets, and some of that will be of the TRAPPIST system, for just one example. The Hubble can’t see much about the atmospheres of the planets in that really interesting, quite different solar system. The moment we see unmistakable signs of atmospheres favorable to life on planets that are otherwise favorably sized and located in their solar systems is one big moment. The moment we see biosignature gases is a much bigger moment.
And the moment we see signs of planetary-scale technological activity is the biggest. That last term in the Drake Equation, L, the length of time that communicating civilizations exist, and fc, the fraction that do communicate (in this sense, communicate in ways that are detectable at interstellar distances), might be incredibly small simply because technologically complex intelligences that have some form of language end up not using technologies that have signals that go beyond their atmospheres and it never occurs to them to deliberately beam signals into space (or it occurs to them and like Stephen Hawking, they decide it is a really bad idea to do that). Maybe a global-scale intelligent species with sophisticated technological communications builds a fiber-optic network from the start, or some other infrastructure that encodes information for entirely different kinds of biological reception than hearing or sight organs.
But if we get to the point that we can look at thinner atmospheres and their components with some discernment, we might spot technologically active intelligences whether they’re spewing signals into space or not. That would be the biggest and most exciting threshold to cross, the beginning of yet another re-assessment of ourselves as just one of many, and not necessarily typical or inevitable in any way.
The Webb is doing that work regardless, wherever it points in our universe. If you want to hold on to the idea that we are still on the road to progress, to something better, then the Webb is as fine a sign of moving down that road as you’ll ever find.