Ep. 1 – No Dark Sky

Ep. 1: No Dark Sky – Transcript

Jesse Eubanks: The year is 1968. If Earth has a pressure gauge, the needle is stuck in the red.

Media: The new communist campaign in Vietnam continues. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis tonight. …Made to be reported that Senator Kennedy had been shot. He’s been shot. That’s right. Most delegates to this convention do not know that thousands of young people are being beaten in the streets of Chicago.

Jesse Eubanks: Protests erupt. Leaders fall. Streets burn. For many, the world is coming apart at the seams.

Faith Stults: There is no timeout coming to the rescue. No balm for the chaos. No moment to catch your breath.

Jesse Eubanks: Just the next hit, and then another and another.

Faith Stults: The future isn’t hopeful. The future is broken and scary. And then six days before the year is about to end. Something unexpected breaks through.

Jesse Eubanks: It’s Christmas Eve. As families are baking cookies and wrapping last minute gifts, three men orbit the moon.

Faith Stults: They aren’t landing, they aren’t walking. They’re just circling in a cone shaped capsule-

240,000 miles from home. Further than any human has ever traveled.

Jesse Eubanks: Three astronauts. Bill Anders. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell. Drifting in silence above the cratered rock sliding past beneath them.

Faith Stults: It’s their fourth time circling the moon and the capsule has just rotated. Its windows no longer aimed at the surface, but now opened out into the black of space.

None of them knows to look for what’s about to appear, which is why the next moment takes them by surprise.

Apollo 8 Astronauts (Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, Frank Borman): Oh God. Look at that picture over there.

Jesse Eubanks: All three men lean forward. Their eyes lock on the same spot

Apollo 8 Astronauts (Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, Frank Borman): They’re coming up. Wow, that pretty.

Faith Stults: The black of space begins to lift, and in the distance a blue marble appears. Earth. It’s lower half shrouded in night. It’s top half glowing in sunlight.

Apollo 8 Astronauts (Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, Frank Borman): You got that color film, Jim?

Hand me a roll of color. Quick! Oh man, that’s cruising. Quick!

Jesse Eubanks: They scramble. Hands fumble with the camera film. Voices rise. Every second threatens to steal the moment.

Apollo 8 Astronauts (Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, Frank Borman): Yeah, I got it right here.

Faith Stults: They catch it. That tiny world. Off-center. A cloud covered globe rising above the moon’s barren edge.

Apollo 8 Astronauts (Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, Frank Borman): I got it right…

oh, that’s a beautiful shot.

Jesse Eubanks: The photo becomes known as Earthrise, the most famous image of earth ever taken. Not just a picture, a revelation.

Faith Stults: For the first time, we are seeing our planet whole and in color. No borders, no enemies, just one fragile sphere.

Jesse Eubanks: After a year full of wreckage, these men are glimpsing home from far enough away to see it unbroken.

That night, the astronauts open a Bible and share ancient words.

Apollo 8 Astronauts (Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, Frank Borman): In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

Faith Stults: 10 verses broadcast from space… heard by nearly one quarter of everyone alive.

Jesse Eubanks: Years later, one of these astronauts, Bill Anders, will reflect on this moment. He’ll remember what it felt like to see our planet in context. Not at the center of everything but a single speck in a vast unfeeling void. Questions will rise up inside of him that will follow him the rest of his life. He’ll ask aloud, are we really that special?

And then answer himself… I don’t think so.

The same moment that drew out amazement also revealed just how small humanity is and whether our existence truly has any cosmic significance.

Faith Stults: So is this true? If we’re just a speck on a speck floating in an endless sea of darkness, do we still matter?

Jesse Eubanks: Tonight on Wonderology, we chase the story of the biggest thing ever photographed. Something so vast, it makes Earth look microscopic.

And we ask: Does living in a vast universe make humanity more valuable or less?

I’m Jesse Eubanks, a storyteller and journalist.

Faith Stults: I’m Faith Stults, a science educator.

Jesse Eubanks: So let’s get curious.

Announcer: 9, 8, 7, 6. 5, 4, 3 And we have engines start. And liftoff!

Decollage! Liftoff from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself.

Jesse Eubanks: Fast forward 53 years plus one day from the Earthrise photo. It’s Christmas Day 2021, and while many of us open gifts and settle in with cinnamon rolls, a man is watching a rocket as it leaves earth. The rocket is carrying the James Webb space Telescope.

Faith Stults: Webb has been a major undertaking more than two decades. Thousands of people. 14 countries. Too big to launch assembled. So, it’s folded up inside the rocket headed for a destination 1 million miles away. There’s no repairs possible if anything goes wrong,

Jesse Eubanks: It’s price tag? $10 billion dollars. One of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built. Which is why the questions started long before liftoff.

Faith Stults: Why put that much money into space?

Jesse Eubanks: Why not end world hunger?

Faith Stults: Why not build affordable housing?

Jesse Eubanks: Why not fix healthcare?

Faith Stults: Why throw $10 billion into outer space? Because, if Webb works, we’ll see farther back in time than any human ever has. The first stars and galaxies that ever existed over 13 billion years ago.

Jesse Eubanks: That’s the wager. If Webb succeeds, we see the beginning of our universe.

Faith Stults: And if it fails, it will be one of the biggest financial failures ever. Maybe the last time we try something this ambitious

Announcer: James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

Jesse Eubanks: As the rocket lifts into the sky, the world watches together.

Announcer: Pitch program reported.

Jesse Eubanks: People clap. Some cry. But that man, for all his enthusiasm, he also feels the weight of it, because inside that rocket isn’t just a scientific gamble.

Scott Acton: I was quite nervous about it.

Jesse Eubanks: It’s his gamble too. And this is why he keeps having bad dreams.

Scott Acton: And this whole project, I had this reoccurring nightmare. Um, it’s six months after the launch of the Webb telescope and I’m standing in front of Congress trying to explain why it didn’t work. And, and it was my fault, you know?

Faith Stults: Scott Acton spent more than 20 years making sure Webb’s mirrors would align once in deep space. Technology so advanced, it didn’t even exist before Scott invented it.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott also knows what it means to give years of your life to a dream. And still watch it collapse.

When Scott was in college, he majored in physics. But he believed he had another purpose in life.

Scott Acton: And that was to ride my bicycle around the world.

Jesse Eubanks: He had a vision of peddling through cities and towns and countrysides all over the globe to explore our planet. It felt like a calling from God.

Scott Acton: Everything else was secondary.

Faith Stults: He even told this to the woman who had become his wife on their first date,

Scott Acton: And it was under these conditions that I met and courted and eventually married my wife Heidi.

Jesse Eubanks: And Heidi was in. They trained. They prepped.

Scott Acton: And we were all set to do this, uh, bicycle around the world adventure together.

Jesse Eubanks: But just before their first big ride, Heidi crashed.

Scott Acton: And, and broke her elbow in nine places. And, uh, it was just everything they could just so she could even use her arm again. And, and so with that, you know, the, her bicycling days came to an end.

Jesse Eubanks: As a result, Scott had to do the really painful things so many of us have to do sometimes: he had to let the dream go.

He tried to move on. He built a life, he raised kids. He invested in his work, and he says all of those things were fulfilling for him.

Faith Stults: But when that dream ended, it took a piece of him with it.

Scott Acton: It just, a part of me died with, with the death of that dream.

Jesse Eubanks: So, when Scott has nightmares about standing in front of Congress and having to explain why the telescope didn’t work, his fear isn’t theoretical.

Faith Stults: Scott knows what it’s like to believe in something, to be certain it will work and then watch it fall apart anyway.

Jesse Eubanks: And Webb? This dream is far bigger than his alone.

Mike Menzel: Hello. Well, this is, um, this is a pleasant surprise.

Jesse Eubanks: This is…

Mike Menzel: Yeah. Uh, my name is Mike Menzel and I am the mission systems engineer for the James Webb Space Telescope and I work at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Jesse Eubanks: Mike joined the mission back in 1998, and the goal from the very beginning sounded less like science and more like science fiction.

Mike Menzel: The overall driving goal for the mission never changed, and that was to see the very first galaxies that turned on in our universe. The first stars that turned on.

Faith Stults: Scientists think the universe began with the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. For the first 380,000 years, it was too dense for light to travel, but then the universe cooled. And around 13.5 billion years ago, the first stars ignited.

Jesse Eubanks: That’s what Webb was built to find. Not the Big Bang, but the moment the universe lit up.

Faith Stults: To do that, Webb has to see a kind of light that our eyes can’t: infrared. Its light so ancient, it’s been stretched by the expanding universe until it’s invisible to us, and now we can only detect it as heat.

Jesse Eubanks: And to pick up that faint heat, the telescope has to stay extremely cold. Which means, it needs to get far away from the heat of our planet and the sun. And that means it needs to go a million miles from Earth.

Faith Stults: To achieve all of this Webb has to overcome one major challenge: its size.

Mike Menzel: The telescope itself is gonna be bigger than the rocket that would put it up there.

Faith Stults: The telescope needs to be roughly the size of a tennis court and the height of a three story building, but it needs to fit inside the rocket, which is a space about the size of a school bus. And there’s only one way to make it fit.

Mike Menzel: We would have to fold up the telescope to launch it.

Faith Stults: And if it folds up like origami to launch, that means…

Mike Menzel: We would literally have to rebuild it on orbit. Not only rebuild it, but refocus it. Realign it. That had never been done before.

Jesse Eubanks: It’s going to have to do all of this for the first time in space. No human hands. No test run. No do-over.

Faith Stults: Making Webb capable of folding means designing a mirror alignment system that will defy comprehension.

Mike Menzel: And it was Scott and his team that achieved that miracle.

Faith Stults: The scale of Scott’s job is almost impossible to picture. Webb’s mirror is so large it couldn’t fit inside the rocket, so engineers built it from 18 hexagonal segments, each one designed to unfold in space. And once open, they have to realign until they behave like a single flawless mirror. But here’s the catch: the adjustments aren’t in inches or even millimeters. They’re microscopic.

Scott Acton: So we knew from right off the bat that it was going to be a real challenge to unfold this telescope and put all those optics to where they needed to be, uh, to within, uh, you know, a handful of nanometers. So that’s a meter divided by 10 to the ninth power, or a, you know, a, a, a, a very, very small amount.

Faith Stults: A human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide, and Scott’s team needs to align the mirror, not to 100,000 nanometers, but to just three nanometers.

Scott Acton: It’s, it’s unbelievable. These dimensions are just, you just can’t get your mind around it. And so that’s what had to be done, you know, to move these mirrors that precisely.

Jesse Eubanks: Feels like you guys were, how do we locate and fix a needle in 1 million haystacks, you know,

Scott Acton: A billion.

Jesse Eubanks: Yeah.

Scott Acton: You know, like you say, uh, very early on we knew that this was doable. A solution exists. There’s mathematical theorems that say a solution exists, but when you don’t know the answer, even the simplest solutions can be elusive.

Jesse Eubanks: Still, something in Scott won’t let him quit. Every setback, every trial. He just keeps believing they’ll figure it out.

Scott Acton: I’ve got this, this theory that the universe wants to be understood. It wants to be discovered. Therefore, there must be a solution.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott feels like the universe wants to be discovered. He might even say that he believes God wants to show us the universe.

Faith Stults: But there’s another side to this. If we succeed, if we find what we’re looking for, if we learn more and more about how minuscule our planet and even our species is in the whole timetable of the universe, what does that mean for us?

Does that change how we see ourselves? Does it change how we see God? What are the things we assume are true that we might have to reconsider?

Jesse Eubanks: Even this, though, the fact that we ask these questions at all is strange. How can something as small as us consider things of this magnitude?

Mike Menzel: But if you can stare at this stuff and not ask those questions well, your brain dead. You’re, you, you must be a waste of DNA… ’cause I can’t even… I can’t imagine, you know, looking at these things and knowing that I can contemplate that… even if 1/10th of the things that I believe are right, the fact that I could learn about a 10th of this truth is… it’s mind blowing. It’s incredible.

Jesse Eubanks: Back when this telescope was first pitched, NASA figured 10 years. Launch date? 2007. Price tag? Half a billion dollars. Ambitious, but not unthinkable.

Faith Stults: I was interning at NASA in 2010, and by then it was already behind schedule. Deadlines were slipping, costs were rising. But I mean, they were building technology that didn’t exist. They were solving problems no one had solved before. Sometimes, that’s just how science works. Discovery, problem solving, they don’t always care about our deadlines or budgets.

Jesse Eubanks: Instead of 10 years, it took 25. Instead of half a billion, it cost 10 billion. That’s 20 times more. And no surprise, there were a lot of people upset about this price tag.

Faith Stults: In July of 2011, the US House Appropriations Committee made an official proposal to cut all funding for Webb. Stating the project was billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.

Jesse Eubanks: A 2019 article in the National Review referred to Webb as quote, “a black hole for taxpayer money.”

Faith Stults: Even fellow scientists were concerned about how expensive Webb had become. A 2010 Nature article described Webb as quote “the telescope at ate astronomy” and said its ballooning budget was overshadowing other important scientific projects.

Jesse Eubanks: In other words, the longer and more expensive Webb had become, the more upset people became. It just required a massive amount of resources to try to get this telescope to work, and people weren’t even confident it would work.

Faith Stults: In the end, roughly 20,000 people worked on it from 14 different countries.

Jesse Eubanks: And in the middle of it all is Scott Acton’s team tasked with aligning the telescope’s mirror segments in deep space so that they functioned as a single seamless mirror.

Faith Stults: But eventually, after 20 years, the telescope is finally ready.

Scott Acton: In that moment, when we finally achieved this, for me it was like, you know, “Thank God.”

Jesse Eubanks: And that takes us back to where we started. Christmas Day 2021. After 25 years, after $10 billion dollars, after criticisms and budget struggles and impossibly hard science… the James Webb Space Telescope is finally launching

Announcer: Lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott watches it from home, his family around him. Publicly, the team radiates confidence. But Scott? He’s not as confident as he wants to be.

Scott Acton: And of course, you know, our program manager, uh, Bill Oaks, got on 60 minutes shortly before the launch. And the guy interviewing says, “How confident are you that the Webb telescope is gonna work?

Media: I’m a hundred percent confident.

Scott Acton: And that’s what he had to say. And I don’t… me? I tend to… I was thinking more than 50, but, um… maybe, maybe 70% chance? I was a hundred percent certain that we would have to adapt. That we wouldn’t… you know, that we were gonna have to do something that was not in our plans, uh, to make everything work.

Announcer: What are you most concerned about unfolding?

The entire telescope is what you worry about.

Faith Stults: The final stage of unfolding the telescope is aligning all of those mirrors.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott’s job. And this is why he keeps having that nightmare.

Scott Acton: That was… that I was quite nervous about.

Mike Menzel: We all knew the pressure. We all knew our lives were, our professional lives. Were gonna be over if it failed. No doubt about that because there’s always assumptions in these math models, right? And if you get the wrong assumption, you get on orb and you find out, “Uh oh. $10 billion down the draining.”

Faith Stults: People might assume if something goes wrong, that someone screwed up.

Jesse Eubanks: Probably thinking to themselves, you had 25 years and billions of dollars to get this right.

Faith Stults: But here’s the truth… there is no way to fully test this thing on earth. They had to model how the telescope would respond to launch, deep space, zero gravity, the way the fuel shifts in weightlessness, even micrometeoroids, all with just math.

Jesse Eubanks: No real world measurements. No full trial runs. Just simulations, theory and educated predictions.

Faith Stults: Because when you send something into space, you’re launching it into a storm of unknowns. There’s simply no way to know exactly what it will do.

Jesse Eubanks: Real space behavior can’t be fully tested on Earth. So they run simulations. Over and over. For years. Testing every possible failure.

Faith Stults: Because once the telescope is a million miles away, even one failure… just one… could end the whole mission. They need that not to happen. They’re doing everything they can to make sure it won’t.

Scott Acton: And, and it did.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott is watching another dream unravel. Only this time, the whole world is watching too. We’ll be right back.

**************

Welcome back to Wonderology, Jesse Eubanks.

Faith Stults: Faith Stults

Jesse Eubanks: When we left off, the Webb telescope had launched. 25 years. Thousands of people. And now it’s out there unfolding itself like origami, a million miles from home.

Faith Stults: And with deployment complete, the riskiest stage is behind them now. But maybe not the most delicate. Because now comes alignment.

18 mirror segments. Each one the size of a coffee table. And all of them have to function as a single mirror perfectly aligned to within nanometers. So basically… no pressure.

Jesse Eubanks: And this is where Scott Acton steps in. This is the moment his 20 years of work has been building toward. The team begins the process of aligning the mirrors, but something’s wrong.

Scott Acton: The telescope, we, we couldn’t point it accurately enough.

Faith Stults: Now to be clear, they expect some misalignment. This thing just survived launch vibrations, zero gravity, minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit, space radiation… all this crazy stuff. But now, they’re trying to assemble it to within one 100th the width of a human hair.

Jesse Eubanks: But this? This is more than they bargained for. The mirrors are actually off by a factor of 30 to 40 times more than predicted.

Faith Stults: Yeah, and that makes things really tricky. The alignment software is built to work just like your brain does with your eyes. You’ve got a left eye and a right eye, and each sees a slightly different image. Your brain uses the differences to create a single clear picture. That’s what the software’s trying to do. Compare the reflections from all 18 mirrors and use those differences to bring them into alignment. But that’s not what comes back. Instead of 18 distinct reflections, Webb sends back 18 nearly identical ones. It’s like trying to see depth with 18 left eyes, no variation, no contrast, nothing to compare against.

Scott Acton: You end up just seeing, but you’re gonna see 18 copies of every star.

Jesse Eubanks: The algorithm can’t untangle which mirror made which reflection.

Scott Acton: So we pointed to a bright isolated star and we get 18 copies of those. And the question is, you know… which segment is which? And furthermore… how do you move them so that they all line up at a certain point?

Jesse Eubanks: But they have a plan. If the software ever fails, Scott will take over. No script, no shortcuts, just him and his team working the problem. Armed with math, instinct, and 20 years of obsession, Scott won’t wait on an algorithm. He’ll become it.

As he stares at those 18 scattered stars, refusing to form a single picture, something else starts to come undone. Not just the telescope. Scott himself.

Faith Stults: It’s easy to think of this kind of work as abstract math mirrors algorithms, but what you’re actually watching is someone shouldering a tremendous burden.

Jesse Eubanks: Imagine every other part of the telescope is working except yours.

Faith Stults: Gosh, no wonder he is having nightmares about standing in front of Congress. I mean, eventually, your soul can’t hold that kind of pressure.

Jesse Eubanks: Months of tension. Years of sacrifice. The gnawing fear of “What if I’m the one who breaks it all?” And now it is catching up with him.

Because when you’re the one everyone’s counting on to pull off the impossible, there’s no guide for what to do when your own body starts to give out. He’s not sleeping. He’s forgetting to eat. His mind just won’t shut off.

Scott Acton: You know, I got tired of feeling bad, so I went to an an urgent care place.

Jesse Eubanks: He walks in and tells him that his anxiety has become overwhelming.

He hopes that they can give him something for his nerves. Their response?

Scott Acton: They gave me this piece of paper called “Managing Anxiety in Adults”. And I just couldn’t believe it. I… you know… I don’t know what I expected.

Jesse Eubanks: And that’s it. A handout. No medication. No plan. Just bullet points. Printed it on a piece of paper.

Faith Stults: I mean, it’s, it’s almost satire at this point. You help launch the most complex telescope in human history and someone hands you breathing tips.

Jesse Eubanks: I mean… I guess you can’t tell the doctor “The reason that I feel anxious is because humanity’s knowledge of the universe is sitting on my shoulders.” You know, you’re gonna end up getting a whole lot more attention from the doctor than you bargained for.

Faith Stults: Fair enough.

Jesse Eubanks: Eventually, a possible solution starts to take shape in Scott’s mind. A potential way through. So, he does the only thing left to do. He sits down and writes. He starts writing code instructions.

Scott Acton: I ended, I calculated all the commands by hand and just getting the the units all right and the directions and the signs, and trying to figure out where each star was based on a mosaic and what we needed to do. And using information that we didn’t even know we were gonna get. But we had, uh, when we were focusing the telescope roughly. And I made… I generated those all by hand.

Jesse Eubanks: He finishes. Looks at the page. The math checks out. It looks solid. But the fear won’t go away.

Faith Stults: He keeps wondering, “What if I get this wrong?”

Jesse Eubanks: So he does what any wise man does when panic takes over. He calls his wife.

Scott Acton: So I’m talking to Heidi. “I don’t know what to do. What if this is wrong?” And all that. That’s where she, you know, said, look, you know, that’s why you’re here, Scott. I mean, you know, basically, what do you think? This was gonna be easy? What were you expecting? You know. Uh, she tells it in a much more nurturing way than I did, but I kind of, I kind of saw that as her telling me to cowboy up, you know? Go and get a good night’s sleep, eat something, uh, go back and double check your calculations and then, and then just trust your gut.

Faith Stults: Yeah. Sometimes the smartest move in science or just life is to eat dinner and go to bed. So he does,

Jesse Eubanks: He eats something. He goes to bed. And the next morning… he types every line of his handwritten code into a spreadsheet. Then he walks it over to the team at NASA.

Scott Acton: And we went through looking at the values and, and agreed that, yep, best judgment. That’s what that, you know, the solution should be.

Jesse Eubanks: They go over, copy and paste his solution into the computer and they hit send. And then Scott and everyone else… they just wait.

Faith Stults: Can you imagine what these hours must feel like knowing you did everything you could and realizing it still might not be enough?

Jesse Eubanks: For all the ways that Scott doubts himself himself, Mike Menzel does not.

Mike Menzel: I was watching how they solve the problems and, uh, their team was just, you know, incredibly talented. So, you know, whatever Scott was doing, uh, I know he was in his private little hell, but he was, he was in there for about a couple days and he fixed it.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott’s calculations work. He moves the mirrors just enough to bring the system back online. The algorithm can see clearly again, and the mirrors finally start shifting into alignment.

Faith Stults: They fix the mirror system.

Jesse Eubanks: Yes, but will this thing actually work? Will the telescope show them what they built it to see? Those distant galaxies from billions of years ago.

Scott Acton: In this case, the telescope was not yet completely aligned, but it was getting really close.

Jesse Eubanks: They’re still tuning the system, tweaking the gears, prepping for the real moment, the one that will justify it all. They snap some photos. They are not quite aligned. But after a series of test photos, they take one more, a second disposable image.

Faith Stults: Okay. That throwaway image, it actually really matters. This part’s easy to miss, but it’s really crucial. After web takes a photo, it lands in a buffer, basically a one photo waiting room. That image just sits there until something else comes along to push it out. So the team adds one more image. Not to study it, but just to flush the system. It’s like blowing an air bubble through a straw to clear the last bit of liquid. And eventually even that final push, the throwaway gets downloaded too.

Jesse Eubanks: They just need something to push the last photo out. So they pick a secondary camera. Not the main one. They’re still fine tuning, and they take a quick throwaway shot again. Just to clear the buffer.

Scott Acton: And we put an image a very simple exposure on one of the instruments known as the fine guider. Not even a science instrument. It’s really there as a tool, a diagnostics tool, to help stabilize the pointing of the telescope.

Jesse Eubanks: They give it a 40 second exposure. Click. Snap. Done. Just another system flush. The images download. Scott thumbs through them until he gets to the throwaway shot. Scott glances at it expecting a blurry image.

Scott Acton: And I see that single image, that complete throwaway image, and I stretch the contrast on it.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott leans in. The image sharpens. And then he freezes. This is not a blur. One of Mike Menzel’s colleagues calls out to him.

Mike Menzel: Mike. Mike, you got, you gotta see this. So he called me in the back and I saw that first image.

Jesse Eubanks: The room erupts. The image meant to be a throwaway is filled with tiny specks. Everyone thinks “stars!” But Mike looks again and he says…

Mike Menzel: Those aren’t stars that you’re seeing. Those are galaxies.

Jesse Eubanks: It’s not a blurry photo. Everyone is looking at something that no human eyes have ever seen.

Scott Acton: I realize that single 40 second exposure contained over 500 galaxies.

Faith Stults: At first glance, it just looks like specks red specks everywhere. Dots and smudges scattered across a black sky. But when you zoom in, you realize they’re not dots. They’re structures. Some are cigar shaped. Some have spirals. And each one is actually its own galaxy. Each with billions, maybe hundreds of billions of stars.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott has spent more than 20 years helping build Webb, but now… seeing this image… he finally understands what he’s built.

Scott Acton: I was not expecting to see it. I had the idea that if we pointed in the right place, you know, maybe we’d see a galaxy, you know? But the reality is in that moment, uh, I realized that there is no dark sky. That there are galaxies everywhere.

Mike Menzel: That isn’t a star, that’s a galaxy. There’s hun… you can see hundreds of galaxies. My God, it was… It was incredible. It was incredible.

Jesse Eubanks: Mike’s colleague turns to him.

Mike Menzel: His first words are “This damn thing’s gonna work.”

Jesse Eubanks: Okay, one last thing before we move on. Later, Scott actually found the scrap where he scribbled his solution… the mirror instructions that saved the whole mission. He flipped over the piece of paper and he realized it was the anxiety pamphlet that they gave him at Urgent Care.

Faith Stults: No! Stop it.

Jesse Eubanks: It was like God handed him both a prescription for his nerves and the answer to the problem that he had been sweating over.

Scott Acton: So ironically they had the right idea. I didn’t need medication, I needed a piece of paper, and that solved the whole problem. That’s what enabled us to align the telescope.

Jesse Eubanks: That image with 500 galaxies? It was a throwaway snapped on a backup camera. If that’s what we find when the system’s not even fully online, what else is out there? What’s been waiting in the dark for billions of years? And if we find it, will it change our place in the universe?

Faith Stults: After the break, we look deep into the corners of the cosmos.

We’ll be right back.

**********

Jesse Eubanks: Wonderology. Jesse.

Faith Stults: Faith.

Jesse Eubanks: So, when we left off, the Webb telescope had just sent back its first image revealing not 500 stars, but 500 galaxies.

Faith Stults: Each one packed with billions of stars. And that photo? It wasn’t from the main camera. It came from a secondary one. Less powerful, just a utility tool.

Jesse Eubanks: But eventually they power up the big one, the primary camera.

Faith Stults: The one they spent decades building designed for a single mission capture, the first galaxies that ever existed.

Jesse Eubanks: And when the first image from the main camera comes through… Mike is stunned.

Mike Menzel: When I first saw that picture, I saw it about two days before the president saw it, and I turned to one of the astronomers and I asked him a technical question. What’s the brightness of the faintest thing in there? And when he told me, literally the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. If you take a child’s nightlight, it puts out about five watts. Put that child’s nightlight on the moon and look at it from the earth. We were seeing something 20 times fainter than that.

Jesse Eubanks: Think about that. I mean… picture a child’s nightlight. And then dim it 20 times. And now put it on the moon. That is how faint this light is. And Webb can see that.

Mike Menzel: And that to me was, you know, that was a… that, that was my moment.

Jesse Eubanks: And for Scott, that all keeps escalating. So that image that they took with the secondary camera, the one with 500 galaxies in it, it was just a 40 second exposure.

Scott Acton: Remember I got so impressed over 40 seconds. Now we can create an image that has a 15 hour exposure. And I sent that image to an astronomer at UCLA and he estimates that that single image had over 10,000 galaxies in it. If you hold up a grain of sand and ask yourself, how many galaxies is this blocking from my eyes? It’s about 10,000. There is no dark sky.

Jesse Eubanks: There is no dark sky, there never was.

Faith Stults: Our eyes are simply failing to see everything that is hanging over our heads.

Jesse Eubanks: Webb’s goal is clear. Find the first galaxies. So has it delivered?

Mike Menzel: Well, we have yet to see the first stars, but we’re not done searching. In one of the first images that James Webb took, we weren’t even trying. We took a picture of a bunch of galaxies very, very far away.

Faith Stults: Mike’s being pretty humble here.

Mike Menzel: Very, very back in time.

Faith Stults: They’ve actually found many galaxies that are more than 13 billion years old. In those first images, they were supposed to be the baby photos of the universe. We expected something fragile, underdeveloped galaxies that were more. Simplistic, but that’s not actually what web is finding.

Jesse Eubanks: What are they finding?

Faith Stults: They’re finding that these galaxies are actually big and bright and way more mature than we expected. It kind of doesn’t add up. Even though they are still young, they look too grown up, too massive, too luminous for how early in the universe they’re appearing.

Jesse Eubanks: Like, in other words, like these galaxies should look like the baby photos, but instead they look like preschool photos?

Faith Stults: Yeah, except we’re looking at the time that we thought they were babies. So scientists now are rethinking how fast the early universe took shape. In fact, some scientists have called it a crisis because these galaxies, they break important aspects of the timeline. We mapped of the universe.

Jesse Eubanks: Because if the universe developed faster than we thought, then that means we are missing something pretty big from our models.

Faith Stults: Yeah, exactly. But here’s the twist. Scientists aren’t frustrated by that. They’re delighted. Because in science, the real thrill comes when something breaks your assumptions. That’s where discovery begins.

Jesse Eubanks: It’s like reaching like a new level of a super nerdy video game. Uh, new challenge, bigger rewards.

Faith Stults: Yeah, exactly, and, and Webb’s just getting started. It’s already found water, ice forming around newborn stars, which is the raw material for oceans.

Jesse Eubanks: Wow.

Faith Stults: It studied the atmospheres of over a hundred distant planets. On one of those, it picked up a specific type of gas that on earth… it kind of actually only comes from living things.

Jesse Eubanks: Whoa. So are they thinking that they might have found life?

Faith Stults: Okay. No. Nobody’s claiming that we haven’t found life, but we are getting closer than we’ve ever been before.

Mike Menzel: Uh, God is teasing us with the data because it’s, we haven’t seen a biomarker yet, but we’ve had some close calls. And I think that, you know, in the end, uh, I hope in my lifetime we will start answering the questions of, yeah, there are, uh, there are a lot of habitable planets out there. And, uh, we, you know, the earth is just one of many places where life, uh, life can start.

Jesse Eubanks: And here’s the thing. We are still in Webb’s early days in just one image. It actually captured 25,000 galaxies.

Faith Stults: Our solar system only has one star our sun. But in that one image, Webb actually captured more stars than there are grains of sand on every beach on earth.

Jesse Eubanks: Ah, that is amazing.

Scott Acton: If you have an instrument that enables you to look somewhere that no one’s ever seen before, everything you see is going to be a scientific discovery.

Jesse Eubanks: So Webb isn’t just changing science. It’s disrupting our assumptions about things.

Faith Stults: Yeah. It’s not just what we’re seeing. It’s what we thought we’d see, but we just aren’t.

Jesse Eubanks: Things like galaxies too big, too soon. Stars that shouldn’t exist. Potential signs of life.

Faith Stults: These photos are causing our, our whole understanding of the early universe to shift. And of course that leaves us with some questions.

Scott Acton: Many, many questions. You know, more questions. We have more problems to solve now than did before building Webb. But that’s, that’s the way it always works, right? You do answer some questions, but you get two or three more for every one you answer.

Jesse Eubanks: Shortly after those first photos start arriving, Scott walks home from work and he calls his wife Heidi.

Scott Acton: And I said Heidi, I just, I just… this, this telescope… it’s unbelievable. I had no idea. There are galaxies everywhere! And, you know, and there were… I will confess there were some tears involved, right? So I got off the phone with Heidi and I remember looking up at the sky at that moment and realizing for the first time that although I can’t see it right, that there are billions of galaxies in my field of view.

Faith Stults: Next time you’re outside at night, try just looking up at the night sky and finding a blank empty patch. And the thing is, that’s not empty. You might not be able to see anything, but anywhere you look, any pin prick of a point in the sky lands on a galaxy that has billions of stars in it.

Jesse Eubanks: As Scott walks, an impression rises inside of him.

Scott Acton: Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying I had a vision or hallucinating, but in my mind I imagined that the galaxies were singing. I think it probably went back to a scripture that I remember from Job. I don’t even know the scripture, but something about stars singing.

Jesse Eubanks: The passage that he’s recalling comes from Job 38.

Where were you when I laid the Earth’s foundation? Tell me if you understand who marked off its dimensions. Surely you know. Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footing set? While the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy.

Scott Acton: So the galaxies were singing and not in any kind of, uh, of language that we can understand, but the emotion was clear. It was joy. Just… it’s like the universe was expressing joy because for the first time in all these millennia, humanity could finally see it. And so that was a life changing experience for me to have that realization.

Jesse Eubanks: A while later, it comes time to celebrate. So, Scott and a colleague actually buy something special. It was a big bottle of cognac from 1906. The year that NASA administrator James Webb was born.

Scott Acton: Uh, enough to give about 70 people a little one ounce pour. So we had this, uh, party where we raised a glass to James Webb and the telescope that bore his name.

Jesse Eubanks: Scott hasn’t had a drink in years, but for this special occasion, he…

Scott Acton: …had about four glasses of this, this 1906 cognac. And I got very, very tipsy, which is a grownup way of saying, you know, drunk… snockered.

Jesse Eubanks: Just like Jesus turned water into wine for a party already full, it seems like God is doing the same thing for Scott because as Scott walks home, he looks up and this time he knows what is up there, even if his eyes can’t see it. He pulls out his phone and he sends a message to a friend.

Scott Acton: Something like, boy, I wish you could see the universe from my perspective. And I had that clarity of thought that if you know what I’m talking about, that alcohol is a way of, uh, removing your inhibitions. So I, I, I said, I wish you could see the universe from my perspective. We are surrounded by… by a symphony of creation!

Jesse Eubanks: Later, NASA asks him for a quote, something to sum up his experience.

Scott Acton: What am I gonna say? I don’t, I don’t know. And I remembered that message that I’d sent. So I copied that and pasted it. Sent it to NASA and it went viral. It was ” we are surrounded by a symphony of creation” and I didn’t have the heart to tell anyone I, um, only said it because I was snockered on pre-prohibition alcohol. But, uh, but, uh, yeah, it, it seemed to capture the moment.

Jesse Eubanks: It’s easy to think that we are at the center. Our planet. Our country. Our people. Especially when all we’ve ever seen is here.

Faith Stults: But that gets harder when you realize the universe is unimaginably vast with quadrillions of stars.

Jesse Eubanks: Apollo astronaut Bill Anders said that seeing Earth from space made him question whether we are special at all. And he didn’t mean that we are insignificant. He just meant that we are a tiny piece of a very big universe.

Faith Stults: We’re a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of everything that exists, and that can be overwhelming or even discouraging, but I don’t think it has to be.

Mike Menzel: It’s, it’s incredible. You know, everything that I love and everything that I care about is within a light year. Right? It’s right here, but yet we are all part of something bigger. And the more we learn about that bigger thing, the more we learn about our own context, our own self.

Jesse Eubanks: But if the universe is this vast, then what does that make us? What possible significance could we hold?

Mike Menzel: I get asked the question of, um, you know, uh, when you talk about the, the scale of the universe, how insignificant we are, how small we are. And, yeah, we’re incredibly… we’re, we’re minuscule, right? But what makes me, what gives me total awe is not that we’re that … and we are… it’s that something as small as us can contemplate and ask those questions and start fathoming something that large. It’s like a bacteria in your pancreas figured out what you look like and that you’re just part of a community and what you do for a living. That’s the thing that blows my mind.

Jesse Eubanks: So maybe significance was never about size. Maybe it was always about nearness.

Faith Stults: In the Christian story, the same God who speaks galaxies into being also shows up as a human. He places the stars in the sky and then steps into the story to know the people he made. It’s like he operates on both scales at once, cosmic and personal. So no, we’re not the center of creation. I mean, we barely register on the scales of the universe. But we’re still seen.

Jesse Eubanks: I guess it’s like a giant universe doesn’t make it any less personal when the creator of that universe actually knows you.

Faith Stults: Yeah. The more we grasp just how big the universe is, the more staggering it becomes that a God like that would focus on the people of one tiny planet and choose to love us. That actually sounds like the opposite of insignificance.

Jesse Eubanks: Years ago, a boy dreamed of biking across the world to see all the wonders of earth. He grew up and helped the rest of us see far more. I asked Scott what drives people to explore, to ask, to reach. And as he’s talking, suddenly he breaks into Rudyard Kipling.

Scott Acton: “We have fed our seas for a thousand years. Still, she calls us unfed. There’s never a way, but all the waves that marks our tombless dead. We have sent our best to the weeds unrest, to the shark and searing goal. If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we have paid in full.” And the there is just this, uh, this thing that is inside of many people that says, you need to go. You need to travel. You gotta see what’s there.

Jesse Eubanks: I think that Scott’s naming something that we all feel. This ache. A pull to know more.

Faith Stults: Maybe the ache itself is a clue. A sign we’re meant to search for more than only what we can measure or photograph.

Scott Acton: It’s very difficult to, um, to not approach, I don’t care who you are, to not approach this from a spiritual perspective, uh, because it just… how else do you get your mind around this?

Jesse Eubanks: We came looking for answers, but what we found instead was an invitation not to resolve all the mystery, but to live awake to it. Because the great mysteries of life keep calling to us… and maybe so does someone else.

Mike Menzel: If anyone wants to start talking about faith or whatever like that, I tell them, look, I could share my faith with you if you want, but I would really convince you to start asking your own questions and start searching for it. I’m not gonna tell you my faith is right or wrong, but I’m gonna tell you, I think you should start looking for that. One of the things that I would ask them is, don’t you find it funny? That something as insignificant as us has the ability to contemplate these questions or even ask them in the first place. It’s almost like something is daring us to ask the question.

Jesse Eubanks: One more thing. In 2016, Scott finally did it. He started his lifelong dream biking around the world. He biked across the US and parts of Canada, through New Zealand and across Europe. And his official mission for the ride? To tell people about this wild new telescope he’d been working on… one that, if all went well, would launch in just a few years.

Faith Stults: Special thanks to Scott Acton, Heidi Acton and Mike Menzel. Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope by going to webbtelescope.org.

Your journey into Wonder doesn’t have to end here. If today’s episode sparks something in you. We’ve got more.

Jesse Eubanks: Check out Science With Faith, our exclusive after show where Faith unpacks the deeper layers of science and faith behind each episode.

Faith Stults: Or dive into Everything From Nothing, our special miniseries hosted by Jesse exploring evolution and Christian Faith.

Jesse Eubanks: Both are free and waiting for you at wonderologyshow.com. That’s wonderologyshow.com.

Wonderology is a production of Christianity Today in partnership with BioLogos.

Faith Stults: It’s hosted by Jesse Eubanks and Faith Stoltz. Today’s episode was written and produced by Jesse Eubanks. Our associate producer is McKenzie Hill.

Jesse Eubanks: Editing by Rachel Akers. Music by Jesse Eubanks. Post-Production by Wind Hill Studios with sound design, scoring, mixing, and additional story editing by Mark Henry Phillips.

Additional music by Mark Henry Phillips Blue Dot Sessions and Scott Holmes.

Faith Stults: Eric Petrek and Mike Cosper are the executive producers of CT Media Podcasts. Matt Stevens is our senior producer. Special thanks to Jim Stump and Colin Hoogerwerf.

Jesse Eubanks: Wonderology is generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Explore the profound questions of life that inspire awe and wonder by visiting templeton.org.

Faith Stults: If you enjoyed this episode, send it to a friend and leave us a rating and review to help more people find the show.

Jesse Eubanks: God invites us to experience the awe of all he’s made… both the known and the not-yet known. So… let’s get curious.