There, where everything began

On Christmas day, December 25, 2021, after many delays, the James Webb Space Telescope was finally launched into space and promises to change our understanding of the cosmos. The James Webb is the largest (and most expensive) Space Telescope ever built and is the result of the effort of three space agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and various universities around the world. It is six times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope and is equipped with the largest mirror ever shipped into space. This iconic mirror is protected by a solar shield that will make it possible to cool Webb's super-sensitive instruments, thus able to identify the far-off stars, detect the atmosphere of potentially habitable exoplanets and capture the very first light of the very first stars when the universe was at its infancy, the beginning of time itself.

Isn’t it fascinating?

Webb will be the first telescope to pick up the light coming from the first stars formed in the universe about 13 and a half billion years ago, just 300 million years after the Big Bang, a period called the Cosmic Dark Ages according to current cosmological theories. At that time, the universe was totally devoid of light. It is difficult to imagine it considering the spectacle that the visible space offers us every night by turning our eyes in the sky; however, darkness and low temperature characterized the early universe. Gradually gas clouds of hydrogen and helium molecules began to group together over the next few hundred million years, long enough for these massive clouds of gas to condense and experience gravitational collapse. (1) The more the density of these clouds increased, the higher their temperature increased, triggering a process that led the first stars to illuminate the universe. At the time of writing, James Webb has fully deployed its sunscreen and primary and secondary mirror. During the launch phase, the telescope was folded into the fairing of an ESA Ariane 5 rocket. A spectacular, precise launch that saved the instrument a lot of fuel, extending its operating life. (2) The control center here on Earth is maneuvering the telescope to get it ready for scientific observations. This operation will take a few more months because it will be necessary to wait for the cooling of its instruments to begin the actual exploration. The James Webb is in fact sensitive to a range of wavelengths between orange light and infrared radiation emitted by bodies of about -150 ° centigrade. The light of the most distant objects in the cosmos undergoes a stretching effect towards the red that leads the light itself to move towards the infrared. This means that the observation of these objects as distant as the first galaxies formed in the universe requires a telescope specialized in infrared observation, just like Webb. Not only on celestial bodies, but the James Webb Space Telescope will also turn its giant golden eye to new planets by scouring the universe in search of other forms of life.

IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE?

When was life born? Was there life in the first galaxies? Will we be able to locate ancient alien civilizations with the new telescope? It is not easy to answer all these questions, the same ones that tormented the physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi's paradox, with respect to the probability for humanity to make contact with alien life, states: "If the Universe and our galaxy are teeming with developed civilizations, where are they all?". Or: "If there are so many advanced civilizations, why haven't we yet received evidence, such as radio transmissions, probes, or spaceships?" In the past year alone, the Keppler Space Observatory has discovered hundreds of planets around nearby stars. As a result, we now know that there are around half a trillion planets in our Milky Way alone. How many can host life? It appears to be too large a number for the odds of other living species to be slim. The Earth was formed only 9 billion years after the Big Bang. Other planets, older than the Earth, could have generated life millions of years earlier, if not billions, to then evolve in complexity. If only a small part had generated intelligent life forms and had begun to create technologies, they would have had millions of years to evolve in complexity. In other words, they should have made themselves visible in some way. How come we haven't found anything yet? There are several possible answers to this silence. These intelligent alien civilizations could be so advanced and despotic that they have imposed a radio silence so as not to be detected; or they may have shrunk to save waste. Or more simply, there are no other civilizations that are as intelligent. Or again, and this seems to be valid for us, intelligence carries with it the seeds of its own destruction in the inability to manage its own technology. And with our current development model, we are proving that this hypothesis is absolutely neither groundless nor unlikely.

THE EXTINCT INTELLIGENCES

Putting in space the James Webb Space Telescope will represent a huge paradigm shift for humanity, a great moment of introspection. As the most widespread, anomalous, powerful, and formidable animal species the Earth has ever produced, we face enormous challenges, such as our relationship with Earth and contradictions. We look out into the cosmos with curiosity, hoping that other intelligent life forms exist. However, on Earth, we have not always been alone. (3) The great monotheistic religions always paint the Sapiens man and woman as the only rulers of the world, but this makes us forget how there were so many human beings of other species in the past. Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Erectus, Homo Rhodesiensis, Homo Naledi, Homo Luzonensis, Homo Floresiensis, Homo Denisova: these are just some of the many species of Homo that lived on Earth and all became extinct about 10 thousand years ago due to the Sapiens. The farewell to all these species has something sinister: it seems that, in reality, the fell victim of the competition, warfare and hatred of the Sapiens. The expansion of African Sapiens has already condemned many living beings to disappearance: from the extinction of the great mammals of the ice age to the destruction of the rainforests by today's civilization. Human violence is a threat especially between different peoples because we compete for resources and the land. Like the language and the use of tools, it is likely that the tendency to genocide is also part of human nature. (4) Old bones discovered at the Nataruk site in Kenya testify to a massacre of 27 men, women and children that took place 9,000 years ago. The stereotype of the good savage, which paints the first communities of hunters and gatherers as more peaceful, probably never really existed: war was also common among ancient civilizations and between species and species of Homo, leading the Sapiens to win for their ability. to think abstractly and for superiority in their weapons. And by weapons I mean the ability to cooperate, manipulate, think strategically and deceive: there are no better weapons than these. How do we know that the other Homo species only died after meeting us? The answer is simple, it is because they survive in us. The mapping of the human genome has shown that genes of Homo neanderthalensis survive in the DNA of European populations, in the Asian, Polynesian, and Australian ones there are traces of Denisovan DNA and in those of African peoples other ancient Homo species. We met, mated, and after they died. So perhaps if there are other forms of life outside our world, intelligent or not, they are lucky not to have met us yet.

Today we look at the stars and ask ourselves if we are alone in the universe. In fantasy and science fiction we wonder what it would be like to meet another species as intelligent as us. It is deeply sad to think that this has already happened in the past and now, precisely because of that meeting, they are gone.

This essay has been supervised by Michela Fantozzi, Digital Content Writer

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1) THE ERA OF MASSIVE POPULATION III STARS: COSMOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS AND SELF-TERMINATION, Naoki Yoshida,1 Volker Bromm, and Lars Hernquist, PAG10

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/382499/pdf

2) NASA Says Webb’s Excess Fuel Likely to Extend its Lifetime Expectations

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2021/12/29/nasa-says-webbs-excess-fuel-likely-to-extend-its-lifetime-expectations/

The analysis shows that less propellant than originally planned for is needed to correct Webb’s  trajectory toward its final orbit around the second Lagrange point known as L2, a point of gravitational balance on the far side of Earth away from the Sun. Consequently, Webb will have much more than the baseline estimate of propellant – though many factors could ultimately affect Webb’s duration of operation.

3) Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind PAG. 14