Tag Archives: wonder

Inconceivably vast

Webb’s First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The deep-field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years.The image is the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken. Captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the image was revealed to the public by NASA on 11 July 2022. (Wikipedia)

It’s too hard to fathom just how big the universe is. The image below only shows a few stars, they are the bright spots with 6 flares coming off of them… a by-product of the James Webb telescope’s design. The rest of the bright spots are galaxies. Galaxies that each hold billions or trillions of stars.

And if you held your pinky up to the night sky you would completely cover the area of the sky that this photo covers with a sliver of a finger nail.

We are so insignificantly tiny, and our Milky Way galaxy is so insignificantly placed in the universe. We just can’t conceive of just how inconceivably vast our universe is, and how insignificantly tiny our solar system is.

It’s too much to comprehend. And yet, here we are. So significant to each other, so connected to our planet. We get to live lives rich in mystery and wonder.

What other life is out there, or was out there, some time in the 13 billion years of our universe’s existence? Could alien life comprehend our existence? We’ll probably never know.

If there was life in one of these distant galaxies right now, we wouldn’t it know for millions or billions of years. The light we see in that photo above are from the past. To put it into perspective, if they were looking at light from our planet, they would be seeing light emitted from before dinosaurs roamed the earth… in other words they would be looking at prehistoric life on a planet with single cell organisms or perhaps no life at all… yet.

It’s too hard to grasp. It’s inconceivable.

A dad’s secret

I love this.

I saw this TikTok last night and it really warmed my heart. A dad kept a childhood secret from his kid until she was 32 and had her own kids. Her dad would take her and her siblings to the beach to go shell fishing, but would go to a souvenir shop first and buy pretty shells. Then he’d throw them in the ripples of waves to be found.

How did she finally find out all these years later? Because he started doing it for her kids, his grandkids. Here is the video.

I grew up on a tropical beach. I still remember the joy of finding a beautiful, unbroken shell. I wish I did this for my kids… and one day I hope to do this for my grandkids.

Nature is amazing

After 17 years underground, the periodical cicadas are ready to resurface. These insects somehow know that 17 seasons have passed, and will be triggered to the surface by the warmth of a spring day… after skipping, yet counting, 16 other springs.

How is this information passed from one generation to the next? What is written into their DNA to give instructions like this? It’s one thing to hibernate for a winter, still another to sit dormant in the soil for 17 years.

Nature holds many secrets. There are many interesting things that happen in the natural world: salmon leave their birthplace in freshwater rivers and come back to the same location after 2 years of living in the salty ocean; monarch butterflies travel yearly from Canada to Mexico; some frogs can freeze for long periods and come back to life after warming up again.

It’s amazing that even today we are discovering new insects, new scientific anomalies, new discoveries about the world we live in, and the incredible mysteries of life. This year, millions of periodical cicadas are going to awake from dormancy after 17 years, molt, mate, and return to the soil for another 17 years. Incredible!

The mass of trees

There are many questions that might seem simple but aren’t. For instance, where does the mass of trees come from?

Many people believe it comes from the soil. However, most of a tree’s mass comes from carbon… in the air.

This is one of those tidbits of information that if you know it, it’s not a big deal, but if you don’t, well then you likely either checked the date of this post to see if it was written on April Fools, or you did a Google search.

While it is interesting to dig into the science of this and learn about photosynthesis, and study the exchange of gasses, and what happens to carbon in the process, it’s also wonderful to marvel at the idea of what’s happening: Trees grow and get their size out of the air.

Here’s a quick video that explains it.

Here is another thought about trees. They won’t grow without the energy of the sun doing the work to convert the carbon from the air into the mass of the tree… so when you throw a log into a fire, you are converting energy captured by the sun back into heat energy.

From Wikipedia:

In physics, mass–energy equivalence is the principle that anything having mass has an equivalent amount of energy and vice versa, with these fundamental quantities directly relating to one another by Albert Einstein’s famous formula:

This is a big jump in thinking, but isn’t it interesting that so much of the mystery of life and our universe can be derived from the mass of a tree?

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* Update: See the first comment by Stephen Downes that points out my error in connecting the relationship to the mass-energy equivalent… I should have just left this post at the marvel of trees growing out of air!