July 13—The best way to put the current strategic situation in focus is by training the James Webb Telescope back on Planet Earth, so to speak. With the Webb telescope, we have become able to see over 13 billion years back into our universe’s existence, while looking at a tiny arc of the sky which NASA has explained is the equivalent of holding a grain of sand up at arms-length! On the one hand, this accomplishment serves to underscore how incommensurably minuscule we each, as human beings, are on the scale of the universe. But at the same time—since we are capable of conceptualizing our relationship with the incommensurably large, with the enormity of continuing creation—it reminds us that we are also possessed of an immense, and apparently unique, power to participate willfully in that process of creation of the universe.
