I first learned of the James Webb Space Telescope right before it launched last Christmas Day. I watched an animation of JWST emerging from its capsule, unfolding the 18 golden-cast elements of its telescope and the five layers of its massive sun screen. It resembled nothing less than a magnificent mechanical butterfly emerging from its confining chrysalis.

Of its potential and purpose, NASA says: “JWST will examine every phase of cosmic history: from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, stars and planets to the evolution of our own solar system.”

They spoke of distances I struggled to wrap my brain around. The JWST orbits nearly a million miles from Earth, and it first looks to a star some 260 light-years away. To better understand, I turned to Paul Thomas, a physics and astronomy professor also known as “The Planet Walk Guy,” since he was instrumental in creating the Eau Claire Planet Walk.

The planet walk, Thomas said, attempts to illustrate vast distances in a meaningful way. Start near the Phoenix Park pavilion, where a silver globe sites atop a kiosk. That globe represents the sun, scaled down from its 865,000-mile diameter to 16 inches, smaller by a factor of 3.4-billion-to-1. Using that same scale, plaques along the walking trail following the Chippewa River represent the various planets and their distance from the sun, starting with Mercury just a few feet away and ending about a mile downriver at the Haas Fine Arts Center with the dwarf planet Pluto.

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And if we know nothing else about ourselves, we know our knowledge is never as powerful as our beliefs.

DAN LYKSETT

Perspective: You can stroll from the silver globe to the Pluto plaque in 15 minutes or so, but in the real universe light from the sun takes 5.5 hours to make the same journey.

Perspective: Using the same scale, if you visit the nearest star besides the sun (Proxima Centauri, real distance 4.35 light-years away), pack a lunch and wear good shoes because you’ll walk all the way to Hong Kong.

Perspective: You want to use the scale to walk to JWST’s first target star? Walk all with way to the moon and more than half the way back. If you’re taking 10,000 steps per day, every day, and your stride is one yard long, it will take you 195 years to finish the journey. Remember, that’s on a scale of 3.4-billion-to-1.

“Space is big,” Paul said – with not even a little irony.

And JWST is a quintessential human endeavor, more than a quarter century in development and survivor of all the changes, concerns, and setbacks imaginable.

“This is truly a generational effort,” Paul said. “Some people have spent their entire careers working on it. People have died working on it, some knowing they likely would never see the results.”

Why is the JWST so important? Consider this NASA statement: “JWST will be a powerful time machine with infrared vision that will peer back over 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies forming out of the darkness of the early universe.”

Seeking answers to a question that big – a longer version of the age-old “Where did we come from?” – has not come cheaply. The price tag is $10 billion – money some say would have been be better spent on issues facing our earthly presence, issues such as hunger and climate change.

It’s a fair question, and one that should always be considered. But it seems our species has been looking to the heavens to answer “Where did we come from?” since the very first night we looked up from a fire of our own creation.

I believe when the first images from 13.5 billion years ago are captured and released, each of us will see something according to our needs and wants. Some will see the hand of God. Others will see the pure, unvarnished energy of creation. And many will see something in between. In the end, JWST will better inform us, but we will still be human. And if we know nothing else about ourselves, we know our knowledge is never as powerful as our beliefs.