The infinite sadness
The first release of images from a new $10 billion space telescope — which provides "the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe to date," NASA claims — seemed to have sparked almost as much excitement on social media as the first Dall-E 2 images (which are similar machine translations of invisible information into human-readable imagery). Look at the amazing things science lets us see! Thank you, NASA, for making technology good again, something to dream on. There was no shortage of corny posts like this one accruing big numbers, as it seems that almost everyone feels safe in liking depoliticized "the stars are amazing" takes. Maybe if we like space hard enough, we can bring back technocratic centrism.
I think Gil Scott-Heron's position on space travel remains correct. Obviously I am not an astronomer, but it seems to me that these images, which look like rejected Tangerine Dream album covers, mainly reveal that where once there were blurry dots, now there are more blurry dots. The image above, for instance, is a superficially rich depiction of sheer scale as its own end, a depiction of the idea of new information as a sheer panoply of arbitrary details: Wow! More stars. Aren't you excited too? So many fresh candidates for the star registry — hopefully there will be a new NFT minted for every new colored spiral revealed in "deep" space. Wake me when you can see spaceships.
It makes sense that NASA would be excited to share these images; they are great publicity for itself as one of the few U.S. institutions that still function. But the lay excitement about the images seems to have been pegged largely to their higher resolution, as if increased visibility were being conflated with sudden accessibility. We're getting closer to the Truth. What if we can eventually see clear through to the beginning of everything? It's as if people believe that if we zoom in far enough, we'll see God's face instead of the infinite sadness.
Many people felt the impulse to share these widely shared photos again and put their own stamp of breathless wonder on them, vicariously participating in this one small step for humankind. The stars become our selfies, a pretense to express an optimistic disposition, an enduring belief in "trusting the science" and the wonders of progress despite all the depredations of the "hell sites." It also quickly prompted a backlash and a series of parody memes as well, as if to prove that there was no escape, that these images too would be assimilated into the usual social media games. Nothing gets old as quick as other people's enthusiasm, in all its inevitable myopia.
It's ironic, though not surprising, that a resonant symbol of hope and progress should be an image of something that is literally the most distant sight humans have ever seen. That's apparently the last place left where we can imagine the potential for good, for renewal. Like an inverted Don't Look Up, we can distract ourselves with the revealed mysteries and marvels in the space pictures as our own planet boils. We couldn't agree on climate science, but we all loved the galaxies far, far away.