When the James Webb Space Telescope began sending images back to Earth thirteen months ago, it showed us pictures of the most ancient phenomena anyone has ever seen—the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe. The birthing, blazing, and fading of the universe that scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are now poring over reveal events that took place 13.4 billion years ago.

With 18 mirrors and five sunshield layers, all precisely aligned and calibrated, the Webb telescope is, in the words of columnist George Will, who recently traveled to Baltimore to see the images for himself, “a tennis-court-size engineering masterpiece.”

There are those who claim that the billions of dollars it cost to peer into the deep regions of the universe could more wisely have been allocated to projects here on Earth. And it’s true that the human need to venture beyond the familiar has often had bad results, such as colonialism and environmental degradation. Yet we are a species endowed with the gift of curiosity. We are impelled to go beyond where we are and see what we can’t yet see, whether the mystery is over the mountain or on the moon, around the bend of the river or into the beginnings of the cosmos.

Besides providing information about the very formation of this universe we all inhabit, here on the “pale blue dot” that is Earth, the images from the Webb Telescope have another advantage. They invite us to look into the night sky and ponder our smallness and the extraordinary unlikelihood of our being.