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We observe the world out of those two small spheres embedded in our heads. It is easy at the scale of a human being to see our lives as purposeful and significant. Yet the timing of these images is propitious because they are an opportunity not merely to reflect on the brazen destructiveness of this war, but to remind ourselves of the stupidity of propelling our civilization into such horrors, and even to the edge of the nuclear precipice. The dye-hard pragmatists might see this flurry of astronomy as nothing more than a brief diversion from the war in Ukraine they might even see it as strangely irrelevant to the matter of life and death on the eastern front. Some of those galaxies in the photograph came into existence just after the formation of the universe itself, older than a staggering 13 billion years. The first picture we saw from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was a deep field view of the universe in which hundreds of little dots were scattered across an area a mere pinprick in the sky, each dot a galaxy containing billions of stars. On July 11, images were revealed to a restless world of the cosmos in which our human trials and history play out. They are an opportunity for us to take a step back and see ourselves, and our wars, in the bigger picture of the universe. The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are such a moment. Sometimes humanity needs a little encouragement to pull itself out of its disagreements and to see how disastrous and pointless they are against the backdrop of the astonishing fact of our existence.