We will no doubt hear a lot more about the James Webb telescope, launched on 25 December on a mission to explore deep space. It is named after the man who served as NASA administrator in the 1960s, when the Apollo programme took mankind to the moon. Mankind’s journey into space was not smooth or free from difficulties. In fact, it was fraught with dangers and setbacks. Worse yet, the missile technology that made such leaps and bounds in the effort to escape earth’s gravity became an integral part of the Cold War and the post-World War II arms race.

It was the Soviet Union that kicked off the race into space with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 14 October 1957. The USSR, at the time, was a major pole in international power politics, and the first satellite to orbit the earth proclaimed this fact. The heated competition between the USSR and the US led to inroads in the foray into space. Many satellites, spacecraft and automated landing vehicles were created for the purpose. In 1969, this intensive scientific drive was crowned with mankind’s first landing on the moon and Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The Apollo programme had achieved its aim. It paved the way for further trips to obtain samples from the asteroid-like mass circling the earth while marking the end of a scientific journey that was as much about technological advances as it was about display, winning, and wowing public opinion both at home and abroad.

 The second phase, after the awe from the phase subsided, was more practical. It aimed to expand on the applications of aerospace technologies, which it managed, giving us a plethora of communications satellites, new alloys and synthesised materials, and new technologies for discovering natural resources on our planet. In the process, the reusable space shuttle was invented, which helped cut back on exorbitant costs. Then came the orbitting space station to serve as a permanent research facility in space or as a takeoff point for deeper explorations into our solar system or beyond. All these achievements unfolded in the decades that followed the first Apollo mission and they continued even after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was soon after that the US established the Space Operations Centre (SOC), which is dedicated to researching how to build, transport and set into orbit mammoth space platforms, and so developing mankind’s ability to work in outer space with minimal dependency on earth for control and supplies. Meanwhile, interest in the cosmos intensified. It was informed by the desire to discover whether other intelligent life exists in the universe and by curiosity about the origins of our solar system. The more we learned the more we realised that the universe extends far further than we had imagined, and that there were countless stars and galaxies beyond the ones we had seen up to then. At the centre of this exploratory process were huge telescopes with ever greater power to see and transmit images from the outermost reaches of infinite space.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble, the orbitting astronomical observatory that offered what were, at the time, the clearest images, not just of the topography but also of the history of the universe. After all, the information it receives relies on light emitted billions of lightyears ago by stars that may now even be defunct. The JWST is six times more powerful than the Hubble and its images are at least that many times sharper and more informative thanks to the JWST’s infrared camera and imaging technologies which were able to peer into depths far beyond the Hubble’s deepest probes.

The Hubble and JWST are major landmarks in the scientific and technological progress mankind made in over half a century since Armstrong set foot on the moon. That became possible because complex things became simpler. The simpler things grew, the clearer they became. Also, the smaller things became, the more powerful they grew – size became something we could control and tailor to our needs. Simplicity and simplification have always been the key to great progress.  Scientists often speak of the surprise they felt when they made a new discovery that turned out to be the result of an insight so simple they were amazed they had not seen it earlier.

Simplicity and complexity also have bearings on the lack of progress. The difference between them is the difference between mankind’s ability to penetrate the secrets of the cosmos and people’s inability to address crucial global issues and how they affect their particular regions and environments. The war in Ukraine, the Russian-US conflict, Chinese-Western tensions, negligent responses to the pandemic and global warming, migration, civil warfare, sectarian strife and ideological extremism all testify to that ingrained dichotomy between the lack of drive to resolve conflict, poverty, migration and fanaticism, and the very evident drive to discover the inner workings of the universe.

I encountered the question of simplicity and complexity during a visit to Tehran over 20 years ago. At a reception that brought together people of different nationalities, an Iranian friend of mine told me, with great pride, that the Iranian mentality was like a Persian carpet. It was such a complex weave of intricate motifs and designs that others could not possibly understand it. At the time, I was not particularly interested in knowing whether or not the Iranian mentality truly defied foreigners’ ability to understand it, though I doubted whether there was great wisdom in not being understood by others. On the other hand, I did wonder whether the Iranians understood their own mentality.

I came across a similar situation upon my return to Egypt in 1982 after finishing my postgraduate studies in the US. At the time there was a furore over “foreign funding” of research about Egypt. Critics spoke of the “Americans’ Description of Egypt”, alluding to the French Description de l’Egypte, the encyclopaedic study of early 19th-century Egypt compiled during the Napoleonic expedition. The argument went that if Americans funded research centres in Egypt they would know everything about us. My response was to ask whether or not we wanted to know everything about ourselves.

The Webb telescope will increase our knowledge of the universe and its history. Maybe it will help us answer the question of whether there is life on another distant planet somewhere. Meanwhile, I fear, we will continue to struggle with life on this planet which is still very short on the wisdom required in order to live.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 21 July, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.