By Dennis D. McDonald

Seeing the amazingly detailed images from the Webb Space Telescope reminds me of the times long ago when our dad took us out in the backyard on clear dark nights. Back then we used a 3.5 inch reflecting telescope to see the stars, the moon, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, double and triple stars, and that distant smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy.

I remember thinking that the moon close-up did look like a cold, dead place but all those other places -- Mars, Venus, imagined planets orbiting distant stars light years away -- what kind of beings lived there? Were they like us?

I was a science fiction addict in those days. I remember devouring every science fiction, space, rocket, and science book at the Bexley Public Library in Columbus, Ohio, especially the “juveniles” by Heinlein (“The Rolling Stones” was my favorite). Then there were the Rick Brant “electronic adventure” series my parents dutifully bought me at the Lazarus downtown store’s book department.

I even remember reading through the entire series of old dusty Tom Swift books at my grandparents’ house, the ones my father read as a kid.

I'm still a big science fiction fan both in terms of books as well as movies and TV series and I still on occasion experience that elusive “sense of wonder” I experienced as a kid when reading about space travel and alien worlds.

Seeing the Webb telescope images reminds me again about the vastness of the universe and how we lowly humans are still able to reach out via our puny tools to understand it all. Not that I believe we’ll be around as a species long enough for that to occur but, at least from my perspective, the journey is what's important — even if the destination is beyond reach.

Text copyright (c) 2022 by Dennis D. McDonald

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