I was out in my front yard earlier this week, staring up at the night sky, and feeling impossibly humbled by the scale and the grandeur of the universe.
In case you missed it, Venus and Jupiter are appearing close together in the western sky in an event called a conjunction, according to CNN.Such celestial phenomena happen frequently. But that frequency doesn’t make these moments any less striking or awe-inspiring. To stare at those two dots, glimmering in an early evening sky, with the moon standing sentinel in another corner of the heavens, is an instant refresher course on our own place in the cosmos. And it should make us think twice about where we choose to focus our energy and attention.
Venus, the brighter of the two planets in the night sky this week, is our nearest planetary neighbor. Jupiter, which appears smaller in this celestial waltz, is 365 million miles from the Earth at its closest point. I say all this because, even as the Webb telescope sends back images that have exponentially expanded our knowledge of the cosmos, we’re still currently the only intelligent life in our galactic neighborhood – and even the evidence of that intelligence seems open to debate.
