The view in this Webb Space Telescope photo is of a fraction of one degree of the night sky, of an area that appears empty to the unaided human eye. It’s not empty; instead, it is packed with hundreds of galaxies, each with millions to billions of stars. Many of those billions of stars have planets circling them.
Those galaxies are distant, unimaginably distant. Millions to billions of light years away. Those galaxies are distant in time, too. One of them, the one in the lower right corner that NASA has zoomed in upon, GN-z11, is 13.3 billion years old; we’re looking at a galaxy that existed 430 million years after the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe.
We are arrivistes, arrogant recent arrivals, brand new to our planet, which itself is a mere 4.6 billion years and still just a new kid in the Universe itself. We imagine our infinitesimally tiny blue dot is important, that our planet and what we do on it is somehow consequential in the unimaginably vast, unthinkably old Universe. We imagine ourselves the master of all we can see.
It’s the very definition of hubris.
And yet we seem to be purely incapable of caring for what we have. We haven’t just trashed important parts of the only planet we know of that supports our needs; we’re well along the path to making it uninhabitable to ourselves.
The Universe is a vast, dark and scary place. We can live in a tiny, minuscule part of it. Even on our planet, if we drill down three miles into the Earth’s crust it’s too hot and too stifling to let us survive. Go up five miles and there’s not enough oxygen to survive, and we’d freeze anyway. We treat that narrow band of our planet as indestructible and inexhaustible, when we know it is neither.
It’s yet another kind of hubris.
And we’ve known since classical times what happens to humans who show hubris.
Wickersham's Conscience 
Thank you.
Many decades ago when I went off to college, my Dad told me to take an astronomy class as an elective. He thought it would give me a proper sense of human insignificance.
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Well said. We are an unnecessary microorganism on an apparently rare biological planet. We have a free ride through this bit of universe, and our host, the driver, isn’t going to put up with much more abuse. We need to quit passing gas, pick up our cheetos wrappers, and clean the windshield. The shortage of gratitude for the ride is appalling.
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