Around 930,000 miles above your head, there is a saucer, pointing into the universe. It has been there for seven months. Recently, it spent 12.5 hours studying a patch of sky.

Yesterday, this saucer, known as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) beamed back the first images of that sky. And it is swarming with radiant galaxies.

The galaxies are billions of years old. Light travels at a rate of about 186,000 miles per second, so the light reaching us now from these distant galaxies has taken aeonsAn aeon is an indefinite and extremely long period of time. to get to us. When we look deep into space, we also look back in time.

That means the JWST has captured these galaxies as they were 600 million years after the Big BangThe moment the universe came into being. It is thought that this took place in a kind of explosion from a dimensionless singularity.. Some have probably ceased to exist. Others have been catapulted trillions of miles away.

The telescope can tell us how stars formed. It can explain the origin of supermassive black holesVast areas of space so dense that even light cannot escape them.. It can reveal how water arrived on our planet.

It might also be able to answer one of the most pressing questions: are we alone in the universe? The telescope is precise enough to detect whether or not an exoplanet lightyears away has an atmosphere. This will help us narrow down the number of planets that have the potential to harbour life.

Some think none of this matters. They point out that the JWST took 26 years and £8.4bn to build. That could have been better spent on research to improve lives.

Others think we should not underestimate the spiritual value of this research. It is only natural for humans to yearn to know where we come from. The JWST might well have captured the stardust that eventually descended upon the surface of the Earth to form us.

We have no idea what threats might face us in the future. The universe is full of terrifying unknowns, from black holes to the possibility of intelligent life operating at the galactic level.

We do not even know how the universe will end. Some think it will one day stop expanding and collapse into itself - the Big CrunchCurrently, the universe is expanding. In the hypothesised Big Crunch scenario, its average density would be sufficient to stop its expansion and cause a contraction, potentially back into a dimensionless singularity.. Some think it will keep expanding until all its heat is spread too thinly and the stars run out of fuel - the Big FreezeAlso known as heat death, this is a hypothesised fate of the universe in which the universe simply grows darker and darker as stars die, and black holes come to dominate.. Or everything could simply end up disintegrating into elementary particles - the Big RipAnother hypothesised end of the universe in which continued expansion simply results in everything, including the tiniest of particles, moving further and further away from everything else until everything has been reduced to subatomic particles and radiation..

Future generations of humans will certainly face these complex problems. It is never too early to start solving them.

Yes: In this image, we see something that no previous generation of human beings, possibly no other intelligent life at all, has ever witnessed. It is a reminder of our extraordinary achievements as a species.

No: A real achievement would be eradicating hunger and poverty on Earth, not spending billions on stargazing. This image is nothing but a reminder of why we will not last as a species.

Or... Astronomical research like this might not be worth it if it were just for the wonder of seeing far-off galaxies, but it has tangible practical benefits as well. Some day, it may just save us all.