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The Greatest Sustained Creative Project In Our Lifetime
The Webb Telescope has huge lessons for creators
I love scientists. I think they are the advanced long term creators. To do something scientifically you have to get it right, literally over and over again until your intellectual peers approve.
It is a different form of creativity.
The project took ten years, ten billion dollars, and endless hours to build and there were 344 failure points during the launch and deployment, each of which would have meant the telescope had failed. You may ask how a science, design, and engineering project like this qualifies as a creative project.
There is a movement in STEM education, science, technology, engineering, and math, to add an additional letter A to the acronym for art. STEAM is the nomenclature. I’d argue that Webb is the ultimate expression of that concept for several reasons.
The first is the magnitude of the vision required to conceive, sell, and fund this crazy endeavor, one that seems designed to fail. What creators can learn from this is persistence against all odds. It may seem like a stretch but a creative act like writing a novel or a symphony, for an individual, requires this level of persistence.
Those are monumental tasks for one person.
Then we see the results of Webb’s success, extraordinarily beautiful images that encompass thirteen billion years of the development of our universe. The telescope was built to make those images and, scientific value aside, they are works of art on a grand scale.
Each view holds enough to inspire legions of new STEAM students to take on impossible things, to boldly go where no…nope, I won’t do that, though that is exactly what those scientists and engineers did.
I strongly suggest watching the Netflix documentary Universe, Cosmic Time Machine, on the building and launch of the telescope. It is truly inspiring.
And let it be the inspiration for that novel you’ve wanted to write. If humans can build something like that, you can write a book. And you probably won’t face 344 points of failure in the process.
