To Look Far Is to Look Into the Past

We Hung Another Mirror in the Sky: The Roman Telescope, Understanding the Universe, and the Question "What Good Is This to Us?"

On the morning of 30 August 2026, a rocket lifted off from Florida. Inside it was a telescope, the product of twenty years of labour, named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy. This piece is as much about why that telescope matters as about whom it belongs to.

Dear Young Comrades,

A piece of news went round; some of you may have seen it, some of you may not: NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was launched into space on the morning of 30 August 2026 at 07:26 local time (14:26 in Turkey), on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. It is now on a three-month journey toward the L2 point, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. We expect its first images in early 2027.

You can guess the comments under that news, because we all know them: "Billions for space while there is hunger on Earth." "What good is discovering places we will never go?" "Let them feed the people here first."

Do not be angry with those who ask this. The question is a rightful anger that has not been aimed at the right address.

The anger is justified: the world really is unjust, and resources really are flowing to the wrong places. But the address is wrong. In this piece we will talk both about what the telescope does and about where that anger ought to be directed.

Let me say this at the outset: the mirror at Roman's heart is leftover from a cancelled spy-satellite programme. It sat in a warehouse for years. That single sentence is, in fact, the summary of the whole piece.

Part One: How Do We Look at the Sky?

A telescope is not an "eye"; it is a time machine

Let us settle the most basic point first, because our intuitions mislead us here. Light does not travel at infinite speed. It covers 300 thousand kilometres a second — fast, but a finite speed. In the universe, that means to look far is to look into the past.

When you look at the Sun, you see eight minutes ago. When you look at the nearest star, four years ago. When you look at the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million years ago — an age in which our species was not yet around. And when you look at a galaxy 13 billion light-years away, you see the universe's infancy, the moment the first stars were only just catching fire.

So a telescope is not merely an instrument that looks at space. It is an instrument that looks into the past. We read the history of the universe from the photons that history itself has sent us. The archaeologist digs the soil; we excavate distance.

And what do we read from that light?

The astronomer does not look at the sky and say "how beautiful." They extract the light. There are three basic ways of doing this:

1. The spectrum: When you pass light through a prism and split it into its colours, you see black lines inside it. Each element leaves that line in a place of its own — like a fingerprint. So from billions of kilometres away, without ever going there, you can say what a star is made of. In 1835 the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte wrote that the chemical composition of the stars could never be known by human beings. Within a quarter of a century, spectral analysis had begun to do exactly that. A fine lesson in the theory of knowledge: the sentence "it can never be known" is a sentence history has always uttered too soon.

2. Redshift: The universe is expanding. As the light of a distant galaxy comes toward us, its wavelength stretches, that is, it shifts toward the red. The greater the shift, the farther that object is, and the further in the past. This is the universe's measuring rod.

3. Change over time: You look at the same patch of sky again and again. If something brightens, fades, or twitches, you catch it. Exploding stars (supernovae), the flickering light of stars with planets passing in front of them, the dance around a black hole — all of them become visible only through repeated looking.

Seeing the unseen

Now we come to the truly unsettling part. In the twentieth century astronomy discovered that the portion of the universe visible to us is a minority.

In the 1970s Vera Rubin measured the rotation speeds of galaxies and found something strange: galaxies were spinning too fast to be explained by the gravitational pull of the matter we can see inside them. They ought to have flown apart under centrifugal force, and they were not flying apart. So there was something invisible, something that emitted no light but had mass: dark matter.

Then in 1998 came the second shock: the expansion of the universe was not slowing down; it was speeding up. We called the thing causing it — because we do not know what it is — dark energy.

Today's picture is this: about 5% of the universe is the matter we know (atoms, stars, planets, you, me, this screen). 27% is dark matter. 68% is dark energy. In other words, the entire store of knowledge accumulated over thousands of years accounts for one twentieth of the universe.

This is not merely a lesson in humility. This is a vast front of knowledge standing before us. And Roman was built to fight on exactly that front.

Part Two: Three Telescopes, Three Different Questions

Hubble, James Webb, and Roman — all three are "space telescopes," but they do not do the same job. To understand the difference among them is to understand how astronomy works.

Hubble (1990): We took our eyes outside the atmosphere for the first time

Hubble was launched on 24 April 1990. With its 2.4-metre mirror, it looks in ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light from an orbit 540 km above Earth.

Why did we put it into orbit? Because the atmosphere is a curtain. The twinkling of stars is romantic, but for the astronomer it is a disaster — air movements blur the image. Worse, the atmosphere absorbs most ultraviolet and infrared light. Looking from the ground, you never see some of the universe's colours at all.

Hubble's story is also the best example of how the scientific method works. When it was launched its mirror was flawed; the images came back blurry. It looked like a multi-billion-dollar fiasco. In 1993 astronauts went up and fitted the telescope with corrective optics — we put glasses on the sky. After that Hubble went through five servicing missions; parts were changed, it was renewed. It has been working for thirty-six years.

What Hubble gave us: measurements that led to fixing the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years. A contribution to the discovery of dark energy. And that famous Deep Field image: a patch of sky that looked utterly empty, a patch no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length, was stared at for ten days — and thousands of galaxies came out of it. The place we thought empty turned out to be full. That image permanently changed humanity's sense of its own place.

James Webb (2021): In the infrared, into the universe's infancy

James Webb was launched on 25 December 2021. It is a very different animal from Hubble.

A 6.5-metre mirror, made of gold-coated beryllium, in 18 hexagonal segments. A five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court. And the most critical difference: Webb looks in the infrared, so it has to be ice-cold — it is cooled to minus 233 degrees. A warm instrument drowns out the thing it is trying to see with its own heat. That is why Webb does not sit in Earth orbit, but at the L2 point of the Sun–Earth system, on Earth's shadow side.

Why infrared? Two reasons. First: redshift. The light of the oldest, most distant galaxies has been stretched so far that even if it set out as visible light it reaches us as infrared. If you want to see them, you have to look in the infrared. Second: the dust clouds in which stars are born are closed to visible light, but infrared passes through that dust. You see behind the curtain.

What Webb has done: it has found the most distant galaxies known so far — objects from only ~280 million years after the Big Bang. And something fine happened here: the early galaxies it found came out brighter and more mature than theory had expected. In other words Webb did not confirm our models; it strained them. That is good news in science. If theory is not being shaken, the instrument is not seeing anything new.

Roman (2026): Not sharpness, but width

Now to our real subject. What does Roman do differently?

Roman's mirror is also 2.4 metres — that is, exactly Hubble's size. Its sharpness is Hubble's sharpness. But Roman's Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera of 18 detectors, sees in a single frame at least 100 times the area Hubble sees.

Think of the difference this way. Hubble and Webb are extremely sharp eyes looking at the sky through a keyhole. Enormous depth, narrow angle. Roman looks at the same sharpness, but panoramically. In NASA's words, Roman can survey the sky roughly a thousand times faster than Hubble. A sky survey that would take Hubble centuries, Roman finishes in months.

And this quantitative difference produces a qualitative difference. This is one of dialectics' most concrete examples: the transformation of quantity into quality. By looking at stars one by one you learn about stars; by looking at a billion galaxies at once you learn the structure of the universe. Statistics does what a single observation cannot.

What Roman will do in its five-year prime mission (likely to be extended by another five years):

Measure the light of a billion galaxies. Map the distribution of dark matter in the universe by watching how it bends the images of distant galaxies. That is, read the unseen from its effect on the seen — exactly as historical materialism does for social relations.
Catch thousands of supernovae in order to reconstruct the history of the universe's expansion, and test whether dark energy changes over time. The answer to that question determines the future of the universe.
Find more than a thousand new exoplanets — and by a very different method, called "microlensing": as a planet passes in front of a star behind it, its gravity bends that star's light like a lens. This method finds what other methods cannot: planets far from their stars, and even rogue planets bound to no star at all.
An instrument called a coronagraph is trying to mask a star's light and image the planet beside it directly. This is a technology demonstration — its real purpose is to open the way for telescopes that will one day photograph another Earth.

And it will send 1.4 terabytes of data a day. NASA's highest-data-rate astrophysics mission to date. Keep that detail in mind; we will come back to it at the end of the piece.

	Hubble	James Webb	Roman
Launch	1990	2021	2026
Mirror	2.4 m	6.5 m	2.4 m
Light	Ultraviolet–visible–near infrared	Infrared	Infrared
Location	Earth orbit (~540 km)	L2 (~1.5 million km)	L2 (~1.5 million km)
Strength	Versatility, longevity, repairability	Depth: the most distant and coldest objects	Width: 100 times the field at the same sharpness
Question	"What is this?"	"What is the oldest?"	"How do they all stand together?"

The three are not rivals. Roman's wide survey finds where something interesting is; Webb looks there and extracts the detail. One is a cartographer, the other a lens. That is how science works: division of labour and accumulation.

Part Three: "While the World's Troubles Are Unfinished..."

Now we come to that question. And let us be honest: emotionally the question is entirely understandable. It is natural for someone who cannot live on the minimum wage, who cannot pay the rent, who has been left without work, to react to a "billions of dollars into space" headline.

But that is exactly why we have to pose the question correctly.

Let us look at the figures

Over roughly twenty years of development, Roman cost a total of 4 billion dollars. An average of 200 million dollars a year. NASA's budget for fiscal year 2026 is 24.4 billion dollars — 3.6 thousandths of US federal spending. That is: of every 1,000 dollars of public expenditure, 3.6 dollars goes to space and aeronautics as a whole; of that, only a portion goes to science.

The same country's 2026 military budget is over 1 trillion dollars.

Now let us ask the question again: is the cause of hunger in the world a telescope that cost 4 billion dollars over twenty years, or a war machine that burns 1 trillion dollars every year? The entire cost of a telescope is a few days' spending of that military budget.

What is more: a third of the food produced in the world is thrown away. Hunger is not a failure of production; it is a problem of distribution and property. So the sentence "the money spent on science would have ended hunger" is technically wrong as well. If we cut the money spent on science, that money does not go to the hungry — it goes to weapons, subsidies, tax cuts.

This is the bourgeoisie's favourite trick: to make the oppressed share their own portion with other oppressed people, or with the common accumulation of humanity. "A raise for pensioners, or a permanent post for teachers?" "The earthquake, or the telescope?" These dilemmas are false. The real dilemma is always this: capital's profit, or society's need?

And they already tried to cut the budget

This is not an abstract debate. Roman's own story is the proof.

The Trump administration tried four separate times to cancel or cripple Roman. In the fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, Roman was allotted 156.6 million dollars, less than half the previous year's figure. An approximately 50% cut was foreseen across science programmes as a whole. Congress turned those cuts back, and the telescope was saved.

Listen to what the team did, because this is an anecdote of class struggle: they finished the telescope eight months ahead of schedule and pulled the launch from September to 30 August. Why? Because they wanted to get into space before the next budget uncertainty caught them. They did not want twenty years of labour erased by a stroke of the pen.

Meanwhile, skilled technicians left because of budget uncertainty; in one unit, two of three specialist technicians went. So capital's relation to science is not merely "giving too little money"; it is the precarity of the scientist's labour. Does that sound familiar? It is the same story as the 50/d research assistant at the university, the doctoral workers bounced from project to project, the precarious academic.

Under capitalism, science exists not as a budget line but as a public realm under constant threat.

Part Four: The Taboos That Fall as We Grasp the Universe

Now to the real answer to the question "what good is discovering places we will never go?" Because the answer is not "it will be useful." The answer is far more radical: to grasp the universe is to change the way we think about the world.

Look at history. Every great leap in astronomy is also the collapse of a ruling ideology.

Copernicus and Galileo (16th–17th c.): Earth is not the centre of the universe. This was not merely a piece of astronomical knowledge; it was the keystone of medieval Christian cosmology — the order in which the heavens were perfect and unchanging, the earth corrupt, and everything stood in its appointed place inside a divine hierarchy. When that stone was pulled, the naturalness of social hierarchy was shaken as well. It is no accident that Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for speaking of an infinite universe and a plurality of worlds. The Church understood, with the instinct of power, that this was not an astronomy debate.

Kant and Laplace (18th c.): The solar system was not created; it formed from a cloud of gas. Engels, in Anti-Dühring, especially praises this discovery: for the first time the idea of history was introduced into nature in place of "it was always thus." The thought that nature too has a history is the sibling of the thought that human social orders are also historical, and therefore provisional.

Darwin (1859): Species were not created; they evolved. The human being is not the crown of creation, but the product of a process.

Hubble (1924): What we took for a nebula is another galaxy. Our Milky Way is not the whole universe, but one among billions.

The twentieth century: The universe has a beginning, it is expanding, and 95% of its matter is foreign to us.

At every step, the human being placed themselves a little further from the centre. And here is the strange part: this did not make the human being smaller. On the contrary. The human being who puts themselves at the centre of the universe is the human being who accepts their fate — because the order has been given from above. The human being who sees themselves in an ordinary corner of the universe, inside a historical process, is the human being who knows that no order is eternal. That knowledge is the antidote to fatalism.

It is no accident that Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on the natural philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. The "swerve" (clinamen) Epicurus gave the atoms was a breach in the rigid chain of determinism — the material ground of freedom. At the age of 23, Marx already saw that a grasp of nature could not be separated from a grasp of human freedom itself.

Lenin too, in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, wrote this to the physicists who panicked when the atom turned out to be divisible and said "matter has disappeared": "The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom." That is: the limit of our knowledge is not the limit of reality. What we do not know is not the "unknowable"; it is the not-yet-known. Dark matter is like that too. Today its name is "dark" because we do not know it; tomorrow it will have a name, an equation, perhaps a technique.

And notice this: what broke dogma was not arguing with dogma. It was measuring. The telescope is humanity's most effective instrument against metaphysics — because it does not argue; it shows. Every instrument that looks at the sky today also undermines every authority that tells us "accept the world as it is."

So the answer to "what good is discovering places we will never go?" is this: we do not need to go there; it is enough that the light coming from there should change us.

And there is this as well: knowledge never arrives alone

Let us also give a concrete answer to those looking for "practical benefit," because that too is a right answer.

Technologies developed for observing space have later seeped into everyday life — and usually nobody knows it:

The digital camera sensor (CCD): Astronomy needed detectors that could catch faint light, and so matured this technology. The camera in the phone in your pocket is a descendant of that line.
Medical imaging: Digital image-processing algorithms developed at JPL to clean up space images were transferred to the processing of tomography and MRI images. Detector technology developed for Hubble led to the digital imaging systems used in breast-cancer diagnosis.
Adaptive optics: The technique developed to correct, in real time, the image the atmosphere distorts was adapted to retinal imaging in eye surgery and to laser eye operations.
Wi-Fi: The signal-processing method at the base of the wireless network standard we use today came out of mathematics developed by the Australian radio astronomer John O'Sullivan and his team in the search for black-hole bursts.
GPS: Location services do not work unless the corrections of Einstein's general theory of relativity are taken into account. That the blue dot on the map sits in the right place is thanks to our knowing that spacetime is curved.
Climate and agriculture: Without Earth observation from space, we would not know the ozone hole or the measure of global warming at this precision.

But be careful: let us not make this list science's justification. Because that means "science is valuable only if it is useful," which is exactly capital's view of science. Science is valuable not because it is useful, but because it makes the human relation to nature a conscious one. Benefit arrives as a by-product of that, always and inevitably. Those who are curious find what they were not looking for.

Part Five: So Whose Knowledge Is This?

Here is where the real question begins. And we return to the sentence at the start of the piece.

Where did Roman's mirror come from?

In 2012 the United States' spy-satellite agency, the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), donated to NASA two unused space-telescope systems. They were leftovers from a spy-satellite programme called "Future Imagery Architecture," cancelled in 2005 because of enormous cost overruns. They were waiting in a warehouse in New York State. Their optics were Hubble-quality. Each was estimated to be worth at least 250 million dollars.

One of those mirrors is today at Roman's heart.

Pause on that sentence a moment, dear comrades.

Optics of a quality that would let humanity understand the universe had been produced to watch people. They were built, unused, put in a warehouse. They sat there for years. Then they were "donated" to science — and NASA engineers had to work with technical documents largely redacted in order to use this hardware.

Here is the condition of science under capitalism, in a single image: The best optics, first for spying; what is unused, for science.

And let us not forget this: the money spent on that cancelled spy-satellite programme was probably many times Roman's total cost. That is: the same state that says "there is no money for science" wasted the same technology on surveillance.

Weapons, sponsors, patents: three channels

This is not a singular example; it is a structure. Under capitalism the first fruits of scientific discovery flow through three channels:

1. The military channel. The internet was ARPANET. GPS was first missile guidance. Infrared detectors were first night vision. The jet engine, the rocket, nuclear energy, the satellite, artificial intelligence — the first financing and the first application of all of them is military. Science is done with public money; the war industry gathers the first fruit.

2. The monopoly channel. Technology developed with public money, in public laboratories, by the labour of public-employee scientists is, once it has matured, transferred to private companies. The company takes no risk, bears no cost, and merely collects the profit. Today the rocket carrying Roman belongs to a private company. Launch infrastructure is being privatised more and more. NASA has become the customer of the sector it itself built. The public invests, private capital collects the rent — this is the general law of monopoly capitalism's relation to science.

3. The property channel. Knowledge is patented, enclosed, locked. The paper from research done with public funds is published in journals that even its author can access only by paying. A drug is found with public funds, monopolised by patent, and sold at a price that cannot be paid.

Let us add a fourth, because it is happening in these very years: the enclosure of the sky itself. Constellations of tens of thousands of satellites launched by private companies both spoil astronomers' observations and pollute the radio-astronomy bands. The night sky, common to all humanity for thousands of years, is turning into a company's commercial infrastructure. This is the continuation in space of the enclosure of the common pastures. Capitalism has found the last field it can enclose: the space above our heads.

The name of the hypocrisy

Now let us complete the picture. In a world said to have "no resources":

A telescope costing 4 billion dollars over twenty years is counted a "luxury," and four attempts are made to cancel it;
The same year's military budget, exceeding 1 trillion dollars, is counted a "necessity," and no one debates it;
Scientists leave their jobs because of budget uncertainty;
But billionaires carrying tourists into space are applauded as "pioneers of the future."

The problem is not that money is spent on space, dear comrades. The problem is by whose decision, in whose interest, and under whose oversight it is spent.

Part Six: So How Should It Be?

Criticism that does not show an alternative is mere complaint. So let us speak concretely.

And here is the good news: the seeds of the alternative already exist inside the present system. One has to know how to see them.

A commons that already exists: Roman's data

We said Roman would send 1.4 terabytes of data a day. Now the really fine part: Roman's survey data have no exclusive-use period. That is, the team that produces the data does not keep it to itself for a while and write its own paper first. From the moment it comes down, the data is open to everyone.

Think about what that means. An undergraduate in Nairobi, a high-school teacher in Diyarbakır, an amateur astronomer in Karaburun — all of them can reach the data of the world's most expensive scientific instrument at the same time and on the same terms as the professor at Princeton.

This is a communist relation of production living in the belly of capitalism. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. No profit, no patent, no enclosure. And it works. It works, moreover, at its most efficient — because science speeds up when it is shared, not when it is shut away. The public arm of the Human Genome Project overtook its private rival because it published the data openly every day. The same principle.

So the answer to "can knowledge be a commons?" is not utopian; it is empirical. It can be, because it is.

Then why is it not like this everywhere? Because the commonality of knowledge contradicts profit. Capitalism permits science but always leaves it free only as far as its own property logic allows.

Two worlds

	Today: Capital's science	What ought to be: The science of the commons
Who decides?	Governments playing with budget lines, lobbies, sponsor companies	Producers determining social needs through democratic planning
Where does the first output go?	The arms industry, surveillance technology, the monopoly patent	Direct social need: health, climate, education, production
To whom does knowledge belong?	Patented, paywalled, data locked	Public and open from end to end
The scientist's condition	Project-based, precarious, unemployed at the budget cut	Secure, able to do long-haul research, an organised worker
What is the measure?	Return on investment, competitive advantage	Humanity's conscious relation to nature, common welfare
Horizon	The quarterly balance sheet	Accumulation across generations
What is space?	A new market, a new mining field, a new battlefield	Humanity's common home and common laboratory
Who takes the risk, who collects the profit?	The public takes the risk, capital collects the profit	Society shares both the risk and the gain

Where do space studies touch daily life?

Let us make it concrete. A space and astronomy programme run by public planning enters our lives from here:

Climate and disaster. Earth-observation satellites already watch the forest, the glacier, sea level, agricultural yield. In a public programme these data flow free and at once into drought early warning, flood maps, post-earthquake damage assessment, agricultural planning. For a country like Turkey, on both the earthquake and the drought belt, this is a matter of life and death.

Energy and materials. Lightweight materials, efficient solar cells, insulation technologies developed for space can be transferred to housing, public transport, the hospital. Today they go first to luxury products.

Health. Astronomy's techniques for catching weak signals and processing images are the engine of medical imaging. In a public order this is a technology that goes not to the expensive private-hospital machine but to every public hospital.

Communications. Satellite communications is not a company's subscription revenue; it can be a public service taking the internet to the village in the mountains.

And most important: education and consciousness. A child's seeing Saturn's rings through a telescope at an observatory in their own city — that changes that child's view of the world for life. There is no "cost-benefit analysis" of this. But it is moments of this kind that decide the fate of societies.

Space work is, in fact, Earth work. Every instrument that looks up also changes what is below.

Part Seven: The Future Human of the Commons

Dear Young Comrades,

Do you see something? It was Nancy Grace Roman who defended Hubble — NASA's first chief of astronomy, the institution's first woman executive, the person whose name the telescope bears today. It was Vera Rubin who found dark matter, and the great observatory in Chile bears her name today. Behind the rocket that launched Roman there are thousands of engineers, technicians, clean-room workers, data scientists. There is an optical craftsperson who figured the mirror, a worker who soldered the cable.

No telescope is the work of a genius. Every telescope is the crystallised form of collective labour. Like a bridge, like a vaccine, like a language. Newton's "I stood on the shoulders of giants" is not humility; it is a technical observation. Knowledge is a commons across generations. No one produces it alone; no one can own it alone.

And that is precisely why the private property of knowledge is a contradiction. The private appropriation of something produced collectively — the very thing Marx described as capitalism's fundamental contradiction. As in the factory, so in the laboratory.

The human being of the future is the human being who has resolved this contradiction. I imagine them like this:

The working day has shortened, because the gain of automation has been turned not into capital's profit but into everyone's time. And the human being who has time is a curious human being. Curiosity has ceased to be the privilege of those with spare time.

Science is not the work of a separate caste. Millions of people take part in processing data, observing, debating. If even today amateurs find comets and volunteers sift exoplanet data, think what would happen in a world where everyone is educated and has time.

The question "What good is this to us?" is no longer asked. Because the distance between "us" and "humanity" has closed. What a telescope finds is no one's profit; it is everyone's knowledge. And benefit is the natural result of that knowledge.

The night sky is still everyone's. No one can hang an advertisement there.

Concrete Tasks

We have talked big; now let us come down to the concrete. Let this piece be not a text of admiration but a call.

Learn, and take it seriously. Read cosmology not as "interesting information" but as an inseparable part of the materialist world-view. Do not set Engels's Dialectics of Nature aside; but read it together with today's physics.
Stand with scientists' labour struggle. The precarious research assistant, the 50/d assistant, the doctoral worker bounced from project to project — they too are our class. "Freedom of science" and "job security" are two names of the same struggle.
Defend open science. Every piece of knowledge produced with public funds must be public: open access, open data, open source. This is not an abstract demand — it is a model already at work in Roman's data.
Pose the budget debate correctly. Do not fall into the "this or that" dilemma. The answer is always: "Not to war — to both."
Turn popular science into organised work. Hold a night of sky-watching in your union, your association, your neighbourhood. One telescope changes a neighbourhood. Show children Saturn.
Oppose the enclosure of the sky. The pollution of the night sky and of radio astronomy by satellite constellations is not a "technology problem"; it is a property problem. Take it up as part of the debate on the commons.

Dear Young Comrades,

Right now, as you read these lines, a mirror is travelling silently about one and a half million kilometres from Earth. In three months it will reach its place, open its eyes, and begin to look, at the same sharpness, at a piece of sky a hundred times wider than Hubble saw. It will count a billion galaxies. Watching exploding stars, it will ask why the universe is accelerating. It will find planets with no star, drifting in the dark.

And that mirror itself was once part of a spy satellite, built to watch people and then forgotten in a warehouse.

I can find no better metaphor: This order first puts humanity's finest capacities to work on its own dark business, and leaves science the remainder. Our job is to reverse that order.

Curiosity is the human being's most revolutionary trait. Because curiosity is the refusal to accept what is given. It is to ask "but why?" of every authority that says "this is how it is." The child looking at the sky and the worker asking where their wage has gone ask the same question: Why is this order like this — can it not be otherwise?

The Church burned Bruno; the universe still came out infinite. The Inquisition silenced Galileo; the Earth still turned. They tried to cut the budget; the telescope still flew.

Knowledge cannot be stopped. It is slowed, enclosed, patented, yoked to surveillance — but it cannot be stopped. Because what produces it is not the genius of isolated individuals, but humanity's common, inexhaustible curiosity.

One day the last obstacle in front of that curiosity will fall as well. That day, the mirrors will be poured into science first. Data will be no one's property. And a child, looking from the observatory in their own neighbourhood at the universe's most distant light, will ask, without anyone's permission:

"And what is beyond that?"

The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, comrades. So is the universe. So is our curiosity.

Do not stop looking up.