“Space. The final frontier.” So I grew up hearing as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock raced through the galaxy and plucky Will Robinson explored the cosmos with Robot despite the machinations of Dr. Zachary Smith. In Seattle a few years back I visited Paul Allen’s Science Fiction Museum and as I stood before the original Enterprise console and viewed Robot in person, it was almost a personal epiphany. This was my childhood all in one room.

Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, courtesy Gnu

NASA has just announced the release of more deep space images snapped by the new and improved Hubble Space Telescope. These images show objects, galaxies, back to a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang. Look any further back and you’re liable to find yourself staring God right in the eye! These incredibly ancient images are humbling to a scholar of ancient times. In the cosmic calendar Sumer isn’t even on the map. And now we can see back almost to the Big Bang itself. It is another kind of epiphany.

Here's lookin' at you, kids - Hubble's new view

Cosmology is inherently religious. Even Stephen Hawking leaves room for the unknown, “religious” entity in his popular writing. As the infinitesimal biological apex of evolution on our own planet, we are somewhat less than cosmic dust on the grand scale. When we reach out to that cold blackness of outer space metaphors fail us until we fall back on God language. I look forward to the day when the Big Bang is captured on film (or digitally). I am almost certain that when that happens science will become far stranger than fiction.