Every time I see a photo of Pillars of Creation it makes me wonder if we would even be able to distinguish an unfathomably optimized engineered system from what we consider raw physics with our current understanding.
Looking up at the night sky, I've always found it to be an awesome experience, in a very literal sense. Looking at these comparisons of the Hubble and Webb images (especially esawebb.org's slider) made me audibly chuckle because I've long been impressed by the Hubble images for all the stars it revealed beyond those visible to ground-based telescopes, much less simple stargazers. With Webb, it just blows my mind how many more stars there are out there; the deeper IR, big mirror, and nice shady spot at L2 result in orders of magnitude difference, and to think of all the stars outside of our Hubble volume that are receding too fast for us to ever witness from here. We live in a truly amazing reality.
This follows from the fact that there is still a lot of “raw physics” we do not fully understand. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...