Not long ago, I watched the KCTS television program, “NOVA,” about the origin of the universe and the birth and death of stars.

I’ve watched many NOVA programs in the past and I feel like I’ve learned a lot, about nature, science, society, psychology and so many other subjects, but this particular episode was epic, teaching me something I had never even imagined.

I guess if each of us thought about it, we would agree that all of the light in the universe comes from stars. Without stars, there would be no light and therefore no life. All life on our Earth was created and is enabled by the light emitted from our star, the sun. And the same is true of all of the other stars out there in the universe, giving light and…life?…to other worlds beyond our own home in the Milky Way Galaxy.

But what I learned on NOVA was that stars are no longer being created at the same rate that they were right after the Big Bang, and at some point, no new stars will be created.

Stars will continue to burn out, to die, as they have since nearly the beginning. Therefore, at some point in the future — maybe in hundreds of billions or even trillions of years — the last star, probably a red dwarf, will wink out and there will no longer be any light or life in the universe.

Complete darkness. No life. Anywhere. There will still be planets, though none will support life, and there will be asteroids and chunks of rock floating around aimlessly, silently, invisibly through space, but with no way to see them and nothing alive to see them. Essentially, this will portend the end of time.

Unlike many of my past opinion columns urging us to acknowledge and address our role and our complicity in climate change, I’m writing now to encourage you to view with wonder and amazement the sublime nature of our incredible universe.

Until the Hubble telescope was sent aloft and activated — and now the new and profoundly powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — we really didn’t have the ability to view the many billions of galaxies that we are now privy to. Or the unimagined, unbelievable, truly profound, and exquisite beauty that exists all around us, light years away.

To give you an idea of the vastness of this universe we call home, the first image from the new telescope showed us a portion of the night sky that represents the size of a grain of sand held out at arms’ length — an impossibly tiny spec of the cosmos. And yet, in that tiny area were revealed thousands of galaxies containing between 500 billion to over a trillion stars, each!

I know that it’s difficult to wrap our minds around numbers this unfathomably large, and I don’t think that, even if we really try, we could even come close to understanding. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to imagine what’s out there or enjoy the images coming from the JWST as pure, natural unbounded beauty and unparalleled stellar magnificence.

If you haven’t seen these images, please go online and find a site — google “JWST images” — and scroll through the many absolutely stunning photographs that this telescope has sent back to Earth.

One consequence of viewing these images, and trying to understand exactly what they represent, may be that they offer us a profound feeling of insignificance: we are so small, our lives so distant and meaningless. But we can also take away a feeling of awe and even a sense of belonging.

We are, in fact, a part of the cosmos, made from the stuff of stars and the elements of the universe. We do belong as much as any supernova or red dwarf. And please don’t forget that all of the stars, galaxies, nebulas and myriad other stellar phenomena are out there, both above, below, and all around us.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, made up of 400 billion stars, is relatively small and drifts at the outer edge, but is no less a part of the whole. It may be small, but it’s home, it’s where we belong.

So despite the vastness of space and the trillions upon trillions of stars that exist at distances impossible to comprehend, despite the impossibility of even trying to travel to even our closest neighbor star, Alfa Centuri, and despite the seemingly insignificant role we play in the giant scheme of things, we really do matter.

Life on Earth does matter. So please continue to recycle.

— Scott Durkee is a freelance factotum, artist and winemaker. He lives on Maury Island.