As I sat at my desk late Tuesday night — election night — pondering Canada’s winters, I began thinking about my place in the universe.

It’s a minuscule position amongst and incomprehensible universe that goes beyond our scope of space, time, distance. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few years, and honestly I don’t know why.

I’m not really going through any midlife crisis nor am I having any crises of faith. I simply began looking up and wondering. If space is good for nothing else, it gives us a canvas to put our thoughts on.

Like many people I wondered if we are alone in the universe. Several theories posit that we may indeed be the only current form of life in the galaxy, for now anyway. It’s possible, scientists think, that there may have been other civilizations, but that they died out long before we reached the ability to gaze far into the heavens.

It’s part of the reason they suspect we have yet to find any life beyond our own blue marble.

Some of this goes far beyond any kind of rational thought I can bring to bear. I understand their point if not the route to this point, but for as big as the galaxy is — 100,000 light years across  — it’s hard for me to imagine there is no other forms of life nestled within these stars.

To give you an idea of that distance, I’ve seen one estimate say that traveling at 35,000 miles per hour — the current speed of the Voyager probe which has slipped well beyond the bounds of our solar system and the only intergalactic vesel we have — it would take 2 billion years to span the width of our galaxy.

So, yeah, I would like to believe there is more out there besides us.

Like Jodie Foster said in “Contact:” “Seems like an awful big waste of space.”

It’s part of why I’m so excited about the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s the newest high-powered telescope by NASA that will give us unprecedented views into our galaxy and our surrounding community. Ultimately it will be taking the place of the current workhorse Hubble which has given us so many shockingly amazing images over the years including The Pillars of Creation, a star-factory that defies belief.

They recently finished the telescope which is scheduled for an October 2018 launch and it will take in — everything. This includes peering into the afterglow of the Big Bang and the formation of star systems capable of harboring planets that could potentially support life.

It won’t be life as we know it, but it could be extended family nonetheless.

We will learn more about our universe in such massive strides that  it will make everything else seem minor in comparison and that takes nothing away from those discoveries that have pushed us this far.

This is a weighty issue because humanity is driven to understand that which we can not. We want to know where we came from and how we came to be and by getting those answers we must reach out to understand the space around us.

It’s an exciting time, a time we should grasp and celebrate. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to give us answers, and it will take our understanding to worlds we’ve never imagined — or so we should hope.

Because out there, in the vast black of our universe, could very well lay a second blue marble.