Perceptual Abundance

How we found the universe.

January 15, 2026

The Shift

For most of history, we looked at the stars and guessed.

The universe was always there. But we couldn’t see it clearly, or measure it precisely. So we guessed. And then, within a single lifetime, everything changed.

What changed wasn’t the universe. It was our access to it.

This is our story.

I. Home

First, we saw our world from the outside.

In December 1968, Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon. As their spacecraft emerged from behind the far side, Bill Anders looked out the window and saw Earth rising above the barren lunar horizon.

He reached for his camera and captured a photograph that would change how humanity sees itself.

That photograph became famous not because it was beautiful, though it was, but because it showed us something we’d never seen before: our entire world, fragile and isolated, suspended in the darkness of space.

This was the first time we saw Earth as a whole.

II. Finding Other Worlds

Next, we found worlds beyond our own.

In 1995, two astronomers announced the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The news made headlines worldwide. Twenty-four years later, they won the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

Today, we’ve confirmed the existence of over 6,000 exoplanets^[1].

We don’t just count them. We study them. Astronomers measure the chemical composition of their atmospheres by analysing the starlight that passes through them. They track temperature variations across the planet’s surface. They infer clouds and atmospheric motion^[2]. These are worlds dozens of light-years away, and we’re beginning to understand them.

After 1995, finding another world stopped being an event and became background noise.

III. Hearing Spacetime

Then, we created a new sense we never had.

We can see electromagnetic radiation across a range of wavelengths. We can feel vibrations through the air and the ground. But evolution never gave us a sense for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself.

On September 14, 2015, two instruments on opposite sides of the United States detected the same signal within milliseconds^[3].

Two black holes, each dozens of times more massive than the Sun, had spiralled into each other 1.3 billion light-years away. In their final moments, they merged into a single, larger black hole. The collision sent ripples through spacetime itself, waves that travelled outward at the speed of light.

When those gravitational waves passed through Earth, they stretched and squeezed space itself. The effect was infinitesimal—LIGO’s four-kilometre arms changed length by less than one ten-thousandth of the width of a proton^[4].

LIGO detected it.

This was the first time humans directly detected gravitational waves. It confirmed a prediction Einstein made a century ago. And it opened an entirely new way of observing the universe.

LIGO now detects these events routinely. Black hole mergers. Neutron star collisions. The universe is full of violent events. Events that emit little or no electromagnetic radiation, events we could never have known about before.

Something evolution never equipped us to perceive.

IV. Photographing the Unseeable

We even made absence visible.

The event horizon emits no light. By definition, nothing escapes. For decades, black holes existed purely in the realm of theory. Einstein’s equations predicted them. We saw their gravitational effects on nearby stars. We inferred they had to be there. But we had never actually seen one.

In April 2019, we made the Earth itself into a telescope.

Eight radio observatories scattered across the globe synchronised their observations down to the nanosecond^[5]. Teams in Hawaii pointed their dishes at the same target as teams in Chile, Spain, and Antarctica. They captured radio waves from the same source at precisely the same moment, recording petabytes of data. It took months of computation to combine those observations into a single image.

The result was the first photograph of a black hole.

What you see is a ring of light—glowing gas heated to billions of degrees as it spirals toward the event horizon. The dark centre is the black hole’s shadow, the region where gravity is so strong that light itself cannot escape. That shadow is exactly the size and shape that Einstein’s equations predicted a century ago.

We didn’t photograph the black hole itself. We photographed spacetime, curved so dramatically that it becomes visible.

We now see gravity’s imprint.

V. Seeing the Beginning

We learned to look back in time.

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, was designed to see what no other telescope could. A mirror six and a half metres across, unfolded in space. Instruments cooled to within a few degrees of absolute zero.

In July 2022, it took its first deep field image^[6].

The patch of sky Webb observed is impossibly small. If you hold a grain of sand at arm’s length, that’s how much of the sky fits in this image. Webb pointed at this tiny, seemingly empty piece of darkness and stared for 12.5 hours.

In that speck of sky: thousands of galaxies.

Some of that light has been travelling toward us for over 13 billion years. It left its source when the universe was just 330 million years old—barely 2% of its current age. This isn’t reconstruction or simulation. It’s light from the cosmic dawn, the era when the first stars ignited, and the first galaxies began to form.

Webb observes in infrared wavelengths that our eyes cannot see, wavelengths that pass through cosmic dust that would blind an optical telescope. And in that infrared light, it can read chemical signatures—the specific wavelengths absorbed by molecules in the atmospheres of distant planets orbiting other stars. Carbon dioxide. Water vapour. Methane^[2].

The deep past became retrievable.

VI. Measuring at Scale

Finally, measurement became systematic.

Earthrise showed us our planet. Gaia showed us our galaxy.

Thirty years ago, we knew the precise distances to roughly a thousand nearby stars. We had painstakingly measured them, one by one, using methods that took years of careful observation. Today, we know the distances to nearly two billion stars^[7].

The Gaia spacecraft has spent years measuring the same stars over and over, refining each position, each distance, each motion. Billions of measurements, carefully reconciled into a map of our galaxy that anyone can access.

We didn’t just find the universe. We kept it.

VII. The Flood

And then perception became abundant.

Once perception became abundant, reality stopped being something we reasoned about, and became something we could retrieve on demand.

That single photograph from 1968—Earthrise—was the first frame.

Today, more than 200 satellites photograph Earth’s land surface every day at 3–5 metre resolution^[8]. The Landsat program has been doing this continuously since 1972^[9]. Over fifty years of observation. Every forest cleared. Every glacier retreated. Every coastline changed.

Specialised instruments track carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, mapping greenhouse gas concentrations source by source^[10][11][12].

The Gaia spacecraft has measured nearly two billion stars—their positions, distances, and velocities. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has mapped thirty million galaxies in three dimensions^[13]. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will record seventeen billion stars and twenty billion galaxies over ten years^[14].

Abundance did not arrive.

It was always here.

What arrived was the ability to retrieve it.

After that, guessing became optional.

Notes & References

[1] NASA Exoplanet Science Institute.
”NASA Exoplanet Archive.”
(Over 6,000 confirmed exoplanets.)

[2] European Space Agency (ESA) / NASA / CSA (2022).
”Webb Detects Carbon Dioxide in Exoplanet Atmosphere.”
(Detection of CO₂ in a gas-giant exoplanet atmosphere using Webb.)

[3] LIGO Scientific Collaboration (2016).
”Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger.” Physical Review Letters 116, 061102.
(First direct detection of gravitational waves, September 14, 2015.)

[4] LIGO Laboratory / Caltech.
”LIGO Facts.”
(Sensitivity: detecting changes smaller than a proton’s width.)

[5] Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (2019).
”First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results.” Astrophysical Journal Letters 875, L1.
(First image of a black hole’s shadow.)

[6] NASA / STScI (2022).
”Webb’s First Deep Field.”
(Deepest infrared image revealing galaxies over 13 billion years old.)

[7] European Space Agency (ESA).
”Gaia Mission Overview.”
(Positions, distances, and motions of nearly 2 billion stars.)

[8] Planet Labs PBC.
”Planet Constellation.”
(Daily Earth imaging at 3–5 metre resolution.)

[9] U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
”Landsat Satellite Missions.”
(50+ year continuous record of Earth’s land surface.)

[10] NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
”Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2).”
(Satellite measurement of atmospheric CO₂.)

[11] European Space Agency (ESA).
”Sentinel-5P / TROPOMI.”
(Daily global monitoring of atmospheric trace gases.)

[12] GHGSat Inc.
”Satellite Methane Monitoring.”
(Detection of methane emissions from individual facilities.)

[13] Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).
”DESI Science.”
(30 million galaxies mapped in 3D.)

[14] Ivezić, Ž. et al. (2019).
”LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design.” Astrophysical Journal.
(Rubin Observatory will catalogue 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars.)