God knows, as a society we are alienated enough from science. This remarkable image is the deepest we have ever seen into the universe. The total exposure time was 10 days. In the photo, we see fainter and more distant objects than ever before. In this pin-prick patch of sky we see several thousand galaxies, galaxies as numerous as snowflakes in a storm.
Every galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, each, perhaps, with planets.
This image flashed briefly on the screens of our televisions and in the pages of our magazines and newspapers. Then we put the remarkable image out of our minds. We don't give a thought to what it might mean to live in a universe of 100 billion galaxies. We prefer a cozier, human-centered universe, constructed on the human scale. We are vaguely interested in these developments, but we haven't a clue how they touch our lives at the level of our emotional, esthetic and erotic lives.