Our delightful pop astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson used uncommon superlatives in his post on social media this week, “So,” he wrote, “possibly one of the biggest events to happen during our lifetime is about to happen on Dec. 18 of this year, yet I’m surprised to see that no one in the press seems to be talking about it.”

Mostly but not totally true, because CNN prepared a well-done 90-minute special about it, “The Search for Planet B,” that aired late night last weekend. I’m confident we can expect more media coverage as the launch date approaches (so far, it’s set back only a few days from the Dec. 18 launch).

But other than the requirement for launch perfection on that day from a pad in French Guinea and the weeks it will take for it to reach a million miles into space, the James Webb Space Telescope, named for our former U.S. Senator from Northern Virginia, will be poised to provide the most dramatic and awe-inspiring look, by far, into deep space than Earthlings have ever has access to.

The JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is three times larger and 100 times more powerful than the groundbreaking Hubbell telescope with its stunning images of our universe we’ve been able to observe. And although many scientists involved in the project are focused on the fact that the JWST will enable us to look back to the earliest periods of the universe’s existence, what most of us are anticipating the most is its promise to definitively establish if, and generally where, intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.

The year of 2022 promises to go down in human history as the year when it will be conclusively established that, yes, we are not alone!

The other burdens of such a discovery, however, may take eons to address, such as how to visit or even just make contact with such intelligent life. Still, getting the news definitively is, I think, going to have a radical impact on us all.

Still, as Jill Tarter, one of the key scientists working on the JWST, said in the CNN special, “Time is a very funny thing,” and addressing the “disconnect” between human time, geological time and cosmic time as the JWST takes us far out to the fringes of our known reality will present a major challenge.

As I’ve been wont to stress repeatedly, there is this bizarre phenomenon called “entanglement theory” that attempts to explain the reality that there are forms of connectedness in the universe that appear to defy all the rules and cause something akin to “action at a distance” to occur. Now, with the eventual effective deployment of the JWST, maybe we’ll get to see about this. Fasten your seatbelts, folks!

It was only with the results from the Kepler telescope in recent years that science has been able to conclusively establish the existence of “exo-planets,” that is, planets rotating around stars outside of our known solar system.

Now, with the JWST, scientists will be able to examine these exo-planets in much greater detail to see if there are abnormalities that can be explained only by the operations of intelligent life.

Like, someone observing Earth might be saying, “Damn, those folks better be getting their act together or they’re going to fry!” The key signature of intelligent life to others looking at our planet will be the evidence of the abnormal changes in the temperature of spheres.

There are 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are 100 billion galaxies, so the chances are overwhelming that there is an abundance of intelligent life out there. There is nothing uncommon throughout the universe about the building blocks of life on this planet.

When asked if she believes life is out there, Dr. Tarter said, “What I believe matters not,” saying we must replace “to believe” with “to explore.” It is scientific observations by which myths are overthrown, just as the key to Galileo’s discoveries through a telescope that the moons of Jupiter revolve around that planet, and not Earth, led to his discoveries that overthrew the idea that Earth is a center of the universe.