Every civilization that ever looked up built something to see further.
The eyes alone were never enough.
The Rigveda records the motions of the sun, moon and planets, and describes a year of 360 days divided into twelve parts.
Aryabhata proposes that the Earth rotates on its axis and calculates the length of the sidereal day to within minutes.
Bhāskarāchārya writes the Siddhānta Shiromani, reasoning about infinitesimals and planetary motion centuries before Newton.
Galileo turns a glass lens toward Jupiter and finds four moons no one had seen before.
Jai Singh II builds the Jantar Mantar, stone instruments so large they measure the sky by their own shadows.
Edwin Hubble shows that the faint smudges in the night sky are other galaxies, and that they are moving away from us.
A detector buried a mile underground hears two black holes collide.
While the instinct is old, the instruments keep upgrading.
Today, we can see more of the universe, in more ways, more often, than any generation before us.
And a new question has begun to form.