I did a little math of my own, and found that while the ratio of these distances is on the order of 10^15, the ratio of the sizes of these objects is on the order of 10^19.
In other words, Webb is only one TEN THOUSANDTH the apparent size of a galaxy that's a _billion light years away_
It’s interesting that you are expressing an opinion about something that you could calculate in the same amount of time it took to write down that opinion.
It's been over a decade since my last astrophysics class, but I appreciate you being charitable about my assumed knowledge! I think if anything this thread shows:
1) how absolutely mindblowingly big space is
2) how bad humans really are at intuiting things at the scale of space
That's a start, for sure, but to do a super accurate calculation (the kind I feel unqualified to carry out), you need to take into account apparent size, redshift, whether or not there's gravitational lensing, interstellar dust in the way, etc etc.
But I want to reiterate that what's meaningful about this discussion is in part how unintuitive things at the far edges of our scales of perception really are. It's a muscle that, left untrained, will lead you to make incorrect characterizations like the one I made.
