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Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

NASA is making a lot of "record-breaking" news in the past few weeks and it is increasingly difficult for me to think how these news affect me and my relationship to the Galaxy. I understood many of these discoveries translated to "current science could be wrong". But if counting stars isn't my hobby, what am I supposed to take a way from this and digest the meaning of 11.1B light years distance?

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It pushed the earliest formation of such clusters ~700 million years further towards the Big Bang and adds to the mystery how such clusters could exist so early in the universe. We currently have no good answer for this question. From the abstract of the paper:

  The large integrated stellar mass at such high redshift
  challenges our understanding of massive cluster formation.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07404

It's basically an experiment that has been running for billions of years. As you go forward in time (closer to earth) you also find more initial setup conditions - almost like scrubbing back and forth in a photographic timeline.

It's an amazing database of real-world physics that we can test our predictions against. These astronomical theories have a habit of trickling down. Consider the impact of having a massive fusion generator in our solar system: fusion energy is something that could have a rather substantial impact on every human being.

That's just how science is. It doesn't need to be driven by a business or human "need".

The drive to satisfy our curiosity is a human need and what drives scientists.

To me that is more of a desire than a need, but I digress.

The opening line tells it all for you:

"A new record for the most distant galaxy cluster has been set".

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_distant_astro...

At this scale of time and given the size, age and distance of galaxies, it doesn't really mean anything that will ever change our lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_cluster

We can't go there. Nothing from there will visit us.

If the big bang is even an actual thing, it still happened everywhere, whenever.

There are lots of galaxies, and they are old and far away.

you are very wrong. understanding the universe means understanding our very home, us, where we come from, where we are going to, how will this all end (ie in big contraction/endless expansion).

if this topic ain't for you, no problem, but it's extremely interesting to many others.

A classic: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Allow me to be the devil's advocate here:

Why should we think its about any of us? Why not for human kind? Its one small observation for a man but one huge observation for mankind. :)

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