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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

This feels perhaps like a silly comment, but I have this intuition that the data collected by JWST could prove to be some of the most important ever collected.

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I keep telling people that, no matter what, we're going to learn something cool about the universe. I'm so excited to see these images. I mean, imagine humans 10,000 years ago, just surviving, maybe figuring out agriculture, and thinking about their place in the world. They looked up at the stars in wonder. Now, we've progressed to the point where we can polish gold down to the nanometer, and we're sending a giant hunk of origami circuits out to L2 to squint back to nearly the beginning of time as part of our eternal quest for answers.

Your comment is not silly.

I suppose I meant it felt silly in the sense that it would probably come across as seeming vague. And I may as well say a few more words. If I had anything specific in mind, it was the possibility that the JWST could find evidence of compounds in the atmospheres of distant planets that made it seem likely that there is life on those planets. Even if that doesn't happen, the fact that it feels like it's even on the table is amazing.

I'm also thinking back to when the Hubble came online and they started releasing the deep field images. And there was this moment where we all realized, "Wow, those things up in the sky that we all casually assumed were stars...many of them are actually galaxies. And all those black spaces in between are full of...more galaxies." Maybe astronomers already knew this; I don't know. But the average person didn't and it was hard to deny once we started seeing those images.

Not sure if it's justified, but I expect similar kinds of moments when the JWST starts collecting its first images.

People (including me!) really don't have a feel for just how far some of these instruments push things.

The Hubble Deep Field was a surprise to quite a few established astronomers. LIGO is measuring things way smaller than nucleons. The JWST can see so far back in time hat you can measure deltas from the beginning of the visible universe.

I know that I just don't have an appreciation for just how hard these things are to do.

In a comment above someone said it "might be high enough to image [...] alien megastructures if they exist"[0] and that was a clear sign I had absolutely no idea how powerful this thing was. I guess I was just expecting Deep Field but like... again? I don't know.

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/telescopes/a19346/jam...

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