Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment
theverge.com
theverge.com
I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.
However, if starship is successful that situation will change and resupply becomes possible. So I suppose we'll see.
It is fully within the realm of possibility that a future OSAM mission will be capable of hitting far more distant points, since the Lunar stuff is just starting to heat up.
From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It has everything.
The only thing that comes close is if there were some green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
I mean he explicitly said it was not the only factor...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
That's not at all what GP is saying. Government investment into industries have different return on investment. This is why governments heavily invest into healthcare. But, if we're talking investing in a military vs. university researchers, I think you have to be fairly elitist to say that adding 100,000 academics is better for society than providing a good life for 1M soldiers. At its core, military spending is the greatest experiment of UBI ever done. Now, downvotes from the left and right.
I agree with what you see. You see 1M soldiers (freeloaders?) and their salaries, housing, and healthcare provided 'free' by taxpayers.
The problem is what you don't see, or as they say in French, ce qu’on ne voit pas!
Paying people to churn butter by hand non stop would probably be more of a contribution, or doing actual UBI.
What about police and firefighters? They don't "produce" anything but you need them.
Shortly after, the US begins covert assistance and operations in Vietnam (which ended up involving the USA, USSR, PRC etc etc.)This continued until 1975.
The US had a brief break from overt warfare until Grenada in the 80s, followed quickly by Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Since then it's been pretty much continuous warfare by US troops to this day.
Just because we don't see it on the news every night, US servicemen are fighting in Africa, in the Middle East, and obviously the Navy is present in almost all the oceans in significant levels.
Sure the USN enables free trade. And I have no issue with a well-funded navy, with clear goals and objectives. But the rest of the military is bloated beyond reasonable belief, committed to tasks that are undemocratic, and as others have pointed out, when you have a large, expensive military, the temptation to use it irresponsibly is high.
If my comments are coming across as endorsing the entirety of the US military and that it is infallible, that was not the intent. I mostly just called people elitist for claiming that academic pursuits are more worthy of funding than the equivalent defense expenditure on the sole basis of academic=good and soldier=bad. Based on my other comments, you can see that I even believe that the technological progress spurred by defense needs is greater than throwing the same amount of money at research.
Exhibit A - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
> the US was doing something it didn't need to do in order to defend itself
Note the negation.
You mean the other group of freeloaders on some other part of the marble flying through the black night?
>wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
We have over the last 10 years. Now we need a grid scale battery race as we are realizing that all the green energy in the world is useless if we can't store it.
Most of us realized this 20-30 years ago.
An infinite amount, in the long run.
True, but virtually nobody would be motivated by just directly investing on the tech instead of an exciting fighter jet.
The regular person will not care about technical stuff like that, but they will care about a shiny new fighting yet.
We could get by with a tiny fraction of our 700B+ / yr defense budget. One wonders how much better a society we would be if we spent that on things that would actually benefit the average citizen, or did something unthinkable like actually paying down debt.
The strength of the dollar is all about beating whoever disagrees with its role as the oil exchange currency to submission, because that is its current base for its demand. Libya was not invaded because the West suddenly remembered that Kandafi is a dictator. Iraq was not invaded because suddenly WMD were found (did they ever find another tale to cover their reasons?), Syria was not made into anarchy because the West wanted the Syrian people to be free. They all had one common point near the time of invasion. So yes the military does play a big role.
I mean, Russia invades and China taunts its neighbors pretty regularly, so clearly their military is focused on more than defense from the US (as if we have any interest in an offensive war against them in the first place). The US military keeps those countries in check, so of course they focus on how they can “defend” against our military. The extent to which Russia and China are scheming against the US military is the extent to which they aren’t invading their neighbors, which is precisely the value the US military provides, and indeed that Russia is invading Ukraine is a failure of the US government to respond firmly to previous invasions (no, not direct military conflict with Russia).
The idea that the US or the world can enjoy meaningful peace while withdrawing from the global theater is dangerously naive. There’s no world in which we pull back without oppressive dictatorships rushing to fill the void.
I don't think there is any role for the US military beyond defending US soil. I'm tired of propping up our bloated military industrial complex on the premise that we are solely responsible for world peace.
Expect some unforeseen problems at the most unfortunate economic moments.
A shared responsibility for world peace probably looks more like "more involvement from our NATO partners" (which we're actually beginning to see now that Europe is waking up to the fact that their peace is a property of NATO protection rather than some foregone conclusion). It decidedly doesn't look like the US dramatically shrinking defense spending (the US only spends 3% of its GDP on defense and that's on track to fall to 2.7% by the end of the decade), but more likely having our partners increase their own contributions and involvement.
I do not believe we should be going deeper into debt for other nation's national security.
I prefer to think of military spending during peacetime as "peace spending" not "war spending".
Spending on actual wars, once they start, is another matter. Some wars are just (like the support of Ukraine, at present, I would say, or the liberation of Kuwait), some are unjust, many are some shade of gray.
But generally, it is preferable when democratic countries have enough military might during peacetime to make would-be conquerors put aside their dreams of being the new Peter the Great, Saladin or Qin Shi Huang.
During WW1 and especially WW2, the US military was employed to nearly maximum capacity, in other words, 1945 was the last time the military was in a state of all-out war.
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the military was partially committed to the wars, maybe around 25% of 1945's commitment. I would label these limited wars.
The invasion phases of the two Iraqi wars as well as the invasion phase in Afghanistan saw similar levels of mobilization, but these were over so quickly they would be more like skirmishes.
And for the rest, I would label them as little more than policing of occupied territories.
(All of the above from the US perspective, from the perspective of the adversary, several of the above were total wars.)
If you look at the death toll, WW2 cost 0.4% of the US population at the time. The Vietnam and Korean wars cost less than 0.1% of the population each, and the rest hardly register.
Compare that to the 5%-20% death toll of many European countries during WW2, and similar numbers for numerous other wars through history, and you get a perspective of how peaceful the US has been since the Civil War.
Looks like useful output to me.
I'm an amateur astronomer, and even I doubt that these telescopes will provide any output that will be of use to humans in the next hundred or thousand years.
What an odd question. Almost anything is more useful and unused military equipment. At the very least the JWST is going to allow many astronomers to publish papers. It may even detect markers of life on other worlds. And there is nothing else that gives us a view into the early universe like the James Webb.
My guess at why, would be that occupants of the industry have an interest in maintaining the status quo, while players adjacent to the industry have an interest in novel, disruptive technologies in adjacent industries.
For example, over a decade ago, the US paid hundreds of billions directly to telcos to fund the buildout of a nationwide fiber network.
Perhaps if that money had gone to a different group, then a nationwide fiber network would exist.
Most companies (regardless of industry) seek profit. Whether that's Microsoft or AT&T, or anyone else, they seek profit, and will do just about anything to get it.
The military, however, is not at all motivated by profit, but rather by winning wars. That has a very different profile than "profit", and being an existential sort of issue, prompts some very different outcomes.
The internet is one outcome, as I mentioned before, but also things like depleted uranium, which are a byproduct of enriching uranium.[0] Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much of a civilian use for the material, but there sure is for war!
Anytime you can get different motivations, you get a more diverse set of outcomes. Teflon and Tang are probably the best known ones from NASA efforts. NASA is of course interested in rockets and scientific research, which have some overlap with commercial and some overlap with the military.
[0] - https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-u...
However there are things that just evolve on their own once the time is right and all the necessary ingredients (computers, networks and already existing backbone service to use) are around. Just like the computer you have parallel evolution with multiple different seeds. So I think even without NPL or CERN we would have something like the internet today, but the underlying protocols and formats might look completely different.
And don't forget about Bulletin Boards (BBS) that happened slightly later somewhat independent of all those academic efforts (and not forming packet-switched networks at all initially, but with high-latency packet forwarding being added later on for email and sending binaries between different sites). This could also have served as a seed to whatever we would be using today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/neil-degrasse-ty...
And
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44157732-accessory-to-wa...
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis Lang
Technology doesn't invent itself, there needs to be a problem you're actively trying to solve. There's no guarantee these things would have been discovered if money had just been spent on research for the sake of research.
With $1.7 trillion dollars you could, for example, give every household in the country a small rooftop solar array (@ ~$10k/ea).
We as Americans pay based on US salaries, US cost of living, etc.
This is why many choose to use Military Purchasing Power Parity (MPPP) [1] instead.
MPPP can explain why the USSR had at one point a truly gigantic force regardless of the spend.
This explains part of the story around how huge China's military force is becoming [2]
Another element to consider is how much of the entire US government (federal, state, local, and tribal) and US industry could be operationally controlled by the US Commander-in-Chief during wartime. China for example could be expected to have unity of command across the board. We wouldn't, despite things like the Defense production Act [3]
Yet one other factor is the amount of unidentified military units, such as China's Fishing Fleet [4] (Chinese Maritime Militia) that serve as a somewhat disguised extension to their Navy. For force parity comparisons, you'd have to total up their Navy, their coast guard, and their CMM fleet.
[1] https://voxeu.org/article/why-military-purchasing-power-pari...
[2] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-colossal-scale-of-...
[3] https://www.fema.gov/disaster/defense-production-act
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-covert-naval-fleet...
Lots? JWST is a schoolbus-sized pile of high-precision high-tech parts, never mind the construction of new facilities to test, transport it. LIGO and friends require substantial construction, colliders are huge construction projects before they're scientific instruments, ...
If there's a productive project that costs billions, it's going to employ a lot of people.
NASA is essentially part of the broader US defense organization and operates in extremely close collaboration with defense agencies using largely the same methods, contractors, and funding. Major NASA projects are largely indistinguishable from major weapons projects, and most of the time the two are closely interrelated in that both use technology developed by the other. Sometimes this is more informal (since the same contractors perform both) but sometimes it is quite formal, e.g. multiple defense satellite systems have been developed in parallel with scientific systems so that the design effort can be shared.
The DoD and NASA work together so much on missiles and avionics it isn't funny.
https://www.nrel.gov/workingwithus/defense-partnerships.html
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/23...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-us-space-force-estab...
etc, etc, etc. NASA's wind tunnel was used to help design DoD missiles. The two have always worked hand in hand.
Like all this money the government spends on military isn't just suddenly vanishing into thin air a lot of it gets put back into creating jobs, and the communities. Now there may be a lot more that gets diverted through seventeen layers of subcontractors, and more useless bureaucracy than you can shake a stick at but it isn't just being used for a useless purpose.
WW1 we went home, and 20 years later things heated up. WW2 we stayed and it's been fairly peaceful since.
Every defence dollar (or any other government spending) comes from taxes that could have been spent or invested and which would have also created jobs.
There’s no evidence that government spending causes a net gain in jobs.
Every time someone tells you that a new government spending program is creating jobs, they’re only telling you half the story.
A lot of that crew would call themselves Marxists, no doubt. Maybe not "commies" if you mean they're not shipping people off to gulags, ok.
> Nationalism isn’t the same as Nazism.
I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
Lenin was influenced by Marx. He considered himself a Marxist for certain. What he practiced was Totalitarianism.
The Nazi party's formal name was the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". You could argue they were influenced by Socialism, but you are being disingenuous if you make the leap to Socialism means exterminating the Jews.
Now, there are people that say that! They are wingnuts.
> I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
I doubt that very much.
We weren't the world's police pre-1941 and had to be pulled into WWII kicking and screaming, not by some moral obligation.
https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us....
USA doing embargo now, though on an energy rich country. Germany still eager to take that energy, though.
However, given that Russia is using chips from laundry machines and microwaves (the type of information that makes me seriously question their hypermissile claims), I do think that we are getting great results if you ignore bang for buck.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/29/how-this-us-made-176000-anti...
Once when I lived in Denver, I was commuting into downtown when a string of big fat jerks with HOMELAND SECURITY on their vests just walk in the middle of 15th and forcing traffic to just stop because they needed another snack. Not like "big guys" but just fat, rude, Larry the Cable Guy looking assholes with big guns slung around their shoulders.
This is coming from a pro-cop, pro-gun kinda guy... fuck this breed of people entirely and their way of life.
</rant>
If only that were true...
Assuming your average of 10,649 is correct, it's the entire taxable output for a year from 0.652% of the average tax of the tax paying population.
939,055/144,000,000 = 0.00652122
You dropped the ball on the SSC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
Knowledge?
How would you value the early experiments that eventually led to, say, germ theory on a monetary basis?
What did spending billions getting to the moon get us, bragging rights? What tangible benefit have we gotten from the space station and other space missions?
Relativity gives us GPS, for example.
> Well-known products that NASA claims as spinoffs include memory foam (originally named temper foam), freeze-dried food, firefighting equipment, emergency "space blankets", DustBusters, cochlear implants, LZR Racer swimsuits, and CMOS image sensors.
Plenty more in this well written list:
Blue-sky science/hard science is not a financial instrument that you can reasonably expect to generate a 10x ROI on a predictable timeline, that's why it's blue-sky research, but it's nonetheless extremely important.
Due to the lack of an immediately apparent profit incentive, it's one of those things that more or less has to be socialized or it doesn't happen. If there was an expectation of this leading to a better kleenex within 5 years then for-profit enterprises would already be doing it. But there isn't, yet there are still scientifically important questions to be answered by performing the research.
"Most Americans think NASA’s $10 billion space telescope is a good investment" in case you missed it.
So to answer your question: the expected return is fundamental/hard science being performed that will lead to potential (but unknown) improvements to our understanding of astronomy, physics, and generally speaking our understanding of the fundamental fabric of our universe.
It's also unclear why you replied to me if your comment was directed at the title of the article and not to anything I said in particular.
Sheesh, typical Hacker News, like you really really needed someone to personally explain the concept of blue-sky/hard-science? Good afternoon to you too, mister roboto.
The point is that I disagree that it is a good investment. The investment is gambling with unfavorable odds - we're hoping we get something out of it. Even if we learn something new from astronomy..so what? There are many problems on earth that could use $10B or more of NASAs space budget that have direct impact on lives.
It's a slippery slope though. sometimes governments pick winners on non-scientific grounds.
I wonder if maybe tax breaks might be a better way of funding, because folks who have ownership could be better.
You mean like roads, bridges, and other infrastructure?
I like to view nice pictures of space as well as anyone else, but I can't agree that it is money well spent. If it was entirely privately funded it wouldn't be a problem, but money from taxes should go for the things that benefit society the most.
Think about all of humankind — our ancestors in the past, us in the present, and our descendants in the future. Think about how much value we have inherited from our ancestors: Fire, wheel, GPS, electricity, farming, materials like steel, the list really goes on and on.
Now, of course, there's no rule that says we _have_ to give to our descendants anything at all, or anything comparable to what we have received from our ancestors, but maybe we should think a bit selflessly when deciding to invest in science.
It’s like your dad leaving you a really nice suit and one billion in debt in your name with no option for bankruptcy.
One problem with answering this question is that we don't know what avenues of research will produce important outcomes. Historically, we have been very bad at it. The mathematicians working on group theory in the late 19th century had no idea how important it would be to 20th-century scientists and engineers.
Spaceflight, in particular, is an important part of the specific problem of solving climate change. Imagine trying to understand climate change without the use of satellites!
But I'm also curious about what comes next. What will only get a chance to live thanks to the things that have died? What will humans be able to do in the aftermath? It sounds morbid, but if you just let yourself play with these thoughts they can lead somewhere different and interesting.
The future is not full of only despair[] .
I don't know about that. Forests are coming back in Europe and North America. As people get richer, they value those things more. Population will peak by the end of the century and decline for a while after that. At that point people and animals will have a lot more breathing room.
We can put a price on nature now and start paying for conservation. Places like Costa Rica also offer really useful paths forward. A lot is possible if people who care don't give in to despair.
Even without a well coordinated global effort emissions growth is slowing, and declining in many places. In the US emissions have been declining for 15 years, and that's almost entirely driven by market forces and technology. Even a modest coordinated effort will make a huge difference over the coming decades.
It's not selfless. Most people have children and or grandchildren. It's extraordinarily selfish to want to see such personal, long-term investments flourish; investing into the macro future well-being is a great way to see to that. Cultures obviously don't always act rationally toward the distant future, some do though and we know from history (eg Norway's sovereign fund, to name one prominent recent example) that it can pay off spectacularly.
... books? Scientific journals?
Have you visited a library lately? Particularly one of the thousands of technical libraries on university campuses? They're still around. In fact it is an enduring frustration for me that I can sometimes only find quality technical information in books, particularly when it is esoteric.
Retaining knowledge was a surmountable problem for past generations of scientists and innovators who had far fewer archival tools than we do today. I think we will manage.
The rules of genetic reproduction disagree. You have to give your descendants the information how to grow into a human, or they aren't descendants by definition.
Since we've been steadily reducing genetic information in favor of learned information, by extension you have to teach your children how to be functional human beings, in absence of instinct, or they grow up mentally disabled (in the wider context of society).
Furthermore, inheritance laws literally say you have to give some of your wealth to your descendants. It's 50% in my country. Sure you can spend it all before you die but that's sidestepping the existence of the rules, which very much exist.
The non-experts elected by non-experts know better than the non-experts.
That's true as far as it goes. However if we had the ability to individually vote on allocations, presumably most people would delegate the details to an expert of their choosing, while taking a stance on high-level classes of expenditures, for example "I will vote for the <insert expert> budget because it reduces military spending and increases healthcare spending", or whatever your policy preference is. Basically Liquid Democracy[1] of some sort (whether the partial delegation is built into the system or implemented outside the allocation voting system).
I do agree with your general point that direct democracy can be problematic, particularly when a binary choice is presented rather than a continuum of options. E.g. see the CA ballot measure system which often results in "choose A&C or B&D"-type choices which exclude certain preferences from being expressed. I think a more granular direct democracy might enable better decision frameworks though, specifically by enabling more options for delegation.
More seriously, I don't think our current decision-makers are informed and the average person wouldn't be either. But I trust the average persons values way more than I trust those of a politician. Maybe we still wouldn't get enough funding for roads and bridges. We don't get that now. But perhaps the average person would put more money towards education and food and less towards war.
Don't get me wrong, it's great science, but great science doesn't always mean great PR. I feel like if you ask people about what NASA has done recently, they'll be like, I dunno. (last answer would have probably been the Shuttle, while ISS has some good coverage it doesn't seem as exciting to people). But they do likely know about Hubble and now Webb.
Which is great, because the amount that the population thinks NASA gets in terms of tax payer dollars is grossly overimagined. It's less than 1%. But in the US you need great PR to get the funding for projects, not only to start, but also to not cancel them after a regime change.
My impression is that people don't have a clue of why we want to do this, in fact, a lot of them explicitly seem to think that the high-res image in the press release was the main point. $10b projects don't get launched simply just for the reason "why not?", they have purpose and intention behind them. It is an interesting look into how the general public relate to science, compared to how scientists relate to it. For a scientist, "why are we doing this?" is one of the very first questions you would ask, not something to be mocked
EDIT: I want to point out that I am a physicist and technically an astronomy (GW interferometry) myself, so I know that there are answers to these questions. I just think that it's interesting how not only do people not know the answers to them, but they think it is rude to ask. I can't reply to comments, as I'm rate limited.
These missions do have primary science goals and in order to book time on the instruments, proposals are submitted and prioritized accordingly.
The science being done is absolutely wild stuff, formation of new planets, stars, universe and everything. With a telescope like this you can watch the evolution of all matter in the universe, from near the beginning of time up to now in all its trillions of permutations. You get this amazing data on everything and can spend decades analyzing it for new insights and models.
Twitter and the general population understands none of this, but NASA understands that a few pretty pictures will keep the funding flowing.
But what thing could we learn that will really wow folks? Composition of exoplanet atmospheres, of course. Class M planet detected!
There’s a pretty good explanation in this documentary: https://www.pbs.org/video/ultimate-space-telescope-gunryt/
First we consume stuff, then after we have grown so tired of stuff that we can't even fanthom acquiring more stuff we can have a discourse about philosophy.
Learning about the Universe really is philosophy after all.
The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..)
They are showing the way by minimizing costs and delivering huge practical benefits.
This argument -- which is brought up in every sophomoric conversation about the nature of science -- is extremely poor and unjustified. Of course Einstein, Feynman, Bohn and Maxwell relied on observations. Their theories fit the data that was collected before them. If you ever want to give the next Einstein a chance to build an even more useful theory, you need to observe more data. Period. This is how science works, you observe the world, you build a model that predicts it, rinse and repeat. There is no such thing as "purely pen and paper" in science and it categorically can never be. The idea that Einstein came to relativity through pure reasoning is silly, his theory was formed to explain observations that cannot be predicted by other models. Of course it involved tons of pure reasoning and mathematics, but the basis was only empirical observations.
That is factually wrong upon a basic research. All their work was based on experiment
How much did LIGO cost? Was it worth it in order to remove the 0.00001% chance that Einstein was wrong?
Well, their theory extended into more extreme regimes. Blame them for making theories about such small or fast things.
> Was it worth it in order to remove the 0.00001% chance that Einstein was wrong?
Even Einstein thought that GWs would be unobservable, they were basically a fringe theory, much like wormholes. The change across both astronomy and general relativity due to observing GWs is also quite vast. It could show us the currently unknown neutron star matter equation of state, which could have profound impacts on a quantum theory of gravity.
I don't think you really know what you are talking about frankly, both the LHC and projects like LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA have had HUGE impacts on physics. I work on LIGO myself, specifically on new methods for reducing quantum noise, and that has huge impacts on high precision measurements. One example would be the incredible new breakthroughs in non-classical states of light, such as squeezed light. Yesterday in journal club we read a paper about how squeezed light could be used to greatly enhance the sensitivity of the tracking of biological particles. Also not only new practical techniques, but a huge amount of interesting new fundamental quantum measurement theory came about due to these detectors. The list goes on and on, I could fill many pages listing both the primary science and secondary technology (especially quantum technology) benefits that came from LIGO. It was absolutely 100% worth it
Amazing! What does it all mean for my quality of life?
When we discovered fire it was a huge bump in quality of life well before we understood the mechanisms of molecules and atoms being agitate by the rise in temperature.
After the 70s we hit a brick wall. All the stuff after we'll never get to use practically, including LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA, LHC etc.
I have the maximum respect for theoretical physicits but they are just humans among 10 billion humans.
10 billion humans won't accept to pay huge amount of money to solve what essentially has become a murder mystery for people with an IQ>180, solving it won't have any impact. Especially when the majority of them are starving and have no A/C in an increasingly warm planet.
New pharmaceuticals, medical sensing technology, better optical disk drive technology, quantum computing, new battery technology, etc.
> After the 70s we hit a brick wall. All the stuff after we'll never get to use practically, including LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA, LHC etc.
Obviously not true at all, I mean the world wide web was invented at the LHC, but a huge amount of technology has been invented since the 70s. Have you literally been living under a rock? Or maybe the 22 in your name means you were born this year. That would explain it. You just have no idea what you're talking about. You think you do, but you don't. You are ignorant, and making it plain to everyone. You haven't actually done any research into what physics breakthroughs have been made or what technology has come of it since the 70s. You are just assuming and running off your ignorant mouth about it. Give it a break, go do some reading, and then come back, rather than remaining in your dark, ignorant hole.
Aspirationally. The hated oil and gas people didn't need billions of dollars and huge amount of press to come up with fracking. But it's a reason why the US is in a better shape than the rest of the world with regards to the energy crisis unfolding.
Aspirational stuff doesn't count. A technology only counts after a layperson can point at it and describe how it makes their life easier.
> I mean the world wide web was invented at the LHC
I correct you. At the LHC cafeteria to be precise which costed about 0.01% of the whole project. Let's specify.
> You haven't actually done any research into what physics breakthroughs have been made or what technology has come of it since the 70s
It wasn't new theoretical physics. What I mean is that the kind of stuff that Hakwing has produced for example we will never get to use it, and verifying stuff that we already know it works at the macro level (which theoretical physicists have to admit will always be our level as mammals macro creatures) doesn't produce any benefit for society.
Kipp Thorne is talking about building something like LIGO but in space, what's that for? How much will this monstrosity cost? What will be the ROI?
While these people are trying to solve a murder mystery , the rest of the population is rightfully in pain because they don't have food, shelter or their loved ones die of diseases such as Malaria or TB. Even in the rich world we are still at the mercy of cancer and heart disease.
> rather than remaining in your dark, ignorant hole.
I can say the same things about you. Unhealthy obsession with a problem, no matter how beautiful or cool, makes you completely ignore the realities around you in terms of people and quality of life and undue setbacks as well as unrealized potential, which is a much worse perspective that not being able to tell if trillions of years from now the Universe will die of a big freeze or a big rip
Why should we stop inventing and discovering things? Just because you want immediate gratification?
> I correct you. At the LHC cafeteria to be precise which costed about 0.01% of the whole project. Let's specify.
I don't accept that distinction
> It wasn't new theoretical physics. What I mean is that the kind of stuff that Hakwing has produced for example we will never get to use it, and verifying stuff that we already know it works at the macro level (which theoretical physicists have to admit will always be our level as mammals macro creatures) doesn't produce any benefit for society.
It actually produces huge direct benefits for society immediately
> Kipp Thorne is talking about building something like LIGO but in space, what's that for? How much will this monstrosity cost? What will be the ROI?
Physics isn't done for ROI, apart from the scientific return. And I will do so, by applying for grants, and taking YOUR MONEY to do it. You don't have a choice, unfortunately. The tax man will come with a gun to take the money from you and give it to me to do science. And oh what a wonderful thing that is! Btw, LISA will not be too expensive, since it is just three satellites. The space based interferometers are much cheaper than stuff like JWST because they can operate at high losses and without any lenses or much optics at all. We do optimise to reduce the budget
> While these people are trying to solve a murder mystery , the rest of the population is rightfully in pain because they don't have food, shelter or their loved ones die of diseases such as Malaria or TB. Even in the rich world we are still at the mercy of cancer and heart disease.
We can solve more than one problem at once. We are not one person.
> I can say the same things about you. Unhealthy obsession with a problem, no matter how beautiful or cool, makes you completely ignore the realities around you in terms of people and quality of life and undue setbacks as well as unrealized potential, which is a much worse perspective that not being able to tell if trillions of years from now the Universe will die of a big freeze or a big rip
Who said I am ignoring such things? Do you think that physicists are misanthropic. Let me repeat: one person can do one thing, while another can do another thing. I will go into more detail:
When you have two organisms in the world, such as two separate humans, they can make their own decisions and do different things. For example, even though you may want to watch one TV show, I can watch a different one on my own TV. While you may want to work as a doctor, I can work as a physicist. Different humans can make their own choices to do their own thing. It isn't a metaphysical requirement of the universe that all effort is put into the same thing
Doesn't have to be immediate, but there has to be gratification in very practical terms. Taxpayers deserve it. LIGO and James Webb telescope won't yield anything for them. Same goes for the ISS. The ITER fusion project is a different animal, it has low odds but huge upside in very practical terms. Same for the money spent on nuclear fission in the 20th century.
> And I will do so, by applying for grants, and taking YOUR MONEY to do it.
Thank god for the existence of the Cayman Islands and BVI and Bermuda and UAE I guess.
> We can solve more than one problem at once. We are not one person.
Sure but there is a reason why BioNtech, Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca can knock at capital markets door 24/7/365 and publicly, while theoretical physicists only have POTUS, or EU Commission President door. People who have arrived at the pinnacle of the human experience, don't have to worry about anything so they can afford to sign off expensive projects (with money which is not theirs to begin with) and done solely for intellectual curiosity which don't yield any benefit.
> Do you think that physicists are misanthropic
No, but the lack of awareness and not collectively stopping to ask questions about ROI and quality of life returns for projects is a bit off. It's one of the only fields where stuff gets routinely written off as a loss (of time and money), and we are at a stage where the rare wins only produce brain juices and prizes for the ones who solve the murder mystery do jour...
However, many _many_ technologies have come out of the space race and other space related endeavors--you might be surprised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
And these are just concrete technologies. A lot of research done to reach the endpoint was, of course, used in many other areas of research. Even just manufacturing breakthroughs--taking something possible "in theory," and actually producing an instrument to do the thing involves a lot of research that bears fruit for basically anyone paying attention.
Of course there is! We are not just looking at pretty pictures. We are also refining our understanding of physics.
Dark matter alone is a glaring indicator that we don't understand what's going on nearly as much as we should. Without any telescopes we wouldn't even know that our theories had a problem.
Improved physics understanding has always led to technological leaps. Be it electromagnetism, photonics, or even just relativistic effects. And now, quantum computers.
You're drawing a line between astrophysics and nuclear physics?
I do agree that the stuff that's immediately practical should be a priority. I'd be in favor of substantially expanding research to solve immediate problems facing humanity (e.g. cancer, climate change, pandemics, energy and food shortages) but I have no objection to our current funding of space exploration.
> For every dollar invested by the government the American economy and other countries economies have seen $7 to $14 in new revenue, all from spinoffs and licensing arrangements.
https://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-not-waste/ (more reading: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/hq/library/find/bibliographies/...)
This suggests that we're under-investing in NASA, since the ROI of the marginal government dollar is surely nowhere near that high. Basically to first approximation, we should start at the bottom of "ROI per marginal dollar" in the federal budget and reallocate those dollars into NASA and other basic research. I suspect agricultural subsidies and military spending are two places where you will find extremely low ROI at the margins.
(In other words I don't think we should be trading off between "big" vs. "small" science.)
It will acquire data pertinent to most of the open problems of physics.
I, however, do not believe it will ever provide any kind of substantial return beyond possibly helping to answer some esoteric questions about the universe that nobody alive today or in 10000 years will benefit from.
Life isn't an investment, or it's a really terrible one, as the final return is oblivion no matter what. Making all decisions on the basis of "investment" is stupid. Why? We all will eventually die, the planet incinerated, all of this is pointless. Even if the JWST helped lead to interplanetary travel that only changes the timeframe, the heat death of the universe being inevitable. If your only basis for doing something now is some material return in the future then you've totally lost the plot.
So yeah. I think it's a bad investment and I'm glad we spent the money on it.
My god The Verge has an atrocious standard of reporting. The headline is clearly written to communicate that most Americans believe the JWST was worth its 2,000% budget overrun. That was not the survey question at all. The survey question was "How good an investment do you think the James Webb Space Telescope has been?"
But I bet that if you asked Americans "Was the $10bn cost of JWST worth it?" and then asked them to describe what the "it" was and re-iterated the first question after they qualified the it.... I doubt you'd get a "yes" twice in a row.
I think it was a good investment, but 10 billion is a lot of money in absolute terms and comparing it to "all US spending between 2003 and 2026" just to make it seem small is disingenuous.
There are only a handful of people amongst those 340 million who can judge whether it was a good investment or not. Why ask the general populace who only see the nice pictures, but they mostly don't know anything at all about this topic. Ask researchers, physicists whether it was money burned or money well spent.
Hopefully this was a rare event that happened to occur right after it was opened up. But there's a decent chance that this is will be a common occurrence that will happen again in the near future and continue to degrade the accuracy of the images.
1: https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-signific...
EDIT: thanks for the links! This was shown to me on google news, and I clicked on the link for more headlines but none of them looked more authoritative (The Hill?). I sure wish they’d included the NASA link!
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en...
It seems like they have 4 impacts that are consistent with expectations and one outside expectations. The first 4 can be be mostly corrected by fine-tuning the deformable optics.
"Sciences generally are divided up into two types: Pure, or Applied sciences. Applied sciences obviously undertake things that improve society. Pure science exists pretty much to satisfy human's curiosity.
Astronomy is perhaps the purest of sciences; like music, you could live without it. You don't need it for your daily life. And for that reason it is important that the results of astronomy, this pure science, be put before the public. I feel that very strongly.
Frequently we are asked, 'So, in a world where there is hunger, why study astronomy? Why devote funds to astronomy when those funds could be used to improve mankind?'
My answer is that if you define an ideal society in which everyone has food, clothing, shelter (a roof over your head), basic medical care -- in fact such societies exist: your local prison, or jail. Each inmate has food, clothing, shelter, and medical care (not the greatest).
When the doors are opened, do people rush to get into that ideal society or do they rush to get out? (chuckling) We know what the answer is: they rush to get out. Why? Because as important as these necessities are, the fact that you are not free to follow your desire (so to speak) is even more important than having food on the table. And astronomy is that [following your desire].
There is an inborn curiosity, I think, in all of us to address these questions of what's our relationship with the global environment? How did we get here? To what extent has the universe evolved in such a way that life has sprung forward? And I think that is something that is fundamental - so I think that public outreach for astronomy is something that is really crucial."
-Dr. Robert Williams, Astronomer, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) from 1993 to 1998. Father of the Hubble Deep Field project.
How much did they estimate the defense budget at, 150%?
By the same logic, I can say that we shouldn't spend $10B on a telescope when we could invest it in one of many humanitarian exploits like micro-finance for developing countries, systems for clean water and sanitation etc.
If the question was, "should we spend $10B of the military budget on this instead of tanks?", then fair enough.
We ought to spend more. A lot more on science and tech.
Luckily it is almost at an end, finally, after years of trying to get it killed