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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than tanks that sit outside rusting?

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.

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You seem a little negative towards astronomy for an amateur astronomer. Knowing that Pluto is there, or other galaxies exist has little use in terms of utility, but we still want to know. The images and data output by the JWST might be of little use to scientists in 100 or 1000 years, but that data will still spark the next round of research that will put them in the more advanced position they find themselves in.

I love knowing this stuff, and getting to see the faint light that comes to us from so far away, and so long ago. I still think it's almost totally useless.

I was trying to highlight the difference between being useful and being valuable. Your stargazing might not be particularly useful but it's very valuable, because you enjoy it and because you're awed by what you see. Trying to find it useful or useless doesn't need to come in to it.

> How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than tanks that sit outside rusting?

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.

A stockpile of tanks, fighter planes, and ICMBs deters a whole lot of aggression without being used. I think people who have only ever known relative global stability don’t appreciate what it will look like if the US dramatically reduces its military capability and oppressive dictatorships rush to fill the void.

Laughs in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, Pakistan, and all the military juntas instigated by the US in Latin America. US has no problem with oppressive dictatorships as long as they cooperate.

I suppose one can argue about the output but there have already been spin-offs from the JWST inventions that do have practical applications.

https://webb.nasa.gov/resources/JWST_spinoffs_v122011.pdf

Was landing on the moon "useful"?

All that matters is we did it before the USSR.

Surely the one thing that would have made the moon landing better is if it had been a truly cooperative international effort.

It would have taken much longer to come about, if it had happened at all. International efforts are like cartels which agree that they'll share any innovations, thus stunting progress (by removing the incentive to improve).

Undoubtedly. But I'm glad my own country got to at least play a small part, which of course we had to make a movie about (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish).

Then why did they do it 6 times?

Landing on the moon was a military gesture. There is no moon landing apart from a defense pretext.

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