Two weeks in, the Webb Space Telescope is reshaping astronomy

That should be a really good way to check our models are accurate!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer

[1] https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

https://www.space.com/nasa-telescope-far-side-of-moon.html

Though I'm not sure if it will ever be built.

In any event, many many areas to aim at, and relatively limited funding unfortunately.

100 % someone would point at the sun by accident and burn all the sensors within six months if access is unrestricted and the api is powerful.

In any case easy access to data will mostly result in data lying idle on disks somewhere because people are busy doing something more interesting. Analysing data is many months of work, and you don't get more months just because there is more data.

So one james web space telescope costs 10 billion and take 20 years to build. However two space telescopes cost 10 billion 100 million and take the same twenty years to build. three would be 10B 200M + 20Y etc.

But this would of only worked if you built the second one at the same time you had the setup and test facilitys prepared for building the first one, I will be generous and assume the r & d is not so space and time critical.

Personally I think the main argument for making a second is that you are putting this thing in a location where it cannot be serviced. The parable of having all your eggs in one basket comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

Reasonable question but JWST is a lot smaller than Earth.

What a dramatic accusation to shut down conversation. That's frankly uncalled for.

I'm expressing fears about a very expensive and time consuming investment.

A positive media spin for NASA means their budget remains unscrutinized and unfettered.

I never said NASA is telling the media to say these things. It may be a general sense of "talk highly about our expensive things so we can keep doing expensive things". How any department, public or private, keeps getting itself funded.

We're seeing a lot of these pieces. It feels as though scientists are telling journalists this byline, because it's everywhere. Nothing wrong with that.

> I'm wondering how well it's going to do as we pass through the Perseid cloud.

I don't think we know yet. We're about to find out.

“It is not yet clear whether the May 2022 hit to segment C3 was a rare event.”

I’ve been unable to find any technical reports on the technique, but the gist of it is here: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/17/james-webb-space-telescope-...

Think of it this way: If you take a picture from a mountain, things in the distance will look bluer than they are when you are close, but does this mean that all the pictures taken from mountaintops have "fake" colours that need to be corrected?

In this sense redshift is just another thing that makes things change colour as the distance increases.

No. There are basically two things influencing the colors of galaxies, their age (young ones have bright, blue stars, old ones are more red) and their distance. In the first "unveil" image of the gravitational lens, you can find several extremely red objects (that are completely absent in the HST images if you do a side by side comparison). These are likely extremely distant galaxies where the "blue"/"green" bands in the JWST image (and all the HST bands) are very faint because it falls in the extreme UV in the galaxy's rest wavelengths.

Equating the two is possible, but lazy.

Though most things probably look pretty similar in visible light.

Not all the wavelengths these telescopes capture can be seen by the human eye so some post processing is necessary for the "publicity shots"

A lot of the real science is not done visually but by analysing the data

The JWST literally cannot take colour images, the colours are entirely a post processing choice.

And there really isn't any obvious choice either, I suspect they chose colour values so the end result looks like a Hubble image.

What if you were to be a species distinct from whatever you are now? With different eyes, perception and cognition?

What if you're looking out the window of a spaceship at relativistic speed? Is is it fake?

Though it would be cool to see a 9 star rack and one super fast white star heading toward them.

But apparently god does not play pool with the universe.

Not that we get that much for the money: probably most of it is simple (wholly-legal!) graft, as with NASA's SLS rocket.

A shift in growing crops more adapted to the local climate reality is also an important shift. A lot of places grow staple crops brought by colonizers centuries ago, which are ill suited to the local soil and require additional resources to grow, whereas less known types of grain and fruit/veg could be grown to produce higher yields with less effort and be more hardy in the area's temp/precipitation/soil.

Initial costs of setting up local food growth might seem exorbitant, but would bring a lot of long-term cost reduction for people.

Added bonus to this is reducing pollution caused by worldwide shipments of produce, and improving food taste as things grown nearby don't need to be harvested early and ripened in route, refrigerated, treated for pests.

Another thing that would be beneficial, and this is the idealist in me speaking, is giving people the empowerment to control their own food supply, boosting communities, giving people the means to have more autonomy over their basic needs so they're not reliant on a global market currently dealing with a variety of issues, mitigating the risk that food imported will be scarce or too expensive for families to feed their members.

I don't think it's that simple: stuff costs more in the US vs other big military spenders, large != effective, etc. If the US cut its military budget, it would have to give up capabilities, and that will have bitter consequences (e.g. the liberal order will shrink even further (e.g. goodbye Ukraine, Taiwan, Baltics), China owns the seas, etc.).

Russia has been an excellent motivator for our allies to get serious on defense spending.

Our absurdly oversized military has prevented a lot of serious wars.

The theory is new to me, so I don't know enough about it to know how much I buy into it, but it's an interesting one.

I didn't know the reference, but I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nzoPopQ7V0 (2 min)

The former is the answer to the latter here. Humanity is trending to a more unified, globalized, monolithic series of structures. Smaller cultures, countries and people groups have been conquered, dimmed, and "globalized". You can easily observe this in art and architecture.

To be clear: you need both. Ironically, thinking that you can exist without a defensive military response is the real failure of imagination :/.

    Humans used to exist in small roving bands. 
    Now we are organized into nation-states. 
    I don't see a truly compelling reason why that 
    trend towards greater organization can't continue.

It's reasonable expectation for a person to care about the others in their "small, roving band." Evolution has selected for those that do, or at least it did for most of human history.

But how far does that scale? Can we truly care about everybody in a village of 100? What about a territory with 1000 people? What about a small country of 100,000? What about a nation with 1,000,000 people or 1,000,000,000 people?

We're not robots. If we were, then larger organizational structures would perhaps clearly be the way. Look at all the wasted, duplicated effort between countries and states.

But we're humans and we need some level of empathy and compassion for our fellow group-members for this stuff to work. When the organizational structure gets large enough it becomes dominated by cliques, infighting, etc. Now you just have warring nation-states with an extra level of abstraction.

I think we're seeing this right now in the United States. This country is too big, too populous, too divided to be effective any more. Unified successes like Webb are quickly becoming the exception, not the norm.

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

The military was the “the largest item of state expenditure” during much of China’s Tang Dynasty.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-chinese-h...

Compared to this, 4% of the US GDP or 12% of annual US federal spending seems like a bargain, especially if you’re Germany.

Huh? Russia (nee the Soviet Union) and the US are neighbors, if you've forgotten. They had a big ideological rivalry that started to get intense around that time.

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

What is the evidence? My impression has been militarily weak countries got invaded by stronger ones. Smaller countries were snapped up by bigger ones. I’m curious to see the evidence to the contrary.

You see this in business, where companies climb to the top through aggression and innovation, but then become laggards and protectionists (and ultimately fall away). You see it in countries. You see it in technologies. Heck, you see it in biological systems.

Perhaps that's just a normal part of the greater process, these cycles of growth, innovation, collaboration, etc., followed by stagnation and decay (and then death, or near-death, whereby the system returns to the growth effort).

The nice thing about being human is that we theoretically have the capacity to choose what our goals are (assuming our basic needs are currently met). As such, we could be choosing to work on goals such as "everyone always has food, shelter, and physical safety". This surely must be achievable, but maybe it would take virtually everyone working toward this goal. It's not really a sexy way to spend your time if you are already fortunate enough to have those things... such as if you live in a place rich in resources and with relatively few people. You would not be particularly compelled to contribute to the wellbeing of others, especially if you could not see them. But we have the privilege of awareness and knowledge, so we can see that there are still many people without even food or water. We could do something about this if we made it our focus.

And it might just turn out that having this collective focus would save our collective lives later. There's a reasonable chance that humanity will face a food crisis due to climate change and population growth. Practicing now at learning how to solve these problems might mean the difference between humans existing into 2100 or not.

I fully believe that only 5% of the budget goes to Veterans Affairs, at least in the US. The system is not very good at taking care of vets/

>Those breakthroughs you mention, you think they wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for the military? Some of those things are also borderline not invented by the military at all, but lets disregard that for now.

The list:

>>rockets, jets, computers, encryption, RADAR, SONAR, internets, canning/food preservation, weather prediction

* Rockets are an entirely military invention - the Hargrave rocket invented for the British Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, the chinese pseudo-rockets used as artillery, the V2 rocket used in WW2 Germany, etc. I think one of the only non-military rocket scientists known to history is Goddard.

* Jets - also an entirely military invention. I'm assuming you mean "jet air craft" here - WW2 was the first use of jets to power an airplane. The Soviets and Americans quickly followed suit.

* Encryption - encryption has been in use in militaries since at least the roman era; another name for a substitution cypher is a "Ceaser Cypher." To be fair, this isn't exclusive to military use, as states have an interest in keeping their communications secure, as do banks, but in terms of "money invested in development of cryptography as we know it," the field was effectively invented whole hog during WW2 (again), as (military led and funded) analysis of how codes could be broken lead to the need for new encryption methods that were more secure. See also: the NSA. (note - I'm being sloppy with codes/cyphers/encryption here)

* RADAR/SONAR - literally developed during WW2 by the British using US funds in order to detect submarines and the Luftwaffe terror attacks. The germans had a very sophisticated RADAR tech at the beginning of the war (directed radar for night defense), but failed to develop it any further.

* Internets - the internet, as a system of interconnected computer networks, was funded by ARPA/DARPA, the DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA-net was first used by the Pentagon. Pretty much the entire US software and hardware industry was built off of US defense contracting, and this is no exception.

* Canning/Food preservation - the biggest advances in canning/food preservation were the result of studies/competitions funded by the British Royal Navy in the 18/19th centuries. The British defense industry funded the development of canned goods as we understand them today. Interestingly, this is where a lot of our understanding about vitamins started to be learned by (heavy) trial and error, as the RN tried to figure out how to combat scurvy.

* Weather prediction - meteorology as a science got tons of money from (you guessed it) the British Royal Navy, who understandable wanted to better predict conditions for their large navy that was made of wood and canvas. in the 20th century, meteorology got huge infusions of cash from the USAF, because planes care about weather and storms to a huge degree. This was a scientific field outside of the military, but even then, it was a matter of State security to predict the weather so you could understand crop growth patterns etc.

So, to answer your question, no, I don't believe any of those technologies would have developed organically.

I don't think we'd have GPS (for example) without the military, among other things like nuclear energy/weapons and so on.

Do you seriously think a corporation would have invested the money creating everything needed from the ground up, including ongoing maintenance of a satellite constellation, to let people fix their location on the earth? Where's the profit/ROI in that?

That gave me a good chuckle.

Also, just because the military did them first, does not mean we wouldn't have created them. We might even have more inventions if we had a dedicated R&D team for America.

BTW, the people who work on these details inside astronomy are called "instrumentalists", whether they're scientists or engineers.

I suspected the damage was a little more important than people were saying, but it sounds like you might know of some evidence.

So the overall number of impacts is consistent with the modeled rate, but the size of the C3 event was outside the modeled rate.