We have multiple single humans with net worths over a thousand times their budget. The only thing that's staggering is what's getting priority over these monumental scientific achievements.
This comment makes me wonder, why don't those rich people make space telescopes just for fun? That's definitely what I would do. Besides, it must be a way funnier than buying Twitter.
Anyone who has billions of dollars to spend is obviously treating their wealth like some sort of highscore and don't give a shit about anybody or anything else, otherwise they would have been spending their money once they were already in the 100 million dollar level because they are already so far beyond any needs or material desires for them or their next 6 generations of family.
The more you have, the more you can invest. Investing is a form of helping. Also, you can use the profits from your investments to give direct aid and donations, as well as create nonprofit organizations to fund. All of this can be gamed for appearances’ sake as well. It’s a hall of mirrors. If everything is politics, what they do is as suspect as what they don’t do.
You can’t pour from an empty cup. The more you have, the more you have to work with, and the more you can help others.
This is what the parable of the talents is meant to demonstrate, for example.
> "why don't those rich people make space telescopes just for fun?"
They do! You can look up why the Simonyi Telescope, or the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, bear those names. (Two examples from memory; there's many others). (edit: Or the Allen Array, for Microsoft fans)
The world's largest telescope of the mid (20th) century was a Rockefeller donation. Several of its peers were Carnegie's.
Observational astronomy was, for much of history, a useless hobby for kings and idle rich. It's a very recent thing that democratic societies decide to fund this kind of no-applications research through public institutions—and to do so on the megaproject scale. There are no precedents in human history for JWST.
Both Bezos and Musk have grand visions for space and humanity which they're pursuing in their own way.
The space based telescopes are useful and valuable projects that I think should be supported, but they also offer sharply diminishing returns paired with sharply rising costs. JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did at twice the cost (comparing at-launch to at-launch), and the successor to JWST will advance our knowledge far less than the JWST is at probably again some multiple of cost of JWST.
By contrast Musk seeks to make humanity a multiplanetary species, and Bezos wants to create an industrial ecosystem in space, not to just exploit resources in space but to move e.g. highly polluting industries into space. These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.
In our economic and political system, I also think this is the more logical way forward. Government is no longer particularly good at long term projects and these sort of visions may come to fruition in a decade, or it may take a century. Left to government, the programs would 100% end up getting scrapped sooner or later. Either by fiscal rhetoric claiming they're wasting money, or by emotional appeal rhetoric claiming that it's unreasonable to indulge in space fantasies when a kid is starving in Africa.
>"Hubble... produced a record 1,073 peer-reviewed publications last year... JWST is performing better than NASA expected, has produced around 1,200 papers since beginning operations in 2022...
Last I checked, 1000 paper a year is more than 1200 papers in 3 years. It will take JWST many years to catch up to Hubble, and Hubble still has atleast another 8 years left in it. If you divide the cost of each telescope by the number of papers tied to it, the cost of the knowledge Hubble advanced humanity by will be many times cheaper than JWST, and that doesn't look like it will change given JWST may operate for 10-20 years.
Just looking at the number of papers gives a very wrong impression. You can have hundreds of papers that change very little, and a single one that changes a whole field.
JWST has already generated lots of counter-evidence for theories we were sure about based on Hubble. If your comparison doesn't even pay attention to this simple fact, how is it worth anything?
I think the Hubble claim is easy to demonstrate because one can simply look at Hubble's greatest achievement - it proved that the universe's expansion is accelerating, in direct contradiction to what was believed prior. It made lots of other revolutionary discoveries, but none of it matters because nothing JWST has, or likely will, uncover comes anywhere near to this degree of relevance.
And that's not a fault of JWST - it's just the nature of diminishing returns when what you're doing is just expanding the capabilities of something that was already highly capable.
On the other issue I don't understand how you can think humanity would never become multiplanetary, outside of expecting an imminent self annihilation. And that is certainly a possibility, but certainly not something one could argue as a high probability event anytime in the foreseeable future.
JWT may well overturn our current theories of early galaxy and black hole formation with potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of the Big Bang. So your statement is both premature and over confident
What you're describing would not be a revolutionary discovery, it would be evolutionary. Hubble discovering the universe's expansion was accelerating is something basically nobody expected, because it's completely ridiculous. I mean think about the absurdity of that for a second, instead of just taking it for granted.
But of course it's true. The announcement was largely met with skepticism. But after it held up, it led directly to the contemporary hypothesis of dark energy and created a general frantic hand-waving not about the earliest moments of the universe, for which we will never have any certainty whatsoever, but about what's happening at this very moment!
For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery effectively resolving dark energy/matter, which would sort of be the equal but opposite of what Hubble achieved. Of course the odds of it doing anything like this are near 0. On the other hand the odds of the universe's expansion accelerating were also near 0.
That, if it was not clear, is why I simultaneously support development of such telescopes and similar technology, but also am extremely skeptical that they'll provide anything of major value. Because in 99.9% of cases, they won't. But that 0.1% is worth looking for nonetheless, because you never know how large a leap it may enable.
> For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery
Yeah, I dunno, you've a pretty subjective valuation of these discoveries that I don't think is shared by many in the scientific community. Feel free to post links if I'm wrong.
What I've said is most certainly the norm. If you want discussion - nasaspaceflight forums are essentially the hacker news equivalent of space stuff. In general people are happy to have a new telescope which will provide some new data, but nobody is expecting much of it.
And what I said regarding Hubble was not subjective in the least. The observation that the universe's expansion is accelerating was huge. JWST cannot realistically be expected to match this, simply because such discoveries are unexpected by their very nature, and phenomenally rare on top of that.
I often wonder about this too. Fund nuclear fusion to a level that it can succeed. Or fund newspapers that do truly independent journalism. It seems a lot of these things would be perfectly in reach for quite a few billionaires. Musk could probably pay for a Mars mission out of his own pocket.
If one considers the leisure that the time’s thinkers were afforded with estates and enterprises underneath them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sum total of the photoelectric investigations came to billions inflation adjusted.
This is one of the most harmful attitudes to come out of otherwise smart people in Silicon Valley. Dismissing any effort that does not bear immediate, tangible fruit, failing to follow a chain of causality to long term benefits and discounting the intellect of people working on such efforts.
For example, a similar attitude would have dismissed J.J. Thompson's work on cathode rays and electrons in the late 1800's, and would have seen his intellect directed to steam engines and steel work. That would have seen a delay in the very technology ecosystem that enabled the parent to post their comment.
Root cause of that attitude is the 3 month metrics reporting required by Wall St.
It is arbit and the largest corps that do research fully understand it can generate these counter productive attitudes generating deadline based superficial progress.
Which is why they try to keep their R&D people separate but it is never long lasting cause its all built on top of contradictions.
You want to build something long lasting look at how the Vatican survives not at how corporations/nations/empires survive. But getting science orgs to be that open minded is very tricky given all the baggage the Church has accumulated.
Interesting doesn’t necessarily mean important. There are an infinite number of potential scientific endeavors, I don’t think it’s unseemly to suggest that a field’s likeliness to improve humanity’s quality of life should be a factor in determining funding.
I think any advances in basic science is worthwhile. You can’t predict when or how it will become useful. Quantum mechanics or relativity were probably pretty useless for a few decades after their discovery.
Sure, but we don't have unlimited time and money. Prioritization is obviously a necessity, and therefore I think the OP's point stands. Considering potential tangible rewards shouldn't be seen as a taboo factor in that calculation.
Sure. But we also need a certain base level of research that has zero potential rewards we can imagine now but pushes the boundaries of our knowledge further out. Because a few decades or even centuries later it will become useful.
Evolution is search. These projects create demand for high tech manufacturing, this alone is a net positive. The money isn't burned in a pit, it is spent employing people.
Then why don't we give everyone a job? Why don't we do even more "searching", without any restriction? Let's spend, spend, spend government money. If your theory is correct, it can be nothing but a "net positive"...
No, you're being ridiculous. We must stamp out this notion that everything that feels good, is useful. Sometimes it's just a waste.
Sure it would but it’s still a big 10%. And it is not like they have the 10% in cash. They are using it for stock votes and dividends and etc. and for what purpose should they give it up? For someone else’s budget?
Better if you compare annual salaries to annual budgets.
Because these are some of the most complicated and technically advanced pieces of technology that we have ever created.
To communicate with them we have a worldwide array of massive satellite dishes (Deep Space Network) which needs to be operated part of the cost is operating that. Then there is the scientist using the data. These are some of the greatest scientists in the world they are getting paid well enough. Then there is the engineers which make sure the spacecraft operates correctly which are expensive good engineers are expensive.and obviously all the other costs associated with it like facility, technology electricity etc.
I think like they said, it's people. The JWST has "17 different modes" (yeah, I wish I knew what that meant exactly), but it sounds complicated. For all our tech, the bottom line is it requires humans to calibrate this thing and keep it that way (or one of 17 different ways) depending on the science that needs done.
> The JWST has "17 different modes" (yeah, I wish I knew what that meant exactly)
It's explained in the user documentation[1]. You did read the documentation right?
For example[2]:
JWST Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) has 5 observing modes: imaging, coronagraphy, grism wide field slitless spectroscopy, time-series imaging, and grism time series.
You’re being downvoted for asking a reasonable question, sadly.
The numbers are staggering. The answer is mostly “Northrop Grumman”, “cost plus”, and “cover your ass”.
The sunk costs are >$10bn. Nobody wants to be the guy who cut the flight operations team from 200 people (!) and have the thing go offline and unrecoverable.
While the cuts are very much in the category of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”, if there’s a silver lining it’s that perhaps it will lead to a more cost-conscious approach for future missions - ie “how can we automate station keeping”, or “do we really need six people to watch a thermal map”, or “perhaps we should look at alternatives to DSN”.
It’s an artefact of a system evolved to never take risks, to shelter congressional pork, and to externalise liability onto padded contracts, born out of Cold War thinking - when JWST was conceived (1992), the Berlin Wall had only just fallen. It was meant to launch in 2005.
