[HN Gopher] Two weeks in, the Webb Space Telescope is reshaping ... ___________________________________________________________________ Two weeks in, the Webb Space Telescope is reshaping astronomy Author : theafh Score : 546 points Date : 2022-07-25 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org) | sxcurry wrote: | "(Only as those stars exploded did they forge heavier elements | such as oxygen and spew them into the cosmos.)" I don't think | this is correct - can't elements up to Iron be created through | fusion in the stellar core? | hinkley wrote: | Today I learned about the Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen fusion cycle: | | https://www.britannica.com/science/CNO-cycle | | Apparently you don't create oxygen in stars by smashing two | beryllium together. | | Edit: interestingly, this article provides a different path, | claiming C + He = O | | https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1727-how-elements-... | vincnetas wrote: | but you need a star to explode in order to "spew them into the | cosmos". | freemint wrote: | A sufficiently fast and heavy collision with a star might | also do the trick but that is a thing we haven't observed. | wiredfool wrote: | It's a large universe, so it's probably happened. | | 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. | simonh wrote: | Yes, but a lot of that occurs in the (relatively) brief phase | near the end of the lives of very massive stars as their cores | collapse. Once they run out of fuel for that process they | explode in a Type II Supernova. | [deleted] | nickstinemates wrote: | How do we know, uh, which direction to send it in? | meltyness wrote: | In physics better fidelity always gives better answers, and | that's exactly what this is. It's launching into an environment | post-film, post-ubiquitous networking, and post-statML. In | addition to a much greater deal of fidelity from the on-board | hardware, humanity has attained a much greater deal of fidelity | of explanation. | | >>> "We worked nonstop," said Pascale. "It was like an escape | room." | | Astronomers (not necessarily cosmologists, or physicists) it | seems are finding many reasons to be very busy with the streams | of data coming from this device. | baggy_trough wrote: | The fact that one of the mirror segments was already severely | damaged by a micrometeorite makes me hope that they hurry up... | the lifetime may not be as great as hoped. | bowsamic wrote: | I heard that it's within their expected budget of damage and | has literally zero impact on any parameter of the telescope due | to the deformable optics | baggy_trough wrote: | I think that understates the case. Have you seen the | calibration image after the impact? | deelowe wrote: | My understanding is the strike happened while en route and | the risk of strikes of similar severity is lower in final | orbit. | baggy_trough wrote: | That is not correct because the damage is not present in | the first calibration images that were released. | sillysaurusx wrote: | I haven't. Mind linking? | | I suspected the damage was a little more important than | people were saying, but it sounds like you might know of | some evidence. | bckr wrote: | Probably talking about this[] from[]. I think it's | overstated, though. The telescope seems to have a lot of | redundancy and flexibility. | | [] https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/jNgqXUj6dDVWbSvkw5ng | Mk-970... | | [] https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope- | micrometeor... | dotnet00 wrote: | I agree that it's fairly overstated as the telescope was | supposed to be able to work even if the 'wings' with 3 | mirrors segments each had failed to unfold. Performance | will certainly drop with collisions, but I seriously | doubt it would get bad enough for telescope performance | to be worse than having 6 less mirror segments. | | The bigger concern would probably be how much sunshade | damage the telescope can handle, although fortunately | there's a good bit of redundancy on that too. | ThisIsMyAltFace wrote: | > When Webb's mission began, the affected C3 segment had | a wavefront error of 56 nanometers rms (root mean | square), which was in line with the 17 other mirror | portions. | | > Post-impact, however, the error increased to 258 nm | rms, but realignments to the mirror segments as a whole | reduced the overall impact to just 59 nm rms. For the | time being, the team wrote Webb's alignment is well | within performance limits, as the realigned mirror | segments are "about 5-10 nm rms above the previous best | wavefront error rms values." | koheripbal wrote: | It sustained this strike - but more strikes like the one | that happened are going to significantly reduce the | lifetime of the telescope. | | There is no debating that that big strike was outside the | model. | topspin wrote: | > There is no debating that that big strike was outside | the model. | | Yes it is. That means the model is wrong. Hopefully JWST | doesn't devolve into a micrometeorite detector. That | instrument could have been built and operated at far | lower cost and one wonders if that shouldn't have been | done beforehand. | AprilArcus wrote: | It could be that the model is wrong, or it could be that | the model is correct and the big strike was an outlier. | Only time will prove. | baggy_trough wrote: | Yes, that's what I'm referring to. You don't consider | that severe damage to a mirror segment? It looks like | somebody shot it with a gun. It's unable to get properly | back into alignment over the full segment. | zaarn wrote: | If you check the reporting on the incident, they are able | to calibrate almost all of this away and use the | telescope as normal. It's bad but not that bad. That the | telescope would be hit was expected so it can account for | this amount of damage. | lapetitejort wrote: | This [0] is what a telescope looks like when shot with a | 9mm gun, seven times. The telescope lost 1% efficiency. | | 0: https://astroanecdotes.com/2015/03/26/the-mcdonald- | gun-shoot... | welterde wrote: | It's not really an issue since it's only a minute | reduction in light gathering power and the active optics | was able to correct the mirror deformation after re- | calibration. | | Speaking of telescope being shot with a gun.. There is a | telescope in Texas (Harlan J. Smith Telescope at McDonald | observatory) that was shot a few times by someone in the | 1970s in the hopes of shattering the main mirror. The | overall effect however was only a 1% reduction in the | light gathering power and the telescope is still in | regular use today. You can find a picture of the primary | mirror here [1]. | | [1] https://astroanecdotes.com/2015/03/26/the-mcdonald- | gun-shoot... | bckr wrote: | _I_ think it looks devastating. The people who run the | thing think it 's fine. I'll defer to the people who run | the thing. See ThisIsMyAltFace's comment. | joering2 wrote: | Hopefully next iteration will have multiple mirrors built | in as a backup. At least one round behind each visible | mirror, and then release broken one, let it fly away, and | push the new one out, call it "shark teeth lensing | replacement system / STLRS". | jacquesm wrote: | Chances are that a broken segment flying away will do | massive damage to the telescope. | airstrike wrote: | Not if we zap it with an antimatter ray as it flies away | jacquesm wrote: | When I got up this morning I felt like I had overslept | but not by that much. | dev_tty01 wrote: | It just needs a tiny bit of acceleration in the right | direction as it is released. It would then just drift | away. That is just clever mechanical design and similar | things have been done in other craft. | jacquesm wrote: | Have a look at the structure of the JWST, I don't see | many 'safe paths' that would work regardless of | orientation. Those segments are pretty much bound to hit | each other if you eject them at an angle (they are quite | thick) and that would make them aimed straight for the | focal point. | | At a guess: all such theories have been debated and | rejected by the people that built then thing in the first | place. | XorNot wrote: | Next iterations will be very different since SLS and | hopefully Starship will exist and be able to be used to | launch: JWST was built the way it was partly because it | had to fit in the launch vehicle they knew was available. | | There's a future where we never do anything like it again | because reusable rockets mean multiple launch orbital | assembly is just plain cheaper. | replygirl wrote: | https://www.google.com/search?q=james+webb+damage+calibra | tio... | toastedwedge wrote: | Calibration image here[0]. According to the article, it | still operates well within its parameters. Still feels | like getting a ding on your new car though doesn't it? | | [0] https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope- | micrometeor... | nuclearsugar wrote: | "Characterization of JWST science performance from | commissioning" - 2022 July 12 | | https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf | | Check out the chapter: 4.7 Micrometeoroids | _joel wrote: | I wouldn't worry too much, they were expecting them (albeit | this was a biggie). The L2 point it's at means there shouldn't | be too much that collects around there, gravity wise, but it | will happen again. | koheripbal wrote: | Both the number and size of micrometeorites is larger than | what was modeled. | | Hopefully it was just a fluke, but if not, this telescope | will not survive it's intended lifespan. | | As such, NASA has already started a project to optimize the | orientation of the craft to minimize strikes. | AprilArcus wrote: | "wavefront sensing recorded six localized surface | deformations on the primary mirror that are attributed to | impact by micrometeoroids. _These occurred at a rate | (roughly one per month) consistent with pre-launch | expectations_ [...] Of the six micrometeoroid strikes | detected thus far through wavefront sensing, _five had | negligible effects_ ". | | So the overall number of impacts is consistent with the | modeled rate, but the size of the C3 event was outside the | modeled rate. | beanjuice wrote: | The title is a bit inaccurate to the article content. Has some | new finding truly un-done past findings in astronomy? How has it | been reshaped? I'm as excited as anyone about what JW can | provide, but it is just a new era in addition, not exception- as | even the article puts it. | [deleted] | dotnet00 wrote: | It's not super groundbreaking yet (given how early it is), but | the oldest galaxies seen in the JWST deep field apparently seem | to be more structured than expected for such a young universe, | which would probably require revision of our models of the | young universe. | bowsamic wrote: | [deleted] | replygirl wrote: | reshaping is beat-agnostic clickbait for "doing some | interesting stuff". plug "reshaping" into a google news | search | throwaway4220 wrote: | To me it's like when they say xy stock plummets (by 5%) | prewett wrote: | Heh, I'd be fine with that. Usually it's "XY plummets | because of ... (XY: -1%)". From my non-statistically | informed observations, 1% is basically the noise floor, | so saying "because" is misleading at best. At least 5% is | pretty rare. | danijar wrote: | To me, that's just bad scientific reporting then. As a | scientist, I also found this headline a bit misleading. | [deleted] | 93po wrote: | All science reporting is bad. All of it. | koheripbal wrote: | There have also not yet been any significant new findings. | | The article is pure fluff. | frebord wrote: | Imagine the increase in existential crises the past 2 weeks. | [deleted] | sebmellen wrote: | Two weeks of service, made possible by 26 years of development. | Not unlike the 10-years-to-overnight-success pattern. | ericmcer wrote: | According to this article it was Joe Bidens doing lol. | Turneyboy wrote: | No it wasn't. According to the article Biden unveiled the | first image. That's it and that's true. | | No credit is being falsely attributed to him here. | z9znz wrote: | This is another good example of how consistency, determination, | and effort can really make big things happen. (It's also an | example of why we should force ourselves to put some of our | energy into long term efforts, the results of which we may | never personally experience.) | echelon wrote: | > Two weeks of service, made possible by 26 years of | development. | | With already unanticipated levels of micrometeorite collision | and mirror damage [1], I'm worried we may not see a full | service life out of JWST. | | All of the "look what the JWST has accomplished in two weeks" | press seems like drumming up accolades in advance of an early | retirement. | | I hope I'm wrong. | | [1] https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope- | micrometeor... | russellbeattie wrote: | First, you're being conspiratorial. I know that seems to be | the fad nowadays, but honestly, that way lies madness. | | I'm wondering how well it's going to do as we pass through | the Perseid cloud. I just did a search online and nothing | obvious came up about it. | | I don't know if the debris is (are?) spread out enough to | affect the area around the moon, and I'm sure NASA has | planned for it, but the news of that meteor which lit up over | the Midwest made me wonder how the telescope is faring. | | https://youtu.be/WDwUmVVpJ4s | mulmen wrote: | > I'm wondering how well it's going to do as we pass | through the Perseid cloud. I just did a search online and | nothing obvious came up about it. | | Reasonable question but JWST is a _lot_ smaller than Earth. | echelon wrote: | > First, you're being conspiratorial | | 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. | russellbeattie wrote: | It was just meant as an aside. Friendly generic advice to | help save your sanity. | | More advice: You're probably just hungry or in a bad | mood. Whenever I overreact on HN or taken something the | wrong way (which sadly has happened more than once) | that's usually the issue. Go have something sweet to | increase your blood sugar, maybe take a walk. It'll help. | :-) | [deleted] | wumpus wrote: | > A positive media spin for NASA means their budget | remains unscrutinized and unfettered. | | Wow. No, it doesn't. | [deleted] | joering2 wrote: | Classical "one person, overnight entrepreneurship success" that | took 10 years of making and a team of skilled employees. | hackernewds wrote: | Kinda like how common people think Elon Musk "invented" | Tesla, while he's not even one of the founding engineers. Yet | he's invulnerable in the company despite impregnating senior | leadership with impunity. Perception is reality | sega_sai wrote: | Astronomer here. This is clearly an overhyped title. Sure JWST is | great and a lot will hopefully come from it, but we don't need to | overhype it. So far we learned from JWST that it is performing | well, but no ground breaking results (but for sure they will | come). (Tbh I stopped reading quanta because every time there is | a news "X solved problem nobody thought could be solved" and | titles like that.) | [deleted] | falseprofit wrote: | The appropriate levels of hype and/or excitement to discoveries | in science and math are entirely subjective. You just aren't as | excited about it as their target audience. | koheripbal wrote: | Agreed. I'm cautiously optimistic that new science gets done | soon, but so far, no existing science theories/data has been | "reshaped". | | I'm also hopeful that it doesn't get hit with any more | micrometeoroids, because that risk is larger than expected and | it will bring the party to a close much earlier than expected. | _joel wrote: | I don't know, finding the oldest known galaxy ever is a pretty | big one in my book. GLASS-z13 at the sprightly 13.4 billion | light-years away. | DiogenesKynikos wrote: | I'd wait for spectroscopic confirmation before declaring this | the most distant discovered galaxy. | | Last I read about this (6 days ago), this was just a galaxy | _candidate_ , based on photometric measurements (not a | spectrum).[0] It still could be some different type of | object. The spectrum will give much more information. | | It's exciting of this discovery pans out, and it's exactly | the sort of thing JWST is supposed to find, but it's still | too early to say that this object has been definitely | determined to be a distant galaxy. | | 0. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09434 | jacquesm wrote: | I think the machine itself, the comms, the general tech behind | it is already groundbreaking enough to justify the title. | oneoff786 wrote: | That would be a feat of engineering. Not astronomy | [deleted] | wumpus wrote: | Isn't there enough credit to go around? | | BTW, the people who work on these details inside astronomy | are called "instrumentalists", whether they're scientists | or engineers. | oneoff786 wrote: | No, and it's not a diminishing comment to suggest | otherwise. It's a great achievement. It's not reshaping | astronomy at this time. | wumpus wrote: | I was hoping you would be interested in how the actual | astronomy community thinks about it. | | Few of them would agree with your statement. | z9znz wrote: | I like to imagine the possibilities if we stopped spending money | on military and instead spent it on research and science. [edit - | perhaps this is misunderstood as me suggesting money spent on the | telecope is wasted; quite the contrary, I'm arguing that we | should be spending MORE on efforts like this!] | | Granted, there are some breakthroughs that come from military | research, being generous that would still amount to a small | fraction of what we could be discovering and improving if the | goals were different. | | And honestly, we should be spending $$$$ on food development | research. We're going to need to know how to grow food in new | ways soon, as the old ways have reached their limits. Food seems | kind of important... | lven wrote: | Great idea! US DOD budget: 700B. We only really need nukes to | keep the peace and maintain our interests. Nukes cost 20B/yr to | maintain (both stockpile and delivery methods). The rest of the | military budget is a bunch of garbage whose availability and | global deployment makes it more likely USA engages in needless | conflicts. A nukes only military is so cheap and effective. USA | could do a yearly nuclear readiness demo on July 4th, like | detonating a ICBM on the moon or in space for the whole world | to see. | mulmen wrote: | The cost of the US Military is a _feature_ , not a bug. It | employs hundreds of thousands of people and provides training | and education for their long-term well-being. | | Is there a historical example of any military where a single | weapon was successful? How would Vietnam have gone | differently if the US was nuke-only? How do you defend your | own territory with nukes? Seems easy to defeat. | sph wrote: | > detonating a ICBM on the moon or in space for the whole | world to see | | No. Outer space is not an American property. Please detonate | it in your backyard. | vanattab wrote: | How would a nuke only army be effective? Your going responded | to 911 by just nukeing Afghanistan? Or by saying 911 was not | worth any response? | asdff wrote: | Not every nuke needs to be a city destroyer. You could use | tactical nukes instead of tanks and mass infantry for | example. Maybe you have a few elite squads on the ground | who basically just serve to mark targets for orbital ICBMs | to quickly destroy. Wars would be over by the time the | ICBMs are launched. You could identify key industrial sites | in advance of the war and basically blow up any capability | for a follow up response or armament buildup as soon as war | were declared. With enough ICBMs you could overwhelm air | defenses; maybe with a swarm approach you could get away | with a lot of decoys that are just made of cheap inert | material versus the air defenses that have to assume each | decoy is active. People think an ICBM only army would just | be a huge hammer, but really it would be best used like a | robotic surgical scalpel. | suby wrote: | I know you're not necessarily advocating for this | strategy and just sharing that they're much more advanced | / tactical weapons now, but this strikes me as too | cavalier. | | It might be true that we can create nukes which have | minimal fallout and minimum impact area (I have no idea | to be honest), but this ignores the broader consequences | such a strategy would bring. Namely that you remove the | taboo of using nukes and start to normalize it. It then | becomes more justifiable for other countries to also use | nuclear weapons, at which point escalation becomes ever | more likely. Imagine the consequences if Russia were to | use nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine. Frankly we | need as large a stigma as humanly possible on the use of | these weapons. | asdff wrote: | What would even be the consequences if Russia were to use | nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Maybe a lot, or maybe | absolutely none depending how they are used. If they are | used in a Nagasaki capacity then yeah, that would lead to | repercussions, but you can do that with conventional arms | too. See what the allies did to Dresden for instance, or | the firebombing of Tokyo. The issue is not the weaponry, | but the act of threatening civilians versus strictly | military targets. If Russia used nuclear weaponry as they | currently use their conventional missile weaponry in | ukraine I'm not sure the international community would | care more than they currently care about the war, in a | world where the political taboo of using nukes did not | exist. | adgjlsfhk1 wrote: | With hindsight, either of those look like better options | than what we ended up doing (20 years, 2 trillion dollars, | nothing to show for it). | mulmen wrote: | I agree the outcome of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq | could have been better. In fact I would even agree they | were disastrous. But: | | If we had nuked Afghanistan we (probably) would have | kicked off WWIII. | | If we had done nothing further attacks may have occurred. | | Both of those seem at least worse than what actually | happened. | tablespoon wrote: | > A nukes only military is so cheap and effective. | | Also mindbogglingly dangerous. Do you _really_ want the | _only_ response options to be: 1) nuke the world from orbit | or 2) surrender, with _no middle ground_? | njharman wrote: | I think your post is sarcastic, given last sentence. But if | not, or for readers who ... | | > A nukes only military is so cheap and effective. | | If it was effective, we'd see them in reality. | asdff wrote: | I feel like the only thing stopping it is political taboo. | If the U.S. actually supplied tactical nukes for the bay of | pigs invasion as planned I think we would see nuke only | armies today. As it stands the only time it was used in | combat was WWII and no one has ripped the bandaid off | diplomatically speaking yet using them in another | situation. | tablespoon wrote: | > If the U.S. actually supplied tactical nukes for the | bay of pigs invasion as planned I think we would see nuke | only armies today. | | IMHO, we would see _post-nuke_ armies... after all the | nuclear wars destroyed the industrial capacity required | to build more nukes. | chasd00 wrote: | with tactical nukes there would be no difference between | nuke-only and regular militaries. You can dial down a | nuke yield to be equivalent of a 2k lb HE bomb. Now | you're right back to a regular military only, now, every | bomb is a nuke instead of only a few. | throwaway64643 wrote: | Ironically, many contractors for this telescope are in military | industry. | AtlasBarfed wrote: | Or say, didn't have a massive amount of wealth owned by the | rich, who really don't do much. But then again, if wealth was | better distributed, there'd be far more consumption, and that | is generally bad for the environment. | | But back to the point, I think napkin math for the military | budget for one year is (if there was supply) solar and wind for | the whole grid. It is close to a trillion dollars, and that is | such a crazy number. | | The Iraq War #2 was such a tragedy of wasted treasure. That is | the budget for mitigation/heading off climate change. It was | the right time, the right amount of money. | ericmcer wrote: | I don't totally know how wealth distribution would fix this. | It isn't like Elon Musk is hoarding millions of used cars, | food and medical supplies. If we distributed all his wealth | it would basically just be flipping some bits in computers to | make the average persons number bigger. How does that | correlate to actual wealth? | asdff wrote: | Well if you taxed people like Elon sufficiently maybe we | would be able to use that to afford everyone in the country | food, medical supplies and care, and more robust public | transport. That quality of life increase to the public is | certainly an example of an increase in wealth. You go from | having no food to having it, having no healthcare to being | covered, having less options for mobility to having more. | These are valuable things that are now in greater abundance | for you, that by definition is an increase in wealth. | ericmcer wrote: | No I am saying if you take 100% of Elon's money and | redistribute it that would really only free up the things | Elon consumes but can no longer afford. We can't turn | money (which is just numbers in a computer) into doctors | and food, it is just a lever for incentivizing | production. | | What would happen if you gave everyone in the country | money to get medical care but didn't increase the number | of hospitals and doctors we have? | gopalv wrote: | > Granted, there are some breakthroughs that come from military | research | | Nobody knew at the time that Hubble was literally a KH-11 class | telescope, but one pointed the other way. The mirror size and | the ability to be carried in the shuttle was probably to get | some synergies out of those two projects. | | "Accessory to War" is a pretty deep take on this topic. | rvnx wrote: | Yeah and the rockets that send the satellites are directly | inherited from world war 2 designs | nemo44x wrote: | To be fair, many of the original rocketry enthusiasts | (German Rocket Society) were interested in the concept | because it could put man into space. It was co-opted by | governments to apply the research to weapons. In essence | the government was willing to fund their research. However, | there were rocket scientists that wanted no part of it but | they were coerced into it. | z9znz wrote: | I figured that was the case for a lot of things we have | developed, but it must surely be more efficient to not also | have the military goals as part of the effort. | | Actually, I think the best thing we can learn from the | military would be how to organize and mobilize large numbers | of people toward some goal. The same could be said for | religion. Then it's down to choosing a good goal... | | I've pondered what would happen if we could dedicate one | weekend per month of sports to community improvement instead. | Where I grew up, sports were a big part of life. Every | weekend the many fields and venues were full of people | working together (and competing). Just imagine if they could | all be organized to put their energy (just one weekend per | month) into goals that would benefit everyone in the area. | Perhaps military command structures and communication | processes could be of value here... | EUROCARE wrote: | I hope you're not thinking about forcing people into this - | and if not, what's stopping you from just starting the | initiative right now? | allendoerfer wrote: | You have just discovered collectivism. Individualism sounds | worse, but to my understanding is ultimately just an excess | of enlightment, which is _the better philosophy_ (tm). | privong wrote: | > Nobody knew at the time that Hubble was literally a KH-11 | class telescope, but one pointed the other way. The mirror | size and the ability to be carried in the shuttle was | probably to get some synergies out of those two projects. | | Along these lines, there's a lot of hearsay that the | technology that enabled JWST's mirrors, sun shade, etc. to be | folded up for launch and deployed once in space had already | been developed for military satellites. | omnicognate wrote: | Interesting. From brief googling, it sounds like there were | similarities/synergies, but "literally a KH11" is going a bit | far. | stevenjgarner wrote: | > Granted, there are some breakthroughs that come from military | research | | Like the Internet that you are using right now. | simonh wrote: | Sure, but that doesn't mean it would not be possible to | develop such technologies without military research. There's | nothing about people with guns that is necessary for | communications research. | | Having said that, I just posted across thread on why I think | we still need the people with guns, so if that's the case we | might as well take the incidental benefits where they come. | mulmen wrote: | Saying we should eliminate the military is the geopolitical | equivalent of rewriting your service from scratch. The | military-industrial complex is the system we have and know. | Another system might work but there is no reason to believe | the costs of developing it would be less than fixing bugs | in our current implementation. | stevenjgarner wrote: | 15 Core smart phone technologies with military origins [0]: | | 1. AI - Artificial intelligence | | 2. Cellular Communication Technology | | 3. Computers | | 4. CPU - Central Processing Units - Microprocessors | | 5. DRAM - Dynamic Random-Access Memory | | 6. DSP - Digital Signal Processing | | 7. GMR - Giant Magnetoresistance - Spintronics | | 8. GPS - Global Positioning Systems | | 9. HDD - Micro Hard Drive Storage or Hard Drive Disks | | 10. HTML Hypertext Markup Language and HTTP - Hypertext | Transfer Protocol | | 11. IC-Integrated Circuits | | 12. Internet | | 13. LCDs - Liquid-Crystal Displays | | 14. Li-ion - Lithium-Ion Batteries | | 15. Multi-Touch Screens | | Probably a good time to reprise the fascinating Steve Blank | presentation on "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" [1] | | [0] https://www.techevaluate.com/your-cell-phone-was-born-in- | the... | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo | badrabbit wrote: | > I like to imagine the possibilities if we stopped spending | money on military and instead spent it on research and science. | [edit - perhaps this is misunderstood as me suggesting money | spent on the telecope is wasted; quite the contrary, I'm | arguing that we should be spending MORE on efforts like this!] | | Stopped? Then you get invaded and there is no more space | program? We live in a world and when you are a country capable | if launching JWST you are also a country that needs defending | from other humans/countries. I do agree with making defense | less of a jobs program making middlemen criminally rich. | | You know, even if we could stop defense spending as a whole I | would say solving homelessness, health care and food security | is a higher priority. But still, space programs should get | their funding just not more than or taking away from helping | your own suffering citizens. | | I think the federal government competing in the private sector | in certain industries makes sense. In this case charging for | space based comms and launches and using that money to fund | space research makes sense. That aside the money should come | from research grants and funding academia is receiving already | if they are the ones using it. Of course, instead of reducing | defense spending, spending defense in space is better, it was | an arms race with russia after all that landed people on the | moon. | [deleted] | slowmovintarget wrote: | Sadly, we can look at Europe to see what happens. You end up | open to someone like Putin, looking to flatter their legacy. | | We need to do things like Elon is doing with SpaceX to | fundamentally change the economics of scientific efforts like | JWST. | | I think I disagree on food development research though. That | money goes straight to Monsanto and Bill Gates on making | copyrighted crops and pseudo-meat. How about we break up food | production monopolies and spend our money figuring out how to | have farmers compete. Put an end to subsidizing fuel crops. | Support food diversity to avoid monoculture vulnerabilities | (where a single disease can wipe out giant swaths of food | sources). We need less "progress" on agriculture, and more | restoration to healthy foods. | | Research on food distribution, yes. | | Research on fresh water supply, yes. | | The old ways for growing food aren't currently being used. We | don't rotate crops anymore. We do stupid things like growing | almonds in water-poor regions. We need to get back to growing | food for people to eat, instead of for giant monopolies to | "optimize." | [deleted] | njharman wrote: | A large portion, 23%, of military budget is paychecks, | healthcare, retirement for veterans. Tons more counting | employees of all the industries that make up the industry | portion of the military-industrial complex. | | A huge amount of the military budget is research and science. | | > some breakthroughs that come from military research | | rockets, jets, computers, encryption, RADAR, SONAR, internets, | canning/food preservation, weather prediction - that's just | things I know from being in tech (and knowing some history). | I'm sure if I was a chemist, materials scientist, engineer, or | doctor I'd be able to name tons more from those fields. | capableweb wrote: | > A large portion, 23%, of military budget is paychecks, | healthcare, retirement for veterans. | | Does it? I'm no military nor budgeting expert, but quick | search seems to say it's closer to ~5% of the total military | budget that goes to veterans, see https://watson.brown.edu/co | stsofwar/costs/economic/budget/ve... for one example | | 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. | hguant wrote: | I believe you're misreading the breakdown - I read that as | "23% of budget goes to personnel costs, which include | paychecks (for active duty), healthcare (for military and | their dependents until 26), and retirement for vets" | | 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. | runarberg wrote: | > Rockets. | | From the wikipedia of V-2 Rockets: | | > The world's first large-scale experimental rocket | program was Opel-RAK under the leadership of Fritz von | Opel and Max Valier, a collaborator of Oberth, during the | late 1920s leading to the first manned rocket cars and | rocket planes, | | Looks like rockets were invented before a global war | broke out with peaceful intentions, then the military | used that invention for violence, as a global war broke | out. | | Just because an invention is used for war doesn't mean it | required one to be invented. | hguant wrote: | >Looks like rockets were invented before a global war | broke out with peaceful intentions, then the military | used that invention for violence, as a global war broke | out. | | This presupposes that the V2 is the first use of rocketry | in history which...well, it's just not true. You | conveniently skipped over the bit about Congreve rockets, | which were invented in the late 18th/early 19th century, | explicitly for war, or the growing evidence about the use | of gunpowder rocketry in Imperial China. Both of these | uses were explicitly NOT peaceful. (not hargreve, I | misremembered in the OP post). | | Also, if you bother to read the article you referenced, | it makes it clear that literally nothing came of the | experiments apart from that book. It took a war to get | the funding and manufacturing resources available to | actually _do the work_ of advancing rocketry. | | EDIT: to sound less like an asshole and engage with the | comment on its face value. | runarberg wrote: | Technological inventions connect like a web. There is a | reason James Burke named his show " _Connections_ ". We | can move the goal post for any given invention wherever | we like, really. If V-2 wasn't invented for the military, | then we can simply move the goalpost such that we mean | another type of rocket, but make sure not to move it | sideways such that the invention could be used as a | transport propellant or for signalling. | | But I wish to step aside now and acknowledge how silly | this whole argument is--as most arguments are when it | comes to alternate history. Historically the military has | been the most well funded of all government enterprises | so it should come as no surprise that many innovations | happen under such well funded programs. But that does not | mean that is the only possible outcome. Humans kept | innovating and inventing even as funds were diverted to | non-violent endeavors. Today we have universities which | are well funded and engage in research, often handing out | their gathered knowledge to the rest of humanity (James | Webb space telescope can attest to this). Who know what | we would have invented already if it wasn't for the | military taking most of the attention of historic | societies? | kingaillas wrote: | >Those breakthroughs you mention, you think they wouldn't | have been made if it wasn't for the military? | | 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? | runarberg wrote: | > I don't think we'd have GPS (for example) without the | military, among other things like nuclear energy/weapons | and so on. | | I think you are wrong. Nations that don't have a military | (e.g. Iceland and Costa Rica) still build entire systems | of lighthouses, they chart the seas, they map their | mountains etc. Countries spend a lot of money into | civilian infrastructure. The ROI is in enriching local | industry. A GPS system is no bigger ask for civilians | then e.g. a railway network. In both cases the ROI is | huge for local industry. | | As for nuclear energy. A lot of the scientist working on | the bomb later became a huge proponents of non- | proliferation (J. R. Oppenheimer being a prominent | example). I think it is safe to say that the same | scientists would have been even happier to work on the | technology even if the motive was entirely peaceful. | swarnie wrote: | > rockets, jets, computers, encryption, RADAR, SONAR, | internets, canning/food preservation, weather prediction - | that's just things I know from being in tech (and knowing | some history). I'm sure if I was a chemist, materials | scientist, engineer, or doctor I'd be able to name tons more | from those fields. | | Half of those inventions come from other nations who dont | need to spend 800bn a year (or whatever it is now) + however | much the CIA makes from selling crack. | qorrect wrote: | > + however much the CIA makes from selling crack. | | 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. | swarnie wrote: | Don't you have the start of something similar with DARPA? | | Maybe that would be expanded and given a civilian role? | sorokod wrote: | I recently learned that US army supports breast cancer | research. | uoaei wrote: | Over 50% is contractors on bloated budgets. | [deleted] | theplumber wrote: | Unfortunately we live in a world with countries such Russia so | we have to invest in millitary too. | zo1 wrote: | Or America. Matter of perspective. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Invasions_by_the_Unit. | .. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni. | .. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involv. | .. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U. | .. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r. | .. | | I honestly didn't think I'd find that many Wikipedia pages | listing the different "types" of thing America has been | involved with. Wow. | asdff wrote: | We already more than outspend both russia and china on | defense. | tablespoon wrote: | > I like to imagine the possibilities if we stopped spending | money on military and instead spent it on research and science. | | You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more money to | spend on their military? | | And even if you did manage to zero out the military budget | without getting conquered, it's completely unreasonable to | think that money would be reallocated to "research and science" | in a democratic society. Almost all of it would go into stuff | like basic infrastructure, social programs, and maybe culture | war stuff. While comfortably employed geeks may sit in awe of | the pretty space pictures, most people have more quotidian | concerns they care far more about. | | So the fantasy is really one about a science-enthusiast world- | dictator securely protected by his secret police. | jylam wrote: | The US could spend 2 times less on military and still be the | biggest one in the world. And it as allies everywhere. | kbenson wrote: | Given how some think the lessening of US Navy projection of | power and securing shipping lanes around the world is | what's leading to global instability, and global stability | has been very good for US economics the last 50+ years, a | case can probably be made that at least some of that | military spending in the past was extremely effective and | useful. | | 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. | magicalist wrote: | > _lessening of US Navy projection of power_ | | While they continue to have more money allocated to them, | operational mishaps occur more often, and navies look | increasingly vulnerable in a real fight (see for instance | the Moskva). Clearly "at least some of that military | spending in the past was extremely effective and useful" | isn't sufficient guidance on how to continue spending | money. | willhslade wrote: | Can I just sidetrack this conversation? I've seen this new | neologism "2 times less", which I infer from context means | "half as much", and I don't like it. | elpatoisthebest wrote: | Unfortunately this is far from new. I tried fighting it | for years and just gave up. Save yourself the grief. We | already lost. | 867-5309 wrote: | it is bad grammar: you cannot use comparative adjectives | on uncountable nouns | | that said, when I read it I did not notice. my brain | automagically converted the phrase to half. the context | was not lost but it is murky territory | Jaruzel wrote: | Surely '2 times less' is minus 100% less, if the amount | originally spent is '1 times'? | | It's an illogical phrase to be sure. | nodespace wrote: | I think its like saying: | | "2 times (but instead of mutiplying do the oposite thing | that makes it smaller)" | | Is where the "logic" comes from. | | Hm, I bet this parses as well: | | "An hour is .5 times more then a half hour." | | Although not quite as well. | minhazm wrote: | I wonder if this is actually true in practice. I think many | of these countries, especially China & India are | incentivized to understate how much they actually spend on | their defense. Another factor is the cost of labor and | goods is so different that even though the US is spending | far more actual dollars, the actual output might not be as | big of a difference as these articles might have you | believe. | akiselev wrote: | Historically, countries almost never understate the | strength of their armed forces because that would invite | pointless conflicts with weaker adversaries. Unless the | former is looking for some casus belli to invade the | latter, it leads to the most pointless loss of life where | the latter never stood a chance anyway but the former has | to waste resources on the defense. | | I don't know how that calculus changes in the context of | modern superpowers or China's ambitions for Taiwan but | that's the reasoning historically. | [deleted] | signatoremo wrote: | How can you possibly know how much a country spent on | military to conclude they almost never understate their | funding? | | A perfect reason a country may understate their military | spending is to hide their capabilities. For that matter, | they may overstate their spending as well. | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | You have to ask yourself why a country would want to hide | (as in demote) their capabilities. | | Overstating their capabilities is perfectly | understandable. | [deleted] | epicureanideal wrote: | There's a paper I read recently that adjusts for | specifically military related purchasing power parity, in | which case China was spending about 50% and Russia about | 30% of the US. And of course in their region that might | mean a locally more capable military, or the inability of | the US to fight multiple wars simultaneously while | maintaining global freedom of navigation for shipping, etc. | DiogenesKynikos wrote: | At the point that you're talking about being able to | simultaneously fight the next two military powers right | in their respective backyards, you're no longer talking | about defense. | | As for freedom of navigation, China is also in favor of | that. It's their lifeblood. | deepdriver wrote: | >As for freedom of navigation, China is also in favor of | that. | | Sorta-kinda. It's complicated. | | Vietnam, the US, the Philippines and others have clashed | with China over the "Nine Dash Line." China-- and Taiwan, | oddly enough-- refuses to respect the ruling of the UN | Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Tribunal on | this matter. They've harassed other countries' fishing | vessels and maritime police in the region, sinking at | least one. There are ongoing tensions in the area between | China and other countries' navies. China asserts | sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, while | other countries and the UNCLOS disagree and assert their | right to freedom of navigation for military vessels. This | has implications for customs and maritime law | enforcement. | | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/07/chinese- | vietna... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line | SllX wrote: | Not so odd in the case of Taiwan: I like them, they're | _the_ China as far as I'm concerned the UN and State | Department be damned on this front, but it's worth | remembering that Taiwan officially does not see | themselves as just an island nation off the coast of | China. They claim the mainland, and all the island | territories held by the mainland, and even Mongolia and | some other land that the PRC has given up its claims to | to settle border disputes. They're not likely to back | down on any of their claims no matter how small. | | Some people in Taiwan might be willing to give that up in | exchange for a guarantee of independence but as far as I | know this is not at all a settled matter for them. It's | very much like North Korea/South Korea. | [deleted] | DiogenesKynikos wrote: | > China asserts sovereignty over almost the entire South | China Sea, while other countries and the UNCLOS disagree | and assert their right to freedom of navigation for | military and other countries' navies | | China does not object to transit through the South China | Sea. China objects to foreign military vessels entering | into the territorial waters within 12 miles of what it | considers its own islands. The US and its allies conduct | these "freedom of navigation" operations explicitly in | order to challenge Chinese sovereignty over said islands | and reefs. | | But what you're discussing here is sovereignty over a | certain set of islands and reefs that China (and several | other countries) claims, not freedom of navigation | through international waters. | SllX wrote: | A lot of our capabilities is simply being present | (overseas bases) and being able to move to a theater of | war (logistics). | | We are unlikely to ever fight a meaningful war with | either Canada or Mexico, at least there are no signs of | that ever being a possibility in my lifetime. Our | adversaries are pretty much all overseas, and I'm pretty | sure the Coast Guard could single-handedly defend against | the threat posed by a possible Cuban invasion. | | So we have to spend on logistics and overseas bases and | support infrastructure for those bases, in addition to | our nuclear arsenal, satellites, the War against rust, | communications technology, aircraft carriers, aircraft, | submarines and artillery and all manner of other things | which are intended to keep us in the lead in terms of | capabilities, effectiveness and deadliness. | tablespoon wrote: | > The US could spend 2 times less on military and still be | the biggest one in the world. And it as allies everywhere. | | 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.). | worker_person wrote: | Last president pushed hard for NATO counties to up their | military spending to agreed levels. Everyone laughed. | | 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. | z9znz wrote: | The same guy who thinks NATO should have been abolished | and who fawned over Putin? | | The guys like him and Putin are ignorant little boys who | will thankfully die off soon. We must try to find a | different path. | worker_person wrote: | Just drinking the Hillary kool-aid I see. | myko wrote: | This is revisionist/wrong. | | Obama also pushed for more spending in NATO - and got | commitments to do so as % of GDP. Growth was generally | higher but spending was moving towards the % committed | to. | | What the last guy did was tried to piss out allies off | and destroy NATO. Even then most in the US generally | agreed w.r.t defense spending, just thought he was going | about getting our allies to do it counter productively | and not recognizing the fact that they were spending more | (mostly from commitments made during Obama's 2 terms). | | Folks who worked with trump claim he was planning on | pulling the US out of NATO in his second term: | | https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-nato-pay- | fair-s... | https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/obama- | warns... | | https://www.businessinsider.com/bolton-putin-waiting-for- | tru... | https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us- | politic... | [deleted] | swarnie wrote: | > You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more | money to spend on their military? | | I think this stop being true in 1945. | tablespoon wrote: | > I think this stop being true in 1945. | | 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 | nabogh wrote: | I think they're referring to the nukes | swarnie wrote: | And how many invasions have you noted across the Bering | Straits since 1945? | | The world changed.... You dont need an 800bn standing | army any more. | moomin wrote: | Less true than you'd think. America outspends the rest of the | world by an incredible margin and could probably happily | halve its budget without being invaded by Canada or Mexico. | Many European countries have spectacularly (too) low levels | of defence spending and are still doing Ok, because they're | free-riding on NATO. Ukraine spent quite a lot, and spent it | well, but Russia's so much larger it doesn't make enough of a | difference. | | But yeah, there are many things we could better be spending | the defence budget on than galaxy formation research. | stuff4ben wrote: | You almost had it. The US spend a good portion of the | defense budget propping up NATO which is why European | countries can get by with spending less. Love him or hate | him, what Trump was trying to do in getting NATO to pull | its fair share in defense spending was a good idea. Sure | the US could spend waaay less and still ensure it won't get | invaded (they'd have to come by sea or from Canada or | Mexico). But Europe would piecemeal become part of a new | Russian or Chinese Union. | giantrobot wrote: | You almost had it. Obama during his two terms pushed | other NATO members to increase their spending to the 2% | GDP target. They agreed and set long term goals to | increase their spending and started to do so. | | Trump stupidly described other NATO members as "owing" | the US. Not only had several countries met their spending | goals by the end of the Obama admin most of the alliance | was on track with increased spending including targeted | equipment upgrade spending. Trump's complaints were that | other NATO members hadn't met their goals ahead of the | agreed upon schedule. This was going to be used for a | pretext for withdrawing the US from NATO. | | NATO funding is not a simple issue. There's direct and | indirect expenditures that "fund" NATO. It's not some | protection racket. Funding can be direct funding I.e. | military units/equipment maintained as a rapid response | force or indirect funding I.e. spending to upgrade or buy | equipment to keep up with the overall norms of the | alliance. | runarberg wrote: | > You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more | money to spend on their military? | | There is no proof of that, not historic or otherwise. In fact | there is evidence to the contrary, as previous times of less | military spending seem to correlate with more peaceful times. | Your claim on who lives in a fantasy world is entirely | unfounded, and one can just as easily state that your | description is the fantacy one. | signatoremo wrote: | > In fact there is evidence to the contrary, as previous | times of less military spending seem to correlate with more | peaceful times. | | 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. | runarberg wrote: | Just look at a graph of global military spending | interlaced with time-periods of relative global peace. | You will find a remarkable--but ultimately unsurprising-- | correlation. You will find for example that after the | Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, global | conflicts reduced dramatically along with less military | spending. | | Pre-industrialization, governments used to spend upwards | to 90% GDP on their military, and tiny countries existed | back then as they do today. Today there are quite a few | smaller countries (and a handful of medium sized ones) | that don't even have military at all. I think your | narrative of smaller countries being snapped up by bigger | ones is not a historic pattern at all. | marricks wrote: | Just a few thousand years ago we didn't spend huge parts of | our useful resources and lives on militaries. | | I really don't see how our imagination has shrunk so far that | we all participant and perpetuate this fantasy that a world | full of violence, much of which is created by the US, is the | world we must continue to live in. | deepdriver wrote: | Ancient Romans spent as much as 80% of their state budget | on the military. | | 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. | adgjlsfhk1 wrote: | comparing percent of federal spending is an odd way of | doing things since the scope of government has noticably | broadened. | deepdriver wrote: | Yes and no. The total economic pie was much smaller in | antiquity, limiting the potential maximum scope of | government. Even so, entitlement spending still took up | its share of ancient budgets: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae | swamp40 wrote: | 'Twas ever thus. | redblacktree wrote: | > While comfortable employed geeks may sit in awe of the | pretty space pictures, most people have more quotidian | concerns they care far more about. | | As the great Gil Scott-Heron once said: "A rat done bit my | sister, Nell with whitey on the moon." | tablespoon wrote: | > As the great Gil Scott-Heron once said: "A rat done bit | my sister, Nell with whitey on the moon." | | I didn't know the reference, but I found it: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nzoPopQ7V0 (2 min) | m12k wrote: | As William Gibson put it "The future is already here - | it's just not evenly distributed" | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | Probably the best application of that quote I've ever | seen :-) | asdff wrote: | So why isn't michigan conquering ohio or vice versa right | now? Why aren't the canadians from the hinterland coming in | to take over vancouver? Because they are "on the same side" | which is ultimately a meaningless political device. It's | still humans versus humans in michigan or ohio or the U.S. or | anywhere else. It stands to reason that one day we could | possibly be all on the same side, and we could have no fear | of conquest from our fellow humans, just like those humans | who are in michigan have no fear of conquest by ohioans | today. In that world, having an advanced military would be | about as useless as an ohio police department having ICBMs. | ericmcer wrote: | I less agree that we would get conquered without a huge | military. Hard agree about the social stuff though, in order | to satisfy us we require exactly more than whatever we have | at that moment, so spending on social well-being is | limitless. | [deleted] | adriand wrote: | > You'd get conquered and your conqueror would have more | money to spend on their military? [...] So the fantasy is | really one about a science-enthusiast world-dictator securely | protected by his secret police. | | I think that's a failure of imagination, and that vision | isn't one that history necessarily supports. 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. I am also | certainly capable of imagining a world government that is | responsive to the needs of people, maintains global peace and | security, and focuses the vast majority of its budget towards | constructive, not destructive, ends. | | I recognize that this doesn't look likely in the immediate | future, but: | | - An alternative consisting of warring nations equipped with | civilization-ending weapons is surely not the only path | forward (it better not be, if we hope to stick around). | | - We are increasingly faced with existential problems that | require a globally coordinated response. | | - Change often happens a lot faster than we think possible. | The order of things is set in stone until suddenly it's | washed away and everything is different. | no-dr-onboard wrote: | > 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. | | 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 :/. | qclibre22 wrote: | "We haven't tried real pacifism before" | iratewizard wrote: | Imagining a world government as anything but dystopian is a | failure of imagination | uoaei wrote: | Pretty much the opposite is true, by definition of the | word "imagination". | JohnBooty wrote: | 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. | | Empathy and compassion. | | 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. | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | Every thread on JWST starts this flamewar. | prox wrote: | A nice dream is to think what would happen when the budget of | the environmental agencies would switch with the military | globally. Imagine having 800 billion a year to fix things! | dmichulke wrote: | 800bn just for the US, that is | ncmncm wrote: | More than everybody else combined. | | Not that we get that much for the money: probably most of | it is simple (wholly-legal!) graft, as with NASA's SLS | rocket. | simonh wrote: | What we get for the money is a whole lot of aggressive | expansionist wars, all over the world, that never happen. | Unfortunately some still manage to slip through the net, | like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the Russian | invasion of Ukraine, but if the west generally didn't | spend a whole ton on military preparation I believe we'd | see an awful lot more of those sorts of conflicts | everywhere. Here's a historical graph of deaths from | warfare. | | https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war- | casualties-600-yea... | | You can see that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, | deaths per population from warfare dropped off a cliff. | Unfortunately deterrence is hard to quantify because it's | about making things not happen. | DiogenesKynikos wrote: | We also get all sorts of aggressive wars and foreign | interventions from the US and its allies. Iraq, Libya and | Yemen come to mind. | simonh wrote: | When what you have is a hammer... but that isn't an | argument for not having a hammer in your toolbox. | Nevermark wrote: | Unfortunately, the spending also provided a huge military | comfortably capable of over-responses and misdirection in | the context of small but dramatic threats. | | A vast amount of US "defense" spending since 9/11 has | been a "war on money" in the form of massive unending | offensive plays against countries that had/have | undesirable aspects, but that didn't declare war on the | US. | haupt wrote: | It's certainly a dream. It would require some type of | worldwide disarmament agreement since any power that had a | military could ostensibly bully the ones that did not (and | just take what they wanted). | colechristensen wrote: | >And honestly, we should be spending $$$$ on food development | research. We're going to need to know how to grow food in new | ways soon, as the old ways have reached their limits. Food | seems kind of important... | | Eh, not really. | | A whole lot of the world's agriculture is done far from | optimally. Funding agriculture university programs in Africa | with extension programs like the land grant universities in the | US would do great things. Disseminating information, tools, and | capital for "third world" farms is the best thing that can be | done for global food supplies. | z9znz wrote: | Being a bit selfish here, I'm talking about _my food_. And | given what we've seen in the last few years involving supply | chain disruptions (even the local ones in NL when the angry | farmers try to block the grocery store distribution centers), | it's clear to me that the best way to ensure food | availability is to grow it locally. | | Every region that is currently dependent upon remotely grown | food must learn how to grow more of their food locally. Maybe | these will be high efficiency vertical farms, or maybe | something else. But "merely" improving the efficiency of | farming half a world away isn't going to be enough. And | further, our current "efficient" farming is unsustainable. | Our high output methods are causing many negative effects, | not the least of which is soil quality degredation. Our soils | are near barren and require immense additives (fertilizers) | to enable us to continue high yield farming. And returning to | the supply chain topic, fertilizer availability is on that | list. | fritztastic wrote: | I agree, decentralization of food production is critical to | sustainable and reliable food production. Some places even | have community compost centers where people bring their | scraps and can get compost for their gardens. | | 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. | JohnBooty wrote: | This sounds like the folks who say, "What if we stopped paying | for NASA and spent that money on our citizens instead?" | | I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think it often lacks | nuance/insight. Money spent on NASA _does_ stay in our economy. | It provides jobs, funds research, etc. There are pros and cons | to doing it this way as opposed to giving it to our people | directly. I like to imagine the possibilities | if we stopped spending money on military and instead | spent it on | | Money spent on the military is not removed from the economy. It | stays in the economy. | | Some of that money directly goes right back into science via | taxes. Other bits of it fund companies that do both research | and military development. Other bits of that money fund college | educations for tomorrow's science-doers. Etc. | TedShiller wrote: | That's cool but feeding hungry people might be even more amazing | to be honest | mden wrote: | True, but achieving that sustainably is a problem at least 2 | orders of magnitude more difficult. Let's take the wins where | we can. | dougmwne wrote: | I think this is a very counterproductive attitude. It shuts | down the possibility of all art and science till we hit the | goal of "nobody starves." But then it is super easy to move | those goalposts. "Nobody is homeless", "nobody is poor", | "nobody is suffering" and so on. | | And it is this very science that has provided so much more | wealth and quality of life. Without it we would still be blown | in the winds of famines and plagues. | | So you could say, no science that does not solve plagues. But | then we would not have funded Computer Science and we would not | have AlphaFold. You could say no to astronomy, deciding it is | specifically worthless, but then you might be saying no to the | fundamental physics discovery that doubles global carrying | capacity or solves green energy production. | | This is also very much ignoring the fact that hunger is | political, not technical or financial. We have plenty of food, | but no way to distribute it in a politically tenable way. | falseprofit wrote: | So feed them. | aunty_helen wrote: | How is that going to meet scientific goals? | TedShiller wrote: | If you're starving, surviving is more important than | scientific goals | aunty_helen wrote: | You're right. We should make sure everyone lives in a | utopia without suffering before we try to make any progress | as a race together. | TedShiller wrote: | I wouldn't call not going hungry "utopia". | gjs278 wrote: | mupuff1234 wrote: | Isn't it worth it to launch another one? Wouldn't the cost be | minimal given that zero R&D is required? | dhosek wrote: | Why build just one when for twice the price you could have two? | Hallucinaut wrote: | Ha I just made a similar comment. A fellow Contact fan I see! | dhosek wrote: | I adapted the line when my twins were born. | BeefWellington wrote: | This reminds me of that time NASA was just gifted two unused | hubble-sized telescopes by the NRO[1]. | | [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- | science/nasa-... | mulmen wrote: | Makes sense. Hubble is believed to be an adapted KH-11. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN | zaarn wrote: | Barely worth to launch another one. It would be more cost | effective to invest some R&D into building a telescope with a | different target wavelength to get more science than if you had | two of the same telescope. The engineers will also absolutely | want to fix any issues they found in Webb already. | aalleavitch wrote: | The degree to which science has advanced since the Webb | project started can't be understated either. We have a | fundamentally better understanding of the technology | available and what we even want to look at. Much better to | simply move onto the next project, of which there are | currently very many. | noelrock wrote: | Was going to reply along these lines. I was fortunate to | live with someone who was working on the James Webb and | telling me excitedly about it -- back in 2006! Surely even | with the various upgrades/spec changes/delays, things have | moved sufficiently that whatever is started even today will | be a marked upgrade. | | In any event, many many areas to aim at, and relatively | limited funding unfortunately. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | What's the next project? Roman [1] doesn't seem as | groundbreaking as Webb was. | | [1] https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/ | __alexs wrote: | In 20 years we'll be talking about: | | * LISA: LIGO In Space (Amazing!). | | * LUVOIR: JWST but even bigger and UV. | adgjlsfhk1 wrote: | LISA is incredibly cool! | sbierwagen wrote: | I'd like to see a deep space version of the Gaia | astrometry space telescope. | | It measures the parallax shift of stars, and is basically | the one reliable way of directly measuring how far away a | star is from us. Unfortunately, it's at L2, and therefore | has a baseline of 1 AU. Another Gaia way out at 20AU | would have capacities no Earth-based telescope could ever | have. | mulmen wrote: | This seems like the kind of thing where two would | _actually_ be useful. Is there any benefit to making both | observations at the same time? Or are the scales so great | that it doesn 't really matter? | sbierwagen wrote: | You'd almost certainly want to launch several. You get | one data point per half-orbit, when you're at opposite | sides of the Sun. This is tolerable for the Earth, where | an orbit is one year. But a full orbit out at 20AU takes | eighty four years! Collecting a useful number of samples | with one spacecraft would take centuries, while two | spacecraft in opposition on the same orbit can measure | parallax instantly. | lkbm wrote: | I somehow didn't realize we already had pre-Webb stuff at | L2. Luckily, Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.o | rg/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po... | aalleavitch wrote: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_space_ob | ser... | adgjlsfhk1 wrote: | There has been a lot of work on earth based telescopes | (eg the 30 meter, giant Magellan, and some array based | telescopes) that are going online in the next decade. | ncmncm wrote: | Are superior terrestrial 'scopes even possible, anymore, | with Starlink interference getting worse each week? | | Serious question. Or can its interference be filtered out | effectively? | SiempreViernes wrote: | Yes they are very much possible, and cheaper than space | too. | | What starlink does is ruin part of the images, and if the | thing you were interested in observing happens to be | blocked by a starlink trail you're hosed: a thing | literally blocked what you tried to see and you lost the | nigh (because usually you get just a bit of the a night | for your observation). Other things that ruins your night | is clouds, so starlink effectively makes the weather at a | site worse, only you find out _after_ the night that it | was all a waste. | | To some extent you can plan around it, but as the mega | constellations grow they'll have to avoid each other more | frequently and there's no rules for how that shits | coordinated, so you maybe you can know in advance that | the night is wasted. | | But the risk that a satellite is in an undocumented orbit | by the time you try to observe will likely be very high | in the future. | dotnet00 wrote: | For the most part, yes, with adaptive optics and | corrective measures being taken to deal with more | satellites in orbit, ground telescopes are superior or at | least comparable to space telescopes given their ability | to be much larger. | | Space telescopes these days are primarily being designed | for observations that simply can't be done while in the | atmosphere (eg the wavelengths JWST and NGR look at). The | value of a space telescope in the same wavelength range | as what ground based telescopes usually use would mainly | benefit in terms of being able to have much longer | exposures. | wumpus wrote: | Yes, there are many kinds of science which can be done | more cheaply from the ground. | | Even considering the effect of Starlink. | maskedinvader wrote: | My understanding is ground based telescopes imaging in | the same wavelengths also have to deal with distortion in | the atmosphere, star link interference would be easier to | filter out compared to the other stuff (which is why | locations for these mega ground based telescopes are | chosen with utmost care ) | | Disclaimer. Not a physicals or astronomer, just a | enthusiastic backyard amateur astronomer who reads a lot | about telescopes . | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Both of these would be groundbreaking, but they're still | very much at the "Maybe..." stage. | | https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-might-put-a-huge- | telescope-... | code_biologist wrote: | Paul Sutter has a great astronomy and physics podcast | called "Ask a Spaceman". His "Five Exciting Missions | After James Webb" episode (20 min) got me really excited | for the future: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiYVsoxbxAI | jacquesm wrote: | This one is probably my favorite: | | https://www.space.com/nasa-telescope-far-side-of-moon.html | | Though I'm not sure if it will ever be built. | mulmen wrote: | Even if such a device never made an observation or | discovery the experience of building it and making it | operational would be worthwhile. | Phrenzy wrote: | I wonder if they have a list of craters already picked | out. | foobarian wrote: | I wonder how feasible it would be to count on Starship to | succeed, so that each flight could deliver one hexagonal | mirror segment, eventually culminating in a giant composite | mirror | delecti wrote: | Based on how JWST folded up, the width of the hexagonal | segments is already a sizable chunk of its overall launch | diameter. Doing what you suggest could absolutely result in | a bigger overall telescope, but the complexity would be | increased vastly more than the overall telescope diameter. | ncmncm wrote: | You would not need to fold it at all. Instead, launch | dozens of Webb-scale scopes for a fraction of the price, | able to point in that many directions at once. | delecti wrote: | I don't think you understood what I meant. If you launch | the segments by themselves, the width of a single segment | would still be limited to the internal diameter of the | launch vessel, we're not going to just bolt a naked | mirror to the front of a rocket. | | If you compare how the JWST was folded, the width of the | individual segments was already close to the maximum | allowable diameter of the launch vessel. Leaving the rest | of that launch vessel empty won't get you a much bigger | final mirror. | ncmncm wrote: | I understood perfectly. | | Starship is 9 meters wide. | vasco wrote: | > Barely worth to launch another one | | How do you figure? A fleet of space telescopes research teams | could interact with through an API without much cost and zero | approval, would for sure advance science by a lot. I find it | weird to see a statement like this, so maybe you have | something else in mind. It's a stretch to go from "building a | different one would give new classes of insights" to "having | more people being able to use this thing we only have 1 of a | kind is barely worth it". | Hallucinaut wrote: | "Why build one when you could build two for twice the | cost?" | falseprofit wrote: | The cost is nothing next to what we spend on war | [deleted] | divbzero wrote: | There aren't plans to launch an identical telescope. Perhaps | the costs of manufacturing and testing are high enough that we | might as well launch a different telescope with different | capabilities? | | The Roman Space Telescope is a wide field instrument that is | now under development and slated to launch in 2026 [1]. The | Astro2020 decadal survey from the National Academies also | recommended "a large (~6m diameter) | Infrared/Optical/Ultraviolet space telescope" to observe | exoplanets [2]. | | [1]: https://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-falcon-heavy-to-launch- | ro... | | [2]: | https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/26141/interactive... | [deleted] | digdugdirk wrote: | An absolute ton of the cost of this was down to the extremely | precise manufacturing required to make it. Some of that would | be reduced now that they've made it once, but we're still | talking about one-off components here. It won't be an order of | magnitude. | | One thing I am curious about is how many spare parts were | produced - in small scale high precision manufacturing like | this there's often multiples of components produced, with only | the highest spec components shipped out. What could we cobble | together with the rejects and leftovers? And what would that | give us, results wise? | structural wrote: | This is actually where NASA gets a significant amount of | hardware: manufactured parts from intelligence programs that | were the rejects from those production lines. Hubble was a | prime example of this, but there are many others. | SiempreViernes wrote: | You got any source for that claim? | themitigating wrote: | Why does he need proof? People always say government is | bad and evil therefore can't you just "feel" this is | true? | | Now take this as a fact and next time someone makes an | accusation use it to show a history. | Gustomaximus wrote: | I would assume at least one duplicate part, as when a friend | made a component for a sattelite he had to build a second so | they had an identical part on earth to study/test in case of | later issues. | | I'm guessing this is standard practise. | jeffnappi wrote: | For example check out this video from Smarter Every Day[1] | | Measuring the sun shield alone was a 5+ year long project. | | [1] https://youtu.be/Pu97IiO_yDI | elicash wrote: | I'm reminded of this quote from the movie Contact: "First | rule in government spending: why build one when you can have | two at twice the price?" | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ2nhHNtpmk | themitigating wrote: | Didn't that work out for them in the film because some | crazy person blew up the first one? | totallyblasted wrote: | One of the best films ever made! | nickff wrote: | The other huge cost drivers are testing and calibration. Even | if you have all the parts to make another one, you'll spend a | lot on expensive labor to put it together, tune, calibrate, | and verify it. | somat wrote: | I think the ship has sailed on that one, the time to make(and | test) a second one would have been at the same time the first | was being manufactured. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | First rule in government spending: why build one when you can | have two at twice the price? | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et4sMJP9FmM | chess_buster wrote: | This burned into my brain when I was a teenager. | [deleted] | [deleted] | ajuc wrote: | Wait for starship, make a new bigger one that doesn't have to | fold like crazy fragile origami, manufacture and send 10 of | them for the price of making and sending this one. | peter303 wrote: | LUVOIR is a foldable mirror telescope, larger than JWST, UV to | near IR, like Hubble. Congress has a bad test in mouth from | JWST delays and overruns. Pehaps dozens of majornew discoveries | will help. | | Roman is next in queue with many of its parts already built and | operational around 2028. | BurningFrog wrote: | Scientifically: probably | | Politically: no | TIPSIO wrote: | It would be so cool to have a Google Earth / zoom-like | experience of everywhere you can see, like this: | | https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-... | 6510 wrote: | Then have various tiers of telescopes that you can hire to | zoom in on a spot. | causi wrote: | Launching another one wouldn't let Bell and Northrop extract a | 2,000% budget overrun so it's not gonna happen. | bmitc wrote: | There's no way the cost would be minimal. I would even wager | that it would be just as or more expensive to build a duplicate | than to build a new design based upon what was learned. Given | the decades over which the James Webb Telescope was developed, | it has parts and designs in it that are, well, decades old. | | And the bill of materials is unlikely to have been the primary | cost factor. Extensive research, development, and testing was | performed. | _joel wrote: | I'd be keener to see some of the larger diameter rockets coming | online soon be used as a housing. 9m to play with there and | perhaps with NASA's amazing origami skills then that could | really open the door to some huge space telescopes. | moffkalast wrote: | Yeah I think they'll be building LUVOIR with the tooling and | software designed for the Webb, but much larger so it fits | into Starship/SLS and for a wider range of wavelengths. | Rastonbury wrote: | Anyone know how much of a difference are due to post processing | of images when comparing webb and hubble? For example in the | image of NGC7496 galaxy, Webb has more resolution right, but did | they make the colours more intense/shifted, or are these pictures | a sort of representative of what we could see with our eyes | | https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2022/07/NGC749... | krisoft wrote: | > are these pictures a sort of representative of what we could | see with our eyes | | The JWST sees in infrared. Our eyes don't. This makes it not | representative of what we would see with our eyes. | Rastonbury wrote: | So when comparing Webb and Hubble images, we cannot rule out | that the colours have been enhanced in post processing and | comparisons taken with a grain of salt? | biorach wrote: | Hubble images are also frequently "enhanced". | | 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 | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | False color images are common in astronomy as they're | working with spectrum ranges wider than our eyes. There's | nothing about this that requires a grain of salt style | skepticism. | 8note wrote: | The colours are arbitrary anyways. Thanks to redshift, they | represent distance in time and space away. | magicalhippo wrote: | Though I suppose if one has the distance one could shift | back to the color it would be without redshift. Kinda | tricky with light from multiple sources in a single pixel | of course, and I'm not sure it would be terribly exciting | overall. | | Still, would be interesting I think. | whatshisface wrote: | There is no naked eye picture to compare it with, so you | can't say enhanced. To answer your question, though, the | JWST pictures and the Hubble pictures were turned into RGB | images in the same way. | BurningFrog wrote: | The Webb pics would be invisible to humans without | enhancing the colors. | | Though most things probably look pretty similar in visible | light. | simonh wrote: | The main problem with visible light is it's absorbed and | scattered by dust. It's Webb's ability to see through all | that dust in the IR spectrum that reveals a huge amount | of information and images Hubble and our eyes would never | be able to see. | laxd wrote: | I feel like "what would it look like if I was there with my | own eyes?" is a question that is decreasingly interesting the | more you think about it. | | Your wall would look very different depending on whether the | sun or your lamp shines on it. Or maybe you're in complete | darkness? | | What does the sun look like up close? Your eyes would | malfunction. | | A picture could look very different depending on lens and | camera settings. | | Your perception could be very different from that of someone | who has just woke up in a dark room, walked in from the sun, | or peaking on acid. | | I guess "convey information" would be an important principle | to both brains and astronomists. | infogulch wrote: | To anyone wondering how the sausage is made I recommend this | video [1] by Nebula Photos who reprocessed the same raw data | that NASA used to create the released nebula picture. At around | 19m he talks about how he arranges the images in layers based | on the wavelength of the filter that was used during its | capture. | | About false color... Real things in the universe have real | color -- they emit light in a variety of wavelengths -- even | when that color is outside of the perceptual range of your | eyes. The colorized photos like the ones released by NASA or | Nebula Photos just expose the real relative color differences | present in the original data, just shifted into a range that is | you are able to perceive. "false color" images are definitely | _not_ someone taking a colored pencil to a black and white | photo of a nebula and "coloring it in" to look nice, the | colors are actually meaningful and give you more information | about everything that the telescope actually detected than what | a black and white photo could show alone. | | [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVuonz26P0w | jakear wrote: | All the colors are false, it's imaging inferred. | TremendousJudge wrote: | But aren't the percieved colors redshifted? Aren't these | "false color" images just blueshifting the colors back to a | visible light image, which is how they would look if they | were moving at the same relative speed as us? | jakear wrote: | Roughly speaking sure, but the color mapping function they | used just paints the longest wavelength the telescope can | see "red" and the shortest "violet". No attempt is made to | properly "undo" redshifting. | | 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-... | heavenlyblue wrote: | It does seem like the redshift would need to be fixed on | a star-by-star basis depending on how far away is the | star. | falseprofit wrote: | I think you mean galaxy-by-galaxy. | adgjlsfhk1 wrote: | depends on the observation. Anything in our galaxy or | nearby galaxies is actual infra-red light at the source. | giantrobot wrote: | That is not true. The light reaching us from most objects | in our and nearby galaxies is pretty close to the | original wavelength emitted. It takes extremely relative | velocity to red shift for visible wavelengths to shift to | infrared. | | Most stellar objects emit a whole bunch of wavelengths of | light, some emit _more_ IR than visible. Interstellar | dust doesn 't red shift light due to velocity but because | the molecules absorb higher energy photons and re-emit | lower energy photons. | z9znz wrote: | Politely suggesting that false has some negative | connotations, perhaps "artificial" would be a better word... | or even illustrative or representational. | jefftk wrote: | "False" is the traditional word here: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color | z9znz wrote: | Fair enough. Then it's really a matter of intended | audience. It is a correct technical term for the color- | domain educated audience. Could be that I'm one of the | few outside that audience, but probably not :). | | The wikipedia article does note that pseudo-color is an | alternative, and that carries less generally negative | connotation. | | This is all nitpicking anyway, but thanks for the bit of | education! | | [added - although now I can pick at the definition of | "true color", since it is based on the idea of how a | color would appaer to a human viewer. We know pretty well | that there's quite a variance of perception of color | amongst humans, so there arguably is no "true color". | There's just X% of people see this color. :) ] | lapetitejort wrote: | For a similar term that can confuse outside audiences, | see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_force | lattalayta wrote: | Would love for someone to correct me if I'm wrong - but isn't | this similar to how we look at nightvision or other heat | seeking camera images? We falsely color them so that the | temperature ranges are visible in the image, but it's not | something that our human eyes perceive. | visarga wrote: | > or are these pictures a sort of representative of what we | could see with our eyes | | Webb can do "imaging spectroscopy", where it can take an image, | but it will take a spectrum and every pixel of the image as | well. In imaging spectroscopy, there is information on the | spectrum of wavelengths present in each tiny piece of the | image. This can help clue scientists in as to what elements or | chemicals might have created that spectrum. | | https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-hubble-imag... | peanutz454 wrote: | The pictures are rarely what you will see with the human eyes | (not as much colour). | giantrobot wrote: | First, all astronomy PR images are edited to _look_ good to | normal people. Sharpness is enhanced to bring out fine details | and wavelengths are mapped to attractive colors to make an | attractive composite. If you are a scientist working with data | from Hubble or Webb you 're working on the raw data and ignore | the PR images entirely. The PR images are derived from the | scientific data but they are not themselves scientific. | | Both Hubble and Webb also take observations with fairly narrow | filters. In a PR image these essentially grayscale images are | mapped to a color channel, red, green, or blue. The wavelength | mapped to the "red" channel might be a mix of 650nm and 600nm | filters. This blend will not look like what your eye would see | but makes for a pretty desktop wallpaper. | | Webb in particular only sees in the IR bands which your eye | can't see. Making a PR images from Webb images arbitrarily maps | IR wavelengths to RGB channels. | | That's not to say a researcher won't filter and process the raw | data. But their goal is to extract useful scientific | information and not just produce an attractive image. They'll | spend more time looking at graphs from the raw data than the | actual 2D array of pixels. | | For instance, if you know the composition for an object you | know what it's spectra should look like. If you compare that | spectra to what's received you can calculate the red shift of | every pixel. Doing this for the whole image can then let you | tell the red shift of an entire object giving an idea of its | proper motion relative to us. For say a nebula this can show | how it's moving and give an understanding of its 3D structure | even though the images are all 2D. | | I don't mean to disparage the PR images. They can often be used | to explain phenomena to non-experts (not that I'm an expert). | But they're never really going to show what the human eye might | see, most stellar objects would look like mostly diffuse white | blobs even "up close". Most things emit a number of wavelengths | which just mix and look white to us. It's only with narrow band | filters that telescopes can actually pick out fine details of | most objects. | O__________O wrote: | Are the plans for the future use of the telescope public? | zaarn wrote: | NASA generally publishes the telescope time allocations to my | knowledge, you can atleast find the allocations for the next | year already on the internet. | Cerium wrote: | Yes, you can see the observing schedule and a list of approved | programs: | | https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/observing-sched... | | https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-progra... | _joel wrote: | Yes, they plan the year in advance. All submissions for time | are based on anonymous proposals too so there's no bias in | selection, plus they're open to the public so amateur | astronomers that have the skill to be able to write such a | proposal, can get time on it, just the same as any other | instituion. | ISL wrote: | I'd encourage those with the skill to do so to apply for | telescope time. A friend of mine, with no prior observational | experience, had a good idea for a Chandra observation, | applied in partnership with an astronomer, and got the time | necessary to make the measurement. | | It really does happen. | | Things like a Sagan 'pale blue dot' image would be a longer | shot, but astronomers are humans, too -- if there's a _very | cool_ and human idea out there, the committees might be | receptive there. (i.e., catching the glint of light off a | Mars Observer solar panel or some such thing). | ars wrote: | Is it capable of seeing Pioneer, or is that way too small? | ISL wrote: | My guess is that it is too small, but the RTG _is_ | warm.... :). | sbierwagen wrote: | The JWST call for proposals page is here: https://jwst- | docs.stsci.edu/jwst-opportunities-and-policies/... | lordalch wrote: | My understanding is that due to Webb's location at L2, it | can never point back at the Earth, because that would | basically be pointing directly at the sun. | sbierwagen wrote: | I read that as meaning "Pale blue dot" in the sense that | Carl Sagan wasn't a professional astronomer or a NASA | employee, he just said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you | tried taking a photo of Earth from the Pioneer probe" and | they did it. | ISL wrote: | Sagan was a professional astronomer in Cornell's | astronomy department, but his rationale for making the | pale-blue-dot image was less as a scientific endeavor and | more as a way to tell us more about ourselves. | | Incidentally, there was a lot more to that imaging | campaign -- Voyager captured a "Family Portrait" of our | solar system as its last imaging hurrah: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Portrait_(Voyager) | _joel wrote: | It also can't be pointed as the the optics need to be | actively cooled, hence the giant sunshield and cooling | pumps, so it'll never point towards earth/sun | Aperocky wrote: | Depend on what you mean by public, if made publicly available | to universities after claims and research proposals, great. | General public is probably a bad idea and waste of resources. | wumpus wrote: | The general public can submit an observation proposal, which | will then have to compete with all of the other proposals in | peer review. | dhritzkiv wrote: | I think the parent poster meant is there a timeline/roadmap | of future milestones/missions that are publicly available | dylan604 wrote: | The plans are to view things in space. Is that not publicly | known? | | But in seriousness, if the observation schedule is going to be | listed publicly, I'd imagine it would be on the Space Telescope | Science Institute's website as they are in charge of the | telescope's usage. | | https://www.stsci.edu/jwst | caycep wrote: | that being said, I feel like there's going to be a ton of | datasets to be mined for some time. When I was a summer intern in | ~2000, they were still writing papers out of Viking data from the | '70s | mrtri wrote: | seanhunter wrote: | I couldn't believe that first image. You could clearly see the | gravitational lensing causing the light to form arcs. Even for | someone who knows nothing about astronomy it was super exciting. | ycombinete wrote: | Apparently some of those discs were the same galaxy see in | multiple places due to the power of the lensing? | thamer wrote: | Yes, and they confirmed it was the same galaxy using | spectroscopy: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images | /2022/035/01G... | londons_explore wrote: | Presumably the path lengths are probably not identical... | That means we might be able to see the same galaxy twice at | different points in time? | | That should be a really good way to check our models are | accurate! | jagraff wrote: | This has actually been done before - scientists have been | able to image the same supernova multiple times from a | gravitationally lensed galaxy: | https://www.universetoday.com/151581/astronomers-saw-the- | sam... | leeoniya wrote: | i read somewhere recently that this difference in path | lengths can be measured in days, depending on distance | and how off-center the lensing is. | victor9000 wrote: | Interesting, it should be theoretically possible to use | gravitational lensing to view a past version of earth, | no? | beckingz wrote: | You would probably need a telescope larger than earth to | do this. | Spare_account wrote: | Using interferometery of orbiting observatories | (potentially on solar orbits, to leverage the entire | diameter of the solar system), this is conceivably | possible | mortehu wrote: | Is there anything we can do deliberately to use | gravitational lensing other than aiming a telescope at a | part of the sky where this is happening by random chance? | superposeur wrote: | I seem to remember an astronomer mentioning that it is | possible to interfere the light from gravitationally lensed | double images. Lacking appropriate intuition, this would be | amazing for me as I'd think the photons would lose coherence | over the course of their multi billion light year journeys | (but maybe not?). Does anyone know about this? | api wrote: | Photons travel at c, so don't they experience no time? | Wouldn't they be zero old? | HPsquared wrote: | Interferometry is common in radio telescopes, and was the | method used in the recent imaging of a black hole by the | Event Horizon Telescope, which used interferometry between | multiple telescopes on different sides of the earth. It's | also used a bit in optical telescopes, but harder to do. | Basically yes, interference can still be used even over | these extreme distances. The speed of light is pretty exact | I suppose! | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer | whekdhek wrote: | It's a nice image, but it's not the first time we've seen | something like that pretty clearly. | https://news.uchicago.edu/story/gravitational-lens-reveals-d... | drexlspivey wrote: | Gravitational lensing was how general relativity was "proven" | back in 1919 [1] (4 years after publication). Einstein had | predicted this weird effect but it was impossible to see in | action because the only observable object massive enough to | cause lensing was the sun and you cannot take a picture of | it. In 1919 they managed to take a picture of the sun during | a total sun eclipse which showed the effect clearly. | | [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how- | the-1919-s... | jffry wrote: | It's not even the first time this little bit of the sky has | been imaged by one of our space telescopes, but that makes | the image no less beautiful. | | It's really cool to see all the additional, older galaxies | visible in JWST's infrared which were not previously visible | to Hubble! | 867-5309 wrote: | I wonder if it's additive/accumulative i.e. every star in the | galaxy lends itself to the effect, or if it comes mainly from | the SMBH at the centre of the galaxy, or a combination of both? | throwaway64643 wrote: | I guess it's mostly from dark matter. | TedShiller wrote: | I'm not sure that assessment is accurate | falseprofit wrote: | What part? | jacobedawson wrote: | "The telescope's first public image shows a cluster of | galaxies called SMACS 0723, which is so heavy it warps and | magnifies the light from distant galaxies beyond it." | TedShiller wrote: | This is accurate. However, it wouldn't be just based on the | assessment of someone who knows nothing about astronomy. | seanhunter wrote: | I said it was exciting for me as someone who didn't know | about astronomy. I'm very amply qualified to make that | assessment. Gravitational lensing and how it shows in | images is something I learned about by attending a | lecture. | [deleted] | Linda703 wrote: ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-25 23:00 UTC)