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.
These kinds of observations have frequently been made for lensed quasars. Quasars are fairly stochastic and have random bursts in their brightness. If you see multiple images of the same quasar, you can see one of the images get brighter and then some time later (usually of order days) you can see the other image get brighter.
By measuring the time delay and the separations between the images you can get an estimate of the Hubble constant.
You would need a gravitational lens so powerful it not only bent light, but made the light perform a complete slingshot around it so that it would be aimed back at Earth. The nearest such object is the Milky Way's black hole, and there's no way we'd be able to resolve Earth in an image coming from a) that far away and b) that close to the galactic core where so much other stuff is in the way.
But could a photon make such a journey? Yes. But you'd never be able to recognize it against everything else.
To correct myself, because I didn't actually bother to check first, there are actually black holes or probable black holes closer than the center of the galaxy. Like, a lot closer. [1] And we've seen a lensing effect from at least one of them. And moreover that one happens to be isolated from other material. [2]
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?
Using interferometery of orbiting observatories (potentially on solar orbits, to leverage the entire diameter of the solar system), this is conceivably possible
That's pretty amazing, I'd certainly not expect more than a small time shift since it still managing to get the same light source to the same location to be detected.
The lensed light has generally traveled for billions of years, and wound up being separated by thousands of light years before the gravitational lensing. Two paths taking days apart DOES count as only a small time shift!
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?
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!
Interesting, thanks for the links. Looking at them, though, it would appear that the two "paths" being interfered differ in length on the order of the separation between the two telescopes -- i.e. meters or kilometers -- rather than astronomical distances. Using the speed of light, this corresponds to a difference in flight time of the light on the order of nanoseconds or seconds. I can imagine how the light traversing the two paths could remain unmolested by stray random, environmental phase shifts during such short times (necessary if you want them to interfere). On the other hand, the double images in the photo would have a difference in flight times of years? But, again, I don't really understand precisely what the astronomer was referring to, or have proper intuition for the conditions of space through which astronomical photons travel...
True that, but from the point of view of an outside observer, their wavefunction does have a phase that regularly oscillates (with a frequency corresponding to the color of the photon)
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.
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?
"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."
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.
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?
My understanding from that was they were measuring it to make and test a computer model to simulate the shield in 0 g, not to get exact measurements to "it to the right size". Now its in space, they know how it performs and how accurate the model is. I definitely could be wrong.
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.
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.
I'm not sure he's precisely correct, but Hubble's primary mirror was changed from 3 meters to 2.4 meters, which happened to be the same size as the primary mirrors for the KH-11 KENNEN series of spy satellites. The book Power To Explore - History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960-1990 says of the decision to change the mirror:
> "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."
There's quite a difference between "used infrastructure built by the military for their needs" and "manufactured parts from intelligence programs that were the rejects from those production lines".
Especially the strong implication that Hubble is made out of lower tolerance parts, since they are rejects, is a claim that need significantly more evidence than what you provided here.
Pointing a telescope at something bright and nearby is easier than something very distant and dim, so the precision requirements are obviously in the opposite direction.
> Pointing a telescope at something bright and nearby is easier than something very distant and dim, so the precision requirements are obviously in the opposite direction.
You're wrong. Between 1979 and 1998 the MMT Observatory used six repurposed spy satellite mirrors that had been donated by the NRO, manufactured for the cancelled KH-10. Furthermore in 2012 the NRO donated two unflown spy satellites to NASA, the mirrors from which may be used for the upcoming Roman Space Telescope. Spy satellite mirrors make great telescope mirrors.
> "manufactured parts from intelligence programs [...]"
As I point out above, the NRO has donated at least eight primary mirrors that were specifically manufactured for cancelled or unused spy satellites. The Hubble mirror may be another example of such, or it may have merely been fabricated by the same people.
> that were the rejects from those production lines".
That's the only dodgy part of his claim, but it's not that strange of a claim when you recall that Hubble's primary mirror infamously had a spherical aberration. I presume NASA didn't know about the aberration before they launched HST, otherwise they should have corrected for it on the ground instead of having astronauts correct it in space. But it doesn't seem completely outlandish that the NRO gave NASA mirrors they had previously deemed unsuitable for their own use.
That people accept mirrors gifted for free is not strong evidence of their superior quality, when you get something for free you can make do with something that's not really what you want.
As an example, the MMT observatory was so happy with the "cobble six telescopes together" design foisted upon them by the donation of the mirrors that within 8 years of completion they were officially[1] reporting they hoped to replace them with a single mirror by 1993. Honestly I think the MMT is the only telescope I've heard of where the main mirror was so bad they opted to replace it with a completely different design within 20 years.
Anyway, the Hubble mirror has a different focal length than the KH-11 so can't have been used as is, it would have to be reground and polished for the new curvature and so it would have been essentially just a mirror blank.
> Especially the strong implication that Hubble is made out of lower tolerance parts, since they are rejects, is a claim that need significantly more evidence than what you provided here.
Well, it did ship with a faulty mirror after all :)
Just joking, I know this was a manufacturing error specific to Hubble which kinda proves it wasn't a reused part. I think the mirror would have a slightly different focal length anyway? But maybe 400k is far enough to be "infinity" even at that scale.
Spy satellites don't have a fixed distance to their target; they have elliptical orbits and take take pictures of earth at different angles, different distances to the target. So both spy satellites and telescopes use mirrors focused to infinity.
> I know this was a manufacturing error specific to Hubble which kinda proves it wasn't a reused part.
It was ground very precisely into the wrong shape during the final stage of manufacturing. But I don't think that proves anything one way or the other. Even if the mirrors were finished in unique ways, they may have started identical earlier in manufacturing.
> It was ground very precisely into the wrong shape
It was said at the time that the aberration made the Hubble near-sighted and, indeed, was corrected with lenses. I had suspected, apparently incorrectly according to yours and others comments indicating that spy satellite mirrors are interchangeable with and used for astronomy without alteration, that the mistake was one of habit, because I figured they were ordinarily making near-sighted mirrors to specification to focus up to a few hundred miles rather than stellar or galactic distances. I am honestly am still having trouble accepting that a mirror designed for a telescope to look no further than a few hundred miles is identically focused to infinity precisely like similar telescopes that are designed to peer with a lower bound of at least millions of miles. But if you say so.
> I am honestly am still having trouble accepting that a mirror designed for a telescope to look no further than a few hundred miles is identically focused to infinity precisely like similar telescopes that are designed to peer with a lower bound of at least millions of miles.
Consider the 2.4m lens to be the base of an isosceles triangle with a height of 100km, the edge of space and much lower than the satellite's orbit. This triangle has two angles of 89.9993 degrees. If the lens was 10cm thick and you wanted to taper the edges to match this angle, you'd need to bring in the near edge one micron, or about 1/50 of a human hair.
100km or 100,000 lightyears, they're still effectively straight away (focused to infinity).
> So both spy satellites and telescopes use mirrors focused to infinity.
That's just not what focal length means in the context of mirrors, the focussing happens by moving the secondary not by re-grinding the entire primary mirror or whatever it is you are imagining.
structural didn't suggest that NASA repurposing military tech is "bad and evil". Why would it be? That's just your own bias, and one I doubt you can back up with much rational argument. Was the Gemini program "evil and bad" because the Titan II boosters used were originally developed as ICBMs? That wasn't evil, that was smart.
Anyway, he's substantially if not completely correct and it's not hard to find sources backing up the connection between the HST and KH-11 spy satellites if you bother to look it up. In the sibling comment to yours, I provide a link to a book about NASA, hosted on NASA's website a few years ago, that says Hubble's primary mirror was fabricated using technology developed for the military, that a 2.4 meter mirror was specifically chosen to make that reuse possible. The mirrors were almost certainly manufactured by the same people on the same tools. Read the wiki page for the KH-11 and you'll see that the apparently similarities run deeper than that. Dimensions and general structure of the satellites are also believed to be the the same. None of this is fringe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you taken a photo while someone else used a flash? The flash is also only on for a fraction of the camera exposure but you sure as hell notice when it happened and it went off close to what you wanted to depict you will just have to take a new photo.
The length of the occlusion isn't very relevant when the thing going in front is orders of magnitudes brighter than what you are trying to observe.
a leo telescope doesn't look anything like a star (mainly because it's moving too fast). the way you deal with this is by not taking hour long exposures, and instead take thousands of second long exposures. then you can composite them all together, cropping out the bits that look like satellites from each frame. it's a little annoying, but pretty easy to automate.
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 .
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".
> 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.
100 % someone would point at the sun by accident and burn all the sensors within six months if access is unrestricted and the api is powerful.
In any case easy access to data will mostly result in data lying idle on disks somewhere because people are busy doing something more interesting. Analysing data is many months of work, and you don't get more months just because there is more data.
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
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.
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.
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.
JWST folded is about 3 tiles wide, in a housing 4.7m in diameter, unfolding to 6.5m. So a JWST style fold in a Starship would be double. A one-mirror-segment-per-flight would be something like 36m, in the same arrangement. But since you would be constructing from separate sections, the diameter is theoretically limitless.
Just stack the mirrors inside Starship, and assemble them in space.
Below, an example of a 300m diameter telescope using 8-meter mirror segments assembled in-orbit
I guess in-orbit assembly would then be a whole different can of worms. But, a very useful can of worms - once it's figured out, it's like horizontal scaling - you can just keep sending up more parts.
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].
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.
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.
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.
Honestly this is probably true sigh. the temptation is to say most of the cost of manufacturing an item is in r & d, setup, confirmation testing, etc these are mostly one time costs, the actual price of manufacturing the item is fairly trivial in comparison, this is what makes economy of scale work.
So one james web space telescope costs 10 billion and take 20 years to build. However two space telescopes cost 10 billion 100 million and take the same twenty years to build. three would be 10B 200M + 20Y etc.
But this would of only worked if you built the second one at the same time you had the setup and test facilitys prepared for building the first one, I will be generous and assume the r & d is not so space and time critical.
Personally I think the main argument for making a second is that you are putting this thing in a location where it cannot be serviced. The parable of having all your eggs in one basket comes to mind.
They have different focal lengths, so even if the glass was originally for a KH-11 it couldn't have been used in Hubble "as is", which makes it nothing more than a rough polished mirror blank.
Why would it need to be used in Hubble? We don't even know if these satellites are KH-11s. They might be some other design that is capable of fulfilling a NASA mission. The point is that Hubble is suspected to be based on a spy satellite so there is potential technology transfer. Maybe these are just useful as parts.
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.
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.
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
No doubt. Because all the instruments are active when observing, teams will end up with tons of data unrelated/unused in their own research. A treasure trove for future researchers for sure.
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.)
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
Current amount of damage has JWST operating perfectly fine, it was created to sustain some damage and still function for its mission. If the JWST gets hit by a second unexpectedly large micrometeorite it’ll become an issue though. Getting hit once this quickly is bad luck, getting hit twice would probably mean we were wrong about how common debris of that size was at JWST’s position.
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.
What a dramatic accusation to shut down conversation. That's frankly uncalled for.
I'm expressing fears about a very expensive and time consuming investment.
A positive media spin for NASA means their budget remains unscrutinized and unfettered.
I never said NASA is telling the media to say these things. It may be a general sense of "talk highly about our expensive things so we can keep doing expensive things". How any department, public or private, keeps getting itself funded.
We're seeing a lot of these pieces. It feels as though scientists are telling journalists this byline, because it's everywhere. Nothing wrong with that.
> I'm wondering how well it's going to do as we pass through the Perseid cloud.
I don't think we know yet. We're about to find out.
It 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. :-)
It isn’t uncalled for, what is uncalled for is how in the modern era you can’t talk about fucking anything without a conspiratorial interjection like yours, always without evidence, derailing fucking every conversation and every attempt to do something good. stop.
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.
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
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.
> ...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.
It's amazing to see the structure in such colorized images or even the picture of our Milky Way. I wonder, without the colorization, say, to a human eye, would such images appear mostly black (black-and-white)?
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?
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.
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.
> JWST pictures and the Hubble pictures were turned into RGB images in the same way
Webb and Hubble have different filters so what does this mean? Did they just take some Webb filters and pretended they where Hubble filters and ran their old code?
What I mean is, a telescope will produce several arrays of numbers detailing the number of photons received by each sensor pixel, one array for each frequency it measures. Then you pick three arrays and pack them into a bitmap as the R G and B components. At most you can get fancy by letting it mix three artistically chosen colors (rather than red green and blue), but a lot of pictures don't even involve that. That's the same between Webb, Hubble and any other telescope. Even digital cameras do it - they differ from the human eye, not by a lot but noticeably under some conditions.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Politely suggesting that false has some negative connotations, perhaps "artificial" would be a better word... or even illustrative or representational.
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. :) ]
Perhaps it's like most other things in life. In hindsight, we might have done it differently.
In this case, there are probably better, more descriptive (and less confusing) adjectives than "fictitious" which would succinctly describe a non-existent but perceived (or imagined) force.
Even so, I never visualized something pushing me back into the seat. I always visualized the seat pressing against me. After all, I didn't feel sensations on the front of my body when accelerating. The sensations are the same as if someone has come from behind and starting pushing you.
Removing yourself from the equation makes it easier to see: imagine a ball on a string in a car. Something happens and the ball moves forward relative to you. It’s not hard to see how you might assume a force pushed the ball forward.
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?
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.
Aren't these ... 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?
No. There are basically two things influencing the colors of galaxies, their age (young ones have bright, blue stars, old ones are more red) and their distance. In the first "unveil" image of the gravitational lens, you can find several extremely red objects (that are completely absent in the HST images if you do a side by side comparison). These are likely extremely distant galaxies where the "blue"/"green" bands in the JWST image (and all the HST bands) are very faint because it falls in the extreme UV in the galaxy's rest wavelengths.
Yes, but so what? The colour we see is the colour we see and that seems like a sensible colour to report.
Think of it this way: If you take a picture from a mountain, things in the distance will look bluer than they are when you are close, but does this mean that all the pictures taken from mountaintops have "fake" colours that need to be corrected?
In this sense redshift is just another thing that makes things change colour as the distance increases.
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.
This phrase implies that there are some "true colors", but are they? People see colors in weird ways, and it is a bold move to declare them to be the true ways.
Monitors output color via modulating three color channels. The modulation can either vaguely correspond to how the original wavelength would activate the three cone varietals in most humans, or can bear absolutely no relation to that.
I do not believe that human perception has anything to do with "true" colors. Such a complex system with so many quirks cannot be called the true way to deal with wavelengths. And yes it starts with cones in a retina, which wipe out most of information about a spectrum of a light. Some information got lost completely, some is mixed up, to a point where it is just vaguely represents the source signal.
But if it seems to you too vague, then I can come to a point from a different angle: did you hear about tetrachromacy? "A study from 2010 actually suggests that a rare condition known as tetrachromacy exists in up to 12% of women in the world."[1] Don't you think that these women see colors in a "more true" way than other people? I personally think they are. It means, at least, that a more common way of a trichromacy is not the true way to see colors. It gives us not true colors, but some approximation which is very far from reality.
You mentioned "most humans" as a reference point, so probably you believe that the truth can be established by a voting. I do not. I know that the objective truth is an unattainable ideal, but I do not believe that the majority of votes would be enough to establish an acceptable approximation to the ideal. It needs something more than that.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
Sadly seems like it's way too small.
Pioneer 10 is ~2.9m long [1] and 2.0e7 km from Earth [2]. JWST is just 1.5e6 km from Earth, so that doesn't make much of a difference.
Doing the trig, you get the arc-width of P10 is 2atan(w/2d) = 2atan(2.9m/4.0e7km) = 7.33e-14 rad.
JWST has a resolution of 0.1 arcsecond = 4.8e-7 rad [3].
So we're off by "just" a factor of 10,000,000 on resolution :-(
NASA generally publishes the telescope time allocations to my knowledge, you can atleast find the allocations for the next year already on the internet.
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.
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.
"(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?
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.
Anyone can apply for time to point JWST somewhere by making a research proposal to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). STScI weighs the proposals and picks the ones that it judges to be most compelling. This is the same system that is used for Hubble. You’d be competing with the world’s top research teams, and there isn’t remotely enough time for JWST to execute all of the proposals, so in practice your chances are low as a layperson—but anyone can at least submit a proposal.
Yes, but there are only a few places it can go were it would stay put, which we want because if it goes too far away we loose track of it and then it's just junk that might give someone a bad day in several millions of years.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
> 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 :/.
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.
> 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 now have the benefit of awareness. We can know what is happening to far away people. If anything, the current obvious changes in climate/weather and the associated impacts are evidence that we should have some motivation to care about things that impact those beyond just our own group (even though selfishly speaking it is because we know it ultimately will benefit our local group too).
When there is a major disaster, you will see people with very differing opinions drop their "simple" conflicts and work together. There is some recognizable human drive to help those visibly in need. Or maybe it's just an instintive behavior to ensure human survival.
Really, most of our political and ideological squabbles are manufactured by "leaders", and adopted by followers because we all have too much time on our hands. If we were collectively operating in survival mode, I think we might be a more cohesive society. Not that I'm asking for that; I like comfort.
Right, but how many far-away people can you care about? There's the distance factor and then there's the quantity factor.
When there is a major disaster, you will
see people with very differing opinions
drop their "simple" conflicts and work
together.
This is true, and one of the best parts of human nature.
But does it scale to tricky, nuanced, thorny questions?
A natural disaster is an entirely unambiguous event. We all think, "Earthquake bad. People trapped under rubble bad." and want to help them directly or indirectly. Some of us help more vigorously than others and some do nothing, but we all agree that the earthquake is bad and we would like the poor victims to suffer less.
It's harder to scale this cohesion up to tackle issues that are actually thorny and nuanced. Look at how fractured many countries were regarding COVID-19 and the vaccines, for example. Or the eternal Israel/Palestine conflict. Or whatever.
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.
There are so many parallels and analogies to this idea, but there's a reoccuring pattern where some system becomes dominant and then seems to lose the characteristics which made it successful, ultimately becoming doomed.
You see this in business, where companies climb to the top through aggression and innovation, but then become laggards and protectionists (and ultimately fall away). You see it in countries. You see it in technologies. Heck, you see it in biological systems.
Perhaps that's just a normal part of the greater process, these cycles of growth, innovation, collaboration, etc., followed by stagnation and decay (and then death, or near-death, whereby the system returns to the growth effort).
The nice thing about being human is that we theoretically have the capacity to choose what our goals are (assuming our basic needs are currently met). As such, we could be choosing to work on goals such as "everyone always has food, shelter, and physical safety". This surely must be achievable, but maybe it would take virtually everyone working toward this goal. It's not really a sexy way to spend your time if you are already fortunate enough to have those things... such as if you live in a place rich in resources and with relatively few people. You would not be particularly compelled to contribute to the wellbeing of others, especially if you could not see them. But we have the privilege of awareness and knowledge, so we can see that there are still many people without even food or water. We could do something about this if we made it our focus.
And it might just turn out that having this collective focus would save our collective lives later. There's a reasonable chance that humanity will face a food crisis due to climate change and population growth. Practicing now at learning how to solve these problems might mean the difference between humans existing into 2100 or not.
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.
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:
If I were going to drink any politician's kool-aid, it would have been Bernie's. Hillary Clinton was part of the problem, just as most other sitting politicians are part of the problem.
> 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.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Yes, that’s how China sees it. Other countries see the creation of artificial islands and reefs via dredging and landfill as a pretext to restrict navigation in the South China Sea. It’s complicated, hence sort-kinda.
China's aim is, quite clearly, to prevent the US Navy from operating in the South China Sea in the case of a war. That's not a question of freedom of navigation, and the US "freedom of navigation" operations have to go out of their way to go near the islands China claims.
China is additionally interested in the resources under the South China Sea, just as all the other countries that occupy various islands and reefs are. This, again, is not an issue of freedom of navigation.
China isn't about to block shipping through the South China Sea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They extracted a return on that investment, at least in the early days of the empire. A lot of land, gold, and slaves were returned to Rome by their military.
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:
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
* 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.
> 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.
>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.
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?
You can’t really compare solid fuel rockets with liquid fueled rockets. And rockets fed by turbopumps (unlike the earlier pressure-fed models made by Goddard and others) are in a class of their own.
> 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.
> + 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.
> 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.
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...
You have just discovered collectivism. Individualism sounds worse, but to my understanding is ultimately just an excess of enlightment, which is the better philosophy™.
> I hope you're not thinking about forcing people into this
Of course not. Forcing people to volunteer is... not effective long term.
Anyway, I long since left that Texas city which gave me the idea. I know amateur and professional sporting happens all around, but I don't encounter it much (so I forgot about the idea until now). I'm onto other things, although I still think this is a good idea. I know some churches organize their members to do good community services periodically, so I don't think it's a stretch to imagine sporting communities to make a routine of doing the same.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
imo, there's no possible world where not invading Afghanistan causes 2 trillion dollars of attacks. (especially because 9/11 had only very weak links to Afghanistan)
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. Tim Berners-Lee was an independent contractor to CERN in his original March 1989 proposal [1]. But CERN paid the bills. I believe the point that citation [0] (above) is making in this regard is that CERN has received significant funding from the US, and that HTML/HTTP was an enabling technology of the original darpanet. CERN has 23 (European), even more Non-Member States (including the USA) and states with Observer status (Japan and USA). The US funding for CERN historically has been from both The US Department of Energy and The National Science Foundation [2]. The US contributed $531 million just for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) CERN project alone [3].
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
