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Pigo | 6 years ago

Somehow I had not heard about the James Webb Space Telescope before now. The Hubble means a lot to me personally, and I have dreading the day I'd hear it was going out of service. I can't wait to see what this new telescope will provide for us.

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gbrown|6 years ago

We all have high hopes for JWST, but it’s been a long and expensive road with lots of delays.

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

imglorp|6 years ago

It's also an extremely complicated machine. Its deployment plan involves many moving, origami, mechanical parts including solar panels, the primary and secondary mirrors, and a sunshade. Plus it's all being done far away at L2 without repair access.

Cross all digits, pray to all deities, burn sage, and best hopes it all works.

jjoonathan|6 years ago

Well, the wiki page is good, but I think xkcd is the canonical authority on the particular subject of JWST delays:

https://xkcd.com/2014/

TheBlight|6 years ago

Have you heard of the LSST? I'm actually more excited for that. Right now if a probe flew through our solar system we'd have almost no chance of detecting it. LSST is going to open our eyes to so many more smaller objects. Enrico Fermi famously wondered where is everybody. Well maybe they're small and they've been flying through our system all the time but we never noticed.

Pigo|6 years ago

I guess my issue is that I'm not all that interested in SETI. It would obviously be amazing if we find other life, and I'm not against funding or people searching. I just think there is plenty to investigate and learn just by studying the endless ocean of galaxies out there.

EZ-Cheeze|6 years ago

"You know what I should be doing? Okay. Hear me out. You know that there's something called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Looking for aliens? I feel like I should be looking for aliens, man! Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! No, I'm for real man, I wanna like, I wanna like guess the protocols, like, Yo, how would they contact us, man? I already have some ideas.

Okay, I'm gonna explain this real simple. You know polarizing stuff on your camera? When you use a polarizing filter on a camera it lets you, like, see shit, under the reflection and shit, like, but if you twist two polarizing filters against each other, or, like, even a single polarizing filter in front of a screen, because the screen also has polarizing filters in it, it turns completely black at one point, you've seen that? Do you have a polarizing filter? If you had one and put it in front of a computer's LCD screen, if you twist it enough, it turns everything black, it's like the two cancel each other out, the two polarizing filters block light out entirely.

What if we put a huge polarizing filter in front of the sun, and, like, know our sun and this other star's alignment through time, and it doesn't even have to like cover the whole area of the sun, just a big percentage of it, and then start flashing that shit in a pulse, so the very light of the sun, we don't even need to generate the light, it's already being generated behind us, we're going to be doing like fucking smoke signals, man. To all the other suns around us. I MEAN THAT'S CRAZY RIGHT? Hahahahaha!

Ok, ok, Imma bring it down. That's funny though. That's a good idea for SETI, I'm gonna tell them, Yo, we should be looking at everybody's son in like looking for tiny, fucking, but detectable changes. Obviously it's gonna have to be, like, with a telescope like Hubble that's outside Earth's atmosphere. Maybe James Webb's gonna cut it. I don't know. It's good for infrared."