I hate to say it (as someone formerly from this field), but --
Astronomers can justify any amount of spending you ask them to, based on whatever incremental learning a telescope of a new type can be built for, based on:
-- size of telescope
-- new sensors
-- background noise reduction, sensitivity
-- frequency domain, spectroscopic resolution
-- it goes on and on
Who provides the external check of whether the latest improvement is worth spending the money? Because astronomers will always say it's worth it on some dimension. How do we decide whether that dimension is worth the money?
Is pushing the discovery of some metal content in an early galaxy by one more unit of redshift worth $10B? Study of dust obscuration of some nebula really pushing the boundaries of our understanding like it was 50 years ago? (or similar esoteric questions)
What $ / unit scientific discovery is worth it?
Edit to add: and yes there are things like the decadal survey and the “industry” has to justify itself to Congress (in the US at least). And yes, I generally do think the finding of this is (at these levels) probably going to bring some net positive multiplier benefit even if hard to quantify. And is more value per money than sending it to war to use an extreme comparison. But I wish there were a more defensible bar for knowing, other than public opinion or “at least we’re not as much a waste as <xyz>”.
Just lucky for astronomy that at least they produce pet pictures for the public to support. But sad for other important fields that don’t have this luxury.
(I'm not dismissing, your position, just adding context.)
A very similar argument can be made for particle physics and their colliders. Yes, telescopes produce pretty pictures, but fundamental particle physics occasionally produces practical results.
Well, they used to (the colliders I mean). Modern particle physics seems to be more in the confirmation stage of current theory rather than a discovery phase like it used to be maybe 40 years ago.
Meanwhile astronomy keeps opening up new questions about the universe that require even better equipment to attempt to answer.
Building better colliders and better telescopes are interesting end goals, but also consider what goes along with them.
Building them means funding multiple generations of new theorists and engineers. A lot of those people do fundamental research and then branch out to both found new commercial companies based on those discoveries and to work for those companies.
I think it's better to look at "big science" in a much broader perspective. The new collider or telescope might "cost" $10 billion, but that isn't the cost of building the machine and its materials.
Most of that money goes into paying people across a very diverse field of professions to do the research and engineering required to make that big pretty picture machine work. That's the stuff that drives technical innovations at the edge of what we apes currently understand.
When we fall back to asking why build pyramids, cathedrals, highways, rockets, or anything else that requires a vast number of people to work towards the same goal, don't forget about what everyone gets from the journey on the way.
I remember listening to a talk where the presenter suggested the history of radio telescopes development was driven by the need for intelligence gathering. The telescopes could be used for spying but were justified on a scientific basis.
I imagine a lot of space development is similar. The real reason for the huge investment is for defence applications, but it is more acceptable to justify it by the scientific ‘value’ of the projects.
If you asked someone if they wanted $1billion to go to health research or space research the answer would be obvious.
As someone in the field (I made an account just to comment on this), I agree that scientists will always be motivated to push the boundaries on questions that are relatively esoteric. People are right to be skeptical... However, even if they aren't immediate, there are enormous tangible benefits to society from conducting scientific research:
1. Basic research directly underpins the vast majority of the technology we have available. Or at the minimum provides the framework with which we understand how technology operates, making it easier to improve. I think the utility of this is greatly underappreciated.
2. It's impossible to know in advance how useful some basic piece of research will prove to be in the future. We can only guess at the $ value, and many of the most useful results are surprises from blue-sky research not applied goal-orientated work.
3. Academia produces an army of highly-trained disgruntled postdocs and PhD students (just look at the ratio of student to professor positions) who have beneficial transferable skills for industry. It's not that you can't learn to do research outside of the academic environment, but getting a PhD is good training for it.
Finally, just guessing here, but did you work on galaxies or the ISM? We're on the cusp (a couple of decades) from imaging potentially habitable Earth analogs with next-generation space missions. This is a huge step toward answering the 'are we alone' question. Personally, I'd happily spend a few billion on that though I know not everyone would agree...
In the American astronomy community, there is a process every 10 years to determine what should be prioritized over the next decade. It's called the Decadal Survey.[0]
The Decadal Survey does not determine the overall level of funding for astronomy. It just says, "If you gave us X amount of money, here's how we would divide it up, based on what we think are the most important questions in our field." There's a competitive process within the community to propose projects and argue for different scientific research areas, which eventually gets distilled down into a set of funding recommendations.
The Decadal Survey is really just a recommendation to the funding agencies, which can ignore it if they wish. However, since it does represent the consensus of American astronomers, it's taken very seriously.
As for the overall level of astronomy funding, astronomers have very little control over that. That's decided at a political level, by Congress, and I doubt there's any rigorous cost-benefit analysis to society going on there.
As someone also formerly in the field, I agree but also that’s sort of what funding agencies are for? You have finite funding, where is the best place to put that money? Yes you can find any number of astronomers interested in spending money better spent elsewhere but my impression of the field as a whole when I left was that there were far more genuinely important projects not funded than bad projects funded.
> Who provides the external check of whether the latest improvement is worth spending the money? Because astronomers will always say it's worth it on some dimension. How do we decide whether that dimension is worth the money?
I'm surprised you don't know that as someone from the field.
On the general level, it is the elected politicians that decide of the budget of the state, and which part goes to science and to which science branch. On the specific level, it's the science organizations (usually staffed by scientists) that decide who get what based on the quality of scientific proposals.
Scientists don't get money just because. They have to write lengthy proposals justifying their requests. These proposals are examined by other scientists and compared to others, and the most promising are awarded money. It can take decades to go from an idea to having a project funded.
Also there is no "unit scientific discovery" so no $/unit scientific discovery can be evaluated
How does that differ from any request for funding in any field, public or private. It applies to everyone seeking funding from the public (via Congress), to people seeking funding from grant-making organizations, to people seeking funding from banks, from VCs, etc.
Everyone has a story on how they will provide value, and the funders must decide who offers the best ROI.
I've always wondered how that works. I'm all for full bore public spending on space but sometimes when you read the list of the research goals for NASA/EU spending hundreds of millions on getting to Jupiter (for ex) I often wonder "that's it"? But then I remind myself I don't know anything about this stuff compared to the people doing it as their job and assume the scientists/admins have some set of priorities which are essential in the process for some bigger important stuff.
My biggest question is why they aren't putting tons of pressure on getting a telescope that can do gravitational lensing to see as far into space as possible ASAP. But again I'm probably just speaking out of turn not being familiar with the wider industry/culture/economics.
So scientists want better instruments to work with. Why is that a crime? Even CERN may be a huge expense. Idk even now I think Michelson and Morley’s ether experiment was worth it.
I say revisit it when we don’t have billions in poverty, global climate change is tamed, cancer is significantly reduced, etc. I can’t justify a living breathing human dying on our planet right here as we probe the minutiae of the universe looking for things that are largely meaningless at this point. It’s not that I don’t find research like that fascinating, it’s just that I find life that is here even more precious and fascinating.
If you want to watch a fight, Get Astronomers into the room with "manned space in LEO is important because..." people and say "robots work in space"
Actually you can probably get the same outcome by putting land optical scope astro people up against space optical or RF people. "all that launch cost spent on active optics here on the ground could.."
There's not really a conflict between land- and space-based telescopes. They have very different capabilities. There are things you can only do from space, and things you can only do from the ground.
To give you an example, using adaptive optics, you can get higher resolution on small fields of view from the ground. That's because you can build much larger telescopes on the ground, which therefore have a smaller diffraction limit, and you can use adaptive optics to correct for the atmosphere in a small field of view. However, if you want high resolution over a large field of view, you have to go to space.
Other advantages of space: extremely stable calibration (because you can control conditions more precisely, and because there's no atmosphere) and ability to view parts of the spectrum that are unavailable from the ground.
Other advantages of ground-based telescopes: larger and heavier instruments, ability to do repairs and upgrades.
Robots vs. manned spaceflight is much simpler. Robots will almost always give you more science return for the same price. I still think manned spaceflight should be pursued, but for other reasons (it's cool, and we should be pushing the envelope of what's possible).
This was my first thought when reading the article.
> The lunar far side is permanently shielded from the radio signals generated by humans on Earth. During the lunar night, it is also protected from the Sun. These characteristics make it probably the most “radio-quiet” location in the whole solar system as no other planet or moon has a side that permanently faces away from the Earth. It is therefore ideally suited for radio astronomy.
Maybe we need to treat this as a "pristine natural resource" and put some treaties in place now where we agree to limit how much we "pollute" this area with RF signals, before it's too late?
Man, this really excites me! I hadn't even thought about this before, but it seems super obvious now. Especially the bit in the article about putting a telescope at one of the poles inside of a crater (to shield from sunlight).
I'm surprised this proposal hasn't been tried sooner. Is this because the cost per pound to send something into space has gotten cheaper? Why now?
As my understanding goes, Moon is very big and meteors are very small and aim/crash rarely. You can look at its surface and assume there is activity all the time but because of lack of atmosphere anything that touches the surface leaves footprints for thousands of years. Armstrong footprint is still there.
After JWST ran thousands of percent over budget and decades behind schedule I'm tempted to suspect any new telescope project of being a grift. If they get Congressional approval for a fifteen billion dollar lunar telescope it's going to end up costing fifty billion and somehow that won't result in anybody going to prison.
JWST was being built with the knowledge that there would be no way we could ever get to it to make repairs. A telescope on the moon would be something we could send the Maytag repair guy to make a house call. The risk is much smaller
They mention NASAs Artemis program, but the real enabler of larger payloads to the moon may be SpaceX Starship, not SLS, which is too expensive and can't be launched often enough to be used for any additional missions to those already scheduled.
> They mention NASAs Artemis program, but the real enabler of larger payloads to the moon may be SpaceX Starship, not SLS
Note that the two aren't mutually exclusive: Artemis 3 uses [1] Starship as a major component, and it's likely that Starship will take over other parts of the works for the reason you note.
There already are 'telescopes' on the moon .. in the form of the Hasselblad [1] cameras that were left on the rover passenger seats, pointed up into the cosmos, for future retrieval ..
No doubt some physicists of the future are going to be very interested in the contents of those lenses. Kind of the "pitch drop experiment" of astrophysics, I suppose.
There's more. The triangulations would provide some really great confirmation and precision on a number of things.
The unanswered question is if this is blocked out from earth communication, what are you doing for earth communication? Moon satellites? Optical relays? Would it go to the Mars satellites? These things get booked so far ahead of time, you can probably pretty easily schedule the dark times when it couldn't talk to Mars especially if you send it up with modern storage tech.
I guess there's also Venus satellites coming around soon as well.
A radio telescope on the scale of Arecibo - where you are after extremely large surface area for detection of faint signals - is limited by the size of the dish.
Arecibo was 73,000 square meters while JWST is "only" 25 square meters.
For this, building it in a crater on the moon and allowing the moon itself to help support it is advantageous.
Dark matter has a very simple and literal explanation, matter affected by gravity (thus below the speed of light) that we arent able to detect. This could be almost entirely mundane things like planets of asteroids that are impossible to see at lightyears if they dont pass in front of a star.
Dark energy is the odd one that is part observation, part speculation
Right. I suggest astrophysicists first start using Einstein instead of Newtons theory of gravity, and actually use Pi instead of 3, etc. Before they ever have the right to complain about wanting more accurate devices :p
I've noticed that 'water' is often discovered in places where people want to spend money to scrutinize/get to. (For a variety of reasons.)
E.g. sometimes vast internal 'oceans' are somehow implied by water vapor escaping from the surface of a moon. For the sake of visiting astronauts, I hope some of this 'water' turns out to be real.
(Wherever the water in the Earth's oceans really came from is at least, finally, being questioned.)
[+] [-] supernova87a|2 years ago|reply
Astronomers can justify any amount of spending you ask them to, based on whatever incremental learning a telescope of a new type can be built for, based on:
-- size of telescope
-- new sensors
-- background noise reduction, sensitivity
-- frequency domain, spectroscopic resolution
-- it goes on and on
Who provides the external check of whether the latest improvement is worth spending the money? Because astronomers will always say it's worth it on some dimension. How do we decide whether that dimension is worth the money?
Is pushing the discovery of some metal content in an early galaxy by one more unit of redshift worth $10B? Study of dust obscuration of some nebula really pushing the boundaries of our understanding like it was 50 years ago? (or similar esoteric questions)
What $ / unit scientific discovery is worth it?
Edit to add: and yes there are things like the decadal survey and the “industry” has to justify itself to Congress (in the US at least). And yes, I generally do think the finding of this is (at these levels) probably going to bring some net positive multiplier benefit even if hard to quantify. And is more value per money than sending it to war to use an extreme comparison. But I wish there were a more defensible bar for knowing, other than public opinion or “at least we’re not as much a waste as <xyz>”.
Just lucky for astronomy that at least they produce pet pictures for the public to support. But sad for other important fields that don’t have this luxury.
[+] [-] geuis|2 years ago|reply
A very similar argument can be made for particle physics and their colliders. Yes, telescopes produce pretty pictures, but fundamental particle physics occasionally produces practical results.
Well, they used to (the colliders I mean). Modern particle physics seems to be more in the confirmation stage of current theory rather than a discovery phase like it used to be maybe 40 years ago.
Meanwhile astronomy keeps opening up new questions about the universe that require even better equipment to attempt to answer.
Building better colliders and better telescopes are interesting end goals, but also consider what goes along with them.
Building them means funding multiple generations of new theorists and engineers. A lot of those people do fundamental research and then branch out to both found new commercial companies based on those discoveries and to work for those companies.
I think it's better to look at "big science" in a much broader perspective. The new collider or telescope might "cost" $10 billion, but that isn't the cost of building the machine and its materials.
Most of that money goes into paying people across a very diverse field of professions to do the research and engineering required to make that big pretty picture machine work. That's the stuff that drives technical innovations at the edge of what we apes currently understand.
When we fall back to asking why build pyramids, cathedrals, highways, rockets, or anything else that requires a vast number of people to work towards the same goal, don't forget about what everyone gets from the journey on the way.
[+] [-] brutusborn|2 years ago|reply
I imagine a lot of space development is similar. The real reason for the huge investment is for defence applications, but it is more acceptable to justify it by the scientific ‘value’ of the projects.
If you asked someone if they wanted $1billion to go to health research or space research the answer would be obvious.
[+] [-] brokeAstronomer|2 years ago|reply
1. Basic research directly underpins the vast majority of the technology we have available. Or at the minimum provides the framework with which we understand how technology operates, making it easier to improve. I think the utility of this is greatly underappreciated.
2. It's impossible to know in advance how useful some basic piece of research will prove to be in the future. We can only guess at the $ value, and many of the most useful results are surprises from blue-sky research not applied goal-orientated work.
3. Academia produces an army of highly-trained disgruntled postdocs and PhD students (just look at the ratio of student to professor positions) who have beneficial transferable skills for industry. It's not that you can't learn to do research outside of the academic environment, but getting a PhD is good training for it.
Finally, just guessing here, but did you work on galaxies or the ISM? We're on the cusp (a couple of decades) from imaging potentially habitable Earth analogs with next-generation space missions. This is a huge step toward answering the 'are we alone' question. Personally, I'd happily spend a few billion on that though I know not everyone would agree...
[+] [-] ultra_nick|2 years ago|reply
The scientific betting principal could be used to optimally size bets on which research will benefit humanity the most.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
[+] [-] DiogenesKynikos|2 years ago|reply
The Decadal Survey does not determine the overall level of funding for astronomy. It just says, "If you gave us X amount of money, here's how we would divide it up, based on what we think are the most important questions in our field." There's a competitive process within the community to propose projects and argue for different scientific research areas, which eventually gets distilled down into a set of funding recommendations.
The Decadal Survey is really just a recommendation to the funding agencies, which can ignore it if they wish. However, since it does represent the consensus of American astronomers, it's taken very seriously.
As for the overall level of astronomy funding, astronomers have very little control over that. That's decided at a political level, by Congress, and I doubt there's any rigorous cost-benefit analysis to society going on there.
0. https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/decadal-survey-on...
[+] [-] throwawayastro|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poulpy123|2 years ago|reply
I'm surprised you don't know that as someone from the field.
On the general level, it is the elected politicians that decide of the budget of the state, and which part goes to science and to which science branch. On the specific level, it's the science organizations (usually staffed by scientists) that decide who get what based on the quality of scientific proposals.
Scientists don't get money just because. They have to write lengthy proposals justifying their requests. These proposals are examined by other scientists and compared to others, and the most promising are awarded money. It can take decades to go from an idea to having a project funded.
Also there is no "unit scientific discovery" so no $/unit scientific discovery can be evaluated
[+] [-] wolverine876|2 years ago|reply
Everyone has a story on how they will provide value, and the funders must decide who offers the best ROI.
[+] [-] vogon_laureate|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|2 years ago|reply
My biggest question is why they aren't putting tons of pressure on getting a telescope that can do gravitational lensing to see as far into space as possible ASAP. But again I'm probably just speaking out of turn not being familiar with the wider industry/culture/economics.
[+] [-] travisporter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xchip|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Mistletoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|2 years ago|reply
I do hope we try it though, speaking from my inner 12 year old.
[+] [-] ggm|2 years ago|reply
Actually you can probably get the same outcome by putting land optical scope astro people up against space optical or RF people. "all that launch cost spent on active optics here on the ground could.."
[+] [-] DiogenesKynikos|2 years ago|reply
To give you an example, using adaptive optics, you can get higher resolution on small fields of view from the ground. That's because you can build much larger telescopes on the ground, which therefore have a smaller diffraction limit, and you can use adaptive optics to correct for the atmosphere in a small field of view. However, if you want high resolution over a large field of view, you have to go to space.
Other advantages of space: extremely stable calibration (because you can control conditions more precisely, and because there's no atmosphere) and ability to view parts of the spectrum that are unavailable from the ground.
Other advantages of ground-based telescopes: larger and heavier instruments, ability to do repairs and upgrades.
Robots vs. manned spaceflight is much simpler. Robots will almost always give you more science return for the same price. I still think manned spaceflight should be pursued, but for other reasons (it's cool, and we should be pushing the envelope of what's possible).
[+] [-] double2helix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrussino|2 years ago|reply
> The lunar far side is permanently shielded from the radio signals generated by humans on Earth. During the lunar night, it is also protected from the Sun. These characteristics make it probably the most “radio-quiet” location in the whole solar system as no other planet or moon has a side that permanently faces away from the Earth. It is therefore ideally suited for radio astronomy.
Maybe we need to treat this as a "pristine natural resource" and put some treaties in place now where we agree to limit how much we "pollute" this area with RF signals, before it's too late?
[+] [-] freeqaz|2 years ago|reply
I'm surprised this proposal hasn't been tried sooner. Is this because the cost per pound to send something into space has gotten cheaper? Why now?
[+] [-] enlyth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiccuphippo|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] SECProto|2 years ago|reply
Note that the two aren't mutually exclusive: Artemis 3 uses [1] Starship as a major component, and it's likely that Starship will take over other parts of the works for the reason you note.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_3
[+] [-] boffinAudio|2 years ago|reply
No doubt some physicists of the future are going to be very interested in the contents of those lenses. Kind of the "pitch drop experiment" of astrophysics, I suppose.
[1] - https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/hasselblad-in-space...
[+] [-] kristopolous|2 years ago|reply
The unanswered question is if this is blocked out from earth communication, what are you doing for earth communication? Moon satellites? Optical relays? Would it go to the Mars satellites? These things get booked so far ahead of time, you can probably pretty easily schedule the dark times when it couldn't talk to Mars especially if you send it up with modern storage tech.
I guess there's also Venus satellites coming around soon as well.
[+] [-] gumby|2 years ago|reply
Actually I think this is already being planned anyway, unrelated to a telescope.
[+] [-] dflock|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] shagie|2 years ago|reply
Arecibo was 73,000 square meters while JWST is "only" 25 square meters.
For this, building it in a crater on the moon and allowing the moon itself to help support it is advantageous.
... and has some interesting scaling up possible.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258694444_Implement...
[+] [-] autokad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeanlou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Out_of_Characte|2 years ago|reply
Dark energy is the odd one that is part observation, part speculation
[+] [-] samstave|2 years ago|reply
Could one theoretically point the hubble at the james webb mirrors and see anything?
[+] [-] CalChris|2 years ago|reply
The JWST is about a million miles away from earth. It is only 6.5 meters wide.
The Hubble can resolve 1/10th of an arc second or So it's roughly 100 times too small for the Hubble to see.[+] [-] cyberax|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] m3kw9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maursault|2 years ago|reply
Why is HN taking after reddit so much lately with duplicates?
[+] [-] moi2388|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|2 years ago|reply
E.g. sometimes vast internal 'oceans' are somehow implied by water vapor escaping from the surface of a moon. For the sake of visiting astronauts, I hope some of this 'water' turns out to be real.
(Wherever the water in the Earth's oceans really came from is at least, finally, being questioned.)