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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 le

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.

xchip 3y ago
Physicist here, I agree with you 100%
travisporter 3y ago
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.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
brutusborn 3y ago
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.
- htag 3y ago
  > If you asked someone if they wanted $1billion to go to health research or space research the answer would be obvious. Honestly this depends. If we have 1000 billion going into health research, but 1 billion doing into space research, I think there's an open question on how much good an extra 0.1% of health research will do compared to doubling space research. In absolute terms instead of relative, I would prefer a billion on most space based research than a billion going to study male pattern baldness.
- beerandt 3y ago
  Pretty much all serious science spending is actually military spending. People don't always like to admit that, though, even when it's obvious. More so when it's not obvious.
- XorNot 3y ago
  The US actually built at least 9 Hubble Space Telescopes, they're just not called that: they're called Keyhole surveillance satellites. The size and shape of the Hubble is directly influenced by those satellites, and in particular the surprisingly cheap main mirror optics provided you built a mirror of exactly a particular size that it would turn out there was a very experienced and equipped facility in the US for building.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    In that case it's the opposite though: science taking an almost free ride on the coattails of spending that was originally budgeted as military.
ultra_nick 3y ago
Investors have a tool for that. 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
dmix 3y ago
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.
- shagie 3y ago
  > 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. You are likely interested in the FOCAL project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) > FOCAL (an acronym for Fast Outgoing Cyclopean Astronomical Lens) is a proposed space telescope that would use the Sun as a gravity lens. The gravitational lens effect was first derived by Albert Einstein, and the concept of a mission to the solar gravitational lens was first suggested by professor Von Eshleman, and analyzed further by Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and others. > In order to use the Sun as a gravity lens, it would be necessary to send the telescope to a minimum distance of 550 astronomical units away from the Sun, enabling very high signal amplifications: for example, at the 203 GHz wavelength, amplification of 1.3 x 10^15. Maccone suggests that this should be enough to obtain detailed images of the surfaces of extrasolar planets. --- That 550 AU... for comparison, Voyager 1 is currently at about 159 AU and moving at 3.6 AU/year. New Horizons is "only" 55.6 AU and going at 2.9 AU/year. But its an interesting project.
  - Mtinie 3y ago
    Was the Voyager series designed and optimized to get outside the heliosphere and into interstellar space as fast as possible? I just don’t have context to know whether covering 159 AU over ~45 years is exceptionally fast (for human-made objects) of if 550 AU could be reasonably reached in a far shorter timeframe if that was the primary goal.
Mistletoe 3y ago
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.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think there's any point in history where this heuristic would have allowed for significant basic research. But looking at the modern world, there's no way we could support today's population without some of that basic research. Regardless, poverty isn't mainly a problem of wealth scarcity, but instead of wealth distribution. So even if you stopped spending on any research that doesn't have a short-term justification, I don't think that money would end up alleviating poverty, but instead going to fund somebody's slightly bigger superyacht.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    And the people who would have been employed by the research work for Google on a pre-canned project, or on a better weapon.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      The sad thing is, better weapons are needed, because without them, we get people like Putin invading countries and stealing their resources (after murdering and raping their people) and then spending money on bigger superyachts. As for those "living breathing humans beings", reportedly 200,000 of them have died so far trying to help Putin achieve his goals and get another superyacht, so I really don't see why you'd want to spend money helping random humans when you could spend it on scientific research instead.
- prox 3y ago
  I have to disagree strongly. My take on this that navel staring is a source of the problems you mention. We are so hopelessly fascinated by internal conflict that having a more telescopic view and/or grand horizon view of what Earth’s place is, and our what should be a brotherhood of mankind is that we don’t have enough of that. Instead I get flipping news about stupid Kardashians or some navel gazing shit like wars, stupid ideologies, etc. etc. all day, every day.
throwawayastro 3y ago
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.
geuis 3y ago
(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.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Isn't Gorilla Glass effectively particle physics? There's a ton of surface treatment in materials science that amounts to firing a beam of atoms at a surface and/or bathing it in a plasma in order to get a unique chemical structure.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    the stuff you're talking about is what physicists call "low energy" particle physics. There is nothing wrong with that field but it's been around a while and it is not what CERN and other groups are doing.
    - 3y ago
wolverine876 3y ago
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.
DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
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. 0. https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/decadal-survey-on-astronomy-and-astrophysics-2020-astro2020 https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/decadal-survey-on...
brokeAstronomer 3y ago
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...
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  Why is getting a PhD good training for being a disgruntled and unemployed post-doc? Why should society spend sooo much money training someone and filling their heads with knowledge only to just kick that person out of science? It is a horrible mystery why people like you feel this is a good way to run society.
- stef25 3y ago
  > We're on the cusp (a couple of decades) from imaging potentially habitable Earth analogs with next-generation space missions Would love to hear more!
  - brokeAstronomer 3y ago
    Sure! The summary is that we'll likely be able to detect Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of their host stars and conduct basic biosignature searches using direct-imaging missions like HabEx and Luvoir. Below I'll give a bit more context. (It's late here and this ended up being quite long so feel free to skip to the second last paragraph!) There are currently three ways of studying exoplanets: the transit method, the radial velocity method and direct-imaging. (I'm excluding gravitational microlensing which is a fantastic technique for studying populations of planets, but each lensing event is a one off so the exoplanet is not amenable to follow-up observations.) The radial velocity method works by very carefully measuring the movement of a star (can reach sensitivities as low as a few meters per second!) in response to the planets orbiting around it. This gives us a good mass estimate, but no way to know about the atmosphere of the planets to search for biosignatures. The transit methods works on chance alignment; occasionally a planet will cross ('transit') its host star blocking out a portion of the light that would otherwise reach us (~1% for Jupiter, ~0.1% Neptune, ~0.01% Earth). We're able to detect this dip/shadow and infer the presence of the planet indirectly. Some of the light from the star will filter through the planets atmosphere and we can use this signal to infer the composition. However, there are some limitations. Earth's radius is 6,400km and the atmosphere is about 100km in height, or about ~0.15% of the radius. If the signal from an Earth like planet in transit is about ~0.01% you can imagine how much smaller the signal from the atmosphere is. So in practice, when doing 'transmission spectroscopy' you want to observe multiple transits and combine them together to boost the signal. This works well for planets on short orbits, but if one orbit takes a year then we have to wait a long time search for our aliens... Direct-imaging on the other hand aims to have a spatially separated image of the planet orbiting its host star. The planet itself isn't resolved - it's just a point of light - but it's separate from the star and so we can directly study its atmosphere. The technical challenges with imaging are extremely difficult, and primarily stem from the fact that the planet will be incredibly faint (~10^-10 times) compared to the host star. For comparison this is much smaller than aberrations induced by minuscule nanometer imperfections in your mirror, or by temperature induced changes in your optics. But, to make it feasible, we can use a coronagraph to block out most of the light of the star, observing from space affords a very stable temperature environment and use post-processing of the images to further boost sensitivity. Finally this leads us to the next generation direct imaging missions. Three key examples are LIFE, HabEx and LUVOIR. All three are in the concept phase, but the key idea is to have a large mirror in space (4m for Habex and 8m or 15m for LUVOIR). One big enough to comfortably spot an object as faint as an Earth sized planet in reflected light from it's host star. The trick with HabEx is that they also want to use a starshade flying in formation with the telescope to physically block out light from the star being observed. A starshade would theoretically be much better at blocking out light than our current coronagraphs. LUVOIR is just plain big. Finally, LIFE is a little different. Instead of one large mirror it is a mission that relies on interferometry to search for biosignatures. By combining light from several different telescopes flying in tight formation you can simulate a much larger mirror and achieve a similar effect. I'm leaving out a lot of details but I hope this gives you an idea of the direction astronomers are taking. Someone else mentioned the decadal survey (Astro2020), this is a great place to read some of the technical details. Feel free to PM any questions. It's not clear which one of these missions will be successful, and needless to say the required technology development is huge. However, I strongly suspect we'll be able to say something about habitability of a few dozen Earth like planets in the next couple of decades which is an incredible prospect. If we're lucky maybe we'll even see a biosignature!
vogon_laureate 3y ago
Hubble’s images has inspired millions. We should be happy to invest in things that spark wonder and awe. It’s good for humanity.
poulpy123 3y ago
> 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

xchip 3y ago

Physicist here, I agree with you 100%

travisporter 3y ago

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.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

brutusborn 3y ago

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.

htag 3y ago
> If you asked someone if they wanted $1billion to go to health research or space research the answer would be obvious. Honestly this depends. If we have 1000 billion going into health research, but 1 billion doing into space research, I think there's an open question on how much good an extra 0.1% of health research will do compared to doubling space research. In absolute terms instead of relative, I would prefer a billion on most space based research than a billion going to study male pattern baldness.
beerandt 3y ago
Pretty much all serious science spending is actually military spending. People don't always like to admit that, though, even when it's obvious. More so when it's not obvious.
XorNot 3y ago
The US actually built at least 9 Hubble Space Telescopes, they're just not called that: they're called Keyhole surveillance satellites. The size and shape of the Hubble is directly influenced by those satellites, and in particular the surprisingly cheap main mirror optics provided you built a mirror of exactly a particular size that it would turn out there was a very experienced and equipped facility in the US for building.
- usrusr 3y ago
  In that case it's the opposite though: science taking an almost free ride on the coattails of spending that was originally budgeted as military.

ultra_nick 3y ago

Investors have a tool for that. 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

dmix 3y ago

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.

shagie 3y ago
> 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. You are likely interested in the FOCAL project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) > FOCAL (an acronym for Fast Outgoing Cyclopean Astronomical Lens) is a proposed space telescope that would use the Sun as a gravity lens. The gravitational lens effect was first derived by Albert Einstein, and the concept of a mission to the solar gravitational lens was first suggested by professor Von Eshleman, and analyzed further by Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and others. > In order to use the Sun as a gravity lens, it would be necessary to send the telescope to a minimum distance of 550 astronomical units away from the Sun, enabling very high signal amplifications: for example, at the 203 GHz wavelength, amplification of 1.3 x 10^15. Maccone suggests that this should be enough to obtain detailed images of the surfaces of extrasolar planets. --- That 550 AU... for comparison, Voyager 1 is currently at about 159 AU and moving at 3.6 AU/year. New Horizons is "only" 55.6 AU and going at 2.9 AU/year. But its an interesting project.
- Mtinie 3y ago
  Was the Voyager series designed and optimized to get outside the heliosphere and into interstellar space as fast as possible? I just don’t have context to know whether covering 159 AU over ~45 years is exceptionally fast (for human-made objects) of if 550 AU could be reasonably reached in a far shorter timeframe if that was the primary goal.

Mistletoe 3y ago

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.

wpietri 3y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think there's any point in history where this heuristic would have allowed for significant basic research. But looking at the modern world, there's no way we could support today's population without some of that basic research. Regardless, poverty isn't mainly a problem of wealth scarcity, but instead of wealth distribution. So even if you stopped spending on any research that doesn't have a short-term justification, I don't think that money would end up alleviating poverty, but instead going to fund somebody's slightly bigger superyacht.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  And the people who would have been employed by the research work for Google on a pre-canned project, or on a better weapon.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    The sad thing is, better weapons are needed, because without them, we get people like Putin invading countries and stealing their resources (after murdering and raping their people) and then spending money on bigger superyachts. As for those "living breathing humans beings", reportedly 200,000 of them have died so far trying to help Putin achieve his goals and get another superyacht, so I really don't see why you'd want to spend money helping random humans when you could spend it on scientific research instead.
prox 3y ago
I have to disagree strongly. My take on this that navel staring is a source of the problems you mention. We are so hopelessly fascinated by internal conflict that having a more telescopic view and/or grand horizon view of what Earth’s place is, and our what should be a brotherhood of mankind is that we don’t have enough of that. Instead I get flipping news about stupid Kardashians or some navel gazing shit like wars, stupid ideologies, etc. etc. all day, every day.

throwawayastro 3y ago

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.

geuis 3y ago

(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.

hinkley 3y ago
Isn't Gorilla Glass effectively particle physics? There's a ton of surface treatment in materials science that amounts to firing a beam of atoms at a surface and/or bathing it in a plasma in order to get a unique chemical structure.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  the stuff you're talking about is what physicists call "low energy" particle physics. There is nothing wrong with that field but it's been around a while and it is not what CERN and other groups are doing.
  - 3y ago

wolverine876 3y ago

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.

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago

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. 0. https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/decadal-survey-on-astronomy-and-astrophysics-2020-astro2020 https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/decadal-survey-on...

brokeAstronomer 3y ago

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...

xhkkffbf 3y ago
Why is getting a PhD good training for being a disgruntled and unemployed post-doc? Why should society spend sooo much money training someone and filling their heads with knowledge only to just kick that person out of science? It is a horrible mystery why people like you feel this is a good way to run society.
stef25 3y ago
> We're on the cusp (a couple of decades) from imaging potentially habitable Earth analogs with next-generation space missions Would love to hear more!
- brokeAstronomer 3y ago
  Sure! The summary is that we'll likely be able to detect Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of their host stars and conduct basic biosignature searches using direct-imaging missions like HabEx and Luvoir. Below I'll give a bit more context. (It's late here and this ended up being quite long so feel free to skip to the second last paragraph!) There are currently three ways of studying exoplanets: the transit method, the radial velocity method and direct-imaging. (I'm excluding gravitational microlensing which is a fantastic technique for studying populations of planets, but each lensing event is a one off so the exoplanet is not amenable to follow-up observations.) The radial velocity method works by very carefully measuring the movement of a star (can reach sensitivities as low as a few meters per second!) in response to the planets orbiting around it. This gives us a good mass estimate, but no way to know about the atmosphere of the planets to search for biosignatures. The transit methods works on chance alignment; occasionally a planet will cross ('transit') its host star blocking out a portion of the light that would otherwise reach us (~1% for Jupiter, ~0.1% Neptune, ~0.01% Earth). We're able to detect this dip/shadow and infer the presence of the planet indirectly. Some of the light from the star will filter through the planets atmosphere and we can use this signal to infer the composition. However, there are some limitations. Earth's radius is 6,400km and the atmosphere is about 100km in height, or about ~0.15% of the radius. If the signal from an Earth like planet in transit is about ~0.01% you can imagine how much smaller the signal from the atmosphere is. So in practice, when doing 'transmission spectroscopy' you want to observe multiple transits and combine them together to boost the signal. This works well for planets on short orbits, but if one orbit takes a year then we have to wait a long time search for our aliens... Direct-imaging on the other hand aims to have a spatially separated image of the planet orbiting its host star. The planet itself isn't resolved - it's just a point of light - but it's separate from the star and so we can directly study its atmosphere. The technical challenges with imaging are extremely difficult, and primarily stem from the fact that the planet will be incredibly faint (~10^-10 times) compared to the host star. For comparison this is much smaller than aberrations induced by minuscule nanometer imperfections in your mirror, or by temperature induced changes in your optics. But, to make it feasible, we can use a coronagraph to block out most of the light of the star, observing from space affords a very stable temperature environment and use post-processing of the images to further boost sensitivity. Finally this leads us to the next generation direct imaging missions. Three key examples are LIFE, HabEx and LUVOIR. All three are in the concept phase, but the key idea is to have a large mirror in space (4m for Habex and 8m or 15m for LUVOIR). One big enough to comfortably spot an object as faint as an Earth sized planet in reflected light from it's host star. The trick with HabEx is that they also want to use a starshade flying in formation with the telescope to physically block out light from the star being observed. A starshade would theoretically be much better at blocking out light than our current coronagraphs. LUVOIR is just plain big. Finally, LIFE is a little different. Instead of one large mirror it is a mission that relies on interferometry to search for biosignatures. By combining light from several different telescopes flying in tight formation you can simulate a much larger mirror and achieve a similar effect. I'm leaving out a lot of details but I hope this gives you an idea of the direction astronomers are taking. Someone else mentioned the decadal survey (Astro2020), this is a great place to read some of the technical details. Feel free to PM any questions. It's not clear which one of these missions will be successful, and needless to say the required technology development is huge. However, I strongly suspect we'll be able to say something about habitability of a few dozen Earth like planets in the next couple of decades which is an incredible prospect. If we're lucky maybe we'll even see a biosignature!

vogon_laureate 3y ago

Hubble’s images has inspired millions. We should be happy to invest in things that spark wonder and awe. It’s good for humanity.

poulpy123 3y ago

> 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