Let me state for the record that **I am not trolling**, and I am blown away by the imagery as much as the next person.
But what can we do with this new information? Where does it take us? How does it help us?
What’s next?
In: 262
We can learn much more about how the universe formed, how the earliest galaxies formed, and what (relatively) nearby exoplanets are made of and what atmospheres they have. You increase scientific knowledge *first,* and figure out what if anything to do with that information *second.*
The universe has a bunch of extremes, and many phenomena that don’t jive with what we understand. Both of these are areas rich in the possibilities of new understandings of how things work. From this understanding new physics may be developed that could one day be used to create new devices.
Many devices were first designed and used for astronomy reasons. CCDs were first designed for capturing images from telescopes and are now the basis of that digital camera in your iPhone. Synthesizing images from multiple sources was first used for radio astronomy, but the technology is now used in generating images from CAT scans and MRI machines.
Humans are a naturally curious, and trying to understand our place in the universe is interesting to many of us.
The short answer to “how do we benefit” is “Math”
This new resolution and capabilities allows for more precise measurements of stellar phenomena and their effects on surrounding celestial bodies.
Plain to the untrained eye will be lensing, where we see galaxies stretched out because their light has been bent around a powerful source of gravity like a galaxy. Hard to see in old images, it is very clear now what is lensed and what is negligibly so without any instruments or measurements, just the naked eye
With the new data, lots of math can be done to determine all kinds of things. It will further our understanding of gravity, dark matter, and the formation of galaxies and ultimately the formation of the entire universe.
Very cool stuff.
Well for starters science isn’t necessarily interested in utility, but in the breaking of boundaries for scientific progress technology is created that eventually needs up in the hands of regular folk like you and I.
A perfect example is relativity: one could’ve asked the same question about paying Einstein to doodle some math about the nature of space and time. “What can we do with it, time travel?!”
As it turns out, a whole lot: GPS, satellite comms, more lasers, and a myriad of sensors in your phone are the indirect result of spending money trying to prove Einstein’s doodles right or wrong.
In the case of the JWST as a success story of science and engineering (in spite of the massive price tag), just making the thing, putting it in space and getting the data are such gargantuan tasks that technology’s probably having a field day with all the things that got invented to make it happen.
As for the telescope itself and the information it collects it is mostly stuff about cosmological origins: how a planet/star/galaxy is made and seeks to throw evidence into the existing theoretical framework.
What could *that* be used for? Well, what could you do with detailed information about how a planet is formed? What could you do if you understood in detail how your phone was made?
The answer is… we don’t know where that’s gonna take us. We never have, but we keep doing science and technology keeps moving forward. Ask again in 10 years, [what was the JWST good for](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-technology-spinoffs)?
The pretty images that gets published only use a part of the vast dataset collected each time. The full dataset does not just contain the colors of each pixel but its full spectral dataset where we can identify elements such as hydrogen and carbon, even isotopes. So we know the exact composition of all that gas and stars and galaxies. From the amount of redshift we know how fast they are going and therefore how far away they are, how fast the galaxies are spinning and so on. We find groups of galaxies orbiting each other. We can even reconstruct their exact possitions, not what we see, which means we can find out how the light bent on the way to Earth. From this we can create maps of where the mass in the universe is and find clouds of dark matter. There is so much more information we might gather from this telescope then what you see in the picture, it just takes a lot longer to calculate and understand.
The goal of this is to find things that does not match our theories. There is a very high chance that our current scientific theories are not quite right, but only match our current observations. We know this both from experience and because we have contradicting theories and theories which matches almost all our observations. By making more observations and find more data that does not match the theories we can improve upon these theories. If we know how our theories are wrong and by how much we can better understand how to come up with the correct ones.
It is hard to speculate on what som knew unknown theory based on yet to be studies scientific data might mean. But the theories which governed long time ago in a galaxy far far away still govern Earth. It just might be that we have been unable to recreate the conditions required for us to observe it, but those might be observed out there. But once we know about the theories we can construct conditions to take advantage of them here. Maybe we findally crack the problem of a working warp drive, we already have designs which should work with current theories but not current economics.
To give you a simple example fitting for this subreddit the closest nuclear fusion we have is the Sun. And even then we needed to study various different stars and compare them to each other to figure out how stars evolve to figure out what fusion reactions take place on the Sun. And now we are using that data when building working fusion reactors on Earth to solve our power problems. There are currently several research reactors and they have just managed to technically make power. If we had not studied the stars we would never have discovered fusion. Not only from observing fusion on the Sun but a lot of other scientific discoveries done by telescopes and other astronomical instruments. So who can tell what possible discoveries we might get from the JWST to help us here on Earth.
As we look further away, we also are looking further in the past. Being able to look this far in the past might help us decide which of our theories about the very early universe are right and which ones are wrong.
There are a whole slew of problems where we do not have enough information to know which solutions are correct. Which ones, if any, will be helped? We won’t know that until we start looking.
Many people think that science breakthroughs happen with a “Eureka”, but in truth, most breakthroughs happen with a “That’s strange…”
At this point it’s a situation of we just aren’t aware of what we don’t know. As several have already stated, we can use whatever we find to refine or redefine our existing understanding of everything. We’re flying by the seat of our pants here.
More precise measurements of exoplanet atmospheres means we’re more likely to discover life elsewhere in the universe.
I think that discovering life elsewhere will cause a massive infusion of new effort into many fields of science and engineering and shake things up in unforeseeable ways. I think it will give a lot of talented people (who may be spending their efforts in less personally meaningful ways) something to focus on that is still noble and untainted by the misery of everything else going on in the world. Humans will finally have a *place to go*, however long it takes. And a specific goal is a potent motivator.
It might possibly be centuries, if ever, before humans set foot on a habitable new world (if and when we discover one). But that’s mostly due to the limitations of human biology. Robotic probes don’t have to worry as much about rapid changes in direction, g-forces, food/water/air, living space, etc. I think the first *truly living world* confirmed to exist might draw that kind of interest and investment of effort to realistically study it up close even in my lifetime.
We may already have the understanding to build realistic missions of that kind if people can be convinced to spend that effort and investment. There are spacecraft designs that could get to Alpha Centauri, though they rely on some scary-sounding nuclear propulsion strategies and extreme timespans, both of which render them entirely unsuitable to be accompanied by humans.
Anyway, we’ll never know if we don’t try.
I’m also eager to see what cosmology results will come out of JWST. Learning about our origins is a valuable effort (to me, at least) whether in some ancient temple in a valley in Turkey or by looking at the darkest spot in the sky with the highest resolution instrument yet devised to see what we can see. There’s always a chance that studying star formation in the relatively higher precision JWST can might revolutionize our understanding of physics in some unforeseen way and make technologies we can’t even fathom today possible.
Maybe we discover new information while studying a freshly ignited young star that fills an important gap in theory and leads to new and safe forms of nuclear energy or a breakthrough in fundamental physics. This opportunity is inherent in looking at any neglected phenomena. The massive dividends of looking where few people ever have has paid off tremendously for our civilization time and time again – too often to keep writing it off as wasted time or money.
That kind of discovery could practically reform all of human civilization overnight. Imagine oil and coal becoming obsolete within a decade. Or some new means of composing matter by fission or fusion byproducts that negates the natural scarcity of rare earth metals that require large scale mining and exist in large concentrations in only a very few places accessible to us on the surface.
Science fiction stuff, right? The same was true of virtually all science until somebody put in the work. Much advancement comes without a real expectation of specific results, but curiosity alone.
Finally, why not? Why not do this instead of that? The sheer quantity of things I read about every day that astonish me in their scope and yet effect me not even in the slightest is overwhelming. I don’t know if you get the same effect from reading your local newspaper or world news, but 90% of the headlines I read evoke a strong “Why *the hell* is anybody doing *that*?” response in me.
We have this “fallacy of relative privation” wherein we think effort spent in one direction is wasted when another direction seems more important. But everybody has a different idea of “more important”. Should I set aside my career to bake and hand out bread? There remain hungry people in the world. We should all stop what we’re doing and do that instead. While noble, that idea fails because it assumes that humans can (by force) or should (by virtue of real results) be pulled away from something that interests them toward some goal that interests them less. In reality, people tend to do best at what interests them most. And to enforce otherwise is counter to ideologies that value personal freedom. I say let people do what they will and see what fruits they bear.
Modern astronomy might never turn out to be useful for anything. In which case, it’s just a frivolous use of resources that does nothing but entertain anyone who cares about that stuff. But you could say the same about art and culture and all the other things we do that aren’t necessary for human survival.
When the Wright Brothers first flew, one of the reactions to the feat was “Well that’s interesting, but of what use is it?”
When man landed on the moon: “Well that’s interesting, but of what use is it?”
The whole history of science in the post-industrial era is of constantly pushing the limits of our knowledge farther and farther out, *just for the sake of gaining knowledge.* The actual benefits of that new knowledge can’t be predicted, only recognized in hindsight.
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