In light of everyone losing their minds over the great high resolution JWST images, what’s the functional application of this new information? Considering that we are so far away from even the closest star that interstellar travel is extremely unlikely, how does this new information help us?

Question

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

Answer 1

The tools and infrastructure used to process new types of data, and built originally for scientific purposes, tend to find their way into other fields. For example, NumPy, the library for numerical computing (which is a big part of the reason for Python’s popularity now) is built off of libraries (Numeric, Numarray) which were developed in part to help with processing images from the Hubble telescope. Python was then used as the basis for Google, because NumPy is more generally a connection to Fortran libraries which allow the types of linear algebra operations that are useful for processing other types of data. Python is used as the basis for innumerable companies because of this fact.

https://scipy.github.io/old-wiki/pages/History_of_SciPy.html