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?
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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.
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