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
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)?
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