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 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.