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
Yeah but 7billion….and vulnerable to very small objects hitting the mirror. I applaud the effort and technology challenges solved but 7 billion…
You’re not the only one that thinks that. I’ve seen where other people have said that discoveries tend to come before applications. That’s absolutely true here. Aside from having awesome new images for wallpapers and such, it can advance the understanding of our own solar system, and Earth as well. To use this as an example, studying weather patterns on the other planets have helped understand Earth’s patterns and helped build/advance meteorological models. There’s a lot to be gained by looking up and out
Usually discovery and research in physics and other sciencea doesn’t come with a practical application in mind. But sometimes the application comes years later to amazing results. Einstein didn’t have LED screens when he discovered the Photoelectric effect. The apollo missions gave us amazing advances in almost all area of science.
Some amazing answers here regarding making discoveries without a clear path to utilization often leading to amazing new things.
I’ll add one other less-likely scenario: the instrumentation can detect oxygen in the atmosphere of distant planets, which may lead to additional insights as to whether those planets contain life – and possibly even intelligent life. That doesn’t lead directly to anything since we still can’t travel there, but it COULD lead to potential contact with another civilization on a distant planet.
No direct utility at all, but the possibilities for learning under that scenario are endless. It would also change the human psyche fundamentally to know that there is other intelligent life in our galaxy.
Science is about discovery and learning how the universe works. That’s what JWST does.
With knowledge and understanding, practical applications to use this knowledge will come in due time.
1. Light travels at a certain speed. So what you are seeing in the space is technically in the past. The farther it is, the older it is, but it was also harder to see. The high resolution allows us to see much farther in the past with more data and precision, thus undertstand much more about the creation of the universe.
So you look at a closer younger galaxy then a farther older one and compare to see how they differ and draw conclusions.
2.But aside from the resolution, the biggest point about JWST is that it also has a very precise measurement on ranges of colors. Colors travel at different speeds. By isolating color ranges you can technically go back in time on a picture of the same object. Which is HUGE.
There are very few experiments to confirm the most advanced theories of gravity. Looking out into space may give more data to confirm details of these theories. More details give a greater ability to apply theories in engineering. Bam hover shoes.
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
Granted it has not much practical use of the everyday person….
But it expands our overall knowledge of the universe
Can it shut the flat earthers up?
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