Why are we “wasting” so much money on Space Telescopes? 5 reasons here...
★Eduardo Sugra?es
Open Innovation | Business Strategy | Disruptive Technologies | Adj Professor | Mentor [+6K]
A couple of days ago watching a docu about the James Webb telescope my fiancée asked me why we are putting so much money here rather than in other areas with a more direct impact in our lives.
This question shook my head and made me wonder: are space telescopes really worth it?
Have you ever looked up at the stars and wondered what they were? Have you imagined the vastness of the universe and how much is out there?
Well, the truth is that telescopes allow us to do that. And much more.
How Much Did it Cost the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?
This groundbreaking telescope was launched in 2021, more than a decade after its original launch target of 2010. The project's total investment has skyrocketed in the meantime, now exceeding $10 billion and costing NASA more than ten times their original estimation.
Large projects like this, especially those that rely on experimental and breakthrough technologies, often exceed budgets. However, a 1.000% increase is certainly atypical and speaks to the difficulties encountered during the development process.
About $9.7 billion is from the U.S.; $810 million came from the European Space Agency - ESA , and $160 million came from the Canadian Space Agency | Agence spatiale canadienne .
What are the Applications of Space Telescopes?
1) Observable Universe
Light travels at roughly 300.000 km/s and is an unbreakable law of physics, reaching to us light coming from different space objects such as planets, stars or galaxies. We use different portions of the radiation spectrum to know how far they are, their composition if they are solid or gas structures… and recently discovered that, although their speed is the same, they are each time further away from us. This phenomenon is explained by the space-time expansion theory explaining why objects in space are exponentially separating faster and further every.
those objects we don’t observe and explore today won’t be able to do it anymore
In other words, those objects we don’t observe and explore today won’t be able to do it anymore since they will escape from our vision range , ultimately being isolated. Obviously, this is according to actual knowledge and science...
2) Rare-earth Scarcity and Geostrategy
With the world population about to hit 11 billion people in the next decades, natural resources such as food, energy, water… are obviously becoming more and more important, but other resources, called key strategic resources, are getting critical and decisive in the global political landscape.
Resources are finite elements whose scarcity is making that those who dominate and control the resources will have the chance to challenge the status quo of our actual society. Nowadays minerals are used everywhere you look around and thus, they directly influence industries such as energy generation, energy storage, military and defence, health, transport, telecommunications…
3) Faster-than-light Travel
Not fiction anymore. In a research project funded by DARPA and intended for understanding better Casimir cavities, Dr Harold White discovered a real-world “Wrap Bubble” at the Limitless Space Institute ?(LSI).
They accidentally reproduced a structure whose peculiar energy distribution was predicted in 1994 by Miguel Alcubierre that generates “a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble…”.
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As we “all” know, space fabric isn’t fixed and it can be curved due to the mass of space objects and the gravity they produce that attracts other objects, therefore, if we could shorten the front side space of an object with positive gravity at the same time that we enlarge the rear with a negative gravity force this object would move extremely fast. The problem? This hypothesis needs (among other things) huge amounts of exotic matter and energy.
Where do telescopes come in? They help us to better understand exotic matter like dark matter and dark energy for instance.
I know this is hard to digest and requires a huge imaginative capability, so I will leave you here a short video explaining a bit deeper in details what’s all of this about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtXOLkVrdmE
4 ) Survivability
Telescopes are fundamental to science and human progress. They allow us to see beyond our horizon, study the most distant objects in the universe and better understand the cosmos.
Many of Earth's mass extinctions have already been caused by asteroid strikes. We still don't know the size of the cosmos and the number of celestial bodies out there, but telescopes allow us to detect the endless asteroids and comets with impact trajectories that could change life on Earth as we know it.
These are "only" the dangerous asteroids identified by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and zoomed-in to near-Earth region, not to mention the remaining space within the 46 billion lighyears radious observable universe.
Deep space telescopes are our first safety shield, not physical but an information one.
5) Curiosity:
Maybe is simpler than all of that and is just a matter of our human inherent curiosity that makes us imagine, create, seek knowledge, and eliminate uncertainties...
Back to hundreds of years ago when we sailed the oceans on big and tall ships, the one that could see further could know earlier and had a competitive advantage.
What other reasons come to your mind?
Resources:
Weekly?#innovation ?and?#technology ?resumes |?#TechnologyRadar ?#RadarTecnologico #space #physics #astronomy ?#espacio #fisica ?#earth ?#future
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