Now imagine a world where every taxpayer can vote where their money goes, and there are institutions making sure that this money is spent where it's meant for, like: education, healthcare, local infrastructure, research, military, military operations, etc I wonder if things would be different..
Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. Why would a popular vote, where expertise means nothing, result in anything better than we already have? There are plenty of issues people don't even know exist, but are nonetheless essential. People also in general do not know how much is necessary to maintain infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd expect a catastrophe.
> Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country.
That's true as far as it goes. However if we had the ability to individually vote on allocations, presumably most people would delegate the details to an expert of their choosing, while taking a stance on high-level classes of expenditures, for example "I will vote for the <insert expert> budget because it reduces military spending and increases healthcare spending", or whatever your policy preference is. Basically Liquid Democracy[1] of some sort (whether the partial delegation is built into the system or implemented outside the allocation voting system).
I do agree with your general point that direct democracy can be problematic, particularly when a binary choice is presented rather than a continuum of options. E.g. see the CA ballot measure system which often results in "choose A&C or B&D"-type choices which exclude certain preferences from being expressed. I think a more granular direct democracy might enable better decision frameworks though, specifically by enabling more options for delegation.
Almost no politician has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. Why would a legislature, where expertise means nothing, result in anything better than a popular vote? There are plenty of issues politicians don't even know exist, but are nonetheless essential. Politicians in general do not know how much is necessary to maintain infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd expect a catastrophe.
More seriously, I don't think our current decision-makers are informed and the average person wouldn't be either. But I trust the average persons values way more than I trust those of a politician. Maybe we still wouldn't get enough funding for roads and bridges. We don't get that now. But perhaps the average person would put more money towards education and food and less towards war.
Something need to be done to give more power to the majority... But it isn't as simple as having a web app for having everyone vote on every topic even if you assume that the identity problem is solved.
It is - and that's $10b upfront cost for an asset that will operate for a decade. $1b a year is a steal for that compared to the other shit the US wastes federal money on.
I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.
Current estimate is closer to 20 years until fuel to keep it in the Lagrange point is exhausted. Originally planned for 10, but the deployment was precise enough to leave enough fuel for many more years :)
The supply of coolant is finite. At the time of mission planning there was no spaceship capable of resupplying at the Lagrange point. As I understand it the coolant onbaord is good for 10 years.
However, if starship is successful that situation will change and resupply becomes possible. So I suppose we'll see.
NASA is already doing resupply missions to easily-accessible orbits [1] and they have previous spin-offs less customized to repair/replace but capable nonetheless e.g. X-37/X-40
It is fully within the realm of possibility that a future OSAM mission will be capable of hitting far more distant points, since the Lunar stuff is just starting to heat up.
JWST is limited by fuel, not by the cryocooler. Helium is not a consumable, although some level of leakage may occur. But only one of its instruments requires it.
How many factory or construction jobs does "hard-science" funding create? I love science but defense invests in the entire "stack". It creates factory jobs but it also creates jobs for basically every STEM field.
From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It has everything.
The only thing that comes close is if there were some green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
> From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It has everything.
I mean he explicitly said it was not the only factor...
"The belief that destruction is good for the economy"
That's not at all what GP is saying. Government investment into industries have different return on investment. This is why governments heavily invest into healthcare. But, if we're talking investing in a military vs. university researchers, I think you have to be fairly elitist to say that adding 100,000 academics is better for society than providing a good life for 1M soldiers. At its core, military spending is the greatest experiment of UBI ever done. Now, downvotes from the left and right.
Why thank you. I know that many believe that militaries can only be used for destruction. Of course, we've had 70 years of peace (for the most part) that was really only possible with the largest military movement (10% of the US) to counteract a true force of destruction. I'm the first one to ream on the US's use of drone strikes and getting involved in the Middle East in the first place, but the GPS system and the US Navy probably contribute $1T each to the functioning of the global economy per year. If that takes a large amount of soldiers to be combat ready (definitely not freeloading) then I'm personally fine with that.
They're freeloading in the sense that they're paid to not meaningfully produce anything, cleaning guns, loading and unloading crates, doing calisthenics and polishing up boots are some fairly unproductive uses of able bodied people, not to speak of the pencilpushers setting up the logistics for this.
Paying people to churn butter by hand non stop would probably be more of a contribution, or doing actual UBI.
You have a cynical view. I have a humanitarian service medal from rendering assistance to Indonesia after their earthquake in 2009. While I was deployed my friends got theirs helping Japan after their devastating tsunami.
What about police and firefighters? They don't "produce" anything but you need them.
I'm pretty pro-military, but "70 years of peace" is ridiculously inaccurate. We had the Korean War running until 1953 (which involved the following: USA, USSA, PRC, AU, Canada, the list goes on).
Shortly after, the US begins covert assistance and operations in Vietnam (which ended up involving the USA, USSR, PRC etc etc.)This continued until 1975.
The US had a brief break from overt warfare until Grenada in the 80s, followed quickly by Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Since then it's been pretty much continuous warfare by US troops to this day.
Just because we don't see it on the news every night, US servicemen are fighting in Africa, in the Middle East, and obviously the Navy is present in almost all the oceans in significant levels.
Sure the USN enables free trade. And I have no issue with a well-funded navy, with clear goals and objectives. But the rest of the military is bloated beyond reasonable belief, committed to tasks that are undemocratic, and as others have pointed out, when you have a large, expensive military, the temptation to use it irresponsibly is high.
That's my laziness of not couching all my statements with more nuance. There is the famous stat of the US having a pretty small number of years of peace since inception. The "70 years of peace" was meant to be the perception bit you talk about but also more "peace at home". In all the conflicts you mention, the US was doing something it didn't need to do in order to defend itself. People were/are course afraid of nukes, but I think that's a very different sentiment.
If my comments are coming across as endorsing the entirety of the US military and that it is infallible, that was not the intent. I mostly just called people elitist for claiming that academic pursuits are more worthy of funding than the equivalent defense expenditure on the sole basis of academic=good and soldier=bad. Based on my other comments, you can see that I even believe that the technological progress spurred by defense needs is greater than throwing the same amount of money at research.
>wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
We have over the last 10 years. Now we need a grid scale battery race as we are realizing that all the green energy in the world is useless if we can't store it.
I wish more people realized you don't need necessarily batteries to store energy. There are mechanical ways to store large amounts of energy, like pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
Eh, everything except useful output. Sure, a by-product of military research could be something useful, but that money would go a lot further if we just went for the useful thing immediately. The F35 is a good example. Whatever technology gains came out of that project are likely useful in general, but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon.
I don't know if you've ever met any ... aircraft metallurgists, for example, but holy poops are they motivated by doing anything awesome with advanced alloys.
Indeed. Some people defend war spending by saying that it leads to, say, medial advances. Seems to me that you can fund medical research without spending a trillion dollars sending humans around the planet, causing another trillion in infrastructure damage, air-conditioning tents in a desert, blowing limbs off the aforementioned humans, flying them home and then still spending the money on the research to fix them (and in the US especially, then also denying these hard-won fruits of this whole taxpayer-funded endeavour to the taxpayers).
The point of military spending is to prevent war by creating a strong deterrent that encourages diplomacy. It’s not to start wars, that’s why it’s called defense spending. (I’m not arguing the US always does this right.)
That doesn't work when you have a belligerent who needs to get itself into conflicts every 15 years to keep its experience levels up and foment conflict abroad in the "off season" to support its MIC.
The continental united states is surrounded by two friendly neighbors that are not a threat to us. We are separated from our nearest peer adversaries by thousands of miles of ocean, and their entire military doctrine revolves around defending themselves from us.
We could get by with a tiny fraction of our 700B+ / yr defense budget. One wonders how much better a society we would be if we spent that on things that would actually benefit the average citizen, or did something unthinkable like actually paying down debt.
> Our military has nothing to do with the strength of the dollar. That is totally reliant on the strength of our economy.
The strength of the dollar is all about beating whoever disagrees with its role as the oil exchange currency to submission, because that is its current base for its demand. Libya was not invaded because the West suddenly remembered that Kandafi is a dictator. Iraq was not invaded because suddenly WMD were found (did they ever find another tale to cover their reasons?), Syria was not made into anarchy because the West wanted the Syrian people to be free. They all had one common point near the time of invasion. So yes the military does play a big role.
> their entire military doctrine revolves around defending themselves from us.
I mean, Russia invades and China taunts its neighbors pretty regularly, so clearly their military is focused on more than defense from the US (as if we have any interest in an offensive war against them in the first place). The US military keeps those countries in check, so of course they focus on how they can “defend” against our military. The extent to which Russia and China are scheming against the US military is the extent to which they aren’t invading their neighbors, which is precisely the value the US military provides, and indeed that Russia is invading Ukraine is a failure of the US government to respond firmly to previous invasions (no, not direct military conflict with Russia).
The idea that the US or the world can enjoy meaningful peace while withdrawing from the global theater is dangerously naive. There’s no world in which we pull back without oppressive dictatorships rushing to fill the void.
It's not our 'job' to be the world police. We've been effectively subsidizing social spending in LATAM and europe for decades now. Other countries would simply have to increase their defense spending as necessary to keep themselves safe.
I don't think there is any role for the US military beyond defending US soil. I'm tired of propping up our bloated military industrial complex on the premise that we are solely responsible for world peace.
I hope you are prepared for many more russian and/or china backed regimes in africa/se asia. This would put any ressource extraction/trade from these regions in the hands of Putin/Xi.
Expect some unforeseen problems at the most unfortunate economic moments.
If it doesn't happen to US citizens on US soil, it's not our place to directly intervene with boots on the ground. We can manage international relations with diplomacy and trade.
I doubt you'll find anyone who believes that it's ideal that the US is solely or primarily responsible for world peace, but it is an important role that we play. Further, not only is it morally reprehensible to allow the world to fall into chaos on the basis that "we ought not have to" as we retreat within our own borders, but it violates our own self-interest--as our partners fall, we become weaker economically and militarily, which leaves us vulnerable to attack.
A shared responsibility for world peace probably looks more like "more involvement from our NATO partners" (which we're actually beginning to see now that Europe is waking up to the fact that their peace is a property of NATO protection rather than some foregone conclusion). It decidedly doesn't look like the US dramatically shrinking defense spending (the US only spends 3% of its GDP on defense and that's on track to fall to 2.7% by the end of the decade), but more likely having our partners increase their own contributions and involvement.
Last I saw we spend 3.7% of our gdp on defense, and most of our allies are spending like half that much. Must be nice to spend on your populace while you rely on uncle sam to have your back.
I do not believe we should be going deeper into debt for other nation's national security.
Europe disarmed massively after WW2, understandable if you look at scale of the damage that was done. That left the US as the bouncer (street name: NATO) for the West, an arrangement that's probably by and large worked, some questionable misadventures on foreign shores notwithstanding. WW2 is no longer relevant and Europe should rearm and share the defense burden, even Germany. Ideally there'd be no defense burden at all, and a defense budget of $0, but if you neglect it then, even in enlightened 2022, you get raped and pillaged c.f. Ukraine.
Considering how frequently we put our weapons of war to use ruining the lives of poor people around the world I would say that theory has been disproved. The US is virtually always at war.
What do people think happens if the US withdraws from the global theater and doesn’t maintain its military capabilities? Do we really think that Russia or China would settle for regional skirmishes, and the world would be at peace? The US is very often at war, but there are greater evils than the US bombing ISIS even with the commensurate civilian casualties (hint: few other military powers are so scrupulous about civilian casualties).
You might want to research the contacts, support, decisions and occurrences regarding the US administration and ISIS. And that's just regarding an organization you mentioned. We would lose count if we started listing the countries the US willingly destroyed in cold blood.
I prefer to think of military spending during peacetime as "peace spending" not "war spending".
Spending on actual wars, once they start, is another matter. Some wars are just (like the support of Ukraine, at present, I would say, or the liberation of Kuwait), some are unjust, many are some shade of gray.
But generally, it is preferable when democratic countries have enough military might during peacetime to make would-be conquerors put aside their dreams of being the new Peter the Great, Saladin or Qin Shi Huang.
Peace is relative. The US has not had war on its own territory since the Civil War, so the civilian population has experienced peace for over 150 years.
During WW1 and especially WW2, the US military was employed to nearly maximum capacity, in other words, 1945 was the last time the military was in a state of all-out war.
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the military was partially committed to the wars, maybe around 25% of 1945's commitment. I would label these limited wars.
The invasion phases of the two Iraqi wars as well as the invasion phase in Afghanistan saw similar levels of mobilization, but these were over so quickly they would be more like skirmishes.
And for the rest, I would label them as little more than policing of occupied territories.
(All of the above from the US perspective, from the perspective of the adversary, several of the above were total wars.)
If you look at the death toll, WW2 cost 0.4% of the US population at the time. The Vietnam and Korean wars cost less than 0.1% of the population each, and the rest hardly register.
Compare that to the 5%-20% death toll of many European countries during WW2, and similar numbers for numerous other wars through history, and you get a perspective of how peaceful the US has been since the Civil War.
It’s not popular to talk positively about the F35 yet. You need to pretend that the US’s military spending is entirely negative and the world would be better off if it had zero standing army.
How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than tanks that sit outside rusting?
I'm an amateur astronomer, and even I doubt that these telescopes will provide any output that will be of use to humans in the next hundred or thousand years.
It would have taken much longer to come about, if it had happened at all. International efforts are like cartels which agree that they'll share any innovations, thus stunting progress (by removing the incentive to improve).
Undoubtedly. But I'm glad my own country got to at least play a small part, which of course we had to make a movie about (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish).
You seem a little negative towards astronomy for an amateur astronomer. Knowing that Pluto is there, or other galaxies exist has little use in terms of utility, but we still want to know. The images and data output by the JWST might be of little use to scientists in 100 or 1000 years, but that data will still spark the next round of research that will put them in the more advanced position they find themselves in.
I love knowing this stuff, and getting to see the faint light that comes to us from so far away, and so long ago. I still think it's almost totally useless.
I was trying to highlight the difference between being useful and being valuable. Your stargazing might not be particularly useful but it's very valuable, because you enjoy it and because you're awed by what you see. Trying to find it useful or useless doesn't need to come in to it.
> How useful is the JWST's output? Is it any more useful than tanks that sit outside rusting?
What an odd question. Almost anything is more useful and unused military equipment. At the very least the JWST is going to allow many astronomers to publish papers. It may even detect markers of life on other worlds. And there is nothing else that gives us a view into the early universe like the James Webb.
A stockpile of tanks, fighter planes, and ICMBs deters a whole lot of aggression without being used. I think people who have only ever known relative global stability don’t appreciate what it will look like if the US dramatically reduces its military capability and oppressive dictatorships rush to fill the void.
Laughs in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, Pakistan, and all the military juntas instigated by the US in Latin America. US has no problem with oppressive dictatorships as long as they cooperate.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of the F-35 was to keep the engineering firms sort of perpetually in a war-ready state and keep the engineer pipeline going strong.
That the Internet exists directly refutes what looks like common reasoning. It never would have happened without DARPA (because telecoms never would have let it happen).
That's a fair point; there's something to be said for novel technology being developed by industries/organizations adjacent to but not directly involved in the industry of that technology. This seems to tend to yield better results than funding the industry directly.
My guess at why, would be that occupants of the industry have an interest in maintaining the status quo, while players adjacent to the industry have an interest in novel, disruptive technologies in adjacent industries.
For example, over a decade ago, the US paid hundreds of billions directly to telcos to fund the buildout of a nationwide fiber network.
Perhaps if that money had gone to a different group, then a nationwide fiber network would exist.
You make a great point about "adjacent" players. However, in the case of the military, it's even moreso. . .
Most companies (regardless of industry) seek profit. Whether that's Microsoft or AT&T, or anyone else, they seek profit, and will do just about anything to get it.
The military, however, is not at all motivated by profit, but rather by winning wars. That has a very different profile than "profit", and being an existential sort of issue, prompts some very different outcomes.
The internet is one outcome, as I mentioned before, but also things like depleted uranium, which are a byproduct of enriching uranium.[0] Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much of a civilian use for the material, but there sure is for war!
Anytime you can get different motivations, you get a more diverse set of outcomes. Teflon and Tang are probably the best known ones from NASA efforts. NASA is of course interested in rockets and scientific research, which have some overlap with commercial and some overlap with the military.
I think it’s just lack of imagination—no one in the 80s could see what the Internet could become—it would have been a huge gamble with little predictable value (of course, we have the benefit of hindsight).
You act like the basic research that darpa funded could not have been otherwise funded by a nation that didn't spend a large chunk of its budget on military spending.
I’m also having a hard time imagining some hypothetical peaceful country spending billions on a computer network without the benefit of hindsight regarding its potential value. In other words, without knowing the commercial, social, etc potential of the Internet in advance and without a military pretext, what country would have committed to spending on its development?
Many networks were being developed in parallel, so I am not sure how you can say that the idea of interconnecting them would never have come up. And most of the initial network designs (including ARPANET btw) were very much inspired by a design coming from the NPL in the UK (a metrology institute.. very much not military).
So what you meant to say was that without basic research institutes like NPL or CERN the internet as we know it today would not exist.
However there are things that just evolve on their own once the time is right and all the necessary ingredients (computers, networks and already existing backbone service to use) are around.
Just like the computer you have parallel evolution with multiple different seeds.
So I think even without NPL or CERN we would have something like the internet today, but the underlying protocols and formats might look completely different.
And don't forget about Bulletin Boards (BBS) that happened slightly later somewhat independent of all those academic efforts (and not forming packet-switched networks at all initially, but with high-latency packet forwarding being added later on for email and sending binaries between different sites).
This could also have served as a seed to whatever we would be using today.
The internet being a byproduct of defense spending means that the ROI of defense spending is probably many years ahead considering where it put the U.S. from a global software dominance standpoint.
> but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon.
Technology doesn't invent itself, there needs to be a problem you're actively trying to solve. There's no guarantee these things would have been discovered if money had just been spent on research for the sake of research.
Agreed. There’s no way the government in the 80s would have invested in the Internet without a defense pretext, for example, because no one understood the potential it would unlock. Similarly, there would be virtually no space exploration or satellites (or any of the other significant advancements) apart from the space race.
Why can't we fix and improve infrastructure... and spend less bullshit like the F35 program? I believe research, development, and program maintenance costs are expected to exceed $1.7 trillion dollars.
With $1.7 trillion dollars you could, for example, give every household in the country a small rooftop solar array (@ ~$10k/ea).
"Improves defense" is such a canard. The US outspends every other military power on earth by a zillion to 1. And most of it is unaudited and except for the rare whisteblowing, we don't really know how much is a total waste. We can absolutely afford to shift a few billion to hard science.
The problem is, you are using an unlike comparison.
We as Americans pay based on US salaries, US cost of living, etc.
This is why many choose to use Military Purchasing Power Parity (MPPP) [1] instead.
MPPP can explain why the USSR had at one point a truly gigantic force regardless of the spend.
This explains part of the story around how huge China's military force is becoming [2]
Another element to consider is how much of the entire US government (federal, state, local, and tribal) and US industry could be operationally controlled by the US Commander-in-Chief during wartime. China for example could be expected to have unity of command across the board. We wouldn't, despite things like the Defense production Act [3]
Yet one other factor is the amount of unidentified military units, such as China's Fishing Fleet [4] (Chinese Maritime Militia) that serve as a somewhat disguised extension to their Navy. For force parity comparisons, you'd have to total up their Navy, their coast guard, and their CMM fleet.
> How many factory or construction jobs does "hard-science" funding create?
Lots? JWST is a schoolbus-sized pile of high-precision high-tech parts, never mind the construction of new facilities to test, transport it. LIGO and friends require substantial construction, colliders are huge construction projects before they're scientific instruments, ...
If there's a productive project that costs billions, it's going to employ a lot of people.
Major science projects have extremely similar economic impact to military spending for the simple reason that they are extremely similar. The dominant companies involved in high-end scientific projects, especially in aerospace, are the exact same companies that receive the most military spending. Essentially every major defense contractor is involved in JWST, and the prime contractor is a defense company (Northrup Grumman). The only parties with significant involvement that are not directly the military-industrial complex are university coalitions, which operate similarly to the university coalitions that defense R&D programs heavily rely on.
NASA is essentially part of the broader US defense organization and operates in extremely close collaboration with defense agencies using largely the same methods, contractors, and funding. Major NASA projects are largely indistinguishable from major weapons projects, and most of the time the two are closely interrelated in that both use technology developed by the other. Sometimes this is more informal (since the same contractors perform both) but sometimes it is quite formal, e.g. multiple defense satellite systems have been developed in parallel with scientific systems so that the design effort can be shared.
I will point out that the military spending that people complained about provided my brother a good job at a factory making a decent wage while he was figuring out his life and college. In addition grew up to a major AFB, which was one of the biggest employers in the region, and these were good jobs too that paid well.
Like all this money the government spends on military isn't just suddenly vanishing into thin air a lot of it gets put back into creating jobs, and the communities. Now there may be a lot more that gets diverted through seventeen layers of subcontractors, and more useless bureaucracy than you can shake a stick at but it isn't just being used for a useless purpose.
The ideal military size is such that we are strong enough that no one is willing to start WW3. The smaller the budget that achieves this the better. Too small and wars become more common.
WW1 we went home, and 20 years later things heated up. WW2 we stayed and it's been fairly peaceful since.
Don't kid yourself. It's been peaceful in spite of us injecting ourselves into matters that are none of our concern. We could have achieved the same thing with a few dozen nukes. You don't see anyone lining up to invade North Korea any time soon.
No, you're missing the point. You need a military to defend the homeland. That could be done with a few dozen nukes and the national guard. We do not involve ourselves in 'smaller wars' as we are no longer the world police.
How many factory or construction jobs do you want? How many should be funded by government. We'll be paying collectively for these jobs forever or they will disappear. And what do we get for this expense? We certainly don't get to be safer. More science research creates jobs too, and those jobs can advance our competency as a country and as a spieces, and advance self-funded market based industry too.
> defense invests in the entire "stack". It creates factory jobs
Every defence dollar (or any other government spending) comes from taxes that could have been spent or invested and which would have also created jobs.
There’s no evidence that government spending causes a net gain in jobs.
Every time someone tells you that a new government spending program is creating jobs, they’re only telling you half the story.
Shipping people off to the gulags is not a feature of Marxism. My point here is that these terms get attached to political movements and then people mistake how the movement is practiced with the original thing.
Lenin was influenced by Marx. He considered himself a Marxist for certain. What he practiced was Totalitarianism.
The Nazi party's formal name was the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". You could argue they were influenced by Socialism, but you are being disingenuous if you make the leap to Socialism means exterminating the Jews.
Now, there are people that say that! They are wingnuts.
> I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
You know we didn't really want to enter into WWII until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? and there wasn't huge support for it, either. Until we went to war with Japan, the Nazi's hadn't actually declared war on the U.S. We had stayed isolationists post WWI and decided to let Europe and Asia "just kind of deal with it, themselves".
We weren't the world's police pre-1941 and had to be pulled into WWII kicking and screaming, not by some moral obligation.
A single Javelin missile costs $170M. It's impossible to disagree with you.
However, given that Russia is using chips from laundry machines and microwaves (the type of information that makes me seriously question their hypermissile claims), I do think that we are getting great results if you ignore bang for buck.
I think you're getting it mixed up with something else. The javelin is a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon. According to wikipedia it has a unit cost >$200K (just for the missile). Not sure sure what the launcher pricing is, nor the amortized development cost. Yes, it's still high, but it is enough to shift balance of power in Ukraine (for example).
You're actually bang-on, if you intended 'M' to denote thousands[0]. Otherwise the Peacekeeper[1] is the closest I could find to a per-unit cost of $170mm, and that offers ... quite a bit more bang.
Once when I lived in Denver, I was commuting into downtown when a string of big fat jerks with HOMELAND SECURITY on their vests just walk in the middle of 15th and forcing traffic to just stop because they needed another snack. Not like "big guys" but just fat, rude, Larry the Cable Guy looking assholes with big guns slung around their shoulders.
This is coming from a pro-cop, pro-gun kinda guy... fuck this breed of people entirely and their way of life.
What's wild about cooperation on the scale of the US is that this project is almost free for the individual. 1billion is just $3 per American per year. So for a "subscription" cost of just 25¢ a month, we all get James Webb telescope.
There are 144 million actual taxpayers so the cost is more like $70 per taxpayer. Worthwhile but definitely not free or low cost. Another way to look at it is the average taxpayer paid $10,649 in 2019, so Webb required the entire year of taxable effort from 939,055 average taxpayers.
Another way to look at it without making it look bigger than it is by omitting zeros from 144 million and including the zeros from the much smaller number:
Assuming your average of 10,649 is correct, it's the entire taxable output for a year from 0.652% of the average tax of the tax paying population.
Knowledge for what? What do we want to know? Is it for the sake of putting in a text book or showing neat pictures in a museum that people will forget about by the next exhibit?
What did spending billions getting to the moon get us, bragging rights? What tangible benefit have we gotten from the space station and other space missions?
Who said "investment"? That's not a phrase that anyone here used prior to you bringing it up.
Blue-sky science/hard science is not a financial instrument that you can reasonably expect to generate a 10x ROI on a predictable timeline, that's why it's blue-sky research, but it's nonetheless extremely important.
Due to the lack of an immediately apparent profit incentive, it's one of those things that more or less has to be socialized or it doesn't happen. If there was an expectation of this leading to a better kleenex within 5 years then for-profit enterprises would already be doing it. But there isn't, yet there are still scientifically important questions to be answered by performing the research.
That doesn't seem to carry the implication of an expected return-on-investment in a financial sense. Something can be a good investment and nonetheless operate at a loss.
So to answer your question: the expected return is fundamental/hard science being performed that will lead to potential (but unknown) improvements to our understanding of astronomy, physics, and generally speaking our understanding of the fundamental fabric of our universe.
It's also unclear why you replied to me if your comment was directed at the title of the article and not to anything I said in particular.
Sheesh, typical Hacker News, like you really really needed someone to personally explain the concept of blue-sky/hard-science? Good afternoon to you too, mister roboto.
You said "It is". I was replying to you because you said it was a good investment, and I was questioning you why - to justify your opinion.
The point is that I disagree that it is a good investment. The investment is gambling with unfavorable odds - we're hoping we get something out of it. Even if we learn something new from astronomy..so what? There are many problems on earth that could use $10B or more of NASAs space budget that have direct impact on lives.
>... compared to the other shit the US wastes federal money on.
You mean like roads, bridges, and other infrastructure?
I like to view nice pictures of space as well as anyone else, but I can't agree that it is money well spent. If it was entirely privately funded it wouldn't be a problem, but money from taxes should go for the things that benefit society the most.
I'm going to go a little rant just from the headline:
Think about all of humankind — our ancestors in the past, us in the present, and our descendants in the future. Think about how much value we have inherited from our ancestors: Fire, wheel, GPS, electricity, farming, materials like steel, the list really goes on and on.
Now, of course, there's no rule that says we _have_ to give to our descendants anything at all, or anything comparable to what we have received from our ancestors, but maybe we should think a bit selflessly when deciding to invest in science.
The best choice would have been to curb climate change, yes...but we are materially beyond the point of no return now. We could maybe give one more generation a better life with cuts, but putting a team together to find answers to big questions is much much easier than to make billions of people change their actions. It is far more efficient.
That's an age-old question. "Should we solve other problems besides what we think are the most important problems?"
One problem with answering this question is that we don't know what avenues of research will produce important outcomes. Historically, we have been very bad at it. The mathematicians working on group theory in the late 19th century had no idea how important it would be to 20th-century scientists and engineers.
Spaceflight, in particular, is an important part of the specific problem of solving climate change. Imagine trying to understand climate change without the use of satellites!
Bingo. Also I would note that it is incredibly not a zero-sum game. A person could dedicate their life to playing Video games, zex, drugs, charity, religion, science, the environment, etc. Spending time and money on science does not remove time and work from climate, in fact it may increase the amount by adding public interest.
We'll leave them with a whole array of low and no carbon energy sources, and the seeds for technology to draw down carbon. At some level our decedents will be born into a different world where people have adapted, they won't know anything else, but they'll have the tools to make the world they want. The future is full of possibility if we only look up a bit and try to imagine something better.
Some won't but there's no reason to believe we won't be able to revive some species. It's unfortunate, but some loss is unavoidable. All we can do is prioritize, protect what we can, and move forward.
There's this idea that we should be sad about this. I say, if you're sad about it, I understand. I feel a little sad, too.
But I'm also curious about what comes next. What will only get a chance to live thanks to the things that have died? What will humans be able to do in the aftermath? It sounds morbid, but if you just let yourself play with these thoughts they can lead somewhere different and interesting.
This argument always upsets me. You’re curious about what new species will come about in hundreds of thousands of years, millions? It’s certainly not going to be anytime soon. With the loss of biodiversity, we either have less life or more of life which isn’t preferable. I forget the best examples, but invasive species will spread further, and wreak further havoc, and then what? What kind of better world are you imagining this will enable?
You are right, of course, and I know the kids will be all right, but - I have a hard time taking any reassurance from this. Civilization will probably not collapse, but all wild places everywhere will be destroyed; there is no stopping it anymore. A world completely dominated by humans sounds like a miserable, ugly, suffocating kind of place, and I'm glad I won't have to live in it.
> but all wild places everywhere will be destroyed
I don't know about that. Forests are coming back in Europe and North America. As people get richer, they value those things more. Population will peak by the end of the century and decline for a while after that. At that point people and animals will have a lot more breathing room.
We can put a price on nature now and start paying for conservation. Places like Costa Rica also offer really useful paths forward. A lot is possible if people who care don't give in to despair.
I am sure there will continue to be many parks and groves and "natural" areas, carefully managed by humans, in order to meet various human needs, and many people will enjoy the time they spend working on them or visiting them. But that's not the wildness I wish we could have left alone - untouched, busy with its own devices, for its own sake.
There probably hasn't been much "untouched" (by humans) wilderness anywhere since the Pleistocene. Basically all of North America was managed by fire and shaped into effectively a giant game park by indigenous peoples as the glaciers retreated. The Amazon basin was similarly intensively managed with burning, flood controls, and mound building. You'll find similar interventions in the land across the old world as well.
Yes, it has certainly been disappointing to learn, over the years, just how little there is left we could even attempt to preserve. Of course none of it matters anymore as it will all be damaged by climate change.
I think knowing that people have been actively managing whole landscapes and ecosystems for as long as people have existed should inspire hope. Climate Change isn't insurmountable and a lot of damage can be repaired. If we want more vibrant and ecologically diverse landscapes in the future, we have the ability to make that happen.
Even without a well coordinated global effort emissions growth is slowing, and declining in many places. In the US emissions have been declining for 15 years, and that's almost entirely driven by market forces and technology. Even a modest coordinated effort will make a huge difference over the coming decades.
I think you put too much faith in the collective "we". Right now the charity/investments of billionaires is funding most of the climate action from what I can tell.
Energy markets are shifting away from coal and wind is becoming dirt cheap. Decarbonizing energy is probably the biggest near term win we could aim for.
> maybe we should think a bit selflessly when deciding to invest in science
It's not selfless. Most people have children and or grandchildren. It's extraordinarily selfish to want to see such personal, long-term investments flourish; investing into the macro future well-being is a great way to see to that. Cultures obviously don't always act rationally toward the distant future, some do though and we know from history (eg Norway's sovereign fund, to name one prominent recent example) that it can pay off spectacularly.
I like this way of thinking but just to be devil’s advocate, we also constantly lose knowledge on a longer (but rather small) time scale. I think our high tech present, is at a bigger risk of losing >90% of what we’ve learned in the past few years. It’s like the global supply chain is great while it lasts. What happens to human knowledge if/when electricity is unavailable, hard drives are unavailable, etc. Some mad max or other post apocalypse situation is probably in the cards at some point, how do we keep the knowledge alive? If we knew how, would we? We seem to like to just ignore existential crises even when near and present. So it’s easy to be pessimistic about humanity in this regard.
Have you visited a library lately? Particularly one of the thousands of technical libraries on university campuses? They're still around. In fact it is an enduring frustration for me that I can sometimes only find quality technical information in books, particularly when it is esoteric.
Retaining knowledge was a surmountable problem for past generations of scientists and innovators who had far fewer archival tools than we do today. I think we will manage.
That could go away too. It requires resources and specialization. Also, literacy rates, mobility, and access could be limited. It's a gradient, it could be completely lost or revert back to some priest/scribe higher class within the social system.
Okay. Let me know when literacy rates stop rising, access to information starts becoming less prevalent, the number of technical degrees granted every year begins to fall, or the number of libraries begins to decrease.
> there's no rule that says we _have_ to give to our descendants anything at all
The rules of genetic reproduction disagree. You have to give your descendants the information how to grow into a human, or they aren't descendants by definition.
Since we've been steadily reducing genetic information in favor of learned information, by extension you have to teach your children how to be functional human beings, in absence of instinct, or they grow up mentally disabled (in the wider context of society).
Furthermore, inheritance laws literally say you have to give some of your wealth to your descendants. It's 50% in my country. Sure you can spend it all before you die but that's sidestepping the existence of the rules, which very much exist.
A few comments saying it is cheaper than X which is much worse than a space telescope but to me, that is irrelevant. They are proposing to spend this in addition to all the other garbage they spend money on so the comparison is not logical.
By the same logic, I can say that we shouldn't spend $10B on a telescope when we could invest it in one of many humanitarian exploits like micro-finance for developing countries, systems for clean water and sanitation etc.
If the question was, "should we spend $10B of the military budget on this instead of tanks?", then fair enough.
Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment
My god The Verge has an atrocious standard of reporting. The headline is clearly written to communicate that most Americans believe the JWST was worth its 2,000% budget overrun. That was not the survey question at all. The survey question was "How good an investment do you think the James Webb Space Telescope has been?"
Is that actually materially different?
Foundationally, if it was supposed to cost $10B and it was worth it and if it ended up costing 10B when it wasn't supposed to and was worth it, is that actually different? It's still a $10B project. Yes it overran it but, worth it.
The survey participants were not informed of the cost at all. The JWST is absolutely worth ten billion dollars, but I'm not naive enough to think most Americans would agree with me, and I think that NASA contractors extracting twenty times their original grant from the taxpayers with no consequences is a major problem.
Agreed. I think a better headline would be "Most Americans still think Space is Cool as Fuck, still embody some childlike wonder about the universe, and are excited about JWST"
But I bet that if you asked Americans "Was the $10bn cost of JWST worth it?" and then asked them to describe what the "it" was and re-iterated the first question after they qualified the it.... I doubt you'd get a "yes" twice in a row.
It has actually become somewhat cultlike. I watched someone on twitter get completely torn apart for asking the very reasonable and scientific question: "What will we learn from this telescope?". They got absolutely demolished, people going through his tweets and personal details and making fun of him. I decided to ask a few of them what new stuff we expect to learn about the universe using this new telescope. Only one person managed to answer me, and they were not one of the people to mock the original guy.
My impression is that people don't have a clue of why we want to do this, in fact, a lot of them explicitly seem to think that the high-res image in the press release was the main point. $10b projects don't get launched simply just for the reason "why not?", they have purpose and intention behind them. It is an interesting look into how the general public relate to science, compared to how scientists relate to it. For a scientist, "why are we doing this?" is one of the very first questions you would ask, not something to be mocked
EDIT: I want to point out that I am a physicist and technically an astronomy (GW interferometry) myself, so I know that there are answers to these questions. I just think that it's interesting how not only do people not know the answers to them, but they think it is rude to ask. I can't reply to comments, as I'm rate limited.
Their first mistake was using Twitter. Twitter actively encourages people being toxic to each other since that is what gets the most likes. I remember back when I used it was during the Pewdiepie vs T-Series meme, and people kept calling me a fascist just because I watched his videos.
I had the absolute privilege to regularly attending lectures at the DC air and space museum. These were held partly as an educational tool for congressional staffers, to demonstrate the hard value of NASA science mission funding. They were deep yet accessible. We get so much out of our science funding!
These missions do have primary science goals and in order to book time on the instruments, proposals are submitted and prioritized accordingly.
The science being done is absolutely wild stuff, formation of new planets, stars, universe and everything. With a telescope like this you can watch the evolution of all matter in the universe, from near the beginning of time up to now in all its trillions of permutations. You get this amazing data on everything and can spend decades analyzing it for new insights and models.
Twitter and the general population understands none of this, but NASA understands that a few pretty pictures will keep the funding flowing.
But what thing could we learn that will really wow folks? Composition of exoplanet atmospheres, of course. Class M planet detected!
I mean, it's Twitter. What else do you expect from an app with a significant user base of frankly frustrated people looking to pour out their lack of happiness with their lives on others?
Hot take / prove me wrong: Space telescopes, astrophysics, and other "big" science have not yielded and are not likely to yield NEARLY as much practical benefit for mankind as biology, medicine, nuclear physics, and other "small" science.
We don't do science for the secondary technology benefits, we do it because in our society we believe that the goal of learning about the universe is justified inherently
First we consume stuff, then after we have grown so tired of stuff that we can't even fanthom acquiring more stuff we can have a discourse about philosophy.
Learning about the Universe really is philosophy after all.
The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..)
They are showing the way by minimizing costs and delivering huge practical benefits.
> The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..)
This argument -- which is brought up in every sophomoric conversation about the nature of science -- is extremely poor and unjustified. Of course Einstein, Feynman, Bohn and Maxwell relied on observations. Their theories fit the data that was collected before them. If you ever want to give the next Einstein a chance to build an even more useful theory, you need to observe more data. Period. This is how science works, you observe the world, you build a model that predicts it, rinse and repeat. There is no such thing as "purely pen and paper" in science and it categorically can never be. The idea that Einstein came to relativity through pure reasoning is silly, his theory was formed to explain observations that cannot be predicted by other models. Of course it involved tons of pure reasoning and mathematics, but the basis was only empirical observations.
> The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn[sic], Maxwell..)
That is factually wrong upon a basic research. All their work was based on experiment
Well, their theory extended into more extreme regimes. Blame them for making theories about such small or fast things.
> Was it worth it in order to remove the 0.00001% chance that Einstein was wrong?
Even Einstein thought that GWs would be unobservable, they were basically a fringe theory, much like wormholes. The change across both astronomy and general relativity due to observing GWs is also quite vast. It could show us the currently unknown neutron star matter equation of state, which could have profound impacts on a quantum theory of gravity.
I don't think you really know what you are talking about frankly, both the LHC and projects like LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA have had HUGE impacts on physics. I work on LIGO myself, specifically on new methods for reducing quantum noise, and that has huge impacts on high precision measurements. One example would be the incredible new breakthroughs in non-classical states of light, such as squeezed light. Yesterday in journal club we read a paper about how squeezed light could be used to greatly enhance the sensitivity of the tracking of biological particles. Also not only new practical techniques, but a huge amount of interesting new fundamental quantum measurement theory came about due to these detectors. The list goes on and on, I could fill many pages listing both the primary science and secondary technology (especially quantum technology) benefits that came from LIGO. It was absolutely 100% worth it
> I don't think you really know what you are talking about frankly, both the LHC and projects like LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA have had HUGE impacts on physics. I work on LIGO myself, specifically on new methods for reducing quantum noise, and that has huge impacts on high precision measurements. One example would be the incredible new breakthroughs in non-classical states of light, such as squeezed light. Yesterday in journal club we read a paper about how squeezed light could be used to greatly enhance the sensitivity of the tracking of biological particles. Also not only new practical techniques, but a huge amount of interesting new fundamental quantum measurement theory came about due to these detectors. The list goes on and on, I could fill many pages listing both the primary science and secondary technology (especially quantum technology) benefits that came from LIGO. It was absolutely 100% worth it
Amazing! What does it all mean for my quality of life?
When we discovered fire it was a huge bump in quality of life well before we understood the mechanisms of molecules and atoms being agitate by the rise in temperature.
After the 70s we hit a brick wall. All the stuff after we'll never get to use practically, including LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA, LHC etc.
I have the maximum respect for theoretical physicits but they are just humans among 10 billion humans.
10 billion humans won't accept to pay huge amount of money to solve what essentially has become a murder mystery for people with an IQ>180, solving it won't have any impact. Especially when the majority of them are starving and have no A/C in an increasingly warm planet.
> Amazing! What does it all mean for my quality of life?
New pharmaceuticals, medical sensing technology, better optical disk drive technology, quantum computing, new battery technology, etc.
> After the 70s we hit a brick wall. All the stuff after we'll never get to use practically, including LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA, LHC etc.
Obviously not true at all, I mean the world wide web was invented at the LHC, but a huge amount of technology has been invented since the 70s. Have you literally been living under a rock? Or maybe the 22 in your name means you were born this year. That would explain it. You just have no idea what you're talking about. You think you do, but you don't. You are ignorant, and making it plain to everyone. You haven't actually done any research into what physics breakthroughs have been made or what technology has come of it since the 70s. You are just assuming and running off your ignorant mouth about it. Give it a break, go do some reading, and then come back, rather than remaining in your dark, ignorant hole.
> New pharmaceuticals, medical sensing technology, better optical disk drive technology, quantum computing, new battery technology, etc.
Aspirationally. The hated oil and gas people didn't need billions of dollars and huge amount of press to come up with fracking. But it's a reason why the US is in a better shape than the rest of the world with regards to the energy crisis unfolding.
Aspirational stuff doesn't count. A technology only counts after a layperson can point at it and describe how it makes their life easier.
> I mean the world wide web was invented at the LHC
I correct you. At the LHC cafeteria to be precise which costed about 0.01% of the whole project. Let's specify.
> You haven't actually done any research into what physics breakthroughs have been made or what technology has come of it since the 70s
It wasn't new theoretical physics. What I mean is that the kind of stuff that Hakwing has produced for example we will never get to use it, and verifying stuff that we already know it works at the macro level (which theoretical physicists have to admit will always be our level as mammals macro creatures) doesn't produce any benefit for society.
Kipp Thorne is talking about building something like LIGO but in space, what's that for? How much will this monstrosity cost? What will be the ROI?
While these people are trying to solve a murder mystery , the rest of the population is rightfully in pain because they don't have food, shelter or their loved ones die of diseases such as Malaria or TB. Even in the rich world we are still at the mercy of cancer and heart disease.
> rather than remaining in your dark, ignorant hole.
I can say the same things about you. Unhealthy obsession with a problem, no matter how beautiful or cool, makes you completely ignore the realities around you in terms of people and quality of life and undue setbacks as well as unrealized potential, which is a much worse perspective that not being able to tell if trillions of years from now the Universe will die of a big freeze or a big rip
> Aspirational stuff doesn't count. A technology only counts after a layperson can point at it and describe how it makes their life easier.
Why should we stop inventing and discovering things? Just because you want immediate gratification?
> I correct you. At the LHC cafeteria to be precise which costed about 0.01% of the whole project. Let's specify.
I don't accept that distinction
> It wasn't new theoretical physics. What I mean is that the kind of stuff that Hakwing has produced for example we will never get to use it, and verifying stuff that we already know it works at the macro level (which theoretical physicists have to admit will always be our level as mammals macro creatures) doesn't produce any benefit for society.
It actually produces huge direct benefits for society immediately
> Kipp Thorne is talking about building something like LIGO but in space, what's that for? How much will this monstrosity cost? What will be the ROI?
Physics isn't done for ROI, apart from the scientific return. And I will do so, by applying for grants, and taking YOUR MONEY to do it. You don't have a choice, unfortunately. The tax man will come with a gun to take the money from you and give it to me to do science. And oh what a wonderful thing that is! Btw, LISA will not be too expensive, since it is just three satellites. The space based interferometers are much cheaper than stuff like JWST because they can operate at high losses and without any lenses or much optics at all. We do optimise to reduce the budget
> While these people are trying to solve a murder mystery , the rest of the population is rightfully in pain because they don't have food, shelter or their loved ones die of diseases such as Malaria or TB. Even in the rich world we are still at the mercy of cancer and heart disease.
We can solve more than one problem at once. We are not one person.
> I can say the same things about you. Unhealthy obsession with a problem, no matter how beautiful or cool, makes you completely ignore the realities around you in terms of people and quality of life and undue setbacks as well as unrealized potential, which is a much worse perspective that not being able to tell if trillions of years from now the Universe will die of a big freeze or a big rip
Who said I am ignoring such things? Do you think that physicists are misanthropic. Let me repeat: one person can do one thing, while another can do another thing. I will go into more detail:
When you have two organisms in the world, such as two separate humans, they can make their own decisions and do different things. For example, even though you may want to watch one TV show, I can watch a different one on my own TV. While you may want to work as a doctor, I can work as a physicist. Different humans can make their own choices to do their own thing. It isn't a metaphysical requirement of the universe that all effort is put into the same thing
> Why should we stop inventing and discovering things? Just because you want immediate gratification?
Doesn't have to be immediate, but there has to be gratification in very practical terms. Taxpayers deserve it. LIGO and James Webb telescope won't yield anything for them. Same goes for the ISS. The ITER fusion project is a different animal, it has low odds but huge upside in very practical terms. Same for the money spent on nuclear fission in the 20th century.
> And I will do so, by applying for grants, and taking YOUR MONEY to do it.
Thank god for the existence of the Cayman Islands and BVI and Bermuda and UAE I guess.
> We can solve more than one problem at once. We are not one person.
Sure but there is a reason why BioNtech, Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca can knock at capital markets door 24/7/365 and publicly, while theoretical physicists only have POTUS, or EU Commission President door. People who have arrived at the pinnacle of the human experience, don't have to worry about anything so they can afford to sign off expensive projects (with money which is not theirs to begin with) and done solely for intellectual curiosity which don't yield any benefit.
> Do you think that physicists are misanthropic
No, but the lack of awareness and not collectively stopping to ask questions about ROI and quality of life returns for projects is a bit off. It's one of the only fields where stuff gets routinely written off as a loss (of time and money), and we are at a stage where the rare wins only produce brain juices and prizes for the ones who solve the murder mystery do jour...
And these are just concrete technologies. A lot of research done to reach the endpoint was, of course, used in many other areas of research. Even just manufacturing breakthroughs--taking something possible "in theory," and actually producing an instrument to do the thing involves a lot of research that bears fruit for basically anyone paying attention.
> There's not a lot of practical benefit to looking at the stars beyond trying to understand the universe we live in.
Of course there is! We are not just looking at pretty pictures. We are also refining our understanding of physics.
Dark matter alone is a glaring indicator that we don't understand what's going on nearly as much as we should. Without any telescopes we wouldn't even know that our theories had a problem.
Improved physics understanding has always led to technological leaps. Be it electromagnetism, photonics, or even just relativistic effects. And now, quantum computers.
I guess you could go through recent Nobel prizes (in physics) and see how many came from astrophysics/astronomy vs. Earth-bound physics? One recent astrophysics Nobel off the top of my head is the discovery of dark energy (whatever it may be) due to supernovae occurrences.
Big science inspires wonder and curiosity, which causes children and young adults to pursue STEM, which leads to more biologists, medical researchers, and nuclear physicists.
> Space telescopes, astrophysics, and other "big" science have not yielded and are not likely to yield NEARLY as much practical benefit for mankind as biology, medicine, nuclear physics, and other "small" science.
You're drawing a line between astrophysics and nuclear physics?
NIH does get a lot more funding than NASA, they just don't tend to be in the news as much. 41.6 billion vs 22.6 billion in 2020. (I'm actually surprised the difference isn't larger.)
I do agree that the stuff that's immediately practical should be a priority. I'd be in favor of substantially expanding research to solve immediate problems facing humanity (e.g. cancer, climate change, pandemics, energy and food shortages) but I have no objection to our current funding of space exploration.
> For every dollar invested by the government the American economy and other countries economies have seen $7 to $14 in new revenue, all from spinoffs and licensing arrangements.
This suggests that we're under-investing in NASA, since the ROI of the marginal government dollar is surely nowhere near that high. Basically to first approximation, we should start at the bottom of "ROI per marginal dollar" in the federal budget and reallocate those dollars into NASA and other basic research. I suspect agricultural subsidies and military spending are two places where you will find extremely low ROI at the margins.
(In other words I don't think we should be trading off between "big" vs. "small" science.)
Thats because we dont use them as much in practice as we should and could. Asteroid mining for instance can provide access to endless resources, reduce our reliance on authoritarian states and help keep our planet tody. At some point we will run out of the stuff we make our gadgets from and instead of waiting until last minute we should start working towards the goal asap.
Now do SOFIA - the telescope most astronomers agree that, while unique, it is not a good investment and, by itself, contributes significantly to the carbon footprint of astronomy.
Luckily it is almost at an end, finally, after years of trying to get it killed
> ...JWST’s total costs account for 0.0095 percent of all US spending between 2003 and 2026.
I think it was a good investment, but 10 billion is a lot of money in absolute terms and comparing it to "all US spending between 2003 and 2026" just to make it seem small is disingenuous.
Considering it’s a 20+ year project in the making and has an expected operation of 5-20 years… I don’t think it’s entirely ridiculous to look at it this way.
There is a lot of side effect when needing to push tech limits so hard to achieve this. The tech that was invented likely will be used. And to lead the world is also a big statement to the world that USA is where cutting edge things is still happening
This is a weird question, because they don't tell the participants how much it cost, and I imagine most people who don't actively follow space science news wouldn't know off the top of their head. It's like simultaneously asking people to estimate how much a space telescope might have cost, and then also whether they think that estimate would have been a good investment.
How will they feel when they find out that the telescope has already sustained "significant uncorrectable damage" from micrometeoroids? [1]
Hopefully this was a rare event that happened to occur right after it was opened up. But there's a decent chance that this is will be a common occurrence that will happen again in the near future and continue to degrade the accuracy of the images.
EDIT: thanks for the links! This was shown to me on google news, and I clicked on the link for more headlines but none of them looked more authoritative (The Hill?). I sure wish they’d included the NASA link!
It seems like they have 4 impacts that are consistent with expectations and one outside expectations. The first 4 can be be mostly corrected by fine-tuning the deformable optics.
While the damage to the mirror segment itself can't be corrected, the effect on the JWST as a whole is negligible and it is still operating within performance limits. Just telling someone that it received "significant uncorrectable damage from micrometeoroids?" seems intentionally worded to incite a negative response directed towards NASA.
Its not rare per se NASA expects an impact about every month. this one was larger than their calculations, but that "significant uncorrectable damage" won't affect the pictures or the scientific work. also all damage to the telescope is uncorrectable due to the location of the telescope. If you read NASA report and not sky news which doesn't even link the report you would know.
I think it's great how much that NASA advertised this telescope, and the name. They really piggy-backed off the love of Hubble, of astronomy picture of the day, etc.
Don't get me wrong, it's great science, but great science doesn't always mean great PR. I feel like if you ask people about what NASA has done recently, they'll be like, I dunno. (last answer would have probably been the Shuttle, while ISS has some good coverage it doesn't seem as exciting to people). But they do likely know about Hubble and now Webb.
Which is great, because the amount that the population thinks NASA gets in terms of tax payer dollars is grossly overimagined. It's less than 1%. But in the US you need great PR to get the funding for projects, not only to start, but also to not cancel them after a regime change.
This article gives zero information. It gives noise.
There are only a handful of people amongst those 340 million who can judge whether it was a good investment or not. Why ask the general populace who only see the nice pictures, but they mostly don't know anything at all about this topic. Ask researchers, physicists whether it was money burned or money well spent.
People forget things fast. JWST as a telescope is great, but as a project, is catastrophic. Massive budget overrun, delay after delay. It's certainly the sign/result of project mismanagement. Unless they figured out what's wrong on this run, there won't be the next 'JWST', like ever.
I think you might be underestimating the complexity of the JWST. A publicly funded project of this complexity will almost always have budget overruns and delays.
So much of the complexity and cost overrun of the Webb was because we lacked a heavy rocket with a large payload fairing. The need to fold the telescope so delicately and intricately was the biggest challenge. Hopefully the larger rockets in development mean that future telescopes will not suffer from such constraints.
Investment? If we are looking for ROI an understanding of the universe with images will never return us anything even if it increases our understanding there is no tangible ROI. Yes it gives us knowledge but is it usable to help us in anyway that would have been useful to Neanderthals millennia ago?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadThe non-experts elected by non-experts know better than the non-experts.
That's true as far as it goes. However if we had the ability to individually vote on allocations, presumably most people would delegate the details to an expert of their choosing, while taking a stance on high-level classes of expenditures, for example "I will vote for the <insert expert> budget because it reduces military spending and increases healthcare spending", or whatever your policy preference is. Basically Liquid Democracy[1] of some sort (whether the partial delegation is built into the system or implemented outside the allocation voting system).
I do agree with your general point that direct democracy can be problematic, particularly when a binary choice is presented rather than a continuum of options. E.g. see the CA ballot measure system which often results in "choose A&C or B&D"-type choices which exclude certain preferences from being expressed. I think a more granular direct democracy might enable better decision frameworks though, specifically by enabling more options for delegation.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
More seriously, I don't think our current decision-makers are informed and the average person wouldn't be either. But I trust the average persons values way more than I trust those of a politician. Maybe we still wouldn't get enough funding for roads and bridges. We don't get that now. But perhaps the average person would put more money towards education and food and less towards war.
I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.
However, if starship is successful that situation will change and resupply becomes possible. So I suppose we'll see.
It is fully within the realm of possibility that a future OSAM mission will be capable of hitting far more distant points, since the Lunar stuff is just starting to heat up.
[1] https://nexis.gsfc.nasa.gov/osam-1.html
From a practicality standpoint- military spending is difficult to beat. Improves defense, improves the defense of allies, creates factory jobs, creates science and engineering jobs. It has everything.
The only thing that comes close is if there were some green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
I mean he explicitly said it was not the only factor...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
That's not at all what GP is saying. Government investment into industries have different return on investment. This is why governments heavily invest into healthcare. But, if we're talking investing in a military vs. university researchers, I think you have to be fairly elitist to say that adding 100,000 academics is better for society than providing a good life for 1M soldiers. At its core, military spending is the greatest experiment of UBI ever done. Now, downvotes from the left and right.
I agree with what you see. You see 1M soldiers (freeloaders?) and their salaries, housing, and healthcare provided 'free' by taxpayers.
The problem is what you don't see, or as they say in French, ce qu’on ne voit pas!
Paying people to churn butter by hand non stop would probably be more of a contribution, or doing actual UBI.
What about police and firefighters? They don't "produce" anything but you need them.
Shortly after, the US begins covert assistance and operations in Vietnam (which ended up involving the USA, USSR, PRC etc etc.)This continued until 1975.
The US had a brief break from overt warfare until Grenada in the 80s, followed quickly by Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Since then it's been pretty much continuous warfare by US troops to this day.
Just because we don't see it on the news every night, US servicemen are fighting in Africa, in the Middle East, and obviously the Navy is present in almost all the oceans in significant levels.
Sure the USN enables free trade. And I have no issue with a well-funded navy, with clear goals and objectives. But the rest of the military is bloated beyond reasonable belief, committed to tasks that are undemocratic, and as others have pointed out, when you have a large, expensive military, the temptation to use it irresponsibly is high.
If my comments are coming across as endorsing the entirety of the US military and that it is infallible, that was not the intent. I mostly just called people elitist for claiming that academic pursuits are more worthy of funding than the equivalent defense expenditure on the sole basis of academic=good and soldier=bad. Based on my other comments, you can see that I even believe that the technological progress spurred by defense needs is greater than throwing the same amount of money at research.
Exhibit A - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
> the US was doing something it didn't need to do in order to defend itself
Note the negation.
You mean the other group of freeloaders on some other part of the marble flying through the black night?
>wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.green arms race where we are funding and building wind, solar, nuclear, fusion, etc.
We have over the last 10 years. Now we need a grid scale battery race as we are realizing that all the green energy in the world is useless if we can't store it.
Most of us realized this 20-30 years ago.
An infinite amount, in the long run.
True, but virtually nobody would be motivated by just directly investing on the tech instead of an exciting fighter jet.
The regular person will not care about technical stuff like that, but they will care about a shiny new fighting yet.
We could get by with a tiny fraction of our 700B+ / yr defense budget. One wonders how much better a society we would be if we spent that on things that would actually benefit the average citizen, or did something unthinkable like actually paying down debt.
The strength of the dollar is all about beating whoever disagrees with its role as the oil exchange currency to submission, because that is its current base for its demand. Libya was not invaded because the West suddenly remembered that Kandafi is a dictator. Iraq was not invaded because suddenly WMD were found (did they ever find another tale to cover their reasons?), Syria was not made into anarchy because the West wanted the Syrian people to be free. They all had one common point near the time of invasion. So yes the military does play a big role.
I mean, Russia invades and China taunts its neighbors pretty regularly, so clearly their military is focused on more than defense from the US (as if we have any interest in an offensive war against them in the first place). The US military keeps those countries in check, so of course they focus on how they can “defend” against our military. The extent to which Russia and China are scheming against the US military is the extent to which they aren’t invading their neighbors, which is precisely the value the US military provides, and indeed that Russia is invading Ukraine is a failure of the US government to respond firmly to previous invasions (no, not direct military conflict with Russia).
The idea that the US or the world can enjoy meaningful peace while withdrawing from the global theater is dangerously naive. There’s no world in which we pull back without oppressive dictatorships rushing to fill the void.
I don't think there is any role for the US military beyond defending US soil. I'm tired of propping up our bloated military industrial complex on the premise that we are solely responsible for world peace.
Expect some unforeseen problems at the most unfortunate economic moments.
A shared responsibility for world peace probably looks more like "more involvement from our NATO partners" (which we're actually beginning to see now that Europe is waking up to the fact that their peace is a property of NATO protection rather than some foregone conclusion). It decidedly doesn't look like the US dramatically shrinking defense spending (the US only spends 3% of its GDP on defense and that's on track to fall to 2.7% by the end of the decade), but more likely having our partners increase their own contributions and involvement.
I do not believe we should be going deeper into debt for other nation's national security.
I prefer to think of military spending during peacetime as "peace spending" not "war spending".
Spending on actual wars, once they start, is another matter. Some wars are just (like the support of Ukraine, at present, I would say, or the liberation of Kuwait), some are unjust, many are some shade of gray.
But generally, it is preferable when democratic countries have enough military might during peacetime to make would-be conquerors put aside their dreams of being the new Peter the Great, Saladin or Qin Shi Huang.
During WW1 and especially WW2, the US military was employed to nearly maximum capacity, in other words, 1945 was the last time the military was in a state of all-out war.
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the military was partially committed to the wars, maybe around 25% of 1945's commitment. I would label these limited wars.
The invasion phases of the two Iraqi wars as well as the invasion phase in Afghanistan saw similar levels of mobilization, but these were over so quickly they would be more like skirmishes.
And for the rest, I would label them as little more than policing of occupied territories.
(All of the above from the US perspective, from the perspective of the adversary, several of the above were total wars.)
If you look at the death toll, WW2 cost 0.4% of the US population at the time. The Vietnam and Korean wars cost less than 0.1% of the population each, and the rest hardly register.
Compare that to the 5%-20% death toll of many European countries during WW2, and similar numbers for numerous other wars through history, and you get a perspective of how peaceful the US has been since the Civil War.
Looks like useful output to me.
I'm an amateur astronomer, and even I doubt that these telescopes will provide any output that will be of use to humans in the next hundred or thousand years.
What an odd question. Almost anything is more useful and unused military equipment. At the very least the JWST is going to allow many astronomers to publish papers. It may even detect markers of life on other worlds. And there is nothing else that gives us a view into the early universe like the James Webb.
https://webb.nasa.gov/resources/JWST_spinoffs_v122011.pdf
My guess at why, would be that occupants of the industry have an interest in maintaining the status quo, while players adjacent to the industry have an interest in novel, disruptive technologies in adjacent industries.
For example, over a decade ago, the US paid hundreds of billions directly to telcos to fund the buildout of a nationwide fiber network.
Perhaps if that money had gone to a different group, then a nationwide fiber network would exist.
Most companies (regardless of industry) seek profit. Whether that's Microsoft or AT&T, or anyone else, they seek profit, and will do just about anything to get it.
The military, however, is not at all motivated by profit, but rather by winning wars. That has a very different profile than "profit", and being an existential sort of issue, prompts some very different outcomes.
The internet is one outcome, as I mentioned before, but also things like depleted uranium, which are a byproduct of enriching uranium.[0] Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be much of a civilian use for the material, but there sure is for war!
Anytime you can get different motivations, you get a more diverse set of outcomes. Teflon and Tang are probably the best known ones from NASA efforts. NASA is of course interested in rockets and scientific research, which have some overlap with commercial and some overlap with the military.
[0] - https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-u...
However there are things that just evolve on their own once the time is right and all the necessary ingredients (computers, networks and already existing backbone service to use) are around. Just like the computer you have parallel evolution with multiple different seeds. So I think even without NPL or CERN we would have something like the internet today, but the underlying protocols and formats might look completely different.
And don't forget about Bulletin Boards (BBS) that happened slightly later somewhat independent of all those academic efforts (and not forming packet-switched networks at all initially, but with high-latency packet forwarding being added later on for email and sending binaries between different sites). This could also have served as a seed to whatever we would be using today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/neil-degrasse-ty...
And
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44157732-accessory-to-wa...
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis Lang
Technology doesn't invent itself, there needs to be a problem you're actively trying to solve. There's no guarantee these things would have been discovered if money had just been spent on research for the sake of research.
With $1.7 trillion dollars you could, for example, give every household in the country a small rooftop solar array (@ ~$10k/ea).
We as Americans pay based on US salaries, US cost of living, etc.
This is why many choose to use Military Purchasing Power Parity (MPPP) [1] instead.
MPPP can explain why the USSR had at one point a truly gigantic force regardless of the spend.
This explains part of the story around how huge China's military force is becoming [2]
Another element to consider is how much of the entire US government (federal, state, local, and tribal) and US industry could be operationally controlled by the US Commander-in-Chief during wartime. China for example could be expected to have unity of command across the board. We wouldn't, despite things like the Defense production Act [3]
Yet one other factor is the amount of unidentified military units, such as China's Fishing Fleet [4] (Chinese Maritime Militia) that serve as a somewhat disguised extension to their Navy. For force parity comparisons, you'd have to total up their Navy, their coast guard, and their CMM fleet.
[1] https://voxeu.org/article/why-military-purchasing-power-pari...
[2] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-colossal-scale-of-...
[3] https://www.fema.gov/disaster/defense-production-act
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-covert-naval-fleet...
Lots? JWST is a schoolbus-sized pile of high-precision high-tech parts, never mind the construction of new facilities to test, transport it. LIGO and friends require substantial construction, colliders are huge construction projects before they're scientific instruments, ...
If there's a productive project that costs billions, it's going to employ a lot of people.
NASA is essentially part of the broader US defense organization and operates in extremely close collaboration with defense agencies using largely the same methods, contractors, and funding. Major NASA projects are largely indistinguishable from major weapons projects, and most of the time the two are closely interrelated in that both use technology developed by the other. Sometimes this is more informal (since the same contractors perform both) but sometimes it is quite formal, e.g. multiple defense satellite systems have been developed in parallel with scientific systems so that the design effort can be shared.
The DoD and NASA work together so much on missiles and avionics it isn't funny.
https://www.nrel.gov/workingwithus/defense-partnerships.html
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/23...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-us-space-force-estab...
etc, etc, etc. NASA's wind tunnel was used to help design DoD missiles. The two have always worked hand in hand.
Like all this money the government spends on military isn't just suddenly vanishing into thin air a lot of it gets put back into creating jobs, and the communities. Now there may be a lot more that gets diverted through seventeen layers of subcontractors, and more useless bureaucracy than you can shake a stick at but it isn't just being used for a useless purpose.
WW1 we went home, and 20 years later things heated up. WW2 we stayed and it's been fairly peaceful since.
Every defence dollar (or any other government spending) comes from taxes that could have been spent or invested and which would have also created jobs.
There’s no evidence that government spending causes a net gain in jobs.
Every time someone tells you that a new government spending program is creating jobs, they’re only telling you half the story.
A lot of that crew would call themselves Marxists, no doubt. Maybe not "commies" if you mean they're not shipping people off to gulags, ok.
> Nationalism isn’t the same as Nazism.
I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
Lenin was influenced by Marx. He considered himself a Marxist for certain. What he practiced was Totalitarianism.
The Nazi party's formal name was the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". You could argue they were influenced by Socialism, but you are being disingenuous if you make the leap to Socialism means exterminating the Jews.
Now, there are people that say that! They are wingnuts.
> I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
I doubt that very much.
We weren't the world's police pre-1941 and had to be pulled into WWII kicking and screaming, not by some moral obligation.
https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us....
USA doing embargo now, though on an energy rich country. Germany still eager to take that energy, though.
However, given that Russia is using chips from laundry machines and microwaves (the type of information that makes me seriously question their hypermissile claims), I do think that we are getting great results if you ignore bang for buck.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/29/how-this-us-made-176000-anti...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper
Once when I lived in Denver, I was commuting into downtown when a string of big fat jerks with HOMELAND SECURITY on their vests just walk in the middle of 15th and forcing traffic to just stop because they needed another snack. Not like "big guys" but just fat, rude, Larry the Cable Guy looking assholes with big guns slung around their shoulders.
This is coming from a pro-cop, pro-gun kinda guy... fuck this breed of people entirely and their way of life.
</rant>
If only that were true...
Assuming your average of 10,649 is correct, it's the entire taxable output for a year from 0.652% of the average tax of the tax paying population.
939,055/144,000,000 = 0.00652122
You dropped the ball on the SSC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
Knowledge?
How would you value the early experiments that eventually led to, say, germ theory on a monetary basis?
What did spending billions getting to the moon get us, bragging rights? What tangible benefit have we gotten from the space station and other space missions?
Relativity gives us GPS, for example.
> Well-known products that NASA claims as spinoffs include memory foam (originally named temper foam), freeze-dried food, firefighting equipment, emergency "space blankets", DustBusters, cochlear implants, LZR Racer swimsuits, and CMOS image sensors.
Plenty more in this well written list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
Blue-sky science/hard science is not a financial instrument that you can reasonably expect to generate a 10x ROI on a predictable timeline, that's why it's blue-sky research, but it's nonetheless extremely important.
Due to the lack of an immediately apparent profit incentive, it's one of those things that more or less has to be socialized or it doesn't happen. If there was an expectation of this leading to a better kleenex within 5 years then for-profit enterprises would already be doing it. But there isn't, yet there are still scientifically important questions to be answered by performing the research.
"Most Americans think NASA’s $10 billion space telescope is a good investment" in case you missed it.
So to answer your question: the expected return is fundamental/hard science being performed that will lead to potential (but unknown) improvements to our understanding of astronomy, physics, and generally speaking our understanding of the fundamental fabric of our universe.
It's also unclear why you replied to me if your comment was directed at the title of the article and not to anything I said in particular.
Sheesh, typical Hacker News, like you really really needed someone to personally explain the concept of blue-sky/hard-science? Good afternoon to you too, mister roboto.
The point is that I disagree that it is a good investment. The investment is gambling with unfavorable odds - we're hoping we get something out of it. Even if we learn something new from astronomy..so what? There are many problems on earth that could use $10B or more of NASAs space budget that have direct impact on lives.
It's a slippery slope though. sometimes governments pick winners on non-scientific grounds.
I wonder if maybe tax breaks might be a better way of funding, because folks who have ownership could be better.
You mean like roads, bridges, and other infrastructure?
I like to view nice pictures of space as well as anyone else, but I can't agree that it is money well spent. If it was entirely privately funded it wouldn't be a problem, but money from taxes should go for the things that benefit society the most.
Think about all of humankind — our ancestors in the past, us in the present, and our descendants in the future. Think about how much value we have inherited from our ancestors: Fire, wheel, GPS, electricity, farming, materials like steel, the list really goes on and on.
Now, of course, there's no rule that says we _have_ to give to our descendants anything at all, or anything comparable to what we have received from our ancestors, but maybe we should think a bit selflessly when deciding to invest in science.
It’s like your dad leaving you a really nice suit and one billion in debt in your name with no option for bankruptcy.
One problem with answering this question is that we don't know what avenues of research will produce important outcomes. Historically, we have been very bad at it. The mathematicians working on group theory in the late 19th century had no idea how important it would be to 20th-century scientists and engineers.
Spaceflight, in particular, is an important part of the specific problem of solving climate change. Imagine trying to understand climate change without the use of satellites!
But I'm also curious about what comes next. What will only get a chance to live thanks to the things that have died? What will humans be able to do in the aftermath? It sounds morbid, but if you just let yourself play with these thoughts they can lead somewhere different and interesting.
The future is not full of only despair[] .
[] https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw
I don't know about that. Forests are coming back in Europe and North America. As people get richer, they value those things more. Population will peak by the end of the century and decline for a while after that. At that point people and animals will have a lot more breathing room.
We can put a price on nature now and start paying for conservation. Places like Costa Rica also offer really useful paths forward. A lot is possible if people who care don't give in to despair.
Even without a well coordinated global effort emissions growth is slowing, and declining in many places. In the US emissions have been declining for 15 years, and that's almost entirely driven by market forces and technology. Even a modest coordinated effort will make a huge difference over the coming decades.
It's not selfless. Most people have children and or grandchildren. It's extraordinarily selfish to want to see such personal, long-term investments flourish; investing into the macro future well-being is a great way to see to that. Cultures obviously don't always act rationally toward the distant future, some do though and we know from history (eg Norway's sovereign fund, to name one prominent recent example) that it can pay off spectacularly.
... books? Scientific journals?
Have you visited a library lately? Particularly one of the thousands of technical libraries on university campuses? They're still around. In fact it is an enduring frustration for me that I can sometimes only find quality technical information in books, particularly when it is esoteric.
Retaining knowledge was a surmountable problem for past generations of scientists and innovators who had far fewer archival tools than we do today. I think we will manage.
The rules of genetic reproduction disagree. You have to give your descendants the information how to grow into a human, or they aren't descendants by definition.
Since we've been steadily reducing genetic information in favor of learned information, by extension you have to teach your children how to be functional human beings, in absence of instinct, or they grow up mentally disabled (in the wider context of society).
Furthermore, inheritance laws literally say you have to give some of your wealth to your descendants. It's 50% in my country. Sure you can spend it all before you die but that's sidestepping the existence of the rules, which very much exist.
By the same logic, I can say that we shouldn't spend $10B on a telescope when we could invest it in one of many humanitarian exploits like micro-finance for developing countries, systems for clean water and sanitation etc.
If the question was, "should we spend $10B of the military budget on this instead of tanks?", then fair enough.
My god The Verge has an atrocious standard of reporting. The headline is clearly written to communicate that most Americans believe the JWST was worth its 2,000% budget overrun. That was not the survey question at all. The survey question was "How good an investment do you think the James Webb Space Telescope has been?"
But I bet that if you asked Americans "Was the $10bn cost of JWST worth it?" and then asked them to describe what the "it" was and re-iterated the first question after they qualified the it.... I doubt you'd get a "yes" twice in a row.
My impression is that people don't have a clue of why we want to do this, in fact, a lot of them explicitly seem to think that the high-res image in the press release was the main point. $10b projects don't get launched simply just for the reason "why not?", they have purpose and intention behind them. It is an interesting look into how the general public relate to science, compared to how scientists relate to it. For a scientist, "why are we doing this?" is one of the very first questions you would ask, not something to be mocked
EDIT: I want to point out that I am a physicist and technically an astronomy (GW interferometry) myself, so I know that there are answers to these questions. I just think that it's interesting how not only do people not know the answers to them, but they think it is rude to ask. I can't reply to comments, as I'm rate limited.
These missions do have primary science goals and in order to book time on the instruments, proposals are submitted and prioritized accordingly.
The science being done is absolutely wild stuff, formation of new planets, stars, universe and everything. With a telescope like this you can watch the evolution of all matter in the universe, from near the beginning of time up to now in all its trillions of permutations. You get this amazing data on everything and can spend decades analyzing it for new insights and models.
Twitter and the general population understands none of this, but NASA understands that a few pretty pictures will keep the funding flowing.
But what thing could we learn that will really wow folks? Composition of exoplanet atmospheres, of course. Class M planet detected!
There’s a pretty good explanation in this documentary: https://www.pbs.org/video/ultimate-space-telescope-gunryt/
First we consume stuff, then after we have grown so tired of stuff that we can't even fanthom acquiring more stuff we can have a discourse about philosophy.
Learning about the Universe really is philosophy after all.
The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..)
They are showing the way by minimizing costs and delivering huge practical benefits.
This argument -- which is brought up in every sophomoric conversation about the nature of science -- is extremely poor and unjustified. Of course Einstein, Feynman, Bohn and Maxwell relied on observations. Their theories fit the data that was collected before them. If you ever want to give the next Einstein a chance to build an even more useful theory, you need to observe more data. Period. This is how science works, you observe the world, you build a model that predicts it, rinse and repeat. There is no such thing as "purely pen and paper" in science and it categorically can never be. The idea that Einstein came to relativity through pure reasoning is silly, his theory was formed to explain observations that cannot be predicted by other models. Of course it involved tons of pure reasoning and mathematics, but the basis was only empirical observations.
That is factually wrong upon a basic research. All their work was based on experiment
How much did LIGO cost? Was it worth it in order to remove the 0.00001% chance that Einstein was wrong?
Well, their theory extended into more extreme regimes. Blame them for making theories about such small or fast things.
> Was it worth it in order to remove the 0.00001% chance that Einstein was wrong?
Even Einstein thought that GWs would be unobservable, they were basically a fringe theory, much like wormholes. The change across both astronomy and general relativity due to observing GWs is also quite vast. It could show us the currently unknown neutron star matter equation of state, which could have profound impacts on a quantum theory of gravity.
I don't think you really know what you are talking about frankly, both the LHC and projects like LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA have had HUGE impacts on physics. I work on LIGO myself, specifically on new methods for reducing quantum noise, and that has huge impacts on high precision measurements. One example would be the incredible new breakthroughs in non-classical states of light, such as squeezed light. Yesterday in journal club we read a paper about how squeezed light could be used to greatly enhance the sensitivity of the tracking of biological particles. Also not only new practical techniques, but a huge amount of interesting new fundamental quantum measurement theory came about due to these detectors. The list goes on and on, I could fill many pages listing both the primary science and secondary technology (especially quantum technology) benefits that came from LIGO. It was absolutely 100% worth it
Amazing! What does it all mean for my quality of life?
When we discovered fire it was a huge bump in quality of life well before we understood the mechanisms of molecules and atoms being agitate by the rise in temperature.
After the 70s we hit a brick wall. All the stuff after we'll never get to use practically, including LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA, LHC etc.
I have the maximum respect for theoretical physicits but they are just humans among 10 billion humans.
10 billion humans won't accept to pay huge amount of money to solve what essentially has become a murder mystery for people with an IQ>180, solving it won't have any impact. Especially when the majority of them are starving and have no A/C in an increasingly warm planet.
New pharmaceuticals, medical sensing technology, better optical disk drive technology, quantum computing, new battery technology, etc.
> After the 70s we hit a brick wall. All the stuff after we'll never get to use practically, including LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA, LHC etc.
Obviously not true at all, I mean the world wide web was invented at the LHC, but a huge amount of technology has been invented since the 70s. Have you literally been living under a rock? Or maybe the 22 in your name means you were born this year. That would explain it. You just have no idea what you're talking about. You think you do, but you don't. You are ignorant, and making it plain to everyone. You haven't actually done any research into what physics breakthroughs have been made or what technology has come of it since the 70s. You are just assuming and running off your ignorant mouth about it. Give it a break, go do some reading, and then come back, rather than remaining in your dark, ignorant hole.
Aspirationally. The hated oil and gas people didn't need billions of dollars and huge amount of press to come up with fracking. But it's a reason why the US is in a better shape than the rest of the world with regards to the energy crisis unfolding.
Aspirational stuff doesn't count. A technology only counts after a layperson can point at it and describe how it makes their life easier.
> I mean the world wide web was invented at the LHC
I correct you. At the LHC cafeteria to be precise which costed about 0.01% of the whole project. Let's specify.
> You haven't actually done any research into what physics breakthroughs have been made or what technology has come of it since the 70s
It wasn't new theoretical physics. What I mean is that the kind of stuff that Hakwing has produced for example we will never get to use it, and verifying stuff that we already know it works at the macro level (which theoretical physicists have to admit will always be our level as mammals macro creatures) doesn't produce any benefit for society.
Kipp Thorne is talking about building something like LIGO but in space, what's that for? How much will this monstrosity cost? What will be the ROI?
While these people are trying to solve a murder mystery , the rest of the population is rightfully in pain because they don't have food, shelter or their loved ones die of diseases such as Malaria or TB. Even in the rich world we are still at the mercy of cancer and heart disease.
> rather than remaining in your dark, ignorant hole.
I can say the same things about you. Unhealthy obsession with a problem, no matter how beautiful or cool, makes you completely ignore the realities around you in terms of people and quality of life and undue setbacks as well as unrealized potential, which is a much worse perspective that not being able to tell if trillions of years from now the Universe will die of a big freeze or a big rip
Why should we stop inventing and discovering things? Just because you want immediate gratification?
> I correct you. At the LHC cafeteria to be precise which costed about 0.01% of the whole project. Let's specify.
I don't accept that distinction
> It wasn't new theoretical physics. What I mean is that the kind of stuff that Hakwing has produced for example we will never get to use it, and verifying stuff that we already know it works at the macro level (which theoretical physicists have to admit will always be our level as mammals macro creatures) doesn't produce any benefit for society.
It actually produces huge direct benefits for society immediately
> Kipp Thorne is talking about building something like LIGO but in space, what's that for? How much will this monstrosity cost? What will be the ROI?
Physics isn't done for ROI, apart from the scientific return. And I will do so, by applying for grants, and taking YOUR MONEY to do it. You don't have a choice, unfortunately. The tax man will come with a gun to take the money from you and give it to me to do science. And oh what a wonderful thing that is! Btw, LISA will not be too expensive, since it is just three satellites. The space based interferometers are much cheaper than stuff like JWST because they can operate at high losses and without any lenses or much optics at all. We do optimise to reduce the budget
> While these people are trying to solve a murder mystery , the rest of the population is rightfully in pain because they don't have food, shelter or their loved ones die of diseases such as Malaria or TB. Even in the rich world we are still at the mercy of cancer and heart disease.
We can solve more than one problem at once. We are not one person.
> I can say the same things about you. Unhealthy obsession with a problem, no matter how beautiful or cool, makes you completely ignore the realities around you in terms of people and quality of life and undue setbacks as well as unrealized potential, which is a much worse perspective that not being able to tell if trillions of years from now the Universe will die of a big freeze or a big rip
Who said I am ignoring such things? Do you think that physicists are misanthropic. Let me repeat: one person can do one thing, while another can do another thing. I will go into more detail:
When you have two organisms in the world, such as two separate humans, they can make their own decisions and do different things. For example, even though you may want to watch one TV show, I can watch a different one on my own TV. While you may want to work as a doctor, I can work as a physicist. Different humans can make their own choices to do their own thing. It isn't a metaphysical requirement of the universe that all effort is put into the same thing
Doesn't have to be immediate, but there has to be gratification in very practical terms. Taxpayers deserve it. LIGO and James Webb telescope won't yield anything for them. Same goes for the ISS. The ITER fusion project is a different animal, it has low odds but huge upside in very practical terms. Same for the money spent on nuclear fission in the 20th century.
> And I will do so, by applying for grants, and taking YOUR MONEY to do it.
Thank god for the existence of the Cayman Islands and BVI and Bermuda and UAE I guess.
> We can solve more than one problem at once. We are not one person.
Sure but there is a reason why BioNtech, Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca can knock at capital markets door 24/7/365 and publicly, while theoretical physicists only have POTUS, or EU Commission President door. People who have arrived at the pinnacle of the human experience, don't have to worry about anything so they can afford to sign off expensive projects (with money which is not theirs to begin with) and done solely for intellectual curiosity which don't yield any benefit.
> Do you think that physicists are misanthropic
No, but the lack of awareness and not collectively stopping to ask questions about ROI and quality of life returns for projects is a bit off. It's one of the only fields where stuff gets routinely written off as a loss (of time and money), and we are at a stage where the rare wins only produce brain juices and prizes for the ones who solve the murder mystery do jour...
However, many _many_ technologies have come out of the space race and other space related endeavors--you might be surprised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
And these are just concrete technologies. A lot of research done to reach the endpoint was, of course, used in many other areas of research. Even just manufacturing breakthroughs--taking something possible "in theory," and actually producing an instrument to do the thing involves a lot of research that bears fruit for basically anyone paying attention.
Of course there is! We are not just looking at pretty pictures. We are also refining our understanding of physics.
Dark matter alone is a glaring indicator that we don't understand what's going on nearly as much as we should. Without any telescopes we wouldn't even know that our theories had a problem.
Improved physics understanding has always led to technological leaps. Be it electromagnetism, photonics, or even just relativistic effects. And now, quantum computers.
You're drawing a line between astrophysics and nuclear physics?
I do agree that the stuff that's immediately practical should be a priority. I'd be in favor of substantially expanding research to solve immediate problems facing humanity (e.g. cancer, climate change, pandemics, energy and food shortages) but I have no objection to our current funding of space exploration.
> For every dollar invested by the government the American economy and other countries economies have seen $7 to $14 in new revenue, all from spinoffs and licensing arrangements.
https://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-not-waste/ (more reading: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/hq/library/find/bibliographies/...)
This suggests that we're under-investing in NASA, since the ROI of the marginal government dollar is surely nowhere near that high. Basically to first approximation, we should start at the bottom of "ROI per marginal dollar" in the federal budget and reallocate those dollars into NASA and other basic research. I suspect agricultural subsidies and military spending are two places where you will find extremely low ROI at the margins.
(In other words I don't think we should be trading off between "big" vs. "small" science.)
It will acquire data pertinent to most of the open problems of physics.
Luckily it is almost at an end, finally, after years of trying to get it killed
I think it was a good investment, but 10 billion is a lot of money in absolute terms and comparing it to "all US spending between 2003 and 2026" just to make it seem small is disingenuous.
Hopefully this was a rare event that happened to occur right after it was opened up. But there's a decent chance that this is will be a common occurrence that will happen again in the near future and continue to degrade the accuracy of the images.
1: https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-signific...
EDIT: thanks for the links! This was shown to me on google news, and I clicked on the link for more headlines but none of them looked more authoritative (The Hill?). I sure wish they’d included the NASA link!
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en...
It seems like they have 4 impacts that are consistent with expectations and one outside expectations. The first 4 can be be mostly corrected by fine-tuning the deformable optics.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf
Don't get me wrong, it's great science, but great science doesn't always mean great PR. I feel like if you ask people about what NASA has done recently, they'll be like, I dunno. (last answer would have probably been the Shuttle, while ISS has some good coverage it doesn't seem as exciting to people). But they do likely know about Hubble and now Webb.
Which is great, because the amount that the population thinks NASA gets in terms of tax payer dollars is grossly overimagined. It's less than 1%. But in the US you need great PR to get the funding for projects, not only to start, but also to not cancel them after a regime change.
There are only a handful of people amongst those 340 million who can judge whether it was a good investment or not. Why ask the general populace who only see the nice pictures, but they mostly don't know anything at all about this topic. Ask researchers, physicists whether it was money burned or money well spent.