[baltimore]

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.

[MAGZine]

There's not a lot of practical benefit to looking at the stars beyond trying to understand the universe we live in.

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.

[outworlder]

> 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.

[theptip]

The ROI of NASA is extremely high:

> 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.)

[elihu]

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.

[bowsamic]

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

[Bubble_Pop_22]

Who is this 'we' ?

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.

[gnulinux]

> 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.

[bowsamic]

> 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

[Bubble_Pop_22]

Extremely cheap experiments.

How much did LIGO cost? Was it worth it in order to remove the 0.00001% chance that Einstein was wrong?

[bowsamic]

> Extremely cheap experiments.

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

[Bubble_Pop_22]

> 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.

[BudaDude]

Agreed. OP is looking at the capitalist value instead of the value to humanity.

[bckr]

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.

[justin66]

> 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?

[yrgulation]

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.

[mturmon]

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.

[scrumbledober]

dark energy doesn't seem to have much practical use yet

[Balgair]

I have a feeling that this may be one of the understatements of the millennium.

[marcosdumay]

Hum... Space telescopes are one of those projects that have a very low probability of an extremely high benefit.

It will acquire data pertinent to most of the open problems of physics.