[somenameforme]

Both Bezos and Musk have grand visions for space and humanity which they're pursuing in their own way.

The space based telescopes are useful and valuable projects that I think should be supported, but they also offer sharply diminishing returns paired with sharply rising costs. JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did at twice the cost (comparing at-launch to at-launch), and the successor to JWST will advance our knowledge far less than the JWST is at probably again some multiple of cost of JWST.

By contrast Musk seeks to make humanity a multiplanetary species, and Bezos wants to create an industrial ecosystem in space, not to just exploit resources in space but to move e.g. highly polluting industries into space. These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.

In our economic and political system, I also think this is the more logical way forward. Government is no longer particularly good at long term projects and these sort of visions may come to fruition in a decade, or it may take a century. Left to government, the programs would 100% end up getting scrapped sooner or later. Either by fiscal rhetoric claiming they're wasting money, or by emotional appeal rhetoric claiming that it's unreasonable to indulge in space fantasies when a kid is starving in Africa.

[biorach]

> JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did

Strong claim. How are you quantifying this?

> These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.

Another strong claim.

[jimmydorry]

>Strong claim. How are you quantifying this?

We could start with the article [1]:

>"Hubble... produced a record 1,073 peer-reviewed publications last year... JWST is performing better than NASA expected, has produced around 1,200 papers since beginning operations in 2022...

Last I checked, 1000 paper a year is more than 1200 papers in 3 years. It will take JWST many years to catch up to Hubble, and Hubble still has atleast another 8 years left in it. If you divide the cost of each telescope by the number of papers tied to it, the cost of the knowledge Hubble advanced humanity by will be many times cheaper than JWST, and that doesn't look like it will change given JWST may operate for 10-20 years.

[1] https://www.astronomy.com/science/james-webb-hubble-space-te...

[Timon3]

Just looking at the number of papers gives a very wrong impression. You can have hundreds of papers that change very little, and a single one that changes a whole field.

JWST has already generated lots of counter-evidence for theories we were sure about based on Hubble. If your comparison doesn't even pay attention to this simple fact, how is it worth anything?

[biorach]

> Last I checked, 1000 paper a year is more than 1200 papers in 3 years

It's a metric. A good metric? Maybe not. Feels like using lines of code to measure programmer productivity.

Plus, have you controlled for factors like time allocation? If fewer research teams are getting access for longer then this would explain it

[somenameforme]

I think the Hubble claim is easy to demonstrate because one can simply look at Hubble's greatest achievement - it proved that the universe's expansion is accelerating, in direct contradiction to what was believed prior. It made lots of other revolutionary discoveries, but none of it matters because nothing JWST has, or likely will, uncover comes anywhere near to this degree of relevance.

And that's not a fault of JWST - it's just the nature of diminishing returns when what you're doing is just expanding the capabilities of something that was already highly capable.

On the other issue I don't understand how you can think humanity would never become multiplanetary, outside of expecting an imminent self annihilation. And that is certainly a possibility, but certainly not something one could argue as a high probability event anytime in the foreseeable future.

[biorach]

JWT may well overturn our current theories of early galaxy and black hole formation with potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of the Big Bang. So your statement is both premature and over confident

[somenameforme]

What you're describing would not be a revolutionary discovery, it would be evolutionary. Hubble discovering the universe's expansion was accelerating is something basically nobody expected, because it's completely ridiculous. I mean think about the absurdity of that for a second, instead of just taking it for granted.

But of course it's true. The announcement was largely met with skepticism. But after it held up, it led directly to the contemporary hypothesis of dark energy and created a general frantic hand-waving not about the earliest moments of the universe, for which we will never have any certainty whatsoever, but about what's happening at this very moment!

For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery effectively resolving dark energy/matter, which would sort of be the equal but opposite of what Hubble achieved. Of course the odds of it doing anything like this are near 0. On the other hand the odds of the universe's expansion accelerating were also near 0.

That, if it was not clear, is why I simultaneously support development of such telescopes and similar technology, but also am extremely skeptical that they'll provide anything of major value. Because in 99.9% of cases, they won't. But that 0.1% is worth looking for nonetheless, because you never know how large a leap it may enable.

[biorach]

> For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery

Yeah, I dunno, you've a pretty subjective valuation of these discoveries that I don't think is shared by many in the scientific community. Feel free to post links if I'm wrong.

[somenameforme]

What I've said is most certainly the norm. If you want discussion - nasaspaceflight forums are essentially the hacker news equivalent of space stuff. In general people are happy to have a new telescope which will provide some new data, but nobody is expecting much of it.

And what I said regarding Hubble was not subjective in the least. The observation that the universe's expansion is accelerating was huge. JWST cannot realistically be expected to match this, simply because such discoveries are unexpected by their very nature, and phenomenally rare on top of that.