My biggest concern is that telescopes will soon hit a fundamental size limit when we run out of adjectives for naming them - I posit 'Inconceivably Large Telescope' to be the maximum.
I didn’t have time to watch yet, but did he take into consideration lunar crater telescopes? I always thought that would be an excellent reason to establish a lunar base.
Perhaps ISO could create a standardized list of “large” adjectives. Whenever a new telescope is built, it takes over the appropriate adjective and the existing ones are moved down accordingly. The one that gets bumped off the list gets turned into an aviary (after removing the mirror of course).
Edit: come to think of it, mirrors are probably safe right? The birds will stop to avoid flying into the other bird.
it was named OWL (overwhelmingly large telescope) when the project was to have a 100m diameter telescope. so I think there are still some years before we run out of words :)
The ‘you won’t believe how big the next telescope is’ telescope. Seriously though, I think meta materials could end up creating a new field of optical telescopic lenses over the next few decades.
Maybe taking a clue from software. Let's call it "Large Telescope '95" (because let's face it, if it's built they will have been planning it from back then at least)
If only telescopes were being built with significant improvements on a yearly basis. Instead, we have words like decadal project which indicates just how slowly they are brought about.
> I posit 'Inconceivably Large Telescope' to be the maximum.
No, we can't stop just yet as they are – conceivably – other models that will eventually surpass the «Inconceivably Large Telescope»:
– «Penultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope»
– «Antepenultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope»
– «Preantepenultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope».
A strings of further upgrades is also likely as a series of «Inconceivably Ultra Large» and «Pre/ante/penultimately Inconceivably Ultra Large» telescopes.
I used to work in the telescope world. Our organization acquired another organization that was working on NGAT: Next Generation Astronomical Telescope. At the time, we were also working on newer telescope models, and I joked about what we would name those…
I guess astronomers, like programmers, are just bad at naming things.
I actually really like names in the astronomy world. NGC 1832-456.382 really knock my socks off.
When they are not using boring names like that, the astro world does have some great names. It lets us know humans were involved in the naming. From the acronyms to the super superlative names, they have a bit of personality to them.
Yeah, though in this case, it fit in well with the fact that my relative had recently heard the "There's no 'F' in broccoli" dad-joke:
Customer: "I'd like a pound of broccoli, please."
Grocer: "I'm out of broccoli."
... repeat 1 or two times
Grocer: "How do you spell broccoli?"
Customer: "B-R-O-C-C-O-L-I."
Grocer: "You left out the 'F'."
Customer: "There's no 'F' in broccoli!"
Grocer: "That's what I'm trying to tell you!"
My apologies for any annoyance this joke has caused.
This is why I really hate it when people pick dumb names like this, which seem to assume that all progress will completely stop after they finish building this thing.
Look at Windows NT, for example: NT stands for "new technology". Well it obviously isn't new any more.
Ah, see that's when we start swapping the second and third terms for things that imply even larger sizes. And then we can even go up to the inconceivably colossal quettascope.
And the Modern Age ended at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Books are an understandable phenomenon. They were supposed to disappear before the stuff they describe stops being valid. But we have a nasty tendency of naming permanent things "modern".
But anyway, it reminds me on how if you want a real textbook that covers a math or physics subject with all the details, you need to get the one named "fundamentals of X". If you go and get the "advanced X", it has a superficial and incomplete description that won't help you with anything.
Thank you. I have been IP blocked by the Economist for years (and eventually reblocked after IP changes). I've never figured out which of my unlikable attributes was just too much here.
I am super impressed by this. I can understand getting blocked once by mistake or whatever. Getting blocked repeatedly. That takes some doing. How could you possibly not know why they keep blocking you? Are you just naturally nefarious? So much so that your mere presence screams out in the ether?
Are you hosting a tor exit node? Even that shouldn’t be enough. Are you part of a botnet? I mean if you were controlling a botnet you wouldn’t get blocked. You’d have to be skating that fine line of mostly innocent but also bad.
It's from Cloudflare but it isn't like the Crapthca pages, not even the endless, unskippable ones.
Search for this text to see pics
Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access economist.com
Searching from that I see some people only hitting it with certain browsers. As I write this, other browsers give me Cloudflare 502's - where CF says I'm good but the site "could not be satisfied".
With Starship and ..... SLS...... anyway.... coming online I'm extremely excited at the prospects of reusing JWST concepts/tech on larger arrays or larger single mirrors. A whole new upper limit of space telescopes unlocked.
There's a cautionary tale there though. With Starship being able to ferry more than 100 tons into space (JWST = 12 tons), you can imagine how much cheaper it will be to launch telescopes in space. A lot of the cost of JWST was related to the need to make it foldable in complicated ways, and to make it vibration resistant, and in general compensate for the fact that current rockets are cramped. If you can put new telescopes inside a massive cargo ships, protect them with several dampeners, give them ridiculous amounts of space so there's no need for funky folding, how much cheaper can you get? My bet is that by the end of the decade we will have more multiple telescopes more powerful than JWST in the sky, built and launched at a cost below $100 million each, or 100 times cheaper than JWST.
Yet, if you ask 100 people, both scientists and laypeople, mabye 99 will tell you that the $10 billion bill for JWST was worth it.
I'm pro-science, but scientists refuse to even ask this question: when you ask for billions for a super-duper experiment (ITER, looking at you, post-CERN collider too), what is the chance that you could get the same experiment 30 years from now for 100 times less money? The Human Genome Project cost $2.7 million in the 90's, yet now one can sequence any genome for hundreds of dollars (if not less).
At what point will scientists be willing to say that maybe the price for the JWST was too high?
> I'm pro-science, but scientists refuse to even ask this question: when you ask for billions for a super-duper experiment (ITER, looking at you, post-CERN collider too), what is the chance that you could get the same experiment 30 years from now for 100 times less money?
They'd correctly point out spending the money inventing the technology is precisely how it gets that cheap 30 years later.
> At what point will scientists be willing to say that maybe the price for the JWST was too high?
> For context, the JWST cost us about as much as Americans spend on one Halloween.
That's a cute argument, but flawed.
For any project, scientific or not, you need to estimate the return on investment and to survey the alternatives. With your argument it appears you can skip these things. If a project costs less than how much Americans spend on Halloween, then we just do it?
By the way, for a lot of people Halloween is quite important. It must be, since they are willing to part with their money. But that's a choice each of them is free to make.
Spending $10 billion on a science project that discovers some distant galaxies is a choice made by other people on their behalf. And when this happens it is the duty of those people to ask and answer some questions.
Using your argument, it follows that the people who make that choice do not actually need to ask and answer the pertinent questions. Because, you know, science is always worth it.
> They'd correctly point out spending the money inventing the technology is precisely how it gets that cheap 30 years later.
They would certainly point that out, but incorrectly. In the case of JWST, none of the money spent on it resulted in technologies used by SpaceX to build the Starship.
> They would certainly point that out, but incorrectly. In the case of JWST, none of the money spent on it resulted in technologies used by SpaceX to build the Starship.
Sure; the Human Genome Project didn't help develop electric cars, either.
JWST benefits the construction of future telescopes Starship may carry. Deployable sunshades and unfolding spacecraft will still be useful in Starship's larger payload sizes, as will the advances in optics etc.
Again, the fundamental logical error you're making is that waiting 30 years will make technologies just... drop into our laps, fully formed. You mentioned ITER, for example, and implied we'd somehow just magically have cheap fusion power in a few decades without that sort of investment in research and development.
I think the timeline and price tag are overly optimistic, but agree we can expect massive benefits from the lift capability of Starship.
The cheapest big telescopes I could find with a quick trawl are the Hobby–Eberly Telescope and its "clone" the SALT. They cost about $20 million each, compared to similarly-sized telescopes in the $80 million-and-up price range.
I doubt there's a project time-line since the 1970s from inception to first light of under 5 years, which would put us at 2029 already.
Perhaps the aim should be to have lots of "good enough" unit instruments, rather than one world-beatingly big one that politicians or billionaires find stimulating to throw money at.
I don't think larger single mirrors is going to be a thing. The numerous advantages of hexagon arrays far outweigh (pun intended) the single drawback of the large hexagonal diffraction spikes. The point spread function (PSF) is very well defined and can be easily worked around by some combination of PSF modeling, selecting a desired orientation, or multiple exposures.
The Keck Telescope was the first major observatory to use this technique in 1993.
> I don't think larger single mirrors is going to be a thing.
With regard to optical light space telescopes, one iteration of a single large mirror would be a great advancement. Hubble is only 2.4m. Back when NASA was developing Ares V there were proposals for an 8m optical space telescope. You can still find vestiges of that at NASA[1] and various videos of the launch and deployment.
Maybe that can still happen with Starship, SLS or whatever. Just need a big enough payload fairing.
I think these engineering marvels whose FWHM (sorry I'm a bit rusty on what the right parameter for light gathering ability in this application) will be leaps ahead of current instrumentation is important. But have the science missions it will host (spectrographs etc.) received the same attention? Along those lines follow up observations are critical, for the groundbreaking work done at the bleeding edge meter class instruments at universities/labratories/observatories are needed too (also grad students,researchers, data reduction etc.)
I am looking forward for when we can ship an aragoscope to space. I believe the tech is already there (actually simpler compared JWST). A 1KM one could resolve Jupyter moons from 23 light years away [1]. PBS has a great video regarding this [2].
I mean, shipping an origami of light and bendy material should be easier than making an origami of super delicate mirrors that have to be micrometers tolerances and be cooled to few K to operate.
Now that it’s been operational for a while, I would love to see an analysis of the James Webb to determine if there’s diminishing knowledge returns to size.
I worry a bit the cost of something like this may be better spent on other space exploration efforts which will yield more knowledge.
