A while back, it lookedlike the U.S. was going to kill the James Webb Space Telescope by reducing funding for Science and Technology significantly. Now it looks like this is no longer the case:
The 2012 fiscal year appropriation bill, marked up today by the Senate, allows for continued funding of the James Webb Space Telescope and support up to a launch in 2018! Yes, it looks like this bird is going to fly.
In addition to continued funding for the telescope the 2012 bill also allots the National Aeronautics and Space Administration $17.9 billion (a reduction of $509 million or 2.8 percent from the 2011 enacted level) and preserves NASA’s portfolio balanced among science, aeronautics, technology and human space flight investments, including the Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle, the heavy lift Space Launch System, and commercial crew development.
Theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss has something to say about the dangers of defunding the James Webb Space Telescope:
Almost 20 years ago Congress cancelled what was then the most ambitious scientific project ever launched, the Superconducting Super Collider. Well on the way to completion and after several billion dollars had been spent, cost over-runs and management issues meant that the project, the world’s largest particle accelerator which would have resolved questions ranging from the origin of all mass to the nature of fundamental forces, gave a democratic congress an excuse to kill the program during hard economic times.
A similar situation is arising now and is threatening to ground the nearly completed James Webb Space Telescope. Coming in at $1.6 Billion over its recently updated cost estimate of approximately $5 Billion, this successor to the phenomenally successful Hubble Space Telescope will peer back to the period of ‘first light’, when the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe giving new insights into exotica from the first giant black holes, to the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that dominate the dynamics of the universe. After billions have been spent, the House Appropriations Committee has recommended terminating the project because it is over budget and has had management issues.
The cancellation of the JWST would likely herald the beginning of the end of US leadership in Space Science, just as the cancellation of the SSC moved the center of gravity in particle physics to Europe. The JWST was designed to take off where the Hubble Space telescope—which has revolutionized astronomy—has ended, by taking us to the very beginnings of visible structure in the Universe. It was meant to be the centerpiece of astronomy for the next two decades, and without it, the tantalizing hints that Hubble has been able to glean about our beginnings will remain just that for perhaps a generation.
Indeed, if it were simply a matter of the US taking another step back away from the head of the pack in Science, the proposed cancellation of the JWST would merely be a local tragedy. But the cancellation of such a major international science project, and one for which much of the incredibly sophisticated and expensive infrastructure has already been completed, means it is unlikely that a comparable opportunity will arise elsewhere in the foreseeable future.
The JWST cancellation is part of an overall proposed reduction in support for NASA, which comes on the heels of the end of the Shuttle program, and indeed of the immediate future of human space exploration in this country. Yet when one compares the total cost of the JWST, likely to be around $7 Billion (spent over a period of longer than a decade) with the $200 billion dollar price tag of the Space Shuttle program, and the $100 billion dollar price tag of the International Space Station, and the $ 3 Billion/yr devoted to human launch vehicle development, it seems sad that the item with the greatest potential to push forward the frontiers of knowledge, and the cheapest of the bunch, is being cut.
But the potential loss of the JWST is far greater than just science. It is hard to think of a single NASA project, exceeding even the Mars Rovers, that has captured the imagination of the public, and in particular children, than the images of the cosmos provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. Whenever I lecture and show a Hubble photo I can be guaranteed to provoke excitement and awe. One can only imagine what inspirations the next generation will miss without another comparable eye in the sky.
The Universe is more remarkable than our human imagination alone could have ever guessed, which is why science is more exciting than science fiction. Every time we open a new window on the Universe we are surprised, and each time we learn something new and fundamental about the cosmos we learn something new and exciting about our own origins and our connections to the universe.
It is thus both tragic and frustrated that this tempting and vital new probe of the cosmos may soon be both blindsided and blinded as an unfortunately easy but misplaced target during the current congressional budget cutting frenzy.
It turns out the shooter who killed over 60 children on a small island in Norway was a native Norwegian and tea-party loving, conservative, Christian who hated Muslims and loved guns. Let’s see how quickly Fox News gets bored with that.
(Any reference to “vermin” in the article is a mistaken translation of the island’s name, Utøya.)
Nevermind the usual, overly idealistic and romantic reasons for wanting to explore the universe. Here’s one that I imagine most people will agree with:
Whenever we discover a new celestial body up there in the sky, we nearly always see the same thing: The surface, if we can see it, shows the signs of torment caused by endless beatings by rogue planetary or stellar fragments:
Some worlds have been torn apart completely: Our own moon was once a part of this planet. When a rock the size of Mars struck the Earth a fragment was propelled a quarter million miles away where it became known as the Moon.
Saturn, which we like to think of as the protective big brother of our solar system, acts as a giant gravitational slingshot for objects not otherwise headed for Earth, spewing rocks left and right and in and out of our solar system at enormous speeds.
Between Mars and Jupiter is the great asteroid belt which contains more than 550,000 asteroids. The number of objects we detect there increases steadily—we’re nowhere near to tracking them all:
(Be sure to watch this in 1080p fullscreen.)
Only the asteroid belt is seen in the video above—but on the outskirts of our solar system we are enveloped by the Oort cloud, a vast cloud of comets numbering a trillion or more, slowly circling our sun with varying trajectories. In this regard, the gravitional pull of the Sun and our neighboring planets is not our friend.
There is only one defense against this cosmic game of pong: Travelling elsewhere. Only when we inhabit other planets, other moons, giant space vessels, and, eventually, other star systems, will our species be resistant to the constant threat of cataclysmic impacts by space debris.
We inhabit a small, fragile, white and blue water balloon which floats around a cosmic battlefield where the weapons used are stellar machine guns that use small planets as bullets—and we’re naïvely hopeful that our world won’t suddenly… pop.
If we do not decentralize our civilization—if we keep deferring the choice to go beyond the Earth to the next generation, and the next, in favor of feeding the immediate but ephemeral greed of those who already have more than enough—if we let this planet remain our species’ single point of failure, we will have only ourselves and our short-shortsightedness to blame for our eventual demise.
Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring—not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. And once you’re out there in space for centuries, for millennia, moving little worlds around and engineering planets, your species has been pried loose from its cradle. If they exist, many other civilizations will eventually venture far from home.
– Carl Sagan
We can discover and visit untold wonders in the depths of space, but it will be but a fortunate biproduct of our efforts to stay alive. We will pay the ultimate homage to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard, or we will die.
About a month ago, the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, made famous by the movie Contact, was shut down due to lack of funding. The money necessary to keep the array online for another year amounted to $1 million, or the cost of around 12 Javelin missiles. As much as I loathe that, and wonder whatever happened to the American people’s priorities, I can understand why it happened. There are doubts about whether the strength of the array is sufficient to capture any possible signals. (Nevermind the fact that we can’t possibly pretend to know if it would eventually work or not.) It might not capture anything; there might not be anything out there, and even if there is, we would — we assume — not be able to brave the distances needed to make any use of that knowledge.
But now the U.S. Congress is contemplating reducing NASA’s budget by $1.64 billion (8% of NASA’s total budget), a move that would kill, among other things, the James Webb Space Telescope program. The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is arguably one of the chief glories of mankind. It is the tool with which we have gazed through time and space and watched as, time and time again, spots of darkness that were thought to be simply nothing turned out to house thousands of galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars; the marvel of engineering that through the past 20 years has taught us more about the origins of our universe and ourselves than anyone or anything else ever has — and now some people are saying it’s not “worthwhile” to see more.
The congressmen and women who are attempting to cancel the James Webb Space Telescope are essentially saying that they do not want to know about our origins. They are calling what might become a much greater tool of science than the Hubble Space Telescope — which is already one of very few things that humans will remember a few millennia from now — an “acceptable loss”. They are comfortable halting much of the progress in cosmology in order to reap a meager $1.64 billion, or approximately five days worth of sustaining the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To me, this is nothing less than cowardice. This project is not about finding life elsewhere, but about understanding the origin of time and space, and therefore ourselves. It is about not being content with living in ignorance, afraid of the dark, and about finding an answer to the oldest question we know: “Who are we?”
Are you American? Then write to your representative and try to stop what will surely be one of the more regressive acts of our “modern” civilization. If you do not agree, and if you do not act, then I can only ask: Why are you afraid of the dark?
Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
Just now, the first set of answers to questions posed by the Reddit community to Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow, were posted! The original thread is here, but here are the questions and answers for good measure:
Part 1
Dear Reader,
Delighted to be asked to answer these wonderful questions. (Please note that the first question was actually several.) I am currently writing under a couple of pressing deadlines. Want to answer each and every question. So, if it’s okay with you guys, I’d like to respond in installments. Here’s the first. More coming soon.
With best regards,
Ann
Where do you see the future of humanity in 100 years? 1,000 years? 100,000 years?
The most wonderful and terrible thing about life is its inherent unpredictability. Too many variables for human brains to crunch and then extrapolate conditions in the distant future– until, perhaps, someday our computers will have evolved sufficiently to do so. Until then, attempts at prophecy of where we’ll be in ten years, let alone 100 or more, are probably exercises in futility. History doesn’t move in a straight line. It meanders. And there’s so much we never see coming.
Do you think humans need to change their way of doing things to survive long enough to explore the cosmos?
No limb to go out on here: Yes.
In what ways/steps should we change things to fit this proposition?
Start taking the revelations of science to heart. Give up the infantile notion of our centrality to the vastness of space and time. Take seriously the fragility of our environment and treat it as if it were more precious to us than diamonds, because of course it is. Awaken to the urgency of our need to change our ways. Stop living as if everything were disposable. . .as if heaven was somewhere and somewhen else. Question authority, but don’t stop there. Reflect on what great big liars we all are. Next time you hear someone with an investment in, say, nuclear power, tell you that the plant can withstand the worst kind of tsunami, or the country I am itching to invade has weapons of mass destruction, be skeptical. Remember you are a link in a chain of life that stretches all the way across some 4 billion years to its origin on this planet and possibly forward to the stars. Think long term. Remember I, you, all of us, might be wrong.
Kudos to the U.S. congress. Its members can propose legislation that gives a trillion dollar tax break — that’s $1,000,000,000,000 — to the richest 1% of the population, but they can’t spend $5 million on keeping one of the most hopeful — and, potentially, one of the most important — scientific pursuits in the history of humankind alive.
Carl Sagan would be so disappointed.
The timing couldn’t be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized — and some will be in the “habitable zone,” where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.
Just knowing SETI is there was significant for us. This is a setback.
If we miss a distant signal, it would be a terrible loss.
– Sarah Wiehe
All stars emit visible light, and Sun-like stars emit most of their electromagnetic radiation in the visible part of the spectrum. Sensing light is a much more effective way of understanding the environment at some distance; certainly much more powerful than olfactory cues. It’s hard to imagine a competent technical civilization that does not devote major attention to its primary means of probing the outside world. Even if they were mainly to use visible, ultraviolet or infrared light, the physics is exactly the same for radio waves; the difference is merely a matter of wavelength.
I do not insist that the above arguments are compelling, but neither are the contrary ones. We have not witnessed the evolution of biospheres on a wide range of planets. We have not observed many cases of what is possible and what is not. Until we have had such an experience–or detected extraterrestrial intelligence–we will of course be enveloped in uncertainty.
The notion that we can, by a priori arguments, exclude the possibility of intelligent life on the possible planets of the 400 billion stars in the Milky Way has to my ears an odd ring. It reminds me of the long series of human conceits that held us to be at the center of the universe, or different not just in degree but in kind from the rest of life on Earth, or even contended that the universe was made for our benefit. Beginning with Copernicus, every one of these conceits has been shown to be without merit.
In the case of extraterrestrial intelligence, let us admit our ignorance, put aside a priori arguments, and use the technology we are fortunate enough to have developed to try and actually find out the answer. That is, I think, what Charles Darwin–who was converted from orthodox religion to evolutionary biology by the weight of observational evidence–would have advocated.
– Carl Sagan
We conclude that skepticism regarding SETI is at best unfounded and at worst can seriously damage the long-term prospects of humanity. If ETIs exist, no matter whether friendly or adversarial (or even beyond such simple distinctions), they are relevant for our future. To neglect this is contrary to the basic tenets of transhumanism. To appreciate this, it is only sufficient to imagine the consequences of SETI success for any aspect of transhumanist interests; and then to affirm that such a success can only be achieved without trying if they come to us, which would obviously mean that we are hopelessly lagging in the race for Galactic colonization.
We find a streak of very subtle anthropocentrism hidden in the usual understanding of the “Great Filter”. Seemingly, we are led into a dilemma: either we are optimists about extraterrestrial life and SETI or we are optimists about our particular (human/posthuman) future. We find the dilemma false and a bit hypocritical, like all man-as-the-measure-of-all-things argument from Protagoras to this day. We can have both of the alternatives above; we can be optimists about life and intelligence in general. And only future astrobiological research can persuasively show to which degree our optimism in both directions is justified.
As all who have ever tackled this question agree, investments in SETI are invariably a minuscule fraction of any civilization’s scientific investments. Even the cost of the most ambitious SETI projects imagined so far (like CYCLOPS; see Oliver 1973) is negligible in comparison to such endeavors generally regarded as desirable and worthwhile like the development of artificial intelligence, setting up efficient defense against impacts, or building O’Neill colonies (not to mention more ambitious projects, like terraforming or uplifting of stellar matter). Thus, there is no real economic excuse for neglecting this field, as well as the general astrobiological enterprise, once prejudices and fallacious arguments are rejected. At least this argument applies as long as it is really necessary to influence public opinion at large to support this type of scientific research; it is to be hoped that in future rich societies such research could be performed by individuals even if the majority still continues to consider them irrelevant or even undesirable.
Of course, all this pertains to a long-term view. No theoretical model can guarantee the success of SETI on short timescales, certainly not on the scale of a present-day human lifetime. But, a healthy admixture of long-term views and long-term planning seems inescapable if we wish to leave to our descendants a prospect of living under the billion suns of the Milky Way.
With everything going on in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the U.S., you’d think this essay was written today, but in fact Albert Einstein submitted it to the Monthly Review magazine over 60 years ago, in May 1949. Here’s an excerpt:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
Read the whole essay entitled “Why Socialism?” here, or here.
We inhabit a small, fragile, white and blue water balloon which floats around a cosmic battlefield where the weapons used are stellar machine guns that use small planets as bullets—and we’re naïvely hopeful that our world won’t suddenly… pop.
Just now, the first set of answers to questions posed by the Reddit community to Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow, were posted! The original thread is 
“) due to lack of funding.