Astronomy is one of those things that is hard to directly justify in terms of material benefits, but always remains popular with the public. The technology used to build telescopes and such usually has tech benefits for things you may not expect, which is good.
However, the knowledge of what is out there in the universe is a benefit in itself. The ability to make long-term plans and stick to them is one of the advantages of socialism, or any effective form of government, and you need knowledge to make goals.
We don’t know ahead of time what the gravity wave telescope will tell us. We can speculate, and we know it will give us better details about the things we’ve already detected with the ones here on Earth. But we do not know for sure, and that is exciting.
It could change our whole understanding of what the universe is, of what it is made of, etc. It could even find evidence of intelligent life.
A sufficiently advanced culture could modify a pair of orbiting black holes to produce modulated gravity wave signals, and there is nothing to stop those signals being heard on the other side of the universe, unlike the sort of radio waves we currently look for in SETI and similar programs. It sounds sci-fi, but it’s possible. And if anyone in the observable universe is doing it, we would know. And it would be evidence that life can be far more advanced than we have evidence for now.
Astronomy is one of those things that is hard to directly justify in terms of material benefits, but always remains popular with the public. The technology used to build telescopes and such usually has tech benefits for things you may not expect, which is good.
However, the knowledge of what is out there in the universe is a benefit in itself. The ability to make long-term plans and stick to them is one of the advantages of socialism, or any effective form of government, and you need knowledge to make goals.
We don’t know ahead of time what the gravity wave telescope will tell us. We can speculate, and we know it will give us better details about the things we’ve already detected with the ones here on Earth. But we do not know for sure, and that is exciting.
It could change our whole understanding of what the universe is, of what it is made of, etc. It could even find evidence of intelligent life.
A sufficiently advanced culture could modify a pair of orbiting black holes to produce modulated gravity wave signals, and there is nothing to stop those signals being heard on the other side of the universe, unlike the sort of radio waves we currently look for in SETI and similar programs. It sounds sci-fi, but it’s possible. And if anyone in the observable universe is doing it, we would know. And it would be evidence that life can be far more advanced than we have evidence for now.