Technology costs can decrease over time, which make total project costs decrease independently of prior project versions. For example, it costs less to make a chess program to kick Kasparov’s butt today than it did 10 or 20 years ago because the hardware it runs on is thousands of times cheaper and, at the same time, thousands of times faster.
Many of the underlying costs of making a space telescope decrease over time and, at the same time, the capabilities increase as underlying technology improves independent of how many space telescopes have come before.
If you get the same knowledge, but slightly delayed, then it’s a trade off between time and money. Is having blurrier pictures of the cosmos or lower resolution data of subatomic particles a few years early worth billions of dollars?
Time on telescopes is expensive and pretty competative. Scientists often have to book it at least a year in advance (it’s basically like booking time at a convention center, there isn’t one unified group of people who do science with Hubble). So if we’ve already got Hubble up there in orbit we might as well use it, even if something better is on its way. More telescopes equals more science. And don’t even start on how much Hubble is costing us, as pretty much everything else the government does is costing us hundreds of times more.
Particle accelerators do get better and cheaper over time, but that’s because we keep getting better at building them. And waiting to build one on the moon is ludicrious; whenever we end up back on the moon, it’s going to be many decades from now, and transporting supplies to build an accelerator up there would be ridiculously expensive. I’m willing to risk blowing up the universe before forking out that kind of money!
While the Webb telescope will cost less than the Hubble, without the Hubble as a proof-of-concept work, I don’t think Webb would be a priority at this time. So, I don’t think you can simply look at cost/effectiveness/time frame on that basis. At some point there would have been a first space based unmanned observatory, and some of the “learning” costs associated with would be much more expensive than follow-on technologies.
BTW, if you have a cite for the great magnitude in difference in costs between the Hubble and the Webb observatories, I’d like to see it. Per wikipedia articles on the two space telescopes Hubble is estimated in current dollars to have cost, all told, approximately $6 billion, while costs to date on the Webb telescope are about $4.5 billion. Which is not the great savings that your question seemed to imply to me. Also, consider that a large expense for the Hubble is one that no one could have predicted nor avoided: Four years of keeping the completed observatory in a clean room, while in the wake of the Challenger disaster the Shuttle program was revamped and reworked.
Or maybe it’ll destroy the universe and replace it with something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
This may have already happened, but there is a certain uncertainty about it.
Wigner’s friend, however may know, and as long as we don’t ask him, we’ll be safe.
Nope. One premise of so-called “dark matter” is that it is only very weakly or completely non-interactive with normal matter, i.e. via the electromagnetic force. A black hole, however, can carry a charge, and while the charge that can condense in a black hole can’t be very much (the EM force being much, much stronger than gravity), for a very tiny black hole it can be relatively large, at least at the level of fundamental charge. The other issue is that dark matter does not “clump” very well; while it might contribute to large scale cosmic structures, it generally stays pretty spread out, such that it doesn’t form localized and therefore observable masses. Black holes, on the other hand, can and will readily join together, and release dramatic amounts of energy as they do so.
In contradiction to Yumblie’s claim, black holes are areas of local maximal entropy; this is (from a thermodynamic point of view) why it is impossible to get energy from a black hole, or as the great John Wheeler would have it, black holes have “no hair”.
In regard to the concerns expressed by the o.p., I can only reinforce what others have said regarding the natural occurrence of energies far higher than will be created in the LHC. As for the powerful influence of scientists, not so much. Well, except for the “scientists” of the Tobacco Institute.
My original assertion is true: the Webb telescope costs less and does more because a few years have passed. And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the cosmos pretty much the same as it was a few years ago? So by skipping Hubble and waiting a few years, we still end up with the same images, but a few extra billion dollars in our collective pockets. If we delay Webb, the cost savings keep adding up.
I’m fine with waiting six months to see a movie. Why? Because DVDs give me same exact images as the move theatre, but costs me less money. Why should I be force to fork over the first-run theater ticket prices on a space telescope or a particle accelerator?
It costs less because it’s been done before. Like CD players. Remember when CD players first came out and they cost hundreds of dollars for a single disc player? Man, that was stupid. Instead of making those clunky old things, we should have just waited 20 years until it only cost $20 for a portable CD player. Note that you’re not suggesting nobody should have bought those early players, but that nobody should have made them.
Why did people back in the 50’s make those huge televisions with tiny little screens and fuzzy pictures? In black and white, no less. Just think of the money we could have saved if, instead of manufacturing all those televisions, we had just kept listening to radio plays and waited until 2007 when we could start making high def televisions. Millions, possibly billions could have been saved!
And don’t get me started on computers. People are so wasteful it boggles the mind. I mean, what possible reason could there be to build gigantic desktop machines without harddrives that run sooooo slooooooow? Didn’t Apple realize that it would be a much more impressive opening to roll out a slim powerbook with a 17 inch color LCD screen instead of blowing their wad back in 84 on the stupid Macintosh?
Because, without the original theater run, nobody would have made the movie in the first place.
Anyway, in regards to the OP, I’ve always found asking this question to be useful: If tomorrow the Sun were to spontaneously collapse into a black hole*, what would happen to the orbit of the Earth?
Hmm, I’m not seeing any equipment that looks at visible light on the Webb’s instrument list. There’s a Near Infrared Camera and a Mid-Infrared Instrument, but nothing that’ll let the satellite image any wavelength less than 600 nanometers. FYI, 600 nm is deep red. That means that orange, yellow, green, blue and violet are forever beyond Webb’s grasp.
Perhaps you call that ‘more’. Some would call it ‘less’. In actuality, it just means that Webb and Hubble are ‘different’.
Trying to make a point about the cost of Webb being lower than Hubble is like trying to make a point about bulldozers being cheaper than combine harvesters.
On that basis, we should sit on our hands and wait for the Blue Light Special just before the end of the Universe, because everything will be up to 70% off. Of course, you’ll only have 10 minutes to make your final purchases before the Universe closes for business. But hell, think of all the money you’re saviCRUNCH
Let’s just say that I think the exchange rate between universes is going to be extremely unfavorable, especially when they hear that they can’t change it back.
It’s my understanding that physicists did do just what the OP is suggesting. They waited for the LHC’s price to go from infinite to mere billions.
Also, I have heard talk that the CMS detector in particular (I don’t know about the other detectors) was planned for triggering technology becoming sufficiently advanced and cheap by the time they got around to building it, and they say it paid off.
