And I’m the Emperor Napoleon.
And if you can’t distinguish between areas of different brightness, it evaporates also. Resolution and sensitivity are (loosely speaking) the two primary measures of imaging power. What we have is two ground-based telescopes which are almost the equal of Hubble in spatial resolution, and its superior by some margin in terms of sensitivity. That you persist in labelling them inferior overall is bizarre in the extreme, frankly.
Because I’m bored, I’ve constructed an example using that noted celestial object, Freddie Mercury. Here he is:
Freddie, at high resolution and low colour depth (i.e. low sensitivity).
Freddie, at 90% of the linear resolution, but at a higher colour depth.
Which is better?
But you do wish you could be friends? Yes or no?
Space based telescopes fill a very real need. In orbit, they do not have to “see” through the atmosphere. The atmosphere causes problems. It has moisture and dust, and it acts like a filter to many wavelengths. Land based scopes have to be used at night. During the daylight, whatever you want to look at will be “overwhelmed” by sunlight. Sure, with larger mirrors, VLT arrays and adaptive optics things have gotten better, but you still are looking through an atmosphere. You also have to worry about air currents, condensation and cooling down.
Again, space based telescopes fill a very real need. In orbit, they do not have to “see” through the atmosphere. Space based scopes can use a much wider range of frequencies – radio, visible light, X ray, gamma ray. Each wavelength shows a different aspect. Each wavelength reveals something very different. Being in space, they can simply point away from the sun, so you have more hours of “working time”.
As for manned vs robots, there are strong arguments for robotic exploration. Robots do not need a heavy, expensive, complicated life support system. They do not care if they are sent out, never to return. They do not experience bone loss in a zero G environment. They do not go crazy from spending years in total isolation. They do not need years of rigorous physical and mental training.
Getting pretty pictures of far off stars means we are learning something new. We learned more about our own sun and how it works. We all watched SL9 smash Jupiter. We verified the accelerated expansion of the universe. We discovered planets and gamma ray bursters. We verified the effects and presence of black holes. We proved some of what Einstein told us, and also disproved his idea of a “constant”. He thought the universe was expanding at a constant rate. By looking further and further away we in effect can look back in time. We understand gravity a little better, as a distortion in space/time and actually proved it.
Some people argue that the time, effort and money would be better used here on earth. So far, the “space race” has given us composite materials, better ceramics, and microminiature electronics. That’s how we ended up with pocket calculators, personal computers, and nonstick frypans. And who knows what else.
These same people in the far distant past might argue,” Let’s not waste time exploring this continent or trying to make boats. Let’s just stay on this beach.” They might say “Stop screwing with the round thing, man was not meant to have wheels and what can you do with it anyway”. Everything we have is because someone had the courage to say “what if” or “I want to know”. There is no way to predict what new useful things may come out of further exploration, but I know that if it stops, those new things will never come to be. Even warp drive is theoretically possible.
Will the Webb replace all the capabilities of the Hubble and, if so, would the loss of those capabilities for the time period between Hubble decommission and Webb deployment be worth the substantial cost involved to engineer a fix?
Thankfully, owing to special relativity, you will be unable to “explore” other worlds outside Solaria the way you “explored” America. I shudder to think how many aliens you would slaughter with your viruses, your bacteria, and your unmitigated earth-centric greed. It is unfortunate that your discoveries often constitute the pending demise of other worlds.
Heck, you’re lucky. You’re apparently wealthy enough to have someone devoted full-time to calling you an asshole whenever he decides you need it. I can barely even afford PANTS.
Uhhhhhm, OK. So what do you propose? That we wallow in ignorance? That we make the desire/ability to learn things a taboo? How about we all go back to living in trees? Knowledge bad. Stupid good. Grunt.
You’re comparing apples to oranges here.
Ground-based telescopes are limited to the wavelenghts of light that can pass through the atmosphere. Most UV is filtered out, and a lot of the blue end of the spectrum is severely attenuated and scattered. GBTs only work 10-12 hours a day, and are affected by meteorological conditions, coronal discharges, and sesmic vibrations. It’s tied to one geographic position which is rapidly spinning in relation to the rest of the universe. It really sucks when the three nights a year you’ve been allocated at Keck are clouded, or disrupted by earthshocks on Mauna Kea.
Hubble works 24 hours a day, rain or shine, simultaneous missions (as orbit allows), and has unrestricted access to the entire visual spectrum. It doesn’t have adaptive optics, true, but then, it doesn’t really need them, as the primary purpose of adaptives is to compensate for atmospheric distortions. The technology may be 30 years old, but that hardly makes it “obsolete” in terms of results. Even marginally better performance over newer ground telescopes is critical when you’re at the edge of viewing capabilities. And there are some missions, like the Deep Field and the Ultra Deep Field which just could not have been accomplished with GBT.
As for the cost ratio, you’re comparing installation costs. Hubble is already in place and the cost is already amortized; the cost of a servicing mission is a stand-alone. Given the round-the-clock operating schedule I’d be surprised if the cost per hour of operation isn’t comperable to a modern GBT.
As for comments on the viabilty of missile defense/SDI, I’ve started a seperate thread here.
Stranger
I’ve just asked myself the same question.
Huh? And, HUH?
“Special relativity” need not prevent us from exploring beyond the solar system any more than the Earth’s gravity prevents us from exploring near-space. Even dismissing theoretical possibilities for (effectively) superluminal travel, there’s nothing preventing us from embarking on long-duration journeys between stars. We probably won’t be sending bags of protoplasm to do it, true, but exploration by proxy is exploration nontheless.
As for slaughtering aliens with viruses and bacteria, that seems highly unlikely unless said aliens have a DNA-based biology that is compatible with Earthlife, a possibility so infinitesmially-likely that it scarcely bears consideration.
And, lest you paint the American aboriginies as “guiltless” victims, remember that the invasion of the Clovis people led to the extinction of most megafauna of the Americas. The European invaders were just continuing the cycle (albeit in a deliberate and brutal way, apart from introducting disease.)
For all we know, we might send our ships screaming across the empty wastes of space and dive screaming onto the first planet we come to, only due to a terrible miscalculation of scale to have the entire fleet be eaten by a small dog.
It’s just life, the experts say.
Stranger
Go to the pound and get yourself a good Chihuahua. Someone is always dumping them, and they’re great little ankle-nippers when you can’t afford your own Desmostylus. 
How about we all just have some basic respect for others and their property? We aren’t “discovering” anything. To be dis-covered, something must first be covered. Temper your zeal to explore with greater knowledge about what effect your exploration might have. How would you like it if some alien culture came here “exploring”, only to turn out to be conquerors and pillagers? I’m not advocating that you wallow in ignorance, but rather that you rise above it. Given the lessons of the past, man has no excuse for wrecklessness — least of all the excuses being ignorance.
I agree. We need more wrecks.
If you think of your own kind as “bags of protoplasm”, I shudder to imagine the level of contempt you might feel for alien life. Then again, perhaps you are a hand-wringer who feels guilty about his own existence, but believes that a spotted owl should be protected. In any event, you will never travel faster than light. You don’t have enough energy.
As a man who is about to cite the destruction of an environment in his next paragraph as the ruination of a whole race, your argument here is remarkable. At least I can tell you aren’t heading up NASA, because it uses a P4 containment policy whenever there is the remotest possibility of cross-contamination.
I’m afraid your source, last modified January 2002, is a bit out of date. See this source, from February 2003. Evidence acquits Clovis people of ancient killings, archaeologists say.
Previously, you had cited infinitessimal likelihood to rebut my argument, and now you offer this?
The so-called experts don’t even know what life is.
“Bags of protoplasm” is a euphamism for organic life. Lighten up, will ya?
Cite and cite, for theoretical possibilities for supraluminal propulsion, with an acknowledgement that nobody really knows how this would actually work. But then, nobody knew about stimulation emmision of coherent radiation when Wells was writing about Martian heat-rays, either.
As a precaution to prevent a false discovery of life on other worlds. It’s highly unlikely that any Earthlife would prevail over native, naturally-adapted life in a non-terrestrial environment.
This is hardly definitive, and doesn’t really address extinction of predators due to depletion of hunting stock. I don’t think anybody seriously imagines that Clovis-era hunters took on sabre-tooth tigers and short-faced bears. Also, though I used the example of the Clovis peoples who emerged around 8000 BCE, there are indications of pre-Clovis groups in the Americas. Cite and cite.
It’s called humor. You should try it sometime.
Stranger
I understood your euphemism, and recognized it as a somewhat plagiarized line from a Star Trek episode: “ugly bag of mostly water”.
Argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. Something isn’t true just because it hasn’t been proved false.
Nonsense. Assuming it was any sort of life that you could recognize as life, you yourself might be a hostile organism.
Are you making any sort of point? Do you intend to dig back a hundred-thousand years to find something to excuse Amerigo Vespucci’s savage massacres and enslavements?
If you want to sit down and have a virtual beer, we can tell jokes. If you want to swoop in and fart at me, expect me to slap your ass.
No, it will not. The James Webb Space Telescope is optimized for infrared observations. Despite being larger than Hubble, it will have an angular resolution of only about 0.15 arcseconds (vs ~0.04 for Hubble).
The similarity is entirely coincidental, as I’m not a Star Trek fan.
I’m well aware of the classes of fallacy. Something isn’t false just because it hasn’t been proven true, either. It is a theoretical possibility. Actually, my statement, if you wished to consider it a fallacy, would be more properly classified as a appeal to probability, whereas the claim that superluminal propulsion isn’t possible because we don’t presently know how to implement it is a argumentum ad ignorantium.
In any case, I wasn’t staing a proof of method; I was indicating that our understanding of relativity physics doesn’t rule out the possibility.
Strawman. I wasn’t excusing anyone’s “savage massacres and enslavements”; I was providing a counterpoint to your statement of “unmitigated earth-centric greed” by pointing out that this behavior wasn’t the exclusive provence of Spanish conquistadors, but instead is a repeated, cyclic pattern of humanity, and in a broader view, all of life.
You’re not Marsha. Not everything is about you. The Adams quote was an attempt at levity. It’s okay to disagree and laugh about it.
Stranger
That gives something of a false impression; angular resolution depends directly on the wavelength of the light being observed. Since IR is at a much longer wavelength than UV, it’s inevitable that the angular resolution of an IR telescope is going to be worse for a given focal length. At IR wavelengths, Hubble’s resolution capabilities would be very different to the 0.04 arcseconds quoted above.