New Toys

 There is a new topic for science lovers. The James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched and is making its way to its programmed orbit. The JWST group on Facebook is an active discussion group that addresses all kinds of questions about the telescope and about the cosmology it will be used to study.

I'm not that excited about the group. Some of the questions people are asking are old questions, and there sure seem to be a lot of them. I am tempted to drop out of the group, which I joined because Liz invited me to. I eagerly await the images from the telescope. I am interested in the advances in engineering and everything else that led to development of this project. I enjoy learning details of the plans for the telescope. I'm just not that interested in rehashing basic cosmology with so many newcomers, I guess. How big is the universe? How old can the most distant objects the new telescope will see be? Is it possible that the speed of light hasn't always been the same, that it has slowed as the universe has expanded because the space/time continuum has stretched out? Yeah, someone asked that. I'm more interested in that question, maybe because I've read science fiction stories that include technology to slow the speed of light as a way, for example, of trapping people around a specific planet or something so by the time they get out of the trap, millions of years have passed in the rest of the universe while they made their slow light speed dash of a measly few million miles. The technology in those time traps was not explained, just assumed.

Still, it is exciting to see the response and to anticipate the improved data collection of the new instruments. People should be excited by advances in science and technology.

There was also an article on the BBC News website about a new projection for when the sun will become a red giant star, which will cover Mercury and Venus and burn up the surface of Earth. About 5 billion years, so I won't be around to see that one, I don't think. Besides, increases in solar radiation are expected in more like one billion years, enough to kill all life as we know it on Earth's surface. So, the authors of the article say, we should look for ways to expand human existence beyond Earth, start travelling the galaxy, so we might have a possible future beyond a billion years.

I'm not going to worry over the fate of the planet due to the shifts in the life cycle of our star. That's a time scale beyond my limits.

I am wondering, though, what sort of algorithms are involved in the calculations of these expected developments in solar activity and in controlling the fancy new space telescope. Will the AI involved have a meaningful affect on the chosen actions or the interpretation of data? If the advertising algorithms on the Internet are any guide, I hope the control and calculations are pretty much human, because the algorithms are even less efficient that plant reproduction processes.