Amazing job! This might be a silly question but are their any ideas as to the actual real world benefits we could see from this? The director-general of the ESA said "This is a big step for human civilisation" so I presume there is some idea of what they expect to gain from this mission? Edit: Thanks for all the replies! I'm at work now but will take a look at them this evening.
i watched a docu on the large hadron collider and the search for the higgs boson particle where they asked one of the scientists a similar question. what do you expect to gain monitarily from that xBillion dollars we just spent on this? his reply was 'i don't know'. he went on to give the example of how when radio waves were first discovered nobody called them 'radio waves' because no one had thought to use them in t…
A senator (ENLOW) has put an anonymous hold on building a supercollider, the white house deputy communications director (SAM) wants to help his old professor (MILLGATE) get the budget approved for it, and this is near the end of the episode:
ENLOW
I'm a Democrat, Sam. How's a 20 billion dollar astronomy lecture gonna help
the President get elected?
SAM
It won't. "We've discovered a seamless, intellectual framework for the
universe" isn't a good 30-second spot.
ENLOW
If only we could only say what benefit this thing has, but no one's been
able to do that.
MILLGATE
That's because great achievement has no road map. The X-ray's pretty good.
So is penicillin. Neither were discovered with a practical objective in
mind. I mean, when the electron was discovered in 1897, it was useless. And
now, we have an entire world run by electronics. Haydn and Mozart never
studied the classics. They couldn't. They invented them.
SAM
Discovery.
MILLGATE
What?
SAM
That's the thing that you were... Discovery is what. That's what this is used
for.
It's for discovery.