Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Lane
Good thought but no it's actually competition from all the other Astro photographers who are out there and you want your pictures look better than theirs, that's the real motivation.
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The competition isn't with other people in the field, it's with the interest of the general public, and their desire to stay interested in the research of something that they won't be part of (really). I think we (the whole planet basically) all know we'll never travel to the moon, much less Mars, so going to watch a quasar, up close, isn't going to happen either. So, now that we have a picture of one, why keep funding what we'll never see? Because each new picture that takes billions to get, is cooler than the last. So they feed us cool enhanced pics and we all say NASA needs to keep its funding and the kids in Africa can find a meal of their own. And when cool pics don't work, we move on to relevant facts , like, for every $10B NASA spends, we get awesome technology like a digital watch.
Don't get me wrong, I get it, I support it, and I'm the first to say the kids in Africa have been starving for, well, EVER (!!!); so the money we put into NASA and science in general (some more GloryDayz-life-impacting than cool pics of the horse-head nebula), need to stay funded because GloryDayz like cool stuff and cool pics...
But yeah, astrophysics is an expensive luxury because I'll never go to Mars...but that's OK, I'm worth ever $1B of it.... Now, if they find a earth-ending meteor some other science doode figures out how to put Bruce Willis on it to blow it the **** up before it hits earth, they're useful to me beyond benefiting science overall by entertaining me.