The Hubble is a relic.
James Webb Space Telescope Launch Delayed til 2019
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/james-webb-space-telescope-launch-delayed-2019/
The James Webb Telescope is the "new and improved" version of the Hubble, and it has me rather excited. The Hubble, although it did advance our understanding of the cosmos, had limitations. James Webb will be another major step towards furthering our understanding of both what our universe is, and is not. I think it is just as important to learn what the universe is not in order to have a more complete understanding of what the universe is. And right now, it is estimated that we are only aware of about 5% of the basic concepts that are out there, so we are gonna get some things wrong. Important thing is that we learn from them. Eventually, even the James Webb Space Telescope will outlive its usefulness, and hopefully be replaced by even more advanced technology.
I think that the reason that most of us are here to begin with is that we are almost all above average intelligence. It seems to be one common trait amongst most of us. Our individual perspectives and skillsets will very quite widely. Our ability to process data has led most of us to similar conclusions about things being very wrong with our government and had been unified in our support of Ron Paul and the Libertarian Principles. We dont all have the exact same point of views, and those differences have enabled us to become stronger as a community, even if the interest in Ron Paul himself has waned. I think we usually work best when we enact our ability to entertain opposing points of view without either accepting or rejecting them. We fall apart when individuals say I am right and the rest of you are all wrong, now blindly accept my idea because I dont care about your opinions.
Do Black Holes exist? Math says they probably do. Stephen Hawking said they probably do. But Black Holes are not the and all and be all of our understanding, only a very small part of it. If we look to our past, people used to genuinely believe that the earth was flat because they had no way of knowing that it was not. I dont mean like a hundred years ago, or even Egyptian times, I mean like Cave Man times. Even the Greeks knew the Earth was round, and were even able to give a very good approximation of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. We believed that men could not fly. Then we flew. We also believed that "Time Travel" would occur if you went faster than the speed of sound, not light. Then we broke the sound barrier and found it that we were wrong. We thought we could not put a man in outer space. Then we did. We thought we could not put a man on the moon, yet, we did that too.
If we summarily dismiss ideas that our understanding of how the universe works will never advance, it is only those people who do not advance their own thinking that are held back by their beliefs. Humanity will move forward (if we manage to not blow ourselves up first) with or without those types of people. But we need those very naysayers to challenge the ideas we cling to until we finally all of us let go, only to embrace a more accurate understanding of the world in which we live.
Einstein once said that we had reached a point in time where our technology had surpassed our humanity. He longed for the day when our humanity would surpass our technology. Considering what is happening in this very thread, I share Einsteins desire to see our humanity surpass our technology, and advance both to our fullest potential.
