Purple wrote:Eternal_Freedom wrote:Um, yes, apparently you're missing the innate human desire to know more about things.
You do not understand my question. I am not asking why a hypothetical human might want to know this. I my self do and find it neat. I am asking what possible actual physical benefit human kind has from doing so that justifies actually spending money on it. Since "neat" is something you can get out of quite a lot of things which are cheaper.
We have no idea what benefit it might bring. For instance, you might argue there is no point going back to the Moon, but Helium-3 is quite common there, and that may prove an essential fuel for future fusion reactors, so knowing what's on the surface provides a benefit years after the fact becomes known. Just because we can't see an immediate benefit
right now does not mean there may not be one in the future.
As for why Pluto became a dwarf planet, it's because we realised that if we kept Pluto as a proper planet, we would also haveto include Charon, Ceres, posible Vesta and Pallas (the last two are large asteroids int he main belt) Sedna, Halakea, Makemake and the other 20+ dwarf bodies. it would so weaken the definition of "planet" that it'd be unworkable when we started seeing extra-solar planets. So it wasn't "change for the sake of change" it was scientists gathering new data, realising their definition and hypothesis didn't fit and thus they changed said definition and hypothesis. It's what scientists do.
I fail to see how having more planets would have been a bad thing or how it would have made the definition useless.
Aside from making charts of the solar system an absolute bitch? Well, the criteria for planethood are: 1. It orbits the (or a) sun, 2. it is massive enough to have pulled itself into a sphere by gravity and 3. it is massive enough to have wept it's orbital path clear of major debris. Now, all eight current planets have that. Pluto originally did before we started observing more and more Kuiper belt objects that showed Pluto
hadn't cleared it's orbital path. So it gets downgraded to dwarf planet. There's also the fact that it's smaller than the Moon.
The reason the definition would have been useless, or extremely irritating, otherwise? Well this change was years before the Kepler mission went and found a shitload of exoplanets. That's hard enough to do with Jupiter-sized planets, it's impossible for Pluto-size objects. Being abel to say "we've foudn a plnet" and have it be clear to everyone that they mean "something Mars-sized or bigger" is useful, especially in public relations work.
As for other stuff in astronomy, well, it can have some massive implications. For instance, there was a paper presented today at the Royal Astronomical Society that reveals there are a lot more supermassive black holes than previously seen, which may account for some of the "missing mass" of the universe, which would change our theories on how the universe came into being. That's a big damn deal.
Again, it's a nice thing to know these things. But there is a need to ask where the return on investment is.
I am not some astronomy hating ignoramus asking why we bother with astronomy. I am a guy that actually likes knowing this sort of stuff who just happens to at one point have asked the question of if it is really worth all the money invested in it.
Like, as a person I like having these things found out. But if I were the guy making the budget I would not hand any money toward it because it just does not seem worth using money for when there are other things that it's better spent toward.
The return on investment comes from anything that is developed later based on the new knowledge, or anything that is developed as a way to find that knowledge. For instance, the study of nuclear physics indirectly leads to things like MRI scanners, which are vitally important medical tools. The study of radiation led to x-ray machines, again, highly important. The study of electromagnetic waves led to radio communication and radar. The Apollo program gave us some very clever innovations in computing. Research into pure mathematics led to cryptography which led to programmable computers in the first place. All of that in the last ~120 years!
This is why governments invest in scientific research. Because it's happened often enough in the past that a humble scientific discovery can have
enormous ramifications, either financially or strategically or politically. They are hoping that the next round of research grants will lead to something significant in the future.
For another reason, not every return on an investment has to be money. If enough young people see and learn about this mission, or Rosetta, or Kepler, or NuSTAR, or the ISS, they'll be inspired to go into a scientific or technical subject, and the more future graduates in those fields we have, the better.
Finally there is the political angle. Suppose you're the President or the Prime Minister and you give funds to scientists, and they come back with something amazing, like evidence of extraterrestrial life, or a complete answer to how the Universe formed, or a room-temperature superconductor, or a quantum computer. You're going to be able to ride part of that fame as the person who gave them funding. And after something big has resulted once, you'll want a repeat.
