• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

James Webb space telescope (JWST) launch scheduled for 24th of December.

Will JWST successfully deploy in space?

  • Yes. Good chance it goes well.

    Votes: 123 74.1%
  • No. I think something will fail. (no way to fix)

    Votes: 11 6.6%
  • Shepard.

    Votes: 32 19.3%

  • Total voters
    166
  • Poll closed .

IDKFA

I am Become Bilbo Baggins
If this thing sees another planet in another solar system, with liquid oceans, oxygen, ect, we are going there. They’ll figure it out.

Not in our lifetimes.

A strong candidate for a Earth-like planet is Kepler-452b. The planet is in it's star's habitable zone and could be a home to life.

However, the planet is 1,402 light years from Earth. That means if you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 1,402 years to get there from earth. We don't have anything that can travel even close to the speed of light, so traveling to this planet is currently impossible within a human lifetime.

To give you a scale of the distance we're talking here, the New Horizon probe is traveling at 36,000 miles per hour. An insane speed indeed, but even at this speed it would take New Horizons 26 million years to reach Kepler-452b!

The only way it would be possible is if we develop a warp drive. This is currently isn't possible as the technology doesn't exist and involves using exotic matter and negative energy. If it did exist, you could expect the travel time to be maybe a few years. I haven't taken time dilation into account either, which would be another issue all together.

The only way we'd see this technology in our lifetimes is if the whole world joined forces and resources into developing such a technology. With combined funds and resources from the richest nations on Earth, I think we'd crack this in a few decades at least. However, we're still a tribal species that distrust each other. We spend more on developing ways to defend ourselves from other humans than actually spending money on ways that can improve humanity, so unfortunately I doubt we'll ever see a warp drive anytime soon.
 

Sakura

Member
how much longer?

hubble has been going for 31 years and could last another 10-20 years. or maybe JWST is gonna now be able to do 30-40 years more? (doubt).

i know JWST is further away and is pretty much impossible for humans to service it. we need to work on a way to extend its life or are we gonna just start work on a new telescope?

I don't believe they have said how long, just that it will be significantly longer than 10 years because of the extra fuel.

By the time it needs to be serviced, we'll have figured something out. We're good at figuring stuff out on a long time scale.

Maybe. It would likely cost billions just to build something that could go out there and refuel it though.
At some point it would probably make more sense just to build a new and better telescope.

If this thing sees another planet in another solar system, with liquid oceans, oxygen, ect, we are going there. They’ll figure it out.

The best it can do is detect what a planet's atmosphere is made of. It won't be able to see liquid oceans or anything like that even if they did exist.
And as others have explained we won't be going to any exo-planets in our lifetime.
 

MastaKiiLA

Member
I think the secondary mirror deployment that's going down now, is the only make or brake deployment. I think they can salvage a mission with anything else failing, even the sun shield. But if this secondary mirror doesn't deploy, this is just space debris. I trust they this deployment is bomb-proof.
 

Tams

Gold Member
Not in our lifetimes.

A strong candidate for a Earth-like planet is Kepler-452b. The planet is in it's star's habitable zone and could be a home to life.

However, the planet is 1,402 light years from Earth. That means if you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 1,402 years to get there from earth. We don't have anything that can travel even close to the speed of light, so traveling to this planet is currently impossible within a human lifetime.

To give you a scale of the distance we're talking here, the New Horizon probe is traveling at 36,000 miles per hour. An insane speed indeed, but even at this speed it would take New Horizons 26 million years to reach Kepler-452b!

The only way it would be possible is if we develop a warp drive. This is currently isn't possible as the technology doesn't exist and involves using exotic matter and negative energy. If it did exist, you could expect the travel time to be maybe a few years. I haven't taken time dilation into account either, which would be another issue all together.

The only way we'd see this technology in our lifetimes is if the whole world joined forces and resources into developing such a technology. With combined funds and resources from the richest nations on Earth, I think we'd crack this in a few decades at least. However, we're still a tribal species that distrust each other. We spend more on developing ways to defend ourselves from other humans than actually spending money on ways that can improve humanity, so unfortunately I doubt we'll ever see a warp drive anytime soon.
Another way to think of it is merely sending a message. If we could send a message at the speed of light in space (somehow preventing it getting interfered with), it would take 1,402 years to get there. And that's just a simple message.

Or another way, what we see of Kepler-452b is actually Kepler-452b 1,402 and years ago. So even if we could detect space travel around the planet (which we can't), if it had only been developed by the hypothetical inhabitants of there we would only see it 1,402 years later. And vice-versa.
 

Buggy Loop

Member


michael fassbender perfection GIF


Whatever happens now with the mirror’s side deployment, like a failure, with what they have now they could collect data.
 
Last edited:

Buggy Loop

Member
Shown during the broadcast :





The spectroscopy one is insane 😳

Goddamn I love engineering marvels. We’re about to be loaded with so many new answers as well as questions from new observations of the universe like never before in history. FUCK YEA!
 
Last edited:
If this thing sees another planet in another solar system, with liquid oceans, oxygen, ect, we are going there. They’ll figure it out.
How do you propose we cross even 4 light years distance within a single human lifetime. We will get to other star systems but we will be sending advanced robots to explore these places and even that will be a huge challenge.
Voyager 1 travelling at a crazy 10 miles per second will still take 70 000 years to reach our nearest star Alpha Centauri which is 4 something light years away.
 
Last edited:
Shown during the broadcast :





The spectroscopy one is insane 😳

Goddamn I love engineering marvels. We’re about to be loaded with so many new answers as well as questions from new observations of the universe like never before in history. FUCK YEA!

Aye WTF? That spectroscopy instrument is nuts.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
How do you propose we cross even 4 light years distance within a single human lifetime. We will get to other star systems but we will be sending advanced robots to explore these places and even that will be a huge challenge.
Voyager 1 travelling at a crazy 10 miles per second will still take 70 000 years to reach our nearest star Alpha Centauri which is 4 something light years away.

I'll go with Ray Kurzweil's future predictions of the AI singularity and go with :
It won't be meat bags like us that will travel that far in space. It'll be our tools, robots, probably our only remaining trace of existence, that will conquer the stars. Maybe we'll have digitized into machines by that time. Real Humans will be like pet monkeys to robots, or they will get a chuckle looking us when we’re in a zoo like as if today we would see a live Neanderthal. Probably gonna be happening at such a rapid rate that our primate brains just won't comprehend what's going on and the inventions AI will bring will take us so much time to analyze that they’ll already be ahead on something else and other problems while you’re reverse engineering stuffs from their first iterations.

Probably by end of the century they would have all the means to start a long ass voyage, with faster speeds as they wouldn't have to load the space speed boat with cumbersome shits like food and water, or shields for radiation, etc.
 
Last edited:

G-Bus

Banned
Are we going to get closer, clearer shots with this thing?

I get it's a lot stronger than Hubble but at the end of the day are we just going to get more of the same in a sense, visually. But instead of seeing a whole galaxy maybe we'll see a star and planets?

So exciting to think about.
 
Last edited:

greyshark

Member
Are we going to get closer, clearer shots with this thing?

I get it's a lot stronger than Hubble but at the end of the day are we just going to get more of the same in a sense, visually. But instead of seeing a whole galaxy maybe we'll see a star and planets?

So exciting to think about.

Webb will primarily be looking in the infrared. Here are the main objectives of the mission:


  1. What are the main science goals of Webb?​

    Webb has four mission science goals:
    • Search for the first galaxies or luminous objects that formed after the Big Bang.
    • Determine how galaxies evolved from their formation until the present.
    • Observe the formation of stars from the first stages to the formation of planetary systems.
    • Measure the physical and chemical properties of planetary systems and investigate the potential for life in those systems.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Are we going to get closer, clearer shots with this thing?

I get it's a lot stronger than Hubble but at the end of the day are we just going to get more of the same in a sense, visually. But instead of seeing a whole galaxy maybe we'll see a star and planets?

So exciting to think about.

cosmic_timeline.jpg


We'll literally be able to see the formation of the first stars and galaxies after the big bang, we're talking from 100 to 300 million years after the creation. HST (Hubble) did a good job, but we're way beyond it with the JWST.

It's also a telescope that focus on infrared, which will give us more details inside nebulas for example. It'll give use a different shot than Hubble that's for sure as they focus on different wavelengths, but it'll see light sources 100 times fainter than Hubble (thus also being able to look deep in the past of the universe)
 

G-Bus

Banned
Webb will primarily be looking in the infrared. Here are the main objectives of the mission:

Awsome, thanks!

cosmic_timeline.jpg


We'll literally be able to see the formation of the first stars and galaxies after the big bang, we're talking from 100 to 300 million years after the creation. HST (Hubble) did a good job, but we're way beyond it with the JWST.

It's also a telescope that focus on infrared, which will give us more details inside nebulas for example. It'll give use a different shot than Hubble that's for sure as they focus on different wavelengths, but it'll see light sources 100 times fainter than Hubble (thus also being able to look deep in the past of the universe)

I've never seen this image before. Interesting. Part of me hopes they got it all wrong and are just blown away, baffled by what we're going to see.

Don't think I've ever read anything about a cosmic "dark age" either. Cool
 
Last edited:

nkarafo

Member
I wonder if this telescope could see the big bang, somehow. Or whatever started the universe.

Also, heres a crazy idea, isn't hubble capable of seeing webb in its final position? Since they couldn't mount cameras on webb, would it possible to see it with hubble and have visual confirmation of its deployment?
 
Last edited:

Buggy Loop

Member
Awsome, thanks!



I've never seen this image before. Interesting. Part of me hopes they got it all wrong and are just blown away, baffled by what we're going to see.

Don't think I've ever read anything about a cosmic "dark age" either. Cool

The dark age was basically a fog of hydrogen atoms everywhere. Early on there would be no formation of stars, but by the end of the dark age, stars would probably have formed but still in the fog, so it’s like trying to capture light source through fog, the light never left this blanket to reach us, thus a dark age from our perspective.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
I wonder if this telescope could see the big bang, somehow. Or whatever started the universe.

Also, heres a crazy idea, isn't hubble capable of seeing webb in its final position? Since they couldn't mount cameras on webb, would it possible to see it with hubble and have visual confirmation of its deployment?
Absent any radical advancements in physics and technology, it will be very hard to actually "see" the big bang that close and extrapolate past the planck time.

We don't even know if there's anything that "started" the universe. That implies that there was something "before" the universe, but "before" is a construct of time, and time doesn't exist "before" the universe exists.
 
cosmic_timeline.jpg


We'll literally be able to see the formation of the first stars and galaxies after the big bang, we're talking from 100 to 300 million years after the creation. HST (Hubble) did a good job, but we're way beyond it with the JWST.

It's also a telescope that focus on infrared, which will give us more details inside nebulas for example. It'll give use a different shot than Hubble that's for sure as they focus on different wavelengths, but it'll see light sources 100 times fainter than Hubble (thus also being able to look deep in the past of the universe)
Yep.

It was said that James Webb will be able to detect objects so faint that it'll only be receiving something on the level of 1 photon of light per second. When looking at the moon on a clear night the human eye receives like 100 000s photons of light per second or some shit like that. This just blew my mind because it means Webb has to expose for ridiculous amounts of time to resolve objects 13billion light years away.
 

Thirty7ven

Banned
The amount of people that can’t grasp the concept of light years is astounding.

It’s why something like James Webb is so important for knowledge, and also why dreams of space travel is for idiots.
 
Last edited:

haxan7

Volunteered as Tribute
Absent any radical advancements in physics and technology, it will be very hard to actually "see" the big bang that close and extrapolate past the planck time.

We don't even know if there's anything that "started" the universe. That implies that there was something "before" the universe, but "before" is a construct of time, and time doesn't exist "before" the universe exists.

keanu-whoa-woah-940x540.jpg
 

Spaceman292

Banned
The amount of people that can’t grasp the concept of light years is astounding.

It’s why something like James Webb is so important for knowledge, and also why dreams of space travel is for idiots.
Arrogant morons who think they're superior just because they understand basic things like that are also part of the problem. Share knowledge and educate
 
Last edited:

IDKFA

I am Become Bilbo Baggins
Then simply explain it in laymen's terms for those people Mr big brains

The distance between star systems is too far for our limited technology.

1 light year is equal to around six trillion miles. That's just 1 light year.

It would take millions of years with our current tech to travel to other star systems.
 
Last edited:

RJMacready73

Simps for Amouranth
The distance between star systems is too far for our limited technology.

1 light year is equal to around six trillion miles. That's just 1 light year.

It would take millions of years with our current tech to travel to other star systems.
No need to explain it to me, I read stuff
 

RJMacready73

Simps for Amouranth
Yeah the distances are indescribably vast, humans can't really wrap their heads around it and when you start getting into speeds approaching c time starts to do wierd stuff making the whole endeavour even more improbable, hopefully one day those warp drive theories turn into something tangible cause we ain't going nowhere unless we can bend spacetime around us
 

MadAnon

Member
Or maybe transfer your consciousness to the other side of the universe through quantum entanglement.

pipe einstein GIF
How do you entangle 2 particles accross the universe, Einstein?

Entanglement occurs through particle interaction and not somehow magically on demand across the universe.
 

FunkMiller

Member
The only really conceivable way to travel any kind of distance across the universe will have to come from some kind of technology that can punch a hole in spacetime. The Einstein-Rosen bridge allows for such a thing to be possible in theory. General Relativity certainly seems to be far happier with the notion of wormholes than it does faster than light travel - which is deemed impossible.

So, Dune = 👍👍👍

Star Trek = 👎👎👎
 

Coolwhhip

Neophyte
If the Matrix happens and you can't tell the difference between fake and real you don't even have the need to go far any more anyway. I think that might be one of the most likely answers to the Fermi Paradox really. All the advanced aliens are just chilling in VR.
 

NecrosaroIII

Ask me about my terrible takes on Star Trek characters
The only really conceivable way to travel any kind of distance across the universe will have to come from some kind of technology that can punch a hole in spacetime. The Einstein-Rosen bridge allows for such a thing to be possible in theory. General Relativity certainly seems to be far happier with the notion of wormholes than it does faster than light travel - which is deemed impossible.

So, Dune = 👍👍👍

Star Trek = 👎👎👎
For what it's worth, in Star Trek in order to get ftl to work, they had to build giant time machines. Warp Cores work by moving through time
 
Top Bottom