“Humanity benefits from research”

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope offer important perspectives on what it means to be human — and the importance of basic research.

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This is a commander. The editorial expresses Bergens Tidende’s journalistic idea: a politically independent, independent, liberal, bourgeois (non-socialist) party newspaper.

Let’s see 13 billion years Back in time. This is what humanity can do now that it has just done.

The US space agency, NASA, announced on Tuesday Pictures taken with the James Webb Space Telescopewhich was launched from Earth just over six months ago.

Humanity has never been so close to understanding how life originated and whether there is life on other planets. In other words, we’re starting to get closer to the answer to who we really are.

It can feel exhausting, but also liberating. Humankind benefits from research. It puts our earthly differences into perspective.

James Webb Telescope Fall and wake up somewhere between the sun and the earth. It has a giant infrared camera capable of seeing remnants of light from past events in space that are no longer visible to the naked eye. It looks at “past time”, even after the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

The telescope has already found traces of a type of hydrocarbon that could be the origin of all life and planets relatively close to Earth where everything is in place for the presence of water, and therefore life.

This is just the beginning. Over the next 20 years, James Webb will provide scientists with massive amounts of data about space.

more than 20000 Humans and space agencies in the United States, Europe, and Canada have made this possible. But behind the telescope’s phenomenal scientific progress lies an equally important but many unseen feat.

Basic research in mathematics, physics, biology, and many other disciplines laid the foundation for this to be possible, without necessarily having space exploration or telescopes as a specific goal.

This shows The importance of basic research. The societal benefit is not always clear to everyone when implemented. Therefore, it is also an easy victim when politicians have to find items to cut budgets.

So they must sacrifice an idea for the telescope above before making decisions based on what provides immediate societal benefit and business growth.