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The Camera That Changed the Universe

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-the-better-to-see-it-with dept.

StartsWithABang writes As the Hubble Space Telescope gets set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of opening its eyes to the Universe, it's important to realize that the first four years of operations were kind of a disaster. It wasn't until they corrected the flawed primary mirror and installed an upgraded camera — the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) — that the Universe truly came into focus. From 1993 to 2009, this workhorse camera literally changed our view of the Universe, and we're pushing even past those limits today.

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  1. Changed the Universe? by Etherwalk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The camera only changed the universe if we are in a simulation with lazy evaluation (things are extrapolated and created to be as they should exist when we look at them) or or if something like quantum superposition applies on a macro-level (the observed matter's state is changed based on our observation of it).

    The camera didn't change the universe, it changed the *known* universe--made us a little less ignorant. For millenia mankind expanded its knowledge of places by travelling to them. That has now become prohibitive for almost every place in the known universe.

    The easiest stuff is done. We still need to explore the oceans and the solar system, where travel is quite inefficient but not utterly prohibitive.

    We also need to develop defense against world-killers. Biological, nuclear, and simple kinetic energy.

    And the big hump after that should be interstellar exploration. Multigenerational, multicentury.

    We'll need to figure out relatively stable world government and economy before that happens, so give us another four to twelve centuries, I'd say.