Imagine that tomorrow humanity collectively decided to work on designing and constructing a new telescope in space. Magnum opus of humanity's space exploration journey. The US spends close to a trillion buckaroos on their military yearly. Imagine that for just 1 year all of the worlds global powers pool their military budget towards this telescope. Brightest engineers, mathematicians, physicists, logisticians are collected from the masses and a preparatory 10 year education course is given. At the end of the 10 year mark hierarchy is established and work begins on the telescope. What could we produce with current day technology with limitless budget like this? Can we get detailed high resolution images of exoplanets?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_(psychology)#Narcissistic_personality_disorder>Two characteristics of someone with narcissistic personality disorder are:[28]>A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior)>A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, wealth, beauty, or ideal love.
>>16283859>Imagine that for just 1 year all of the worlds global powers pool their military budget towards this telescopeI’d use Medicare. $1.7 trillion. The US government spends more on healthcare (despite it supposedly being “private”) than any nation on earth.
>>16283916Except I'm talking about humans dealing with astronomy and not me. I don't know enough about astronomy and don't plan to so I wouldn't be a part of these grandiose fantasies. I'm just curious. Anyway thanks for the bump
>>16283919Any trillion dollar project having its financing redistributed would do.
>>16283924Make a JWST with 2,500m2 area I guess.
I’ve no idea how collecting area translates to magnification.
>>16283859>Can we get detailed high resolution images of exoplanets?yes, but it wouldn't be very useful data since the pictures of the planets would be images of them tens of thousands of year ago due to the sheer distance between the two points. A planet which is super green and full of life may appear to be a magma world to us, and a planet which is destroyed and empty may look lush to us.
>>16283859>trillion buckaroosThe brightest engineers will get a few 100k each for their efforts. The other $999990000000 will revert to the military.
>>1628443710k years or even a million years doesn't mean much about life as it takes a long time for life to appear and become complex. So if you see a lush green planet 100k light years away even if you see an image from 100k years ago the odds are good that the planet is still teeming with life because if it got like that in the first place then conditions on the planet were favorable for billions of years and a 100k in the past or future won't show a drastic change unless there's been a world destroying event which should be rare considering the planet was fine for so long to sustain complex life
