The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers (Gift for Astronomy and Popular Science Lovers)

by Emily M. Levesque

Usually this common why stems from one of three distinct questions. Why did we, as individuals, decide to study astronomy? Why is it worth the money? And why should humanity study astronomy?

Stars are neat and all, the attitude seems to be, but what are they worth? What does astronomy return to us in dollars and cents and tangible benefits? Why should we spend time and money on the universe instead of something else? In a time, the argument goes, when there are so many complex and serious problems facing us here on our own planet, why would a group of researchers, however small, turn their attention and funding away from everything we run across in everyday life? At times, there’s an unspoken accusation in this question: why are we devoting resources to space when we could be curing cancer or stopping climate change? This apparent choice—between astronomy or some other area of research—is one of the current banes of scientific progress. Astronomers share this quandary with almost every other field of scientific research, constantly told there aren’t enough resources available for what we’re trying to do: not enough to fund both a large survey telescope and a large mirror telescope, not enough to study stars and cure diseases or protect the environment, not enough for the universe. The reality is that these are choices that shouldn’t have to be made. It’s true that there isn’t an infinite wellspring of funding to draw from, but at the current scale of scientific research, even a few more droplets for science as a whole would make, literally, a universe of difference.