Astronomers’ Dark Energy Hopes Fade to Gray

Get every person to donate 2 bucks a month and bingo bango you have it paid for. Americans spend more on Pet Toys than they do on space as my brother likes to Point out, he is an Aerospace engineer. He and I have put a great deal of thinking into the funding issues. I invest in Gold and Silver and BioWebScape Projects. We need a crowd funded Space Projects group.

The US economy is about $20,000 billion a year. The US spent 0.15% of that on lawn care ($29B). The entire budget of NASA, most of which is used for studying the Earth, is 0.1% ($19B). Might I humbly suggest that the US has the wherewithal to set up multiple permanent robotic stations on the moon AND study the reason for the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the Universe? And for those of you that think we should spend more on Alzheimer's, I agree. The US spends 0.005% ($0.48B), currently. The plain fact is that the US is not investing anywhere near adequately in science.

The best solution to this gutting of good sense is to vote: vote out the militarists, the know nothings, the chauvinists. We know who they are. Vote, and help get out the vote. Democracy: a force against implosion.

Why throw billions of dollars into this useless project, when we could be researching a cure for Alzheimers? ALS? Cancer, even.

Keep in mind that If the dark matter theory is correct, it would be the first time in human history we've got it right. Most likely is that we simple don't understand gravity like we think.

Does no-one worry that we will one day understand the nature of dark energy in the same way that we now understand the nature of nuclear energy? I mean, Mr. Einstein did not initial envision the military capabilities of his theories, and now we have North Korea and Iran. I guess it would be worse if someone else figured it out first, but still ...

The theory of the existance of dark energy to me always seemed like magic or religion. An attempt to create an explanation for something we didn't understand because we didn't have enough facts of the how and why things behaved as they did. Plants and animals grow? Nature spirits! Earthquake? Must've ticked off some deity. Perhaps it is just the nature of the universe to expand outward. Everything in the universe is in motion and no matter which way it is going it is still ultimately travelling outwards. Maybe as the universe continues to expand, and therefore its mass gets more diffuse, it meets less counter resistance from whatever is beyond our existance. Maybe our reality is like a drop of oil that drips onto the surface of a puddle in a parking lot. Our reality is incompatible with whatever was there before, so we get stretched out. Just a theory.

Typical Trump. Flash over substance. One more way to put the US behind in science today, and in competitiveness tomorrow.

Some Readers are bummed that we're getting rid of a dark matter telescope that cost 3B and has a low chance of working, and instead focusing on the moon. Makes no sense, no one understands dark matter, it's something dramatized on the history channel, let's go to the moon!

We can and should do both: to go the moon to set up a base and the out what dark matter and dark matter is. And then go to Mars. These things are so inspirational for me and for the next generation that the cost is pittance compared to the defense budget. Cut a warship or a couple fighter jets, or learn about the fundamental fabric of the universe and try to inhabit the moon to inspire humanity and come up with new technologies. It's not a tough call for Americans, only for politicians on the corporate dole.

I'm a former astronomer, so I have perspective but no horse in the race. A manned mission to the moon is very exciting, but little to no science will come out of it. It was an incredible achievement in 1969, but there's little we can learn that can't be accomplished without robots. When people ask me about dark energy, the force that's prevents another big bang and will cause the universe to expand forever, I'm forced to shrug. We know nothing about something so fundamental to the fate of the entire universe. The priority for NASA is clear to me.

It's a shame to cancel this in favor of going to the moon since they aren't going to the moon, either. How many presidents have committed to - pick one - moon/Mars/asteroid and haven't been able to sustain a programme through the next presidency. The same will happen this time, too. There will be several more presidents before the US is capable to once again get a man out of earth orbit. The science missions usually do happen, flying above the radar perhaps. They are what has kept the US in space after abdicating all manned flight to the Russians. That's the real pity.

Kakistocracy. Word of the day and it perfectly describes America today

The NASA budget is around o.5% of the federal budget. With that pittance, they still maintain a system of global monitors that save millions (billions?) with advance warning on storms, analysis of global resources, telecommunications as well as advanced landers and research facilities like the ISS. Life on Earth is better and safer because of reaching for the stars. Write your representatives and demand serious funding for NASA. It is in all of our best interests- as a people and as a planet.

Oh, but we have our tax cuts. I can largely agree with the notion of fiscal responsibility, and there is merit in the notion that "privatization" helps increase efficiency. The thing is, science exploration is about possibilities; things that may lead to other things, but nobody can really say exactly what. It would be hard for a business to justify to a typical board (these days) to invest in a project that _might_ yield a big return in _something_ 20 or 30 years from now, even if that nebulously-defined "something" were "interesting". It has always been true that the forefront of science was funded by people who invested money in something that gave no return at all in their lifetime. The careful astronomical measurements of Tycho Brahe were funded by a rich noble, Da Vince made money from Venice's military spending, but used some of the proceedings to do his private projects that advanced our scientific understanding, Copernicus was at least supported by the Church. The way that science advanced was that people invested in science that did not yield immediate profit yet has benefitted civilization and at the same time often pushed the bounds of technology. Independent of the precise merits of the project, this is something being made and half done. We have a hole in the ground where SSC was to be. I think Congress needs to be honest with the people about what government cost and learn to understand how science leads the way to technology and profit.

Let’s remain optimistic, perhaps before 2022 we will be able to built and fly it better and cheaper.

This is a shame, but it’s not all conservatives’ fault. About all scientific endeavors, particularly involving space exploration and basic science, I constantly hear liberals chanting “with starving children why are we xyz...”.

At the same time the superconducting supercollider was cancelled, the human genome project started. That launched us into leadership in biotech. Chemistry was the queen of science in the 1800s. Physics was the queen of science in the 1900s. Biology and biotech is becoming the queen(s) of science in the 2000s.

This is a glorious testimony to the majority of the USA's population's mindset of hatred, hostility, antipathy, and appalling ignorance when it comes to science and it's role in the advancement of human knowledge. So sad, so terrible, so preventable.

It is worth pointing out that the current basic theoretical basis of cosmology is completely wrong. First, Einstein's relativity is wrong which claims time is relative and clocks can never be synchronized in more than one inertial reference frames, but the fact is that all atomic clocks on the GPS satellites are not only synchronized relative to the ground clocks, but also to each other. Once relativity is wrong, then the Big Bang theory is wrong too. There is no such a thing called spacetime in nature, not to mention the expansion of spacetime. The disproof of relativity leads to the existence of aether - a fluid fills up the entire visible part of the universe, relative to which the speed of light is isotropic. The existence of aether makes all astronomical phenomena easily explained: It is the mass of aether that generates the extra gravitation to bind stars in galaxies (not dard matter); It is the high pressure of aether that pushes galaxies away from each other in acceleration (not dark energy); It is the density change compressed by gravitation near massive celestial objects that bends light (not gravitational lensing); It is the viscosity of aether near the sun that slows down the rotation of the surface of the sun; It is the waves of aether generated by the motion of a particle that makes the particle demonste particle-wave duality. Therefore, it may be a wise decision to cancel the current Wfirst project now as it should first establish the right theory.

America is being eaten from within by people who do not believe in science and who take great pride in their ignorance.

Interesting that the spies have a telescope no one has heard of just laying around gathering dust.

Why focus on cutting edge science when you can order NASA to revisit exploration of the 1960s. Next up, the US Navy will be ordered to reproduce Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world.

It always seemed to me that science has no nationality. If China discovers the "secret", I am sure they will publish the paper and have it reviewed by others. By the way, 3.2 billion dollars seems almost trivial these days. Football stadiums cost about the same and most of those stadiums are mostly payed for with taxes at the local level. Perhaps NASA needs a couple of more degrees in finances.

Oy. With all that money cut from the science budget to fund the Moon mission, NASA should get there just in time for selfies with the tourists from SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Let us remember that a major purpose of such programs is to employ people. If we neglect utilizing the abilities of scientists, what contribution will they make?

Just saw that Super Bowl spending tops 15 Billion. This chance to change our understanding of the Universe costs just over 3 Billion.

Can we identify who actually was responsible for cancelling this program?Just blaming it on the "Trump budget does not shed any light on this. Or is this the result of a group frustrated because of the Webb Telescope "mismanagement"? It would be nice to see the reasons behind this action.

Not to worry. The technology being developed to burn clean coal will assure American supremacy in science for generations. Let others pour wasted money into basic scientific research and renewable energy. In Trump we trust.

We do not know what dark energy is, but we currently think that in the first few seconds of the big bang the envelope of our universe expanded at a rate substantially faster than the speed of light. Some believe that this expansion was also dark energy. We are now beginning the exploitation of nearby solar system planets, and looking for interstellar planets that might be habitable. The crushing truth is that we cannot travel to anywhere fast enough to take advantage of this knowledge. Faster than light (FTL) travel is currently only a science fiction gimmick. If we can verify dark energy, and then harness it, FTL may become possible. The reasons for saving money in the budget are probably important, but the first nation to crack FTL will own interstellar space. The pessimists are learning Chinese and the.optimists are learning Russian. I think they should stick to American ala Falcon Heavy Lifter.

Everybody hates me when I say this, but I don't believe in "Dark Matter." Based on the previous two thousand years of radical scientific revisions to the matter of reality, it seems more likely that an error has been made, or that something has been fundamentally misunderstood. When people talk about religious dogma, I think of dark matter.... That is not to say that I support cutting these programs, or that they won't discover something world changing, but that the search for dark matter is a wild goose chase.

Lol. Dark energy and dark matter are both fictions of blackboard equations. Neither are real, but are looked for because such equations insist that they exist. Whatever happened to the scientific method? Observe something and THEN describe it, rather than write an equation and then go hunting for it. P.S. Any time you rely upon 0 and infinity as your bounds, you are looking for trouble. P.P.S. I know, I know. both are necessary for math to work. But...not for the universe.

While we spend more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined, we are squandering our lead in science. We've surrendered in particle physics. We don't even have a vehicle to reach the ISS. We cancel projects that would help answer the most perplexing questions in cosmology. Our health care system is a disaster. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our educational system turns out students that rank in the bottom quartile among industrialized nations. We are witnessing the demise of the United States as a world leader. We have lost international credibility. Is this what some think will make America great again? I can only take some comfort in knowing that I won't be alive to see the final collapse, but I can see it coming.

Given the recent publication of a study of white dwarfs (the entity that goes off as a type 1a supernova) and the variation in oxygen (carbon too?) from WD to WD, it is probably clear that Type 1a supernovas are not a standard candle, or at least as uniform as presupposed. Alternatives to Type 1a supernovas need to be found, assessed, and employed. It appears that is happening, but given the recent understanding of the nonstandard nature of white dwarfs, the replacements/options also need a thorough assessment so that we get it right.