David Kipping

Yeah, I think, as I said earlier, whenever we improve our instrumentation, our precision, by a factor of anywhere from 3 up to 10, let's say, in that ballpark, like a big improvement, you get surprises.

You find stuff you never expected in the universe.

And we've seen that every time.

Every time.

Yeah, I think whenever you listen to the universe in a different way.

So we were, for years and years, we've just been using our eyes, basically optical light to look at the universe and X-rays and radio waves.

And then recently we started doing LIGO, and LIGO is listening for gravitational waves from the universe instead.

So it's like listening to the acoustic oscillations of the universe rather than seeing it.

And again, as soon as we started doing that, we discovered tons and tons of merging black holes, and it's just totally transformed our idea of how black holes merge and form.

So whenever we do something we've never done before, look in a different way, the universe constantly surprises us.

So it's not going to be a single mission.

It's not going to be, we should all just put all our eggs in this one basket of Habitable Worlds Observatory.

We need to have this multi-pronged attack of let's just keep pushing everything and making sure it's a significant improvement from what came before in terms of their sensitivity and making sure the scientists actually interpret the data at the end of the day, right?

You can't,

do science unless the data is A, public, and then B, people are actually there to study it.

So those are the two key ingredients.

Just have great telescopes and great people.

Is funding the biggest bottleneck for it right now?

Like, what is it?

Yeah, certainly.