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Benefits of Astronomy/Astrophysics
It's not that often that I put up two blog posts in the same day, but I couldn't wait for this one. In the past I've had trouble answering the question of "what has astronomy done for me" or "how can pure research benefit the economy."
Well, today I have a clear example of how something from astronomy is helping a different field which, in turn, helps people:
Adaptive optics technology reveals eye's cellular structure with unprecedented detail
In the article they describe how AO, used to stabilize astronomical images from being blurred by Earth's atmosphere, has now been used to image a living retina. This could, in turn, lead to earlier diagnosis of eye diseases earlier and save people's eyesight!
While we're on this topic, lets make a list. What other things has astronomy provided to the public (please cite sources so we can make it an authoritative list).
Craig Levin (via. Facebook) suggested a page that NASA maintains discussing the benefits of spaceflight: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/hqlibrary/pathfinders/spinoff.htm
Hi! I found this compilation done by NRAOstaff in 2006 describing benefits of radio astronomy for us here on earth : http://www.nrao.edu/news/Technology_doc_final.pdf CS HB
I think that astronomy benefit the economy with the funds released for research and technology developments. These funds have made available a lot of jobs and have put the economy on the move. The research on rockets have developed a lot of army rockets and other kinds of weapons for the development of which a lot of funds went into the cercei argint economy.
As a specific technology developed by NASA and used by mattress manufacturers is the Memory Foam technology.
You can find it even on Wikipedia.