How does astronomy benefit humankind?
There is a lot of information and formulas included in astronomy, but how does it apply to the lives of people living on Earth? How does this information help us in today’s world? There are a few technological developments which have come about because of astronomy (or, in many cases, because of the space exploration program, which is quite separate from the work that most astronomers do) and then turned out to be useful in other areas. Astronomical research itself rarely has a direct impact on people’s lives, but in the pursuit of their research, astronomers often have to invent new instruments and techniques that produce spinoff technologies with broader applications. Some examples of these technologies include low-noise radio receivers (used in cell phones and many other applications) and parallel computing. Nonetheless, I would agree that astronomy does not have many practical benefits to people’s lives. The reason we do astronomy, I think, is that people are interested in learning
