FINALLY, it’s going to launch this week. Of course, the launch date was changed twice just this month, and we’ve been waiting for decades at this point.
It’s currently in French Guiana, undergoing final preparations (after yet more oopsies). Fingers crossed… please work… 
Just watch. The launch will collide with Santa’s sleigh just as the jolly man is starting off.
Christmas will be ruined for everyone in the world. (Though anti-Christmas groups will celebrate in Jersey City.)
With the way it’s progressed over the last 20 years of rotten luck, I won’t be surprised if I watch people’s entire life’s work explode somewhere in the air.
This is the coolest thing in a lonnng time and I’ve been following the progress pretty much from inception.
Pins and needles!!
Ask the average person on the street what a Lagrange point and they will be clueless.
WW
Isn’t that a ZZ Top song? 
The only ZZ Top video I know.
But worth it.
WW
the average technical or educated person wont even know that let alone the average lunkhead
how exciting would it be to detect oxygen atmospheres on exoplanets…
Pins and needles indeed. Unlike Hubble, if they screw just one thing up, they’ll never be able to go fix it.
But…each hexagonal mirror segment is individually adjustable. It will take months to tweak them into perfect focus.
Heh heh. I’m a big ZZ Top fan and was just alluding to their classic song La Grange.
While not proof of life, it’s a good start. If they also find methane and carbon dioxide, or even pollution, the case can get much stronger.
Ask yourselves…
Has the quality of personnel in Industry increased or decreased since we ■■■■■■ up the original Hubble?
Have government regulations improved or degraded the quality of scientific and engineering products over the past few decades?
I will be skeptical until the results are in.
Oxygen won’t stay in the atmosphere without constant replenishment.
Which titanium oxide can produce on the surface in sufficient quantities to replenish.
The process requires liquid water however, so the planet would likely still be a good candidate.
And the average person who does know what they are, can’t articulate what they are. IMO, they are best explained by believing in magic. I can’t think of a better explanation for a point far out in deep space where nothing material exists that a satellite can be placed in orbit about. 
I’d be interested to learn more about that.
Proof of life would be actually finding a living organism (or even a fossilized organism, showing that there USED TO BE life) somewhere.
The existence of all the perfect conditions to sustain life wouldn’t be positive proof of life actually taking hold there.
On the flip side, we are assuming that certain conditions are required to sustain life. That’s true for life as we know it. But what’s to say that some other life form couldn’t exist under some different conditions? The atomic properties of silicon are similar to carbon for instance. What’s to say that there couldn’t be a silicon-based biology? And that all life forms there are semi-transparent – like glass? (Just brainstorming out loud there…)
