The Discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation

I've read that the discovery of CBR was accidental. Would it be possible for the discovery of CBR to be delayed until the modern-day?
 
Ah, the dangers of skimming an article... I had gotten everything from the prediction to the accidental discovery to the revelation, and somehow missed the part where someone was already planning to look for it anyhow. Although that does say "microwave radiation" and links not to CBR, so would they have definitely have located/search for CBR?

Alternately, is there a non-ASB way of getting rid of people looking for it, possibly by reducing interest in astronomy (means less people doing astronomy research in general, which means less people who could discover CBR either intentionally or accidentally)? That article doesn't happen to talk about if there was anyone else in the US or the rest of the world who was looking for it.
 
You're not going to push it back til today IMO. The first detection was by some Bell Telephone guys who were trying to fix an antenna problem around 1930 IIRC. (They didn't know what they'd detected...:rolleyes:) Unless you can eliminate telephone (or at a bare minimum long distance), I don't see how you move it even that much.
 
What about just killing the ability to discover it? Is there some way to make astronomy massively uninteresting for the populace (fewer of whom would be astronomers) and/or governments (minimal funds also equals minimal astronomers)? Maybe other fields dominate to the extent that the ones without any connections to them suffer from a lack of numbers and funds?
 

Penelope

Banned
What about just killing the ability to discover it? Is there some way to make astronomy massively uninteresting for the populace (fewer of whom would be astronomers) and/or governments (minimal funds also equals minimal astronomers)? Maybe other fields dominate to the extent that the ones without any connections to them suffer from a lack of numbers and funds?

Maybe a nuclear war. Humanity's been driven to go to the stars since the beginning of recorded history.
 
Maybe a nuclear war. Humanity's been driven to go to the stars since the beginning of recorded history.

Which is why we're doing so much in space right now and NASA has more funds than ever.

It seems like it should be possible to butterfly away such a massive interest in space, and while I have a couple of ideas they aren't totally satisfactory (my TL is getting into a sort of Mega-Engineering Race in the middle of the 20th Century, so it seems reasonable that less immediately practical sciences might take a backseat to the ones that are necessary for making a second Nile or damming the Bering Strait).
 
As I recall, CBR was discovered by the development of communication sattelites. The techs on the ground were driven mad by the constant static that was coming from all directions. Maybe have different frequencies in use.


Which is why we're doing so much in space right now and NASA has more funds than ever.

NASA was a joke long before this year. Give the funding they use to have to some industrial pioneers (remember how pioneers like Ford and Gates greatly changed their industries?) and they'd have gone farther than a political program. I argue this mostly because private individuals and organizations are going to be more demanding. I read about a recent private launch, and how it was something like half the price of a NASA one. Just imagine what the builders of SpaceShip Two could do with sixteen billion a year.
 
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