Comment by potamic

I mean that can be said of any research, couldn't it? 400 years back, nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help us understand tides on earth. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases are some invisible organisms in the air no one can see. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive that these imaginary "atoms" will lead to reserves of immense energy. And yet here we are today living in a world only made possible because of what people did before.

The cosmic microwave background is not even something imaginary far away in time or space. It is radiation that surrounds us in the present. It is passing by the earth constantly, all the time. There's some research trying to use it for space navigation, but no one knew you could do that when they pointed antennas randomly in the sky. The amount of cross over some research has to a lot of other research and eventually to practical applications cannot be easily comprehended. Science builds upon science in very complex and convoluted ways with each step being that people simply tried to find more about something around them that they did not know. If you knew how to find it, then there's nothing to research in the first place, is there?

There must be so much information in cosmic microwave radiation about things we may not even know. Who knows if it could lead to uncovering information about dark matter or dark energy and who knows where that information would take human civilization. At this time, research simply indicates that you find out as much about it as you can, because it is there!