The recent US Decadal Survey (Astro2010) contains a conundrum. As part of the report, the Decadal Survey committee identified three key "scientific objectives" on which they felt the community should focus. These were:
"Cosmic Dawn: Searching for the First Stars, Galaxies, and Black Holes"
"New Worlds: Seeking Nearby, Habitable Planets"
"Physics of the Universe: Understanding Scientific Principles
(For the record, I think this is a completely reasonable list, filled with the kinds of things that make splashy magazine covers. It's arguably tilted a bit far from more traditional but critically important aspects of astronomy -- for example, we don't actually know how stars form, or how they explode, and yet the only bit of stellar physics that's covered under this list is the fossil record of the absolute lowest metallicity stars. However, the committee had to narrow things down, and these are certainly the most "sellable" aspects of our field, ...
