Unfortunately people would not have gotten nearly as excited when seeing nothing, and the nay-sayers would have made this very clear.

These things are always as much science as they are politics, so the reputation damage would have been real.

If nothing had been seen, the implications would have been spectacular.

Experiments worth doing are worth doing no matter the result.

The implications aren't automatically "there's nothing out there", more "this was the wrong tool for the job".

True, but I doubt that anyone would have gambled that much Hubble time without working out the statistical sensitivity of the measurement.

Right, I suspect that there was much more behind Bob's deep field study than TFA presents.

More importantly, could he have done the same thing in today’s world and political realities that he did then?

While I agree with you about PR and reputation (sadly), it would be valuable for scientists as a Null value. I would put it on the same level as the Aether experiments.

Yes the point I tried to make was explicitly about the political aspects. I agree that from a scientific point of view, the null value is almost as valuable as what we got now.

I think it's not so much that it was a huge gamble. It was more that it was a sensitive time politically, to make that gamble.

I mean, if they found nothing? Sure, that's still a question Hubble should be trying to answer. But right after such a rocky start, the politically obvious choice would have been to go for easy wins.

The timing was as ballsy as anything else, if not more so.