B. Future data gathering

It may well be that the 2dF and SDSS surveys are the last great redshift surveys for some time to come. They have yielded a phenomenal amount of new information which we have hardly had time to fully digest. It is not clear what extra information another million redshifts might yield: long term funding issues may prevent us from ever seeing that. However, the future may well lie in the direction of deeper surveys probing those times when the galaxies themselves were forming and the large scale structure was coming into existence.

A number of such surveys are currently under way: 2MASS, COMBO17, GOODS, DEEP2, CADIS, and the recently funded ALHAMBRA. With these we will be able to confront our models with real data, but only provided we can filter out the effects of galaxy evolution which will affect sample selection and data interpretation (particularly if there are luminosity dependent effects).