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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whose money are you volunteering to be spent on that?
I'm sure you could trade a handful of Patriot missiles and one or two F-35's to fund it several times over.
Arecibo cost $9.3 million in 1963. This is equal to $79,000,000 now (https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1963?amount=93000...).
An F-35 costs about $100 million.
Based on that, I'd be happy to give up a single F-35 to rebuild Arecibo.
I cannot believe they are shutting it down over a broken cable.
When highly-stressed cables under tension fail, the resulting damage can be extremely violent. The decision is to safely dismantle the instrument platform rather than risk yet another cable failing and causing less localized damage.
Is the same money (replacement cost) better spent on a space-based solution?
Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?
Our intellectual capability is not degraded; rather, it's funneled into adtech, porn, social media click optimization, and entertainment. Critical distinction.
I wonder how they could have built it to be longer-lived/more maintainable. Did they not put enough thought into cable replacement when putting a bunch of add’l load onto it? Perhaps working without enough margin?
Also, it might not be intensely obvious from pictures, but this thing is in the middle of rainforest. Very humid. So it’s not all surprising it would degrade quickly.
Anyways, I wonder what they’ll do with that whole space. There’s a whole visitor center and school kids coming and going every day (well, maybe not this year).
This is the kind of thing I always hope that one of the billionaire nerds will help with. Seems right up Elon Musk's alley.