61–70 of 337 posts
"Too big to fail" apparently doesn't apply for science projects. To put this in perspective, at the cost of a single F-35A, Arecibo could be running for ~7y with funding at 2011 levels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The mo…
I think it's high time for Puerto Rico to become a US state. Puerto Rico has twice the population of the two Dakotas combined and the only way they'll receive more-equitable treatment is if they become a state. I think the will is there locally but there has been resistance from established political factions in the US who fear a place that might tip the balance of power one way or the other.
That means DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa (collectively 3.8 million US citizens) should all be made states.
There are undoubtedly lots of issues and hiccups with implementing that, but fundamentally I think that having classes of citizens with abridged rights is wrong.
I've heard that radio astronomy was greatly supported by the military because it can be used to monitor for incoming ICBMs. I guess if Arecibo were still used for such purposes, they wouldn't have let it fall into disrepair. How is such monitoring conducted in this day and age?
The anecdote I heard was that it was because there was no good way of getting data on the USSR over-the-horizon radars - other than the times where their signals would reflect off the Moon and could be analyzed by the US, given good enough antennas.
To clarify, "has collapsed" or "was collapsed"? I had heard they were planning to actively decommission it out of concerns for safety, and I don't trust that level of nuance from the auto-translate.
The message says that it is a message that's announced with great sadness, as one says when someone passes away. I do not think that language would be used if the structure was being decommissioned in a controlled way (Note: Spanish is my first language).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It went thru the journalist filter a million times until unrecognizable. The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. The flightpath of most Russia to US ICBMs would never have passed over the observatory, obviously, but it was a major radar technology research site in the early years.
>The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. Source? This seems unlikely since ground-based visual tracking would be obscured by e.g. clouds. Is ICBM tracking all space-based and visual? (I can see why IR is useful to detect the initial boost, but it would also seem rather useless to track a small, passive object in freefall).
That's probably anomalously hot as it plows back through the atmosphere.
I think radar stealth coatings are sufficiently advanced that they swung the balance back in favor of IR for tracking purposes.
Historically: it was hard / unknown how to make a flying object that resisted reflecting radar
Current: it's hard / unknown how to make a flying object that's resistant to radiating heat
What a sad day for our species. John Michael Godier made an interesting interview with Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay regarding placing a radio telescope on the far (silent) side of Moon. Notably, our moon is also obviously devoid of the ionosphere, but what is less obvious, is that this would allow us to observe wavelengths that have so far never been studied by humans. https://youtu.be/8c8tG1sAK78
"observe wavelengths that have so far never been studied by humans" That's pretty exciting. Historically, every time we find a new way to observe the universe, we discover something that fundamentally changes our understanding. (E.g., optical astronomy put the nail in the Aristotelian model. Radio revealed that our galaxy was one of many. X-ray revealed that black holes are real, among other high energy phenomena.)
That said, there are some signals (like the 21cm hydrogen line) from the Universe's Dark Age that have redshifted to what we can expect to listen for in the multiple meter wavelengths, even 10m or more. But what we will learn from this? I agree with you, it will be exciting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The mo…
I think it's high time for Puerto Rico to become a US state. Puerto Rico has twice the population of the two Dakotas combined and the only way they'll receive more-equitable treatment is if they become a state. I think the will is there locally but there has been resistance from established political factions in the US who fear a place that might tip the balance of power one way or the other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The mo…
We need to adopt similar strategies for getting e.g. green energy production off the ground. Thinking of things like solar panel production.
I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it.
Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but the simple facts are that there is finite oil, finite coal, finite natural gas and the extraction and processing of those fuels is an expensive and dirty business. Of course solar, wind, hydro and nuclear don't compete yet -- how about putting in the same R&D money as fossil fuels? And when you make it work, the entire world will buy this tech from you. It could clearly be the US's next economic gold rush, after the Internet and post-WW2 manufacturing (and, I guess, the gold rush).
I do wonder if the economic approach is just doomed to be a non-starter, and if the faster way is to frame it as a national security issue. That leads to a number of other problems, but time is clearly of the essence and they know how to spend money over there.