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Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

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Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#171

Post by fweespeech »

vxNsr wrote: post #123
wavefunction wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PR residents are actively against the idea mainly because they don't pay fed taxes. only reason democrats are for the idea is because they believe it'll give them another two reliable seats in the senate.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/4/16385658/p....

> Puerto Rico is a US territory and not a state, so its residents don’t pay federal income tax unless they work for the US government. Even so, workers there pay the majority of federal taxes that Americans on the mainland pay — payroll taxes, social security taxes, business taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Puerto_Rico_locations_....

> In 2017, Puerto Rico had a median household income of $19,775 — the lowest of any state or territory in the United States.

----

> PR residents are actively against the idea mainly because they don't pay fed taxes.

They do. They don't pay income tax which with their low incomes is marginal anyway.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#172

Post by colechristensen »

brabel wrote: post #145
colechristensen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then what changed between 1900 and 1945? We had two world wars between those years and nothing but small localized wars never between major powers after? Weapons. We developed weapons that could sanitize the planet, and in the case that someone might challenge our intention to actually use them, we developed weapons that ran the spectrum so that war against us would always seem a major losing proposition. The onl…

Small localised wars?? Did you know that the Vietnam War had the biggest aerial bombardment in history[1], of all wars? The body count in Vietnam easily exceeded 1 million and may be as high as 4 million[2]. Do you think that's a small, localised conflict? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombing_campaigns_of_t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

Yes, I do. Another war between great powers in 1970 could have had a death toll in hundreds of millions.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#173

Post by dralley »

beezle wrote: post #162
SeeManDo wrote: post #67

Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!

Is there still a use case for a new dish built into the same natural bowl? Why not build somewhere else? If there had never been an Arecibo at that location would someone actually pick it today to site a new scope? Not trying to diss all that has been accomplished with Arecibo just wonder if there are not better places to direct funding, assuming it can be found.

Both you and OP are missing the point. This will not be replaced - not because there is no scientific value in doing so - but because there is no political motivation for doing so.

Most if not all of these radio telescopes (including Aricebo) were built in the 60s and 70s with military funding. Science was never the driving motivation for building them -- intercepting Soviet radio communications was.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#174

Post by giantrobot »

javajosh wrote: post #22
VLM wrote: post #14

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).

The IR systems are space-based and look for rocket plumes in the ascent phase. Once a rocket gets above the troposphere there's no clouds to obscure it. It's an intensely bright IR source that easily stands out from the -60°C surrounding atmosphere.

Just a second of observing the plume's trajectory will tell the difference between and orbital or ballistic one. Ballistic missiles will also be launched over the poles to travel the shortest distance to their targets. So IR plumes over the North Pole either means Santa's upped his present delivery game or there's an incoming ballistic missile attack.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#175

Post by dralley »

SeeManDo wrote: post #67

Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!

It's not going to be replaced. Congress never funded these radio telescope projects in the 1960s and 1970s for the "science". For the first couple of years the primary purpose of Aricebo was locating and intercepting Soviet radio transmissions bouncing off the atmosphere.

A huge percentage of radio astronomy equipment is just military leftovers. It's not gonna get funded for science purposes alone.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#176

Post by godtoldmetodoit »

vxNsr wrote: post #127
lotsofpulp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, they will official support it for cosmetic purposes of promoting “democracy”. In practice, however, they know it will cause them to lose power, so they won’t vote for it. Same reason Washington DC residents don’t have representation in the Senate. Or why the popular vote does not matter for the president.

Washington DC isn't a state because it was literally created to not be a state. If they want to give DC residents voting rights they should make it impossible to be a DC resident and instead anyone who lives within DC should vote as part of the state the land was taken from for federal elections. That solves everyone's problems (well aside from the democrats who are trying to get another 2 seats in the senate). Local…

DC has nearly the same amount of people as North Dakota.

Having two Dakotas doesn't make any sense from a political representation point of view either, but here we are.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#177

Post by ars »

bipson wrote: post #20
dmurray wrote: post #17

It might seem like they should have more redundancy - one cable broke, then a second, and just a week later the whole thing falls apart - but for structures held in place by tension it doesn't work like that. A bicycle wheel has redundant spokes: you could design a wheel with 66% of the typical number of spokes and it would work OK. But if you do break a spoke, the wheel will start deforming straight away. If you can…

This is not a matter of incompetence. They even had auxiliary cables installed some time ago, one of these was the first to fail. All well-known best practices don't matter if structures cannot be maintained because the governing bodies deny the necessary funding for maintenance/repairs/operation. In a sense Arecibo was knowingly "given up".

> cannot be maintained because the governing bodies deny the necessary funding for maintenance/repairs/operation.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_re... funding was reduced 15 years ago.

Around 5 years ago there was talk about shutting this facility down. So yah, it was knowingly given up, but it wasn't just a short term thought, this was decades of administrators all saying the same thing.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#179

Post by VikingCoder »

TMWNN wrote: post #130
VikingCoder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've begun imagining that for Defense spending, government money that's spent in a State must have come from that State's federal income taxes. I'm exhausted seeing data that indicates that states like mine put in more money than they get from the Federal government, and watching people from states that receive more than they put in talk about welfare state, wealth redistribution, etc.

No state pays a cent to another state or to the federal government. It is residents of each state that pay federal taxes, which the federal government in turn uses to provide funding and services to states and individuals. The Rockefeller Institute data ( https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-... ) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealth…

Yes, thank you for explicitly phrasing the problem the way I should have.

Cato has different numbers than Rockefeller.

https://www.cato.org/blog/winner-loser-states-centralized-go...

I've lived in multiple blue states, and they're all "losers" by this definition.

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