161–170 of 248 posts
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Any urge to point out that, sometime in the future, someone will make the same noises about their work? :-)
The thing with Arecibo it's not the design you want in in a microwave observatory at all. Same as the Space Shuttle which spent decades siphoning off a good chunk of of the budget for space stuff. It was white elephant.
It feels like the death of American ingenuity. We've fallen from the era where we sent echoes to our neighbours and the stars. When we found clearings in jungles and turned them into monuments to humanity. The time when we put our best foot forward and reached ahead, into the future, racing towards a brighter tomorrow for humanity. I mourn for what has been lost. The American century wasn't punctuated by a war, but b…
Uh, no. Arecibo was quite a low priority for the NSF/NASA for good reasons -- there are other, better, telescopes and facilities to fund.
Are they going to clean that up? Is "decommissioning" just a fancy word for "leaving a big pile of garbage in the woods?"
Imagine if it stays as is. A ruin of a former empire, something for future historians to explore.
Also try to tone down the hubris, Ozymandias.
Are they going to clean that up? Is "decommissioning" just a fancy word for "leaving a big pile of garbage in the woods?"
Another comment above says the NSF is contracted to return the site to its natural state and that since the collapse it is safer to enter the structure and begin removal.
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This is your take on the day before SpaceX attempts to fly the worlds first fully reusable spacecraft to 15 km and land it? That if successful will put larger payloads into space at less than one hundredth the cost of the Space Shuttle, and enable manned deep space missions to Mars and beyond? Just weeks after Apple unveiled the worlds fastest CPU core running on only 15 watts (with credit to a Brit architecture)? If…
Maybe his take is after the USA didn't manage to contain an epidemic, used its power to steal medical equipment from other countries, developed a marvelous vaccine that will sell at a high price for other countries after vaccinating itself.
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You're joking, right? 2020 is a year where SpaceX flew humans to space for the first time ever on a commercial vehicle, we created and started to distribute a vaccine for a never-before-seen virus in under a year, and we began to hook rural people who've never had access to high-quality internet up via a constellation of thousands of micro-satellites in LEO. Sure, not everything is rosy, but we're still capable of so…
If you want to assign countries to companies or divisions of companies, I think Deepmimd is (still) more representative of British ingenuity.
It’s kind of like the strategy in World War II: combine British ingenuity (DeepMind) with America. resources(Google).
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This is your take on the day before SpaceX attempts to fly the worlds first fully reusable spacecraft to 15 km and land it? That if successful will put larger payloads into space at less than one hundredth the cost of the Space Shuttle, and enable manned deep space missions to Mars and beyond? Just weeks after Apple unveiled the worlds fastest CPU core running on only 15 watts (with credit to a Brit architecture)? If…
Maybe his take is after the USA didn't manage to contain an epidemic, used its power to steal medical equipment from other countries, developed a marvelous vaccine that will sell at a high price for other countries after vaccinating itself.
Combined with the crucial failure of China that kept it under lid for too long, and followed by most of the rest of the world who also failed to contain it.
> used its power to steal medical equipment from other countries,
What are you talking about?
> developed a marvelous vaccine that will sell at a high price for other countries after vaccinating itself.
Good thing the world is capitalist by nature and we have two more (cheaper) vaccines ready to go, and Moderna will have to lower its price or sell it to those who are willing to pay them a premium for whatever reason. Right?
And I'm not sure if this is even a thing, but even if it is, what is your problem with each country requesting their labs to provide for their host nation's citizens first, specially in a case where all labs AFAIK received funding in some form by taxpayers?
So if they knew there is no money to even maintain it and this collapse was a likely outcome why not lower the platform in advance before any cable breaks? Just from a safety perspective omitting this seems to be somewhat negligent, no?
The closest you can get to a safe lowering would be to sever all the anchor points simultaneously so that the platform falls vertically, rather than having a rotational component due to differing total tension forces. And even then, I don't see how that can be done particularly safely, given that any human in proximity to any of the towers at the time of premature collapse would be dead.
Just to reiterate: any person working on the support tower platform would have been dead. If not from the cable snapping (you can see how much damage it does to the remaining cables!), then from the support tower itself toppling over a few seconds later.
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"now" is doing a lot of work here... If I'm not mistaken, we have about a millennium or a hundred make arrangements.
The Arecibo message was sent out 46 years ago, in 1974 [1]. We'd only miss responses from potential respondents who are between 23 and (23 + (time to build replacement / 2)) light-years away. Fortunately, the message was sent to globular cluster M13, which is 22,000 light years away. As long as we get it done by the 47th millenium AD we should be fine. Unfortunately, applying Parkinson's law to that task means we've…
Unfortunately, the message was aimed at where M13 appears to us today. By the time the message gets there it will have moved. The message was, is, doomed to miss.