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The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

theguardian.com

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Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#11

Post by steve19 »

onion2k wrote: post #8
hacker_9 wrote: post #3

"The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we currently have" "Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The SKA will be able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very, very distant planets." "visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at the data this place produces. Long before you get to Boolardy, the 346,000-he…

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them. We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the universe is the way it is, and that m…

Many things result in technology being developed. War, for example, creates vast amounts of technology (including rocket technology, satellite etc) , but that is not a good reason to engage in warfare.

Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#12

Post by [deleted] »

onion2k wrote: post #8
hacker_9 wrote: post #3

"The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we currently have" "Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The SKA will be able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very, very distant planets." "visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at the data this place produces. Long before you get to Boolardy, the 346,000-he…

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them. We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the universe is the way it is, and that m…

[deleted]

Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#14

Post by DanBC »

onion2k wrote: post #8
hacker_9 wrote: post #3

"The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we currently have" "Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The SKA will be able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very, very distant planets." "visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at the data this place produces. Long before you get to Boolardy, the 346,000-he…

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them. We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the universe is the way it is, and that m…

I read it as "this is a good thing, an incredibly good thing, that we devote land to pure science".

Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#15

Post by Xophmeister »

Osmium wrote: post #6
kenny-log_ins wrote: post #2

The technical challenges posed by the SKA really are astoundingly huge. The data generated by these dishes will require much higher data throuput than even the fastest optical links between CERN and its tier 1 sites (40 Gb/s), and they will be in the middle of a remote desert. Then there is the scale of compute and storage needed to analyse the data, which would be totally unfeasible with the tech we have today. It's…

CERN had a similar problem too, and the only solution was just to throw away a lot of their data. Do you expect this might happen with SKA, or is the hope that they can capture everything for later processing?

From the article:

    There will be far too much data for it all to be simply recorded.
    The plan is to "use an algorithm to reduce that data down to a
    smaller magnitude that you can then process further on a super
    computer", Morgan says.

Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#16

Post by onion2k »

steve19 wrote: post #11
onion2k wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them. We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the universe is the way it is, and that m…

Many things result in technology being developed. War, for example, creates vast amounts of technology (including rocket technology, satellite etc) , but that is not a good reason to engage in warfare.

That's not the same thing at all. The benefits of a destructive pursuit don't make it a more attractive thing to do. They're in opposition to the negatives of the original action. The side effects of a constructive pursuit do make it a more attractive thing to do because they are in addition to the already positive result of the original action.

Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#18

Post by steve19 »

onion2k wrote: post #16
steve19 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things result in technology being developed. War, for example, creates vast amounts of technology (including rocket technology, satellite etc) , but that is not a good reason to engage in warfare.

That's not the same thing at all. The benefits of a destructive pursuit don't make it a more attractive thing to do. They're in opposition to the negatives of the original action. The side effects of a constructive pursuit do make it a more attractive thing to do because they are in addition to the already positive result of the original action.

I don't disagree! In fact I firmly believe that the ends never justifies the means.

But I wonder how many people would consider a major war to be beneficial if it lead to real fusion ie. limitless clean energy for the world, the end of energy poverty, of nuclear fission, and end of global warming.

Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#19

Post by [deleted] »

onion2k wrote: post #16
steve19 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things result in technology being developed. War, for example, creates vast amounts of technology (including rocket technology, satellite etc) , but that is not a good reason to engage in warfare.

That's not the same thing at all. The benefits of a destructive pursuit don't make it a more attractive thing to do. They're in opposition to the negatives of the original action. The side effects of a constructive pursuit do make it a more attractive thing to do because they are in addition to the already positive result of the original action.

[deleted]

Re: The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

#20

Post by robbiep »

Could someone with some knowledge please elaborate on the potential implications on a project such as this, for example, if we found ourselves with clusters of low earth satellites streaming high-bandwith internet to the entire planet?
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