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Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

sciencemag.org

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Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#151

Post by aardvarkr »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #82
ardy42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore? China already built one: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-china-world-largest-radio-tele... . Given that it's nonmilitary US government infrastr…

It wasn't nonmilitary, it's military use has just come to an end. In a small sidenote of an absolutely magnificent lecture by Steve Blank, the Secret History of Silicon Valley [0], he notes that the reason the radio telescopes were built in the 60's was because the Soviets were using air defense radars in their interiors that were hard to get information on using other methods that were available, but a few times a m…

Great video, thanks for sharing!

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#153

Post by Florin_Andrei »

trboyden wrote: post #146
ardy42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century? No, it's a symbol of the degradation of US political capability in the 21st century. To be more explicit: why build a telescope like this if you axiomatically believe the free market will do everything worth doing and that the government projects are waste by definition? There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant, a…

Yet government space travel is dead, and private space travel (SpaceX) is booming. So there's that. Just because it doesn't happen on your timeline doesn't mean private is inferior to government. It means private is waiting for it to be financially feasible. Which if the government did things that way, we wouldn't be $136 trillion dollars in debt.

One could easily imagine the incentive for private initiative in the field of space travel.

But fundamental research on a huge scale is something that governments are axiomatically the best supporters of. Let's not drink the Ayn Rand Amazing Kool-Aid here.

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#154

Post by Florin_Andrei »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #135
ardy42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century? No, it's a symbol of the degradation of US political capability in the 21st century. To be more explicit: why build a telescope like this if you axiomatically believe the free market will do everything worth doing and that the government projects are waste by definition? There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant, a…

>There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant, That was also a time when three news networks controlled everything on TV. Print media had "journalistic integrity" (i.e. was buddy-buddy with existing institutions) so you never got to hear about it when the police kicked in a black guy's skull for no reason or when a construction project turned into a boondoggle handout for someone well connected. It was also…

> less government

It's enough to look at the current holocaust in the Dakotas to understand the true value of that "philosophy".

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#156

Post by throwaway0a5e »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #154
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant, That was also a time when three news networks controlled everything on TV. Print media had "journalistic integrity" (i.e. was buddy-buddy with existing institutions) so you never got to hear about it when the police kicked in a black guy's skull for no reason or when a construction project turned into a boondoggle handout for someone well connected. It was also…

> less government It's enough to look at the current holocaust in the Dakotas to understand the true value of that "philosophy".

If government wasn't all up in all sorts of stupid things (or was all up in them to a lesser degree) people wouldn't be apprehensive about it being involved in the kinds of things government needs to be involved in, like public health and funding research that has no profit use.

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#157

Post by rmason »

aylmao wrote: post #83
floatrock wrote: post #64

The thing was iconic... even if not everyone watching/playing Goldeneye knew it was a real radio telescope, it was nevertheless one of those science megaprojects that featured prominently in the popular zeitgeist and got more than one young kid excited about what's out there in the stars. But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while…

> But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. Infrastructure can also be maintained and last longer than this, which is why I'm personally sad. Had Arecibo always had the ~60 year timeline, it would've been a bittersweet retirement, like Voyager. In this case I just feel like it's gone before it should. Arecibo has been receiving reduced funding since the early 2000s [1]. The end of an era, although thankf…

Wouldn't it be infinitely cheaper to replace all the cables/fixtures and simply rebuild it? Or have the funders simply lost interest in it?

Is a GoFundMe campaign outside of the realm of possibility? I know that I'd contribute to such a worthy effort, but only if the rest of the players would pledge to fund current operations.

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#158

Post by magicalhippo »

Communitivity wrote: post #2

This is horrible. Arecibo is still crucial in radio astronomy experiments ongoing as of 2019. It should be repaired, until a replacement is built.

Yeah, in the previous story I mentioned[1] NANOGrav, which is on the brink of some really interesting science but relies heavily on Arecibo for their dataset.

They mention a delay of more than a few months of data from Arecibo would have very negative consequences, so an outright loss must be a very, very significant blow for them.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046378

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#159

Post by javert »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #150
javert wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government does not cut the budget. It is ever-growing. Republicans lower taxes sometimes. They re-allocate budget from one thing to another. They don't cut the budget.

It's almost as if this is correlated with the population increase. Almost.

Except growth of the budget outstrips growth of the population, enormously.

Please cut out the sarcasm. Let's be nice to one another. (And if you didn't mean it to be sarcasm, never mind.)

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#160

Post by abnercoimbre »

dfsegoat wrote: post #20
myself248 wrote: post #10

Fuuuuuuuck. I understand the decision to dismantle the failing structure which is currently unsafe and tricky to repair. But might a new one be built in its place? How can we push for that?

It would seem unlikely in PR given the state of infrastructure there. The hurricane destroyed a lot of the already failing power and port infrastructure, for instance. https://www.rollcall.com/2019/11/12/report-puerto-ricos-infr...

Puertorican here who grew up visiting the Observatory!! Became a NASA engineer (at KSC.) It was the dish that made a huge impact on me.

The answer is to invest in rebuilding this, or else puertoricans will continue to lose local sources of inspiration. That's a loss for America.

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