151–160 of 170 posts
If you were wondering if there was any issue even less important to Americans than the lives of pedestrians and cyclists, it is dark skies.
Which is too bad, because it takes a special kind of heartless, empathy-lacking ghoul to disregard such things that make life on this Earth worth living to so many people.
How many people get "things that make life worth living" from the Paranal Observatory every year?
Definitely a hard choice between an industrial complex generating thousands of jobs and a glorified camera.
Gee, mapping every object in the observable universe (and possibly saving us from catastrophic meteor strikes) or pumping out a few more tons of ammonia? Framing does an awful lot of work.
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Gee, mapping every object in the observable universe (and possibly saving us from catastrophic meteor strikes) or pumping out a few more tons of ammonia? Framing does an awful lot of work.
Telescopes in space are much better for saving us from catastrophic meteor strikes.
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Telescopes in space are much better for saving us from catastrophic meteor strikes.
99.9% of asteroid discoveries are done by ground based telescopes. The world is still a long way away from having many (and large) space based telescopes for this purpose due to the economics and sheer complexity involved.
And we're not very far from having many telescopes in space at all. Every year the cost of payload to orbit is getting cheaper. Blue Origin is launching their New Glenn rocket today and SpaceX is having their 7th flight test of Starship in a few days. Starship specifically will drastically reduce the cost of a kg to orbit if it pans out, and this is looking more and more likely.
A significantly reduced launch cost in turn drastically reduces the complexity and cost profile of the actual satellite telescopes.
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99.9% of asteroid discoveries are done by ground based telescopes. The world is still a long way away from having many (and large) space based telescopes for this purpose due to the economics and sheer complexity involved.
That is because most of our telescopes in 2025 are ground-based, not because they're better at it. And we're not very far from having many telescopes in space at all. Every year the cost of payload to orbit is getting cheaper. Blue Origin is launching their New Glenn rocket today and SpaceX is having their 7th flight test of Starship in a few days. Starship specifically will drastically reduce the cost of a kg to orb…
Operations and maintenance costs will still be much higher even if the hardware and deployment would become equally affordable
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That is because most of our telescopes in 2025 are ground-based, not because they're better at it. And we're not very far from having many telescopes in space at all. Every year the cost of payload to orbit is getting cheaper. Blue Origin is launching their New Glenn rocket today and SpaceX is having their 7th flight test of Starship in a few days. Starship specifically will drastically reduce the cost of a kg to orb…
Still, space based telescopes will probably not be able to compete with ground based (mega)projects for at least a decade, if not many Operations and maintenance costs will still be much higher even if the hardware and deployment would become equally affordable
Someone just needs to take a page from SpaceX's Starlink playbook and mass-produce telescope satellites. Or someone should pay SpaceX to do it.
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The omission of this information is partly why I'm suspicious of the article. A well written article would have included things such as the above information about what the project was and additionally why it was being proposed for the given site. Omitting any information on the other side of the equation, and talking only about the impacts it will have on the observatory sure sounds like activist propaganda to me.
Unless the article has been updated there is no omission.
Or did you misunderstand me and think I was suggesting it should say those things about the observatory? In which, yes, it very clearly makes the case for the value of the observatory and what will be lost with the construction of the Industrial Park. And that's the only information it provides. That's the point I was maknig. It's a nakedly one sided article, with a clear activist agenda. Every story has two sides.
It is entirely possible that the other side could be "it's a facotry that digs holes and fills them back in and it was chosen by throwing a dart at a map" in which case every single person would rightfully agree that it shouldnt go there.
Or, it could be a factory that is going to store the entirety of South America's CO2 output underground safely and cheaply and it can literally only go there because of a completely unique geological formation.
In which case, a reasonable person might think it's worth it.
Or, more likely, something well in between those two things.
But the reader doesn't know because the article says nothing. That's a bad article. I would hope that no matter what ones views on the importance of dark skies and earth-based astronomy, one should still hope for better articles than this.
I did a bunch of astrophotography in the Atacama desert last year, it was an absolutely phenomenal place. There are a lot of celestial objects you cannot image from the northern hemisphere and there aren't many other places in the southern hemisphere with weather conditions that good (maybe Namibia but it doesn't have the altitude advantage). The only thing I wish is that some of the parks would be open after dark to…
I think there’s ways to get out there at night. I know people host ‘clandestinos’ aka parties out there.
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Turn the windmills off too because turbulence. Actually turn the entire facility off because again being a hotspot causes turbulence. Why don't we build an all night biker bar next door to your home? It won't cause you any problems like noise or nuisance because they cal always turn off the music or keep closed all night?
Energy for the many is more important than astronomy for the few. Hopefully in the future we have more robust energy production (this is a great example of why green energy proponents need to support nuclear – it has far fewer externalities like this) and then we can reclaim the area for astronomical use. That is my point. Nothing is actually destroyed, unlike with other types of pollution. Light pollution is literal…
On a longer time horizon, we need to figure out how to conduct astronomy without holding large regions (countryside, LEO, etc.) as test articles to control. Constellations like Starlink have already blown through that roadblock and rather than backlash we now see various governments / firms following them. LEO will only become more crowded. In a more extreme case we have planetary protection where entire celestial bo…