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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

#171

Post by fennecfoxen »

ardy42 wrote: post #79
IronRanger wrote: post #7

Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?

> 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…

The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national political leadership class identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today.

For reference, the nation's leadership in the 1950s included the likes of Senator McCarthy, and his famous hearings ran through about 1954. Have you heard of the "Red Scare"? No, Arecibo is the brainchild of the Cold War military-industrial complex, originally meant to help steer anti-ballistic missiles (as part of the DEFENDER program), and we should not shed too many tears that those days are over.

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

#172

Post by Nition »

mncharity wrote: post #125
kgin wrote: post #34

When I was 5 years old, I saw a pbs documentary about the Arecibo telescope. During a shot of a huge expanse of the telescope's metal, the narrator said something to the effect of "as one gets closer to the equator the sun's rays are stronger and the metal becomes too hot to touch". This, combined with the fact that I had a globe with a raised ridge around the equator, caused me to assume (for many years) that the eq…

That's delightful. The ecology of science education misconceptions is a wild and wonderful thing. My best laugh of yesterday was this page[1] from the Stanford Solar Center, saying "It is a common misconception that the Sun is yellow, or orange or even red."... now look the page header, and at the rest of the site. Gee, I wonder where students, including astronomy graduate students, might come by such misconceptions?…

I've noticed there seems to be a constant war over the main image on the Wikipedia page about the Sun.

In 2013 there's no image[1]. In 2014 the Sun is yellow-orange[2]. In 2015 it's white[3]. In 2016 it's briefly orange again[4] before going back to white. At one point it's sort of eye-of-sauron[5]. Finally today there are two images, one white and one yellow-orange. Further down the page it's blue.[6]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=5554532...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6246911...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6882191...

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=7042375...

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6468369...

[6]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

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

#173

Post by AniseAbyss »

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…

Basically everything that has to do with space is tied into the military. I'm sure the Chinese aren't going to the moon just for science.

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

#175

Post by ardy42 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #171
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…

The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national political leadership class identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today. For reference, the nation's leadership in the 1950s included the likes of Senator McCarthy, and his famous hearings ran through about 1954. Have you heard of the "Red Scare"? No, Arecibo is the brainchild of…

> The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national leadership identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today.

Those terms don't have a consistent meaning. What was considered typical "capitalist free-market" thinking then is not typical "capitalist free-market" thinking now. For instance: Atlas Shrugged was only published in 1957 and Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom in 1963, and it took until the 1980s for those ideas to start to have wide influence in popular culture and government.

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

#177

Post by AniseAbyss »

ivalm wrote: post #61
HarryHirsch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 1950s the US Government built a lot of space infrastructure in the South (Stennis, Redstone &c) to develop the backwards corners of the nation. There's no political will for that any longer, it seems.

Admitting Puerto Rico as a state, thus enabling Puerto Rico to have representation in congress who could argue for more infra being built there, would likely be critical.

Unlikely, too much risk PR would be a blue state.

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

#178

Post by AniseAbyss »

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.

Private space travel funded by government contracts.

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

#179

Post by tibbydudeza »

ardy42 wrote: post #79
IronRanger wrote: post #7

Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?

> 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…

China built a bigger one called FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) at a cost of 1.2 billion USD.

The political leaders of the CCP are all trained engineers and it helps not having to explain your actions to fickle voters.

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

#180

Post by goatinaboat »

Retric wrote: post #99
aylmao wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It really depends on the structure. Giant steel objects are much harder to keep intact, to the point where non iconic objects are easier to replace once than maintain for 100+ years.

Giant steel objects are much harder to keep intact, to the point where non iconic objects are easier to replace once than maintain for 100+ years.

What about the Eiffel Tower? Or Blackpool Tower. That proves it can be done.

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