231–240 of 315 posts
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Do you have a list or link to any mega projects you are currently excited about?
Starshade is a crazy concept that could do more for the search for life than any previous approach by allowing us to block out a star to directly view its planets. https://youtu.be/-jA2ABHBc6Y?t=3652
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…
Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?
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Arecibo has been superseded in terms of raw aperture by FAST, and in terms of angular resolution by the interferometry arrays since 1966 at the latest when the One Mile observatory was doing 23 arcsecond resolution images. I think it's main somewhat unique capability was doing radar measurements of things in our solar system. My impressions is the neglect comes from having done all the useful things it could do ages…
I'm too sad today to engage with this, but you're simply wrong about Arecibo "having done all the useful things it could do ages ago, and not finding anything new". Here, for example, is Arecibo on the cover of Nature, in 2018: [1]. And you might want to look into NANOGrav [2]: you'll be hearing a lot more about it (I promise) in one or two years, depending on publication timelines. [1] https://twitter.com/nature/sta…
And it's too bad the NANOGrav risks getting its results delayed by the inability to extend observations on half its sources, but the loss of Arecibo will not doom the entire project: again not conclusive proof that Arecibo added a unique capability.
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…
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> 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.
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?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
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> 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…
I think the problem is in the way things are handled vs the regulations themselves. I believe there very much should be legal standards and licensing processes for building residential and business structures. I also think that getting things inspected and approved should be a really easy, streamlined, cheap, non-profit process. Hell, I'll go one further: I think there should be financial encouragement to bring outdated unsafe facilities up to code, in cases where there isn't already such a thing (and there usually is).
"The free market shall decide" and "let the buyer beware" are great until you eat a sandwich and find out the ground beef was cut with sawdust, or buy a house with a deck, have a party, and the deck collapses because the previous owner built it wrong.
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> 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.