Overwhelmingly Large Telescope Closer to Reality

An anonymous reader submits: "The 100m OWL telescope proposed a few years ago by the European Southern Observatory group (ESO) may actually be built. Currently, the largest aperture for a telescope is the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at a 'very tiny' 16.4m by comparison. This monster is predicted to have a light gathering resolution of about 40 times the Hubble Space Telescope and a sensitivity several thousand times greater. Among many other things, it should be powerful enough to detect and gather spectroscopic data of extra-solar planets in order to determine the atmospheric composition and any signatures for life, like oxygen." We mentioned the OWL in this previous article too.

Comments

Re:Already obsolete

[pubjames]

Although it sounds great, it'll take more than 15 years to build from the start of the construction project - so we're talking at least 20 years.

By then, it is predicted that computing will have advanced enough to build a globally-large coordinated telecope ("GCT").

Yes, but by the time we can build a GCT, we'll only be ten years away from building a massively distributed telescope made of billions of tiny nanobots floating in space gathering photons and performing massively complex calculations with quantum computing methods. So we might as well just all wait around until then.

Re:exposure time

[sam_handelman]

Swiss air traffic control just orders the planes to crash into each other; keeping the air above southern europe free of aircraft.