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The Square Kilometer Array
EyesWideOpen writes "A very ambitious project to build the world's largest radio telescope, named the Square Kilometer Array or SKA, is in its early design stages. As its name suggests the SKA will be one square kilometer in size if it gets built. The SKA consortium (consisting of Cal Tech, Cornell, SETI, the Max Planck Institute and Beijing Astronomical Observatory to name a few) hopes to build the telescope by 2010. "If they succeed the SKA will be so big and precise it will jump the world's current best, the American Very Large Array in New Mexico, by a factor of 100, both in sensitivity and resolution." It's interesting to note that the project is based on technology that will only exist in three, five or seven years -- to account for data rates of tens to hundreds of terabytes per second and storage in the petabytes -- so they're counting on Moore's law to hold true."
> How do you know this is something worth doing?
>
> Or is it just a matter or "because we can build
> something bigger, we should"?
Larger telescopes = the ability to see farther.
So a more apt question would be "Should we explore further, just because we can?"
Isn't the answer obvious?
A very small number of people actually explore our planet and universe. Most of the rest of us sit home and watch them do it on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic specials, and are amazed. The rest prefer the Home Shopping Network and say "who cares about the rest of the universe when we have cubic zirconia?"
> Isn't this what led to the Escalade and the Excursion?
Wow, you're actually comparing bigger and better scientific instruments to ever-larger SUVs?
Eventually, larger telescopes will probably allow us to see the edge of the universe.
They will probably allow us to image planets around other stars.
Then continents on those planets.
Who knows what else we will see. Cities?
As we understand them today, the laws of physics confine us to traveling within our own solar system, but we have the ability see much, much farther. Aren't you interested?
Fermi's paradox doesn't do it for me, although it is a neat way of looking at the problem.
It's too neat, and that's my problem with it. There are just so many other variables. Like stick no FTL in there. Or no "cryo-sleep". Or not even any way of reliably going, say, past 0.3 C for any kind of duration. And let's face it, interstellar empires of the kind that Fermi was suprised weren't knocking on doors, need one or more of those things to exist. At least "life as we know it" "knocking on doors" type galactic empires. As far as "life not as we know it" goes, I'm not even sure we could detect them if they were living on the Moon. Their goals, communication methods, etc. would surely be truly alien.
I'm not convinced. Maybe everyone goes "Dyson". Or to achieve true technological mastery you must achieve a kind of "spiritual" way of working in large groups that knocks you out of the "galactic resource race", (another prerequisite for Fermi) think of your own reasons, we sure haven't figured any of even the stuff I've listed out yet. Not that these are even close to my favourite explanations. but they serve, I think.
There are other famous "equations" Sagan's or Baugher's, which tends to show nothing more, I guess, than that Clarke's famous axiom, which he attributes wisely to "Anonymous" is usually pretty spot on.
Sure, you can come up with as many scenerios on why someone wouldn't do it as you want.
I think this is the part that I'm uncomfortable with - the argument seems to rest on the idea that if someone doesn't do it the way we think they should, then they probably don't exist. I accept provisionally that with a "reasonable degree of certainty" we see no evidence that they have ever been here, and thus must assume that either (a) they don't exist, as per the paradox, or (b) something is wrong with the model under which a paradox arises.
You can make up all kinds of conspiracy scenerios
I recognize that my argument treads dangerously close to loony ground. For the record let me state that I'm no UFO nut. All the same, the detritus of tinfoil hats and Von Daniken spoor all around us should not dissuade us from having a look around the territory. We cannot currently say anything conclusive about the frequency of extraterrestrial civilizations even nearby to our own solar system - we don't have the technology. The only thing we can eliminate with certainty is the presence of any nearby high-power directed beacons. Once we have the technology to detect earth-level RF from other solar systems, then we'll be able to say that we are not surrounded by civilizations. Until then, the Fermi Paradox must rest upon the absence of evidence for visitation within our own solar system.
I accept the conclusions of the paradox, but only provisionally. We are still speculating in a sea of unknowns, and I'm uncomfortable with charting out a single string of minimal-assumption hypotheses and then taking the results with anything but a grain of salt.
FWIW, my own personal suspicion is that technological life is incredibly rare, but that simple, bacterial-level life might be common. This is just based upon the one piece of evidence we have - the history of life on Earth. It's only a single data point, but all the same it is an absolute and undeniable example of life evolving in a solar system. Over 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, nearly 3 billion of those were spent as a stable bacterial world. In all that time, only one successfull association of bacteria managed to develop the information capacity of eucaryotic life. That's really bad odds.
Please take some time to study the subject before you call people stupid. It has been mentioned in other replies that size is very important in radio astronomy. The larger the base line, the better the resolution. Furthermore, the SKA is only the begin. The next project is already planned. It's called LOFAR and it will have a baseline of 100 km. This will give an extremely high resolution and will be impossible to lift into space.
Furthermore, the success of the Hubble space telescope you mention is not all the it's cracked up to be. With modern adaptive optics techniques that compensate for seeing errors, land based telescopes are (in certain areas) superior to Hubble.
Last but not least, research done in the developement of the Dutch Open Telescope has shown that much of the seeing errors are actually caused by temperature difference close to the ground, so by using a dome-less telescope on a special high platform can reduce seeing tremedously, without even having to resort to adaptive optics techniques. All these techniques can be employed for a fraction of the cost of a space based telescope.
-- Please put this in your sig if you think