Telescopes Useless by 2050?

Wellerite writes "Gerry Gilmore, from Cambridge University, has told the BBC that ground-based telescopes will be worthless by 2050. This is due to more and more cloud cover caused by climate change and increasing numbers of aircraft vapour trails. It seems to be time to start preparing to launch more orbit-based telescopes."

Comments

I don't believe this

[Eightyford]

Maybe ground based telescopes will not be as efficient 50 years without taking into account advances in technology, but I doubt that they will be obsolete. And what about the huge telescopes that are being planned today? They aren't going to be built where cloud cover will make them obsolete.

Anyways, I guess a little more cloud cover and vapour trails combined with "light pollution" will make today's designs less efficient, but I can't see how there is any way that ground based telescopes will become obsolete.

WTF?!?

[itwerx]

It seems to be time to start preparing to launch more orbit-based telescopes.

Er, yeah, let's treat the symptom and ignore the cause!

nature of research

[bcrowell]

I did physics research for a few years as a grad student and postdoc, and one thing I learned was that 95% of all research (including 95% of my own) was correct but unimportant. If scientists have access to incremental improvements in technique, they'll still keep on writing grant proposals, taking on grad students, and publishing papers, but very little of the scientific output will be all that earthshattering. All the really big exciting results tend to come out when some new technique is found. In physics, a good example is the groundbreaking experiments (like the discovery of the nucleus) that happened once the Curies purified radium. In astronomy, Galileo's introduction of the telescope itself to astronomy led to a huge amount of progress in a short time.

If there's observing time available on a 10-meter ground-based telescope, you'd better believe there will be competition for that observing time, and papers will be published. But if really amazing things are going to be discovered, it's probably going to come from techniques that are a big leap ahead of what we have now, like telescopes in space. Telescopes in space can have apertures as big as you like without buckling under their own weight, they can probe parts of the spectrum that don't get through the atmosphere, and they're not affected by issues like clouds and contrails.

I don't find it hard to believe that contrails could be a major issue. Every time I go backpacking and spend a lot of time in a remote spot in the Seirras looking up at the sky, that's what I see a lot of -- jet contrails. If ground-based astronomy is already being pushed to the limits of what it can do, then presumably they're often working at levels of sensitivity a gazillion orders of magnitude beyond the naked eye, so I can easily imagine that contrails that would appear to the naked eye to have completely dissipated could be an issue.