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

It's not that simple.

[jd]

The scattering from air pollution is random and localized. It is going to be hard for computers to compensate for such stuff. It's bad enough to compensate for relatively uniform atmospheric distortion.

Secondly, light pollution isn't just a localized problem. Light bends and reflects in the atmosphere very effectively. So much so, in fact, that the moon is still very clearly visible in a full lunar eclipse (it has a rusty brown colour) and car headlights are forever being mistaken for UFOs at a distance.

Personally, I think we should have giant space telescopes anyway. Enough of the 9' junk we call Hubble, we need a good 100' optical space telescope. The mechanisms we use to compensate for atmospheric effects should work just as well for the distortion in space due to dust and crystalline particles in interstellar clouds.

Actually, the way I'd do it is to have a set of giant space-based telescopes on a polar orbit around the moon such that they were always visible from Earth. Less atmospheric drag, so won't have as many problems as Hubble, and the orbit is much less crowded.