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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."
Most appropriate delivery of that message EVER.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As much as I can tell, scoping out babes from a distance will continue to be the standard for Slashdotters far past 2050.
At least integer factorizations won't be worthless by 2*5*5*41.
You've been here long enough to know how badly that tired joke has been beaten into the ground. It wasn't funny to start and it's just retarded at this point.
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.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
According to the article: A location has not been decided; but, despite the difficulties of access, Antarctica may become an option. The icy region has relatively clear skies, with a climate that is somewhat separate from other continents, and, crucially, is free from overflying commercial jets.
Very large electric fans.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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!
I, for one, welcome our new Alien Overclouds!!
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
I think you are a bit dim. Please be more clear.
Nothing helps a cause more than disingenuous sensationalism.
Remember, in 50 years deserts and mountains won't exist because of GLOBAL WARMING!!!!!1!
With oil reserves now on the decline we'll see a steady deindustrializing over the next century, which includes the gradual reduction of air pollution. All these doom and gloom scenarios of pollution and over population never take in to account that the human race is really limited by fossil fuel reserves.
It seems to be time to start preparing to launch more orbit-based telescopes.
No, you don't get it. Instead it might be time to think about stopping to pollute our planet like that.
Remember, in 2050, swimming pools will be rendered useless since the oceans will be in everyone's backyards!
a liberal ecofreak troll reference to the fact that us Americans are fat, wasteful, materialistic boobs whose culture will eventually be the downfall of mankind. An opinion that I won't fully agree with. There are much worse types to be called I suppose. Those parent-poster-type people would feel the Earth would be much better off if we crushed all of the technology we have and return to a pre-Industrial revolution society for the good of the planet and the three flippered platypus. In thier minds doing so would rid us of global warming, corporate greed, and the multitude of diseases that seem to pop up overnight. It's ok if you didn't get the joke/troll. It wasn't funny either way.
While there may be problems with future air traffic growth around the world, Hawai'i may not necessarily be involved in those problems. According to this article at CNN Hawai'i is close to capacity. There may or may not be significant growth in air traffic to the islands.
Given that you need to do astronomy in the winter when there's no sun, it's probably not an issue. That and exposed skin has other problems in Antartica besides sunburn...
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
There is no way that ground-based telescopes are going to become "worthless" by 2050. This is just a false sensationalist claim intended to stir up trouble.
It is possible that cloud cover will increase in some places, and I can believe that jet contrails reduce the visibility of astronomical objects, but unless cloud cover increases to 100% over the entire surface of the earth and/or atmospheric jet travel increases by many orders of magnitudes, there will still be plenty of cloudless night sky on the planet earth in 2050.
Light pollution will probably be a bigger problem for ground based astronomy over the next 50 years.
...by someone who should know better.
Fifty years ago, we had fogs in London that persisted for weeks. Now we don't
What are the causes of this sudden problem with telescopes according this overqualified idiot?
1. Global warming/climate change (the cause of all the world's ills, apparently) which is making it cloudier...but wait! Making it cloudier will reflect more energy back into space, making it cooler. WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
2. Cheap airflight. Apparently cheap airflight means more planes which means more contrails, which as you know persist for ages. That's why environmentalists always go first class so that they're paying for their own pollution when they reach the destination of the next conference on climate change to protest about how much fossil fuels are being used for Mr and Mrs Q. Public going to Miami for a week.
And this blocks out the light needed for ground based telescopes that are a) situated ABOVE the clouds and b) are not on flightpaths.
But hey! The BBC got another ridiculous scary story out and another PhD climbed onto the gravy train.
Never mind the facts, feel the sincerity.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
THe upside to this is of course all those massive lenses and mirrors will be coming on the market.
Evil Geniuses planning to build a super laser and extort the world for billions of dollars on a budget rejoice!
--My signature is six words long.--
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In,
Pulse high energy weapons grade lasers out of the telescope to 'clear' a path to see, if they're strong enough birds, planes and satellites be damned.
seriously, this is more the sky is falling crap, shifting weather patterns will render some locations unusable while others might become better,
this has been a problem for locations such as Palomar, when it occurs they retask and/or devise a new technical method around the clutter.
I can tell you from first hand experience that amatuer astronomers will travel to great lengths to get better seeing conditions.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
By 2050, our civilization will already have crumbled and we'll be in the new Dark Ages -- the result of the global wars fought over oil and religious intolerance. Astronomy will be the least of our worries. This isn't some Nostrodamus shit; just a reasonable extrapolation of Bush's current policies.
despite the difficulties of access
You don't necessarily need to be at the telescope to control the telescope.
...but from first-hand and second-hand experience, this is definitely a problem.
My father is an artist who used to work on Air Force jets in the 50s. He's been watching the sky for 50 years, and he was one of the first in our state to even mention the problem of contrails. I don't care what you skeptics say; the farther you travel from major air traffic, the bluer the sky.
And if any of you are amateur astronomers, you probably didn't need this article to tell you about this problem. 'Seeing' has become progressively worse over the past 10 years, at least in the States. Light pollution is only part of the problem. Moisture in the high atmosphere is what we should be worried about.
How much are we really learning from ground-based telescopes as opposed to satellite telescopes at this time? For real scientists (not your backyard user looking at the stars), will this really affect their current and future research?
I don't think so. There is already a push for satellite telescopes, so this development may speed up the transition, but will not be the sole incentive.
The US Government just has to make sure to seize the credit card company's computer under Eminent Domain afterwards.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What with the use of upstairs window blinds, and one-way polymer coatings, and what not. A bloke's not half as liable to spot a bird on the wing, as in the old days, what?
But, Cor! Look at the knockers she's got!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
"it was us who scorched the sky."
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.
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That's a stretch. Given that an orbit is highly dynamic, how can something be "based" on it? A base implies a solid foundation: something "on orbit" most definitely is not.
What on earth is wrong with "orbiting"? (No pun intended)
Jesus, it's like listening to American TV interviews, when people say "at this time", or "at this moment" when what they mean is "now".
But I guess there a lot of people to whom brevity and clarity mean diddly squat. *sigh*
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
A troll is when you say something you don't believe in order to elicit a desired response. My above comment is not a troll, it is a flame. THIS comment is also not a troll, NOR is it a flame - it's offtopic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's overcast and cloudy here nine months of the year, so if you want to use a telescope, you have to be really lucky, or use it during the summer months.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The safest path argument is compelling, but others are more concerned about the safest path for preserving freedom.
Sure, you'd like it cold for the sensor, but then you have worse problems.
Once you open the dome for observations, you allow outdoor air to come in contact with indoor air. You're going to get turbulence and fog. If you put a layer of glass in the middle, you get dew or even frost. (and you still get turbulence, because the glass will be either warm or cold and thus not equal to the air on one side or the other)
Seeings as where my eyesight will be nearly gone by 2050 and my skin is too light for much sun this is the best news I've heard in a long time.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
and I predict that by 2080 earth-orbit-based telescopes will become useless due to amount of space junk and rocket exhaust vapor clouds ;)
Time to think of a solar-orbit telescope?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Mankind will be wiped out by 2050. This is due to more and more wars caused by America.
I forgot to be anonymous.
There's a fascinating document at http://caao.as.arizona.edu/publications/2004%20spi e%20plenary%20final%202.pdf
comparing and contrasting three sites for a new major telescope facility. Suffice it to say that the top of an unclimbed mountain in the middle of Antarctica is the MOST pleasant and accessible of them.
Ground based telescopes will end up being for hobbyists that want to look at mars or the moon, true astronomy work will come from orbital telescopes that can peer into the far reaching depths of space. At least optical ones. Global climate changes shouldn't affect radio frequency telescopes for deep space scanning.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Ground-based telescope systems are actually important, contrary to popular /. opinion. For example, Swift takes about a minute to slew its Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) to a gamma ray burst (GRB). When Swift first triggers on a GRB, it sends that information to the ground, which is then sent throughout the world to astronomers and robotic telescope systems alike. Those robotic systems are then observing the GRB (provided that it's night and not raining at the telescope's location) within a few seconds of Swift triggering on the GRB. Thus, they are able to observe the *early* optical and infrared afterglow, while Swift is still slewing to the GRB.
There are also cataclysmic variable surveys, transient surveys, and other uses of the robotic systems when they're not pursuing GRBs. These are far easier and cheaper to develop and deploy than space-based telescopes. Each mission has it's limitations, but there is good science to be done by each. Thinking Telescopes has more information about robotic systems and the software behind them.
So yes, the days of a professional astronomer staring through a telescope to study the stars is probably long over. But that does not mean that ground systems are obsolete or outdated. Hell with the budget cannibalization going on at NASA, astronomers are going to loose the largest means of space based missions: Explorers. So when we can't launch into space, we'll build on the ground or make balloon experiments to observe in energies that are blocked by the ozone (amazingly enough, these are still done).
And the picture they use in the bloody article is a RADIO telescope! Radio really isn't affected by contrails or climate change! The biggest concern is in the optical to infrared ranges, where the moisture and clouds do the most damage to light (diffraction, reflection, etc). Radio and microwave suffer most from cell phones, gps units, radio and television broadcasting, etc. That's why radio observatories are out in the middle of *no where*.
You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both
False dilemma ... actually you can do both. Technology is not inherently dirty - it's possible to create and use cleaner technologies.
Why not start focusing on cleaner fuels now (both for terrestrial and space travel) so those blokes stuck on the ground can keep their telescopes for more interesting pursuits than spying the fat old lady next block over?
And keep in mind, this article may not take into account that there will probably be about 2 billion more cars on the planet by then, so we could actually be looking at 2030, not 2050. (hint: invest in parking spaces in China NOW and don't say I didn't tell you so)
Just a thought.
Other guy is wrong.
When the ice age happens, then you can call it 'climate change', but at that point, I think "Global Cooling" would still be more demonstrative.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Telescopes and astronomy are not important (and I speak as a keen amateur astronomer, with a telescope of my own) compared to the survival of mankind. Folks, we are killing ourselves - that's why this observation is important, and too serious to joke about,
Ian D. K. Kelly
idkk Consultancy Ltd.
"Quality through Thought"
the VLA in chile (I think chile) is in a place where there aren't really any clouds, ever.
So dry it'll suck the pee out of you.