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Funding Cut For Arecibo Observatory
satorchi writes "In a recent
Senior Review
conducted by the
National Science Foundation,
a panel of experts recommended the reduction of funding to
Arecibo Observatory, the world's largest radio telescope. Unless other sources of funding are found, Arecibo faces severe cuts in its program, with the prospect of closure around the year 2011.
Development of the global project called the
Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is cited as a reason to decommission Arecibo, but with the SKA coming online around the year 2020, closure of Arecibo in 2011 is some ten years premature. Until SKA is up and running, Arecibo remains the world's most sensitive radio telescope."
-b.
The article doesn't say how much funding it takes to operate Arecibo. If everyone who runs the SETI@HOME screensaver kicked in a couple of bucks, I wonder if it would make a difference.
[Insert pithy quote here]
URL IS WRONG FOR NSF!
[pedant] The "National Science Foundation" link is going to nsf.org - not nsf.gov as it should [/pedant]
I'm as sensitive as any other Star Trek fan to the closure of any important scientific instrument, but the article is nonsense. It doesn't describe the benefits of the telescope. It's as if "yeah, well, no harm done" in a kind of way. Don't reporters learn _anything_ about the subjects they write about, or do they suspect that the public is as ignorant as they are?/ beatles.php/
http://www.lyricslist.com/lyrics/artist_albums/64
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
and did anyone tell the blind dude? They can just move their operation to the VLA in New Mexico, I guess.
"Eastasia^W Iraq"
Iraq is in western Asia.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Que a female astronomer beginning to receive signals from Vega
4Z5TX
Correct procedure:
1. Learn about astronomy, history of science, physics, cosmology, what fiction is, etc.
2. Post about them on slashdot.
Can you spot which two steps you got reversed?
ResidntGeek
Just to get the proportions right; how much of USA's budget is spent on military funding vs NASA?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
First of all, talking to LGM is not what Arecibo is about (as your last paragraph does at least give some credit to). Secondly, FTL communication only exists in science fiction, for the most part. (I.e., there are a few serious scientists who ponder such possibilities, but current theory precludes it.) Finally, Arecibo advances astrophysics which DOES "advance physics".
Here's an idea for getting funding back to Arecibo. Perhaps we should point out that without the Mount Wilson observatory, Hubble's Law would not have been demonstrated, which was an important cornerstone in demonstrating the validity of general relativity. Without GR, we wouldn't be able to have high precision GPS. And where would modern warfare be without high precision GPS?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The likelyhood that simple RF is how advanced cultures communicate is ludicrous. I don't want to get all sci-fi on this thread, but chances are something like subspace (e.g. faster than light) communication is required to really be effective. Otherwise you'll have years and years to wait for a reply from anything, especially given the nearest possibly populated planets are what, hundreds of light years away?
Chances are, FTL is impossible. Fact is *we* do communicate with radio
They use it to take pseudo-colour images of things like x-ray and gamma-ray bursts
Detecting x-rays and gamma-rays with a radio telescope? I don't think so
It's true there are lots of possible research projects with more or less emidiate benefits for humanity, but I don't think radio astronomy is the reason they don't happen. There are other areas already mentioned (and the US are not the only country spending ludicrous amounts of money on their military) which eat up heaps of money without much noticeable gain of knowledge.
You're not thinking this through very well, Tom St. Denis.
The SETI@Home project, which analyses data collected from Arecibo, pioneered Internet-based distributed computing employing the PCs of the general public. Since then, the know-how that went into that project has been used for many other distributed computing efforts.
Some of those efforts, such as the biological and medical research Folding@Home and FightAIDS@Home projects, surely fit your definition of "more vital science". And were it not for Arecibo, those research efforts would not have been possible.
In the meantime, other countries are investing in their people (just look at any university and half of the students are Asian - more in the science classes) and they're investing in their businesses through Government subsidies. Now, don't get me wrong, giving a subsies to large corps like GE is foolish and just promotes the status quo. I'm talking about help for small, up and coming firms that innovate, create jobs, and add wealth to their community. The bigs corps don't do this: they continually cut jobs, thy don't innovate, they keep small companies from innovating by suing them over IP, and they move captial overseas and out of this country. Yes, yes, some of the latter is necessary for a thriving economy, but it is indicative of our business climate when a corp has incentive to move overseas.
I disagree with our national priorities big times!
This is worse than fighting random wars? I don't hear about this telescope killing a few dozen Americans per week.
On the one hand we can learn to grow better crops, treat diesease and advance physics, on the other we can build really large [brute force] radio telescopy to take better pictures of things that were going on, supposedly, billions of years ago.
There's money for it all and more within the current budget if we stopped spending money on things liek unnecessary wars, prisons for non-violent offenders, the joke on the American people that is the War on Drugs, etc...
-b.
You should first learn something about Radio Astronomy, and then you can criticize whatever you want. But, please, don't make stupid arguments about how "science is useless", unless you're really ready to let go of all the science that surrounds you...
There's this thing called posting what you know about... Got some bad news for ya... Yeps.... You failed.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
The field of astronomy has a long history (at least 30 years) of being able
to set priorities for funding, sometimes making hard decisions between projects This self discipline helps it greatly in government funding when funding decisions have to be made between project and facilities; otherwise projects would get "peanut buttered" to death, with too little money spread over too many projects.
If the scientists won't give guidance to the paper pushers, then they do the politically expedient decisions; the hard decisions aren't possible to make in government unless there is political cover from the community itself.
This is clearly another in this series of reports, typically separated by 5-10 years.
Aren't there some VLT arrays more sensitive ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
So that's where the secret goldeneye dish is kept. Mr Bond will be pleased indeed.
"Que a female astronomer beginning to receive signals from Vega"
Female hearing noises from Vega. I think I heard that on "Car Talk" last Saturday.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Good question! Before we start bitching, it helps to have at least rough figures. Then we can start bitching in earnest! (All figures are projections, but give an idea of the orders of magnitude we're looking at.)
n ewsid=43629)u sas-fy-2007-defense-budget/index.php)u ll.pdf)
FY 2007 budget: USD 2.8 trillion (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?
FY 2007 projected Defense budget: USD 532.8 billion (http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/2006/10/the-
FY 2007 requested NASA budget: USD 16.8 billion (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/142458main_FY07_budget_f
Defense~20%
NASA~0.6%
Defense budget is ~32 x NASA's
As a radio astrophysicist, I have to chime in to say that the Senior Review by the NSF (and the associated potential close of Arecibo) is a ballsy move and absolute the right thing to do. This is good governance. In response to the first post, the operating cost of Arecibo is $12M per year. The basic problem is that there are a number of very exciting new projects people want to build, but in an era of flat funding profiles you have to make hard decisions and close something before you can open something else. The Senior Review is made up of senior astronomers, and is how the NSF makes these decisions. The Senior Review also recommended cutting back a number of other facilities, including the Very Long Baseline Array (world's highest resolution images, but only of bright objects), and Kitt Peak, Sacramento Peak and GONG++ on the optical side. The full text of the Senior Review is available at the NSF astronomy website (includes some neat stuff about the science). So what are radio astronomer planning to do instead? As mentioned in the first post there is the SKA, but the real motivation is to clear up money to finish and run ALMA which works at 100s of GHz (top near 700 GHz) and is at 17,000 feet in Chile. The cool thing about ALMA is looking at planet formation and being able to do chemistry in star forming regions, because you can see all the molecular line transitions you can figure out the amino acids etc. in these very young stellar systems (it also does a lot of other things). There are also a number of smaller and very neat projects coming along. One I am working on is called the Mileura Widefield Array - Low Frequency Demonstrator (MWA-LFD). The MWA works down at TV and radio frequencies (80-300 MHz, FM radio is 88-106 MHz), and is in the western Australian desert to avoid earth based transmissions. We have three cool features, we can make an image of the radio sky that is 30 degrees across (a significant fraction of the visibile sky) every few seconds (transients), see the magnetic fields in coronal mass ejections from our sun (space weather), and my piece which is looking at the very first galaxies as they formed 12 billion years ago so we can understand how the galaxies and clusters formed (the latest Scientific American has a neat article by Avi Loeb about this science in the current issue). So in short, radio astronomers want to do new things, and unfortunately that means hard decisions about what to keep and what to close. The NSF is making these hard decisions with the help of the community. And while it saddens me that this needs to be done, the NSF should be commended for doing it. This is good government and the public should be proud. -Miguel F. Morales
I think what he meant was that instead of killing off yet another science project, why not build a couple of F-22 Raptors less? Cancel 10 and you save over $3 billion, that should be enough to keep the observatory going.
hmmm... I swear my cheap Target clock radio is more sensitive, I can *never* get it to tuned to where I want, because it is so damn sensitive. Perhaps we should create an array of those as well.
Before you flame NSF, check out the parent post....
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Radio astronomy discovered dark matter and the cosmic background radiation.
ResidntGeek
Forgot to add in the sickest part:
NAIC funding for Arecibo only requested 12.16 million for FY2007.
only 0.075% of NASA's FY 2007 budget
only 0.0028% of DoD's FY 2007 budget
only 0.00043% of the federal FY 2007 budget
sigh.
maybe we can devote that $12 million to something much more useful than SETI. SIWH: the search for intelligence in the white house.
While the SKA is kinda neat, there is a group of radio astronomers from "Big Ear" who are working on something very similar to SKA, but, is up and functional with at least 20 elements right now.
The group is NAAPO and it includes Dr. Bob Dixon as well as Jerry Ehman -- both of Big Ear Fame -- do have somewhat active roles within the organization. Their Argus project is very similar in the SKA, with the exception is that it's already running, and you can see the live data on the web and do your 'own observing,' and it can see the entire hemisphere at any given time. When I was living in Columbus, I volunteered there (I saw Big Ear right before it was destroyed and turned into a fairway); a great group of guys working on a great project.
I disable sigs...do you?
3. Control the GoldenEye satellite so you can steal billions of pounds from the Bank of England and then destroy the evidence. Just make sure 007 isn't around.
This thread wouldn't be complete without a Google Maps link.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&z=17&ll=18.3444,-6 6.7527&spn=0.0054,0.0084&t=k
Apparently they added hi-resolution pictures of it in the past few months.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
No you won't. You save only the (manufacturing the materials), which is only a small percentage of the cost of the F-22. The remainder has been spent already, on research and development.
I'd expect an F-22 to have a marginal cost of maybe $50M.
Money for torture in Guantanamo, but no money for science in Arecibo.
We're building the Cuban economy while shafting the Puerto Rican economy. But oh, the things we'll learn - about the sadists who run the US.
--
make install -not war
"The likelyhood that simple RF is how advanced cultures communicate is ludicrous"
No offense, but you have no idea what you are talking about. We cannot generalize based on a set of ONE. We have no idea at all if it is likely OR unlikely that aliens would use radio, just like we have no idea if there are any aliens or not and what they are like.
You are not near as bad, however, as the guy who knew so much (based on a sample of one) that he was able to generalize that the only viable life form for any alien civilization was a two-armed two-meter-tall biped with one head that had hair on it. I think he watched too much "Star Trek."
Where were you when the voynix came?
What is happening here is part of the normal review process for the NSF.
;)
The NSF does a very thorough review of grant proposals based on a set of requirements. The grant writer has to show how they will meet those requirements for the proper use and accounting of funds. Some of the requirements *may* include the following:
* NSF projects must include education outreach and community involvement. For example taking on internships and hosting talks at local schools. * The project must show ample leadership and they must have a backup plan in case something happens to the Primary Investigator on the project. * NSF projects must come up with additional funding sources so that the NSF is not the sole source of money for the project. This makes sense. If you can convince the NSF to dole $10 million, then you should be able to convince other sources as well. * The investigation must show collaberation with other research groups for (ex) data-sharing. * The group must show how they will use technology to expand outreach, collaberation and data-sharing (no mad scientists in secret labs)
These factors and many more are reviewed extensively every few years to make sure the project is on track with the goals. If the project has weaknesses, they are notified, and given time to fix the weaknesses. If they still cannot fix problems with the project, the review board will recommended that the project be cut. Most likely (IMHO) the project is failing due to poor management/leadership. The Lead PI is not able to inspire the other investigators to find alternative grant sources, and thus they are not meeting the NSF requirements.
Keep in mind that these rules are put in place to protect YOUR money from being abused by misdirected or unfocused science experiments. If the NSF recommends pulling the funding, there are probably major problems within the project organization that are pushing them toward that conclusion.
Also, bear in mind that the NSF money not spent on that project will likely be apportioned toward newer more competitive organizations who have a proven record of meeting the NSFs requirements.
The NSF does not fund the war in Iraq, but I would love to see that grant proposal per the above reqs!
Now, isn't it time we started discussing the development of a space-based radio interferometer?
You see, it turns out it was her dad all along, so we dont really need it anymore.
Well, obviously all of life's important questions can be solved by simply reading the bible. We shouldn't try to go out and come upon some of those all by ourselves.
Seriously, if your human condition is the shine on the BMW in your three car garage, you are a pathetic human being and need to get fucked. RF communication is used internally on our "advanced" civilization. Only a complete fucking idiot-tool would think we want to do some sort of two way chat. ET: "...." E-man: "hi how r u, A/S/L?" ET: "you look tasty, want to tentacle chat?"
JUST THE FACT THAT IT IS THERE WOULD BE A HUGE DISCOVERY.
Got it? Meathead?
There is a short list of really important stuff for "mankind to know" and life outside our solar system is one of them.
Something like:
1. Fire
2. Tools
3. Wheel
4. ET
5. Microbiology (ok, maybe swap this with 4)
The only real difference between this one, and the others we already have is we know the question before we have the answer.
So what will happen to the land the observatory occupies if it is desactivated? more condo's anyone?
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
--
make install -not war
I love it when liberals fight among one another.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Slashdot really, really needs a "-1 Clueless" moderation alternative.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Really, it is.
I'm no fundamentalist or whatever.
I just think building really huge radios isn't super useful, at least not anymore.
And that if you really want to sit in the desert or in a rain forrest looking at the sky, you should do it with your own damn money.
I'm really not impressed with the idea of finding ET. Specifically because I ASSUME there *is* ET. But until we can actually do something useful with that info (e.g. faster than light comm) it's all just "nice to think about."
Try this experiment. Communicate with your friends ONLY through snail mail for 3 months. By comparison to cell phones, pagers, IMs, emails, and the like it's light years away. Now, try this out. Only read your received snail mail when it's 25 years old. Get your friends to do the same.
Now replace 25 with more than 100.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
and she's PISSED..
Your argument assumes that we already have enough F-22s. We do need to replace older craft as they become obsolete and/or cost-ineffective to maintain. Even if liberals think the USA should practice neo-isolationism by withdrawing all its forces from everywhere on the planet, we would still need to run patrols over US airspace. Your argument could be extended ad infinitium until we had no aircraft. Just the fact that a fighter is expensive and its funds could be used for a purpose you deem important does not make this a viable solution. For example, I could follow you to the computer shop when you want to buy a new Intel Core Cinco Ocho 2 Extreme Burnination Edition Processor and point out that the $500 you paid for it could buy breakfast for 250 people at the soup kitchen.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It costs about $12M/yr to operate Arecibo,
according to the Senior Review report.
Millions of dollars get wasted on much less interesting and important stuff and simply stolen or lost in the burocracy.
There are a lot of interesting stuff to be done in cosmology. By no means I am an expert, but wouldn't you want to know the nature of the Universe, how it was created etc? Things like detecting the 21 centimeter radiation is crucial in understanding the early universe. Things like the Flatness problem and the curvature of the universe are decided through measuring the Plank curve of the background radiation, the correlation function of the temperature of the cosmic background radiation measuring the difference between various angles (as seen from Earth), the measurement of distant supernovas and from galaxy statistics. These data sets indicate that we're living very close to an Eucledian geometry, something between the Riemann geometry and hyperbolical universe and that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, and we also determined the age of the universe through the measurement of the Hubble constant to be 13.7b years with 100 million year precision.
This is new stuff, in the last five years we were all metaphysical about it, now we have measurement data.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Just the facts...
NASA "Science, Aeronautics, and Exploration"
$10 Billion
DoD (Department of Defense)
$420 Billion
So about 42x more for DoDO (Department of "Defense" operations) than for NASA in fiscal year 2006 (completed).
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
Then, go SKA dancing AND looking for ET at the same time. (Ahh, yae, yahh, Ahh, yae, yahh...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Arecibo remains the world's most sensitive radio telescope.
So when we take it down, we'll make sure to say please and thank you.
Have you read my journal today?
Errr, it's not a super-huge radio, it's a super huge radio TELESCOPE. It's used mostly to map out things like neutral hydrogen in our galaxy and others to try and understand galactic structure and formation. It's as important to Astronomy as say the subaru telescope (in my sort-of biased opinion).
I'm an astronomy grad student, and I read the executive summary of the real report, and here is what they recommend in the ~2010-2020 time frame for ground based observing:
OPTICAL
Reduce/cut off funding for Gemini Observatory
commence construction of Giant Segmented Mirror telescope (~30m telescope) and Large Survey Telescope
RADIO
Reduce funding for or close completely Arecibo observatory and the VLBA
Reduce administrative costs at NRAO and the Green Bank Telescope
Start funding construction of Square Kilometer Array
SOLAR
Close national solar observatory and divert resources to Advance solar telescope
------------------------
The most alarming to me is Gemini recommendation as those telescopes are first class instruments, and not so much the Arecibo recommendation as Arecibo is of fairly limited use as it can only see a tiny fraction of the sky.
If we can earmark $250 Million for a bridge to nowhere in AK, why can't we earmark $12 Million for Aricibo? Oops, I guess there is no Senator from PR, huh?
the operating cost of Arecibo is $12M per year ... you have to make hard decisions and close something before you can open something else
Yeah, right. NOT.
Why don't you drop your attitude of inferiority and servitude to the government and instead make the point that the tiny operating cost of Arecibo is peanuts compared to the wildly extravagant spending of the US on its military?
Arecibo could be founded out of military petty cash. And it's *YOUR* tax money.
The blind acceptance of what governments do is just mind boggling.
The military is constitutionally supposed to be part of the federal budget. The military is one of the few reasons we bother to have a federal government at all, because you just can't "correctly" implement a military without it. The military needs a federal government, and that's where it should be funded from.
(If the military were used for what it was intended for (protecting America's security), instead of misused for
- creating business opportunities for contractors
- protecting industries whose viability is a function of certain aspects of foreign trade (e.g. lots of things need cheap oil)
- imposing our ideals on other cultures
- taking care of other nations' responsibilities
then people wouldn't complain so much about funding it.)Science, on the other hand, doesn't need any government. You can't personally be an army, but you can be a scientist. If you're rich, or if you can convince other people that it's a worthy idea, you can even build an expensive instrument. And unlike building your own nuclear missile, your instrument probably isn't going to make your neighbors nervous. Perhaps that's why the constitution doesn't authorize the government to fund science -- it isn't a necessary function of government.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The world's largest radio telescope, the GMRT sits near the city of Pune, India.
s /Diagrams/yarray.gif
a dio-telescope/
Here's some information on the project: http://www.gmrt.ncra.tifr.res.in/
A nice aerial layout: http://www.gmrt.ncra.tifr.res.in/gmrt_hpage/Image
And of course Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMRT
And GoogleSightseeing: http://googlesightseeing.com/2005/08/04/arecibo-r
Why do you assume that other intelligent lifeforms operate on our timescale?
We are on a short timescale. To us, a month is quite a while, and so a hundred years' wait for a reply is unthinkable. But what if the other critters were on a much longer timescale?
That's exactly the sort of critters you'd see evolving out of a cold world, as opposed to a warm lively one such as our own.
Indeed, if mankind becomes spacefaring, the very first order of business will be to convert our metabolism over to a longer timescale. At that time, the speed of light (or even 0.1c) will seem plenty quick.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
And a perfect example of how a good idea can be ruined by a bad one.
but if you want to spend millions upon millions of dollars looking up at the sky, then do it with your own damn money.
If it were up to me, I'd spend the money on Strong AI first and then let it search for the aliens once the technological singularity comes about.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
lack of commitment are what hold radio astronomy back?! Yeah, uh....right.
damaged by dogma
The short term cause is the Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatories (NRAO) convincing a senator to earmark a significant portion of the NSF astronomy funding for NRAO. Since most of that money is going to be spent in the home state of that senator, he earmarked 20% more than NRAO requested. Of course these earmarks don't change the total funding for astronomy. They just restrict how it can be spent. In other words, the director of NRAO and the senator from New Mexico joined forces to fsck over the rest of the astronomy community.
It is possible that the senior review chose Arecibo for the cuts because of the public outcry that might result could cause an increase in the total astronomy budget.
Support SETI@home
Didn't the government close this lab in the 90's already? I remember watching a documentary where Mulder had to infiltrate the little building and listen to Bach's Brandenburgh Concerto #2, broadcast back by the aliens.
Gee whiz guys (and gals)! Haven't we learned anything since Reagan? The answer, of course, is to privatize Arecibo. The market will decide whether Arecibo stays open or closed. They will just have to adapt like so many others whose cheese has moved. They could have fund-raisers, pledge drives, sell t-shirts, and license their iage for more Jodie Foster movies. This is the way things are done in the 21st century, where free market economy is the highest expression of civilization. If those aliens want to communicate with us, its probably because they want to sell us something on eBay.
you must be new here
Actually, that is possible. I was at the SKA meeting this past Friday and listened to the talk by the SETI people. They would be able to do their thing during normal science operations by the SKA.
This is worse than fighting random wars? I don't hear about this telescope killing a few dozen Americans per week.
Please. We must support the troops. If you don't stand with them, you stand against them.
The $14M spent on Arecibo could be spent to support the troops in Iraq. Sure, some of that spending doesn't actually go over to Iraq, but that ignores the way things get done in our system. Without proper motivation, our national leadership is unable to focus on getting the job done.
It is cut and runners like you who are sap our legislative will to fight. Democrats know how sensitive Republicans are to criticism. Congress would have done better, if it weren't for unpatriotic people who don't support our troops.
But we shall stay the course: freedom is on the march.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No worries... only a matter of time before the guy who cut the funding is blown away by Jake Busey and Jodie Foster finds out that (surprise!) John Hurt built a second machine...
Lesson: When soliciting funds for SETI projects from an eccentric billionaire, quote Marty McFly at the last minute.
The answer is really simple.
Don't buy 1 F-22 Raptor.
Seriously. Shave one off of the list of aircraft to buy. From what I'm seeing, the per-unit cost of those aircraft is in excess of $100M. Bam, funding for the next five years (or more) is done. I'm doubting we'll really notice the difference, militarily.
Or here's another idea: We could cut some of the rediculous spending elsewhere. Most of it is military, yeah, but I'm sure if we look hard enough, there are more bridges to nowhere that can be cut instead.
FFS, stop cutting science spending. Spending money on research is almost always a good idea, even if it doesn't pay off immediately. It's not that difficult, really. Learning = good. Duh.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
Firstly FTL communication maybe possible; I specifically remember it was discovered that particle/anti-particle pairs annihilate simultaneously even when separated by great distances, so it should be possible to set up a Rube Goldberg contraption emitting complimentary particles in opposite direction, after the particles arrival constrained by C, instantaneous communications would then be possible!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I am an astrophysics grad student, Arecibo user, and very much familiar with the telescope, the site and the logistics.
To those rallying in favor of various arrays: yes, VLA, LOFAR, etc are great instruments, however, large single-dish telescopes and arrays of smaller telescopes are good for different types of projects and observing different types of objects. The astronomy community needs both types of instruments--otherwise some research areas will suffer. (By the way, LOFAR = LOw Frequency ARray, its frequency range is nowhere near Arecibo's, so the two aren't redundant. And who knows by how many years SKA construction will be delayed, as such things usually are.)
The need to build gigantic radio telescopes: the size a telescope must have if it's going to be useful at all is determined by the properties of electromagnetic waves, we don't have a choice in the matter. The longer the wavelength you want to observe at, the larger the detector/mirror (for comparison, radio wavelengths are on the order of centimeters to meters long, while optical wavelength are on the order of a few hundred nanometers). The larger the detector/mirror, the more emitted flux you can collect and focus and therefore the more sensitive the telescope. (The equivalent of this would be--on a sunny day, it's easier to set a piece of paper on fire by using a larger lens.)
One example of how Arecibo has contributed to the development of astronomy and spawned a whole new field of science: look up Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, which was discovered and observed with Arecibo, and proved the existence of gravitational waves. Hulse and Taylor got the Nobel prize for their research, and gravitational wave physics was born. A slew of gravitational wave facilities are operating now to study this type of emission that stretches and compresses spacetime. And such studies are needed if we're ever going to be able to build those sci-fi "hyperspace" or "subspace" engines.
As for the current competitiveness initiative: China is building an Arecibo-sized telescope right now and it will be completed in a few years. If Arecibo is closed, this Chinese instrument will be the only instrument of comparable capability in the world and the US will have relinquished yet another opportunity for being competitive in science.
JD
Good comment, but there's probably some room for the National Labs as a sub-function of the military. You probably don't want to privatize nuclear weapons research, or chem/bio weapons, especially when test subject are involved, or let them play with the alien craft at Wright's Field.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
2006 means .. should be out around Saturn by now*
By an interesting coincidence, I just finished reading the book (Contact) a week or two ago.
*given 2 or 3 years to reach Jupiter, starting at the begging of 2000 = Saturn by late 2006?