Arecibo Observatory Facing Massive Budget Cuts

SirLurksAlot writes "Many supporters of the SETI@home project have recently received a message informing them of impending budget cuts for the Arecibo Observatory and asking them to show their support for the project by writing to Congress. The letter also informs supporters that there are currently two bills (Senate bill 2862 sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton, and a similar House bill, H.R. 3737), which are intended to secure funding for the project. According to The Planetary Society, the current plan for the Arecibo Observatory involves cutting funding by more than 60% from $10.4 million to just $4 million by 2011."

Comments

What?

[ScrewMaster]

This is insane. We're throwing untold billions of dollars away on useless, inconsequential or outright stupid things every year, and we can't afford a few million for something like Aricebo? Are we nuts?

Re:What?

[dreamchaser]

I support funding Aricebo for use to search for NEO's, but I don't want my tax money going to SETI. I'm sorry, but as cool as it would be to either confirm the 'WOW' signal or find a signal from an ET, it shouldn't be a priority for using tax dollars.

Re:What?

[CRCulver]

Yes it is wonderful for tracking NEOs and providing quality information to astronomers, but what has the return been for ME on MY tax dollar?

Anything that tracks NEOs gives you a return on your tax dollar in that it keeps you aware of any catastrophic threats.

Re:What?

[JebusIsLord]

Are you saying that it isn't worthwhile, or that it should be done by the private sector? Because I just don't see how it could exist without government funding given there is no realistic potential for a monetary return on investment.

Re:What?

[Enderandrew]

I agree. I read a while back that SETI went through their entire spectrum twice and hasn't found anything yet.

I've also read how over the years, despite the fact that we have begun broadcasting more signals over the years, the Earth has gotten "quieter" in that our signals are more focused and don't travel as far. Even if there was intelligent alien life out there, and even if they broadcast radio signals, it seems unlikely they'd broadcast them far enough for us to pick them up.

I don't want tax dollars going to SETI either.

Re:What?

[amccaf1]

Ensuring that there's no imminent repeat of this on a more populated area?

That implies that humanity has the ability to take some kind of preventative action if a collision is imminent. As far as I know, we do not.

Well, we probably couldn't shoot down an incoming meteoroid, but given enough warning time, we could at least begin an evacuation of the impact zone. Additionally, knowing that a sudden, shock explosion was due to a natural occurrence rather than a terrorist or "rogue state" could help prevent WWII being touched off...

Re:What?

[TheOnlyJuztyn]

To put this in perspective, this $6m cut will save the average US taxpayer about $0.024/year. Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years. With that money, you could fund Arecibo at its current level for more then 300,000 years.

Re:What?

[novakyu]

Because I just don't see how it could exist without government funding given there is no realistic potential for a monetary return on investment.

Philanthropy. There are whole organizations pouring money into Africa. What's their expected return?

Re:What?

[wizardforce]

you can't make nearly as much money/trade with people in complete poverty, you can with people who get out of that kind of poverty so it isn't even a matter of ethics/morals/philanthopy, it's one of long term economics.

Re:What?

[bschorr]

So are you suggesting that just because we have few practical options for dealing with a dangerous NEO that it's better that we not even know about them at all? Perhaps we could spend our research dollars on peril-sensitive sunglasses? :-) -B-

Re:Perspective

[pipingguy]

Yeah, but the F-22 actually, like, does "stuff".

Well - kinda

[spineboy]

The F-22 does stuff TO people, Aricebo does stuff FOR people.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

There is no compelling science case for Arecibo that can't be pursued with other telescopes, especially since the frontier of radio astronomy has mostly moved from sensitivity (requiring big apertures) to resolution (requiring long-baseline arrays), or to shorter mm/submm wavelengths that Arecibo can't handle.

They've actually moved a large fraction of Arecibo's time over to survey efforts: "We'll do the same piece of sky, but with a flux limit 3 times deeper!" Sorry, but there are too many programs with the potential for transformative new discoveries to keep a major observatory open purely for incremental science.

"Scientific hedonism"

[Tweenk]

In times of recession the lawmakers get allergic to basic research, which they think is a kind of scientific hedonism. The thought pattern here seems to be that science is a shabby garden run by elitist weirdos. You water this garden with money and then you can pick the new drugs, weapons and consumer electronics growing on its trees. The lawmakers attempt to tidy up this garden in order to improve the yield of goodies by cutting down the trees that don't bear fruit. This can only be harmful in the end, because they don't have a faintest idea about gardening...

Mod parent and grandparent down...

[SETIGuy]

What makes you think SETI is being federally funded, or that it represents a significant portion of what Arecibo does?

SETI@home is at the present time entirely funded by donations. Any time SETI@home uses at Arecibo is piggybacked on searching for pulsars or mapping the Galaxy in the 21cm line.

Or are you suggesting that because Arecibo spends any effort on a project you dislike it should be shut down?

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Tom Womack]

What is Arecibo's credible competition in the radio-bucket field, and particularly in the radio-transmitting field for planetary radar?

You've listed a load of optical instruments, including ATST which is explicitly to study the Sun; the only radio one is the ATA whose area is about a sixth of Arecibo's and who can't benefit from elaborate ultra-low-noise receiver technology unless you want to build 350 dilution refrigerators to cool 350 copies of your instrument.

The Square Kilometer Array isn't built yet, and I can't think of a radio-telescope array which has comparable collecting area to Arecibo; LOFAR's not built yet and is running at lower frequencies anyway; Goldstone _can_ do planetary-radar stuff, but I get the impression Arecibo does it better.

I've argued the other side for some of the British funding withdrawals - there was someone adamant about keeping the UKIRT open to complete a survey, where the UKIRT is a poor survey instrument and the VLT Survey Telescope could do a better job and is already built - but Arecibo is much more credibly a unique facility.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

In an era where every telescope or survey has lifetime costs of tens to hundreds of millions, do you really think we can afford to slice up the pie by wavelength and not pit wavelengths against each other? Some fields naturally rise while others fall (just ask the solar people!), and it doesn't make sense to maintain the same fractional allocation of money.

My argument, which also applies to Scott Ransom's post, is that there are so many science cases that are truly transformative, just doing reasonable science shouldn't be enough to guarantee funding out of the relatively flat NSF pool. We have to be active in examining existing programs to determine which are still contributing as much (per dollar) as a new telescope or survey would. Most of the results I've heard coming out of Arecibo lately seem to fall in the reasonable category, not in the transformative category. I'm certainly willing to be persuaded otherwise, though.

Finally, my list was largely optical/IR because those are what I'm most familiar with, but I'm certainly willing to include the new radio/mm/submm initiatives. For example, ALMA is obviously going to be huge, and I would happily kill a number of optical telescopes if it were necessary to keep ALMA alive.