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

Perspective

[nicklott]

To put this into perspective, $6m is about the cost of the seat in a single F-22.

waste@home

[Adreno]

maybe those aliens just don't want to be found... perhaps a more prudent use of resources would be folding@home. You know, curing cancer instead of holding our head to the ground to listen for non-existent buffalo...

Re:What?

[ROMRIX]

Create an account on the SETI forum and get to know those guys that run the place. They do squat there for what they're paid. I wish I could take a vacation like those guys. They're biggest decision is "What country do you want to go spend a month at?" Shit I'd be playing WOW all day too! Get to know them before you wish them (mine and your) millions.

Re:What?

[Scott Ransom]

As an honest question, what useful things has Aricebo produced?

How about a Nobel prize? (Amongst a bunch of other excellent bits of radio astronomy, aeronomy, and planetary science).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1913+16

Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

The ground-based astronomical budget is finite, and the only way we're going to finance 50 shiny new programs is by shutting down the old ones that aren't scientifically competitive. Arecibo hasn't been scientifically competitive in a decade, and it won't ever be competitive in the era when we want to build LSST, PANSTARRS, TMT, ATA, ATST, and a dozen other acronyms.

We've already had one near-miss, when Hillary Clinton tried to force some budget language funding Arecibo in the weeks before the Puerto Rico primary. She didn't earmark new funding, she just added a mandate that existing funding go there. Oddly enough, the legislation didn't mention which other ground-based program would be cut to free up the funds...

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Einer2]

Hubble: Weak lensing. Reionization. Exoplanet transit characterization. Directly-imaged protoplanetary/debris disks.

Spitzer: Transitional disks. ULIRGs. Exoplanet secondary transits. Star formation, period. Direct imaging of free-floating planetary-mass objects.

See? It's not that hard, even if you don't stray too far outside your (or your colleagues') field of specialization. There really are a lot of important (and sexy) science cases floating around, they just don't really require Arecibo.

Re:Or better yet, don't write Congress

[Scott Ransom]

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.

Sorry, but that is not true. Radio astronomy needs improvement in a wide variety of areas in order to tackle the tremendously wide variety of science that is done at radio bands. Examples include sensitivity, field-of-view, dynamic range, image fidelity, resolution, and wavelength coverage. But sensitivity is one of the most important. That is why the SKA is on the table to be the world's next generation decameter/centimeter wave radio telescope. The most important thing it provides is sensitivity (i.e. SK = square km = sensitivity). And Arecibo is already a 5-10% SKA.

For my own research (pulsars), Arecibo's sensitivity is what sets it apart. Although, truthfully, the fact that it can't observe any of the southern sky (where most of the pulsars are) is a definite downside.

Finally, you mention surveys and imply that because Arecibo is doing a larger percent of them now that that means it is washed up. However, that also isn't true. Modern astronomy is driven by large surveys (including several of the instruments that you mention, for example, Sloan, PANSTARRS, LSST) as they dramatically increase our discovery space.

Profitability of the war in Iraq

[tjstork]

Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years.

If we assume a baseline 100M taxpayers, and an Iraq war cost of 100B a year, then, we're really talking only about $1000 a year on average. Notice, though, that 90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000 a year, so really, we average stiffs are probably not even paying for the war at all.

Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies, PLUS, a reduction in gasoline costs. We can calculate the ultimate profitability of the war based upon a reduction in the price of gasoline per person, knowing that in the USA the per capita consumption of gasoline is about 10 barrels per person per year. Source , and thus, about 30 barrels per taxpayer per year. So we say at 30 x 45 gets us about 1200 gallons of gas per year per taxpayer. We can thus calculate that if the war in Iraq is victorious, AND, nets a global price reduction of about a $1 / gallon, then, each taxpayer would come out ahead about $200 per year, even if the cost of continuing the war is born indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA. Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!

Re:Good!

[budgenator]

Seti@home was started for several reasons

1. SETI researchers were passionate about there work.
2. the idea of SETI is inherently romantic insureing some success
   

3. the SETI project was interesting and computationally amenable to distributed processing

Originally the SETI@home was intended more as a proof of concept rather than the finally goal and it popular success surprised even the SETI team.
boinc was a restructuring of the 1st gen SETI@home software and is designed to be much more modular and versatile framework than its predecessor. Because the framework is more versitile the other projects can spend their time writing their specialized software and not re-inventing the wheel.