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How the Thirty Meter Telescope Ruling Will Impact Future Astronomy Projects (forbes.com)
StartsWithABang writes: If you want to explore the Universe, you need a telescope with good light gathering power, a high-quality camera to make the most out of each photon, and a superior observing location, complete with dark skies, clear nights, and still, high-altitude air. There are only a few places on Earth that have all of these qualities consistently, and perhaps the best one is atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii. Yet generations of wrongs have occurred to create the great telescope complex that's up there today, and astronomers continue to lease the land for far less than it's worth despite violating the original contract. That's astronomy as we know it so far, and perhaps the Mauna Kea protests signal a long awaited end to that.
The best place for an optical telescope of that size is, unfortunately, still on the earth.
...Granted, they only got there a few hundred years before Cook...
Is "seventeen" covered by "a few"? The earliest settlement of Hawaii is about that old. There were no "English people" at that time.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
There's a cost trade-off between the expense of a launch, and the expense of building a bigger mirror. That is, for the same price, you can have a really big telescope on land, or a small telescope in space.
Adaptive optics have advanced enough that ground-based telescopes have surpassed Hubble in resolution. The drawbacks of AO are that it's limited in wavelength (different wavelengths get refracted by different amounts by the atmosphere, so you can't simultaneously correct for all of them), it only works for a narrow field of view (so you can't take majestic shots of the entire Orion nebula), and the atmosphere completely blocks certain wavelengths from even reaching the ground making space the ideal place for far infrared or ultraviolet astronomy. If those constraints don't affect the type of astronomy you plan to do with the telescope, then there's little point paying a lot more to launch it into space.
The telescope site is located in a small reserve that, according to an agreement signed in 1960, is the only place on the mountain where telescopes can be built. To get rights to this plot and to the access road leading up to it, the University of Hawaii had to agree to maintain the 11,000 acres around the reserve as a natural and cultural preserve. The protest movement wants to retroactively change the agreement on their own terms and for reasons they have conjured up out of the thin mountain air.
The TMT controversy could mark the same juncture in American history that the end of the Victorian age marked for the British. A nation that had led the world in science and technology reached its high water mark, and began the handover of its scientific patrimony to the next up-and-coming new country. Watch for the TMT to end up on the Qinghai Plateau of southern China, where a site at 5100 m (over 17,000 ft) has already been qualified for large telescopes.
No, the grammar was correct and the correct meaning is also the most literal.
Sloppy readers were easily confused, and clicked "reply" instead of just re-parsing when they hit the "I don't understand that" part. If it sounds absurdly wrong, the first question should always be "did it say what I thought it said?" They should at least do the double-take before deciding it is wrong.
I disagree with the presumed sentiment, but I think it accurately represents the dispute. I would say yes, seventeen is still only a few. They were there for a few years, other people came, and it has been a few years since. And this isn't land that the protesters owned when Hawaii became a State. They're presuming ownership based on race. It is just like if I, as an American, go to France and start complaining that I'm part Gualish and therefore I have a claim to parts of France that my ancestors controlled. That there were "no English people" at the time is hilarious; there were no Hawaiian people in Hawaii yet even after "discovery," because the English spelling had not yet been coined. That is the only sense in which there were not already "English people" seventeen hundred years ago. Somebody go remind the English that the Romans never invaded England, because they hadn't established national unity and agreed on a name yet.
It seems obvious that if the other 12 observatories are going to be allowed to remain, and the University was truly the organization given the responsibility to manage the land, then the University can also build another one. And that is all true, and they can. This is why the people associated with the project were not running around crying, they were just slightly bummed out about the added delay.
The only thing going on here with this ruling is that people made a stink, and the Hawaiian court made a ruling about process. Basically, this is one of those situation where public hearings were held, they were attended by involved parties, and not a single complaint was raised, and so the project sailed through the public comment phase. Then later, when construction began, people started protesting. So the Court is just making them go back and re-do the initial public comment process. There is nothing about the plans that is likely going to be required to be changed, and there is nothing about the process that is being repeated that has a significant chance of derailing the project. It is just a delay. The protesters will now have to attend the re-do public hearings and convince fellow Hawaiians that they don't want to have the awesomest telescope in the world. And then the University will make the decision. Nothing has been raised in the protests that, if true, would change the decision. Some Hawaiians are against all access to people of the wrong races to the mountains, and that has always been the case. But that is unlikely to persuade those others.