Slashdot Mirror
China Built the World's Largest Telescope, But Has No One To Run It (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: China has built a staggeringly large instrument in the remote southern, mountainous region of the country called the Five hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. The telescope measures nearly twice as large as the closest comparable facility in the world, the US-operated Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. According to the South China Morning Post, the country is looking for a foreigner to run the observatory because no Chinese astronomer has the experience of running a facility of such size and complexity. The Chinese Academy of Sciences began advertising the position in western journals and job postings in May, but so far there have been no qualified applicants. One reason is that the requirements are fairly strict: The candidate must have at least 20 years of previous experience in the field, and he or she must have taken a leading role in large-scale radio telescope project with extensive managerial experience. The candidate must also hold a professorship, or equally senior position, in a world-class research institute or university. Nick Suntzeff, an astronomer at Texas A&M University who helped lead the discovery of dark energy and is involved with construction of the optical Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, said there are probably about 40 or so astronomers in the world who would qualify for such a job. Compared to other astronomy disciplines, radio astronomy is a relatively small field. "I am sure they will find someone," he said. "But most astronomers in the United States do not like to work abroad. It was hard to get people to apply to work in La Serena, something I could never understand, considering how beautiful it is and how nice the Chilean people are." Among the western community of astronomers there are also questions about the scientific purpose of the FAST telescope. As part of a recent National Science Foundation review of its facilities, US officials placed the similar Arecibo radio telescope near the bottom of its priorities list.
Astronomers love to work abroad. See the recent observation campaign for the MU69 flyby which took them to the backcountry of Argentina and South Africa if you need any evidence that they're willing to go out to the middle of nowhere.
The problem is living somewhere remote or hazardous. Nobody but hermits and crazy people want to live near the observatories in South America. China is one of the biggest "political risk" places on Earth.
You need 20+ years of experience to run a telescope that came out recently.
Strict requirements, nobody qualified at home.
If I had to select somebody to run something like this, my first choice would be Bill Nye, without a doubt.
My second choice would be Stephen Hawking.
Automate the whole thing and pay some locals to clean the mirrors occasionally. It's not rocket science.
I believe the issue with the large amount of experience is understanding all the tasks that need to get down from a maintenance perspective.
For comparison, how comfortable would you feel flying on a new plane and the person whom you hired to maintain it is a auto-mechanic. Where to look and what to look for before things become a problem comes only with experience. If the Chinese built something this big, I believe that they don't want to hire some guy to learn on the job, and fix stuff after it gets screwed up.
They should have been apprenticing someone to learn how to take on this task while they were still constructing it, but apprenticeships seem like a dirty word in today's world.
How did such a moronic comment get modded up?
The summary clearly says:
It's not asking for 20+ years of experience with this particular new telescope. It's asking for 20+ years of experience with these kinds of telescopes.
The Arecibo Observatory dates back to the 1960s, for example. That's plenty of time for a number of people to get 20+ years experience in the field.
To give a programming analogy, creimer is being dumb and pretending this is a case of some tech company's HR department requiring "20+ years experience with Ruby on Rails", when clearly what's actually being asked for is "20+ years experience in the field of software development".
Experience in a field is not the same as experience with a specific technology.
It's like this in all sorts of professional fields. Take commercial shipping. The captain of a new supertanker will typically have decades of experience, many of those as a captain of other ships. Nobody, except maybe shit-for-brains creimer, is requiring the captain have decades of experience with the newly-built supertanker. They're requiring decades of experience with commercial shipping operations and captaincy.
Somebody please mod down the totally idiotic comment from creimer.
The full name of the thing is "Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope", and despite being round, it's not even close to being "spherical".
I'm pretty sure they just slapped "Spherical" in there so that the acronym didn't spell FART.
If I had to select somebody to run something like this, my first choice would be Bill Nye, without a doubt.
My second choice would be Stephen Hawking.
Why not Al Gore, he invented the telescope.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"I have the best radio gastronomy skills, believe me! I know more about the stars than Hollywood boulevard and Grassy Tyson combined. When you know stars, they let you grab uranuses, and I've grabbed some yuuuuge uranuses, let me tell ya. It's fake news they were neptunes. Neptune grabbing is for total looosers and I will ban neptune grabbers from serving in the military! We must have quality troops to successfully invade Australia, Germany, and Mar-a-Lago competitors. Make Astrology Great Again!"
Table-ized A.I.
I'd presume it is because people like their friends and families. Picking up and leaving is not terribly easy; even harder if you don't know the language or customs.
What about Jodie Foster? Unlike performer with no science training at al Bill Nye, Jodie Foster was at least in a movie involving radio telescopes.
Once you are there how likely is it that the government would let you leave?
Did it somehow come as a surprise to them that they built this telescope? Wouldn't you think it would have occurred to someone along the way that at some point they needed to turn it on and operate it, and plan accordingly? In fact, the obvious place to look would be the scientists and engineers who developed the design and specified the requirements for the thing in the first place.
Something doesn't smell quite right about this story - either it's wrong/misleading, or it's a ChiCom vanity project that was unplanned from science perspective.
"Build it and they will come" might be an OK premise for a movie but it makes *no* sense for a multi-billion-yuan science project. I have to believe there is something else to this story than is being described, because it's too crazy/irresponsible to be what it seems.
But they only built one, instead of two at twice the price.
Given that it appears that it hasn't had skilled people involved in its design (otherwise I assume they would have been hired on as management) I'm a little doubtful in regards to the quality of its imagery. Something tells me they're trying to bring in outside help because they're having difficulty extracting meaningful science from it.
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
Hundreds of people aren't going to die and the equipment isn't going to be completely destroyed if you make a dumb mistake while managing a radio telescope facility.
They have people and would probably be thrilled at the free access this would give them.
Among the western community of astronomers there are also questions about the scientific purpose of the FAST telescope.
I recall reading something about giant skyscrapers and economic bubbles. The construction of the world's tallest building is usually followed by an economic bubble bursting.
The argument I believe was, very tall skyscrapers are actually not economically efficient, because more and more internal space needs to be taken up with elevators. Also at some point the added cost of building higher and higher becomes greater than the cost of simply buying another lot and making another building there. Therefore whenever you see a new #1 tallest building in the world going up, that's a sign of economic excess and status-seeking ego, rather than an efficient allocation of capital.
Anyways it makes me wonder if this #1 gigantic radio telescope (which western scientists say is not even that useful) is another sign of China's economic bubble about to burst.
I promise I won't blind giant pandas with laser guide stars.. (only because it's a radio telescope otherwise I so would) or reprogram computational apertures to mine bitcoin.
I won't circle a printout of random letters and write "WOW!" next to it nor share decoded alien signals including but not limited to "use weapon" with my fellow Americans.
I promise not to mercilessly poke fun at chinglish speakers or point out all of the perfectly capable Chinese who didn't get the job because they explicitly wanted a foreigner for stature/PR purposes.
Despite the explosion in telescopes, more PhDs than fulltime jobs. Astronomers can easily migrate into tech due to their STEM degree and large data. But that is not what they love.
Looks like the Chinese forgot to plan a key aspect of their project. The normal procedure is to have the scientific team and especially the person heading it lined up in the planning stages, before you start building the instrument. Salary alone would not attract quality senior personnel. Scientist at that career stage are already paid reasonably well. They care more if they can do new science (capabilities of the instrument and the people they manage). They also care a lot about quality of life. On the other hand, with US trying to shut down Green Bank, the Chinese may get lucky.
China should just admit they want Neil deGrasse Tyson
Maybe if their job description included "free speech and uncensored internet for telescope workers and their associates" they'd see more applicants.
But they made up for that by making it twice as big!
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
how long would it take to learn what I need to know for this job? just curious.
China has a tradition of knowledge sharing. You can get a competent Chinese administrator in the position and they would learn on-the-job. There will be some failures, but probably nothing catastrophic. More likely, progress would slow just because of the lack of thorough understanding. On the other hand, you can get someone with the experience to do this from outside the country and then have a few people learn the job as a sort of mentorship. After a few years, China will have all of expertise they need and will be able to teach others in their country the same lessons for similar projects. In the meantime, scientific progress continues at a maximal rate.
Can't someone from the engineering team do it? It isn't like running it will be more complicated than building it in the first place.
Working in China is difficult. All sorts of things we expect in the west aren't allowed. For example, more than 1 banking account. If you are a US citizen, taxes are a HUGE problem, since the USA wants their cut too.
Have a friend working there for 2 years who has never paid any US taxes. He wanted to setup a way to limit theft from his debit card there by having multiple bank accounts and only keeping a small amount of money in the account tied to the debit card. Seems theft of service is common against foreigners there. ...
His computers all have a mandatory Chinese Govt cert installed, so they can have access to all HTTPS traffic.
When he speaks Mandarin, people act like they don't understand - why is anyone's guess. They don't want the hassle (normal big city issue everywhere) or they don't want to help foreigners or
OTOH, if you have a ... how can I say this ... "Asian Fever", perhaps it would be good to move there?
While the summary (and I presume the article) is trying to make it sound like Chinese have stupidly built a mega-expensive giant telescope they have no idea what to do with OR anyone to run it...
What if... naaah... Can't be... Chinese would NEVER think of hiring a talent magnet...
After all... it would only give them LOADS of publicity, access to that scientist's networks and it would poac... I mean draw in the best minds in the field, giving China a boost at the expense of the rest of the world.
Naaah... they'd never think of THAT.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
No greater enemy hath Science than Bill Nye