Slashdot Mirror
Hawaii Supreme Court Approves Thirty Meter Telescope On Mauna Kea (hawaiinewsnow.com)
Applehu Akbar shares a report from Hawaii News Now: After years of legal wrangling and protests, the Thirty Meter Telescope got a green light Tuesday from the state Supreme Court. In a 4-to-1 decision, the state's highest court ruled in favor of the telescope's construction atop Mauna Kea, effectively ending all legal avenues for contesting the controversial project unless the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the case. In a statement, TMT International Observatory Board of Governors Chairman Henry Yang said the body is "grateful" for the ruling and "committed to being good stewards on the mountain."
Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar adds: "Green anti-science organizations, such as Deep Green Resistance and Sierra Club, have been trying to stop TMT construction for years, in an expanded version of an earlier campaign to halt the construction of large research telescopes in southeastern Arizona. As in Arizona, their excuse was at first endangered species on the construction site, and subsequently native rights.
"TMT is an advanced world-class telescope designed to investigate and answer some of the most fundamental questions regarding our universe, including the formation of stars and galaxies after the Big Bang and how the universe evolved to its present form. Native Hawaiians will also be included in other direct benefits from the TMT," the court wrote. "Thus, use of the land by TMT is consistent with conservation and in furtherance of the self-sufficiency of the state."
"TMT is an advanced world-class telescope designed to investigate and answer some of the most fundamental questions regarding our universe, including the formation of stars and galaxies after the Big Bang and how the universe evolved to its present form. Native Hawaiians will also be included in other direct benefits from the TMT," the court wrote. "Thus, use of the land by TMT is consistent with conservation and in furtherance of the self-sufficiency of the state."
Here is the smoking gun, their manifesto on TMT:
https://deepgreenresistancegre...
The author of this piece, Will Falk, has been one of the earliest organizers of the protest movement in Hawaii, whipping up a native uprising against "Western science." Until the Greens got involved, Hawaiians had a long and peaceful relationship with research science, astronomy in particular. Their ancestors constructed star maps to navigate the Pacific, and King Kamehameha himself was an astronomy buff.
The whole summit of mauna Kea is a 114,000 - acre nature preserve administered by University of Hawaii. Within that preserve, a 52-acre patch near the summit was set aside for astronomy in 1960. The TMT would be the latest of about 13 telescopes that have been built in this area. It is the first one to become controversial.
You mean the Trump who wants to make a Space Force to proactively protect the Earth from asteroids - vs the green party who want to halt all progress and the left in general who want to defend the "rights" of native Hawaiians who don't even live/work anywhere near the peak of this volcano while telling the rest of the world "doesn't matter if it's the best place in literally the whole planet to build a telescope, because some politically correct garbage."
I wouldn't call them anti-science so much as anti-progress of any type.
Indeed: they are anti-science because they are anti-progress.
It blows my mind that such people can thing of themselves as "green". Bronze-age farmers clear-cut forests for farmland everywhere they lived. E.g., the Scottish highlands used to be heavily forested, but were almost entirely clear-cut. Meanwhile, thanks to progress, US forested area increased dramatically in the last hundred years. Even though it's a mix worldwide (third world nations are still clear-cutting in some places), worldwide forest corverage has increased more than 7% since the 1980s.
Progress makes life better. That's why we call it progress.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Of course, your views assume that it's someone else who is affected. Soon as it's you, you get your friends to storm the nearest wildlife sanctuary in order to teach the Feds a lesson, like those Texans did.
So you're comparing a scientific endevour the whole species benefits from and a few people are pissed off about because they're racist as fuck and hate outsiders (but it's OK, they get a pass because they aren't white,) to a situation where hundreds of people worked land over generations and still actively use it but were being sold out by a corrupt politician who wanted to sell land to Chinese investors? Those two things are in no way shape or form related, and it really goes to show your bias that you even believe they could be.
Do you know where the Hawiians live or work? I don't and I've followed the story. I can be absolutely certain you know even less.
Lived there for years, actually. Native Hawaiians are easily the most racist and xenophobic demographic in the US, by a very wide margin.
The best place to build a telescope is in space. But you won't spend the money. Spoils your view, against your religion, etc.
Good luck getting a 30m telescope into space with modern technology.
You know, if it's an FU for the Hawaiians, it should be an FU for you too. Build in space a telescope of equal size. The government should take what it damn well pleases from you to build the telescope there. After all, you don't live or work there and it's the best place. Hey, your arguments. Not my problem.
The government isn't taking shit from them: they don't use it. It is literally the single best place on Earth to build a telescope, they don't get squatters rights on such a precious resource they don't even have any intention of using.
A technical heads up. Not only are ground based telescopes many magnitudes cheaper than space based ones (and offer the ability to combine to synthesize larger aperture) they have actually overtaken Hubble in their individual resolution. Agreed the atmosphere prevents wide band infra red capability which is why the next space telescope the James Webb is an infrared telescope. The technical advance which has led to the giant leap in ground based telescope capability is adaptive optics. This uses a laser pointing star and a deformable mirror to eliminate atmospheric turbulence on the largest and best located ground telescopes. See this great lecture from yesterday for example on the state of the art from The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series by Dr. Claire Max (University of California Observatories)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The comparison of the features on Neptune between the Keck 10M and the Hubble 2.4M thirteen minutes in makes this abundantly clear.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
There's no quality of life at issue here. The location for the TMT is at the summit of a volcano. There's nothing there except the already-existing observatory to which this would just be an addition. No one lives there, unless staff or scientists are pulling "all nighters" (Or, would it be "all dayers" considering that astronomers need to be nocturnal to take direct observations?). It's above the tree-line, so any ecosystem disruptions would be negligible; and all but certainly already accounted for in the EIR. There's literally zero quantifiable negative impact to *ANYONE* from having the telescopes there, and a very real *positive* impact from the science done there. The "opposition" to the TMT is basically just a shake-down, nothing more.
Imagine all the people...
You’ve never visited the mountain, I’m thinking. I have, back when the very first telescopes were being built in the astronomy reserve area.
NIMBY doesn’t come into play at all her because nobody lives on Mauna Kea. The mountain is a desolate expanse of red cinder where no one lives. No one even lived there in pre-American times either, because the ali’i, the one-percenters of the Bronze Age world, reserved it for their rituals. Commoner Kanaka were punished by death for so much as visiting the place.
Today the upper part of the mountain is a specially designated natural preserve where every identified heiau (altar) of the ali’i are protected, as is every natural species that has been identified there, down to the humble wekiu bug. All of the telescopes occupy the small reserve within this area that has been approved since 1960 as non-infringing on culture or nature.