I've pointed out elsewhere how to build a telescope capable of spectrometry on Earth-sized planets hundreds of light-years away. Getting a lot of flak for pointing it out, I should add.
So that's the choice. An obsolete telescope we technically can refuel but probably shouldn't, and a space-based interferometer capable of everything you asked but is utterly rejected and despised by many on Slashdot.
The idea I'm putting forward, and suggested on a discussion site elsewhere, is that you have a mirror manufacturing location. You ship raw materials and parts to it, it builds a mirror and assembles a telescope around it.
This joins a constellation of interferometers, so you can always add one. It's not a fixed system.
If the manufacturing improves, replace the modules for that part of manufacture. If a telescope fails, it doesn't take out the constellation, it only degrades the collecting area.
In principle, since assembly is in space, you could modify in space. Might be useful for fuel, but you're probably better off just adding a new telescope since you can then use them together or in different directions.
The consensus was that this was fully scaleable. You could keep adding telescopes and keep upgrading the design ad infinitum. There was no restriction on such a method and minimal restriction on each telescope.
My only concern with Manua Kea is the attitude I'm seeing from some - advocacy of things they believe will hurt others and which they would normally despise if it weren't for this belief in it causing harm.
There's an abundance of species of lichen in the mountains of Antarctica.
Unless David Attenborough has personally affirmed no life is present, it's safe to conclude it is.
The problem with chaotic systems is that you never know which variables were important. Note "were". You cannot know what the variables are in advance, nor their affect on the biosphere as a whole. You can only know after you make a change that there was zero or non-zero impact.
That doesn't mean do nothing. The precautionary principle doesn't advocate sterile minds or zero progress. It does advocate a little more understanding than is possible, so you modify it.
Considering ignorance to be a harm in its own right and harm to be only meaningful in the long term, always choose the best path of lowest probable aggregate harm.
I don't see the big, bad awful problem with that. A lack of science is a harm, so you cannot ever choose a path of little or no science. At the same time, you actually stop, observe and think about all the other variables. There aren't many, it's a bloody mountain. You perform a minimizing function to get the options of least harm, then a maximizing function on that set to get the option of greatest benefit.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than two sides spending decades screaming at each other.
Bad place to assemble a space telescope. Letting politicians fondle the critical components was stupid. Many of the difficulties were political, not technological. Those aren't optical mirrors, materials and wavelength matter.
You're much better off making the mirrors in space. It's not hard, as virtually all the technology being used to make large mirrors try to simulate the conditions of space.
There is life even in deep Antarctica. Unless you can show David Attenborough conclusively showing no life there, there's life there.
We could build a three hundred metre telescope in space today. Gentlemen, we can build it. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first optical interferometer.
In all seriousness, it's child's play in terms of the science and technology. Ship some glass into space, melt it, cool it in roughly the right shape, we know microgravity forms purer crystalline structures so we've fewer defects than we could ever achieve on Earth, we can then use machines not impeded by either air turbulence or ground vibration to actually grind and polish.
That last bit is simulated on Earth. It's how large mirrors are made. They simulate space. So we already have all that experience and hardware.
Because you're not transporting a mirror to space, you've no problems with size restrictions or damage caused by launch.
The rest is assembly. There's probably not much more dust in space than in a clean room, so once the parts are packed up and shipped, the difference is that you're not competing with gravity over where the parts go.
The ISS has limited lifespan for science and America wants out anyway. Converting the American wing to a space telescope manufacturing facility requires a couple of modules for mirror manufacture and not much more.
That could all be set up within Trump's first term in office.
Less time than it would take to get the politics sorted out in Hawaii.
Take the glass into space, then melt it. In space, you can get the purity higher and the defect density lower, so creating the mirror on Earth is stupid and limiting. You can get the crude shape easily enough by any number of means.
You can then grind and polish by machine, and machines work better when they're not competing with vibrations from mini quakes. You can use a mathematical model for the template.
You now have a mirror. You can have a mirror factory in space pump out mirrors at whatever rate you like. Have it as a module on the ISS, if you want. Then you just send up the parts for the rest of the telescope and have an engineering crew do the assembly work.
Once ISS is abandoned for science, why not?
There's nothing hard here. Expensive, as it would require three rockets per telescope to get everything up, but SpaceX has made it affordable.
And if you're building an interferometer - which they could and possibly have - then no, thirteen "isn't enough" because however many you have, you essentially only have one. One that has the collecting area of all the mirrors combined and the mirror size the maximum distance between any two mirror edges. A telescope more powerful than you could imagine.
The real objection is that the mountain simply isn't big enough to do a good enough job and you still have atmospheric effects.
What you want is something like this using optical telescopes in space. Collecting area one square kilometre, virtual mirror 3000 kilometres across.
With that, you could map every asteroid larger than a thimble in a matter of months, discover the atmospheric chemistry and weather patterns of every planet in a hundred light years and plot the exact 3D location of every star in the Andromeda galaxy.
Ok, it would cost a bit more, but as the consensus amongst the right is that taking from others in the name of science is fine for Kea, I must assume they've no problems with the Feds taking everything past the first five million from the rich. It's just religion after that and we're all agreed that religion has no value. What's wrong with taking nothing?
It has enormous value for humanity, and science is the enemy of most of the industrial complex, which is why the right hate science and the left distrust industry.
Then build in space. You'll see asteroids a lot clearer from there, as Arthur C Clarke pointed out more than once. You'll also be able to see them from more directions, since a telescope in Hawaii loses the benefits of a thin atmosphere when trying to look near the horizon.
Astronomers? They would prefer a thirty meter telescope in space, where there's less atmospheric distortion. A square kilometre optical interferometer in space would be heavenly.
For Hawaii? Degrades the environment and biodiversity. Expect unintended consequences.
For the inhabitants? I doubt you'd want a 200' skyscraper obscuring your primary view, either.
For the lawyers? Yes, they're a lot richer and happier now, thank you.
How is this rational? You know as well as I do, almost all scientists are deeply left-wing. You've just created a huge base of operations for the left.
Then nobody's land is disturbed, there's even less atmospheric distortion and you can move the telescope to point in any direction you like from any point in space you like.
Yes, it's more expensive, but the chief argument on this site for the ground telescope is that science should be done even when the ignorant object or when it affects their religious quality of life or involves taking things those people consider theirs.
I've no problems with that. Most rich people are ignorant, they consider money theirs, and money gives them a religious quality of life rather than a practical one.
Bet you ten boxes of doughnuts that right wingers will suddenly discover reasons why government would be bad for taking away their property, or for applying any of their other reasoning to them.
Mind you, I don't think that should matter. I think they should build a series of 30' telescopes in space, with interferometry. Not just in the optical range, but in other parts of the spectrum from microwave to UV.
A ten by ten interferometer would have the sensitivity to observe the surface of Proxima b. That's far more useful than a third swimming pool in a desert or a dozen McMansions nobody lives in. Give me the science.
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.
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.
The best place to build a telescope is in space. But you won't spend the money. Spoils your view, against your religion, etc.
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.
Add up the retail cost of the components. The real cost will be 1% of this.
Let's look at this logically, though. Designing the board costs a lot more than etching it. You don't need gigabytes of RAM. You don't need expansion slots. These are the expensive components in a computer and they're all missing.
Even if we assume embedded costs $300 retail and 50% markup per layer of sales, you're looking at $75 for a set-top box.
The cost of government is irrelevant. It's what you get.
If you get free health, free mental health, cheap fast mass transit, prisons that don't create criminals, free education and a police force that tackles crime rather than causes it, it's worth more than a government that does none of the above.
Cheap government advocates shut up when I point this out.
In bulk, assume 1% of those costs. Mass production versus one-off. Not even wholesale, no middleman. No seller's costs to eBay. Transport covers thousands or tens of thousands, so divide by same to get what is added for each.
And those PSUs are most certainly cheap. They have a short MTBF because they pull a Sinclair.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not disagreeing with that.
I've pointed out elsewhere how to build a telescope capable of spectrometry on Earth-sized planets hundreds of light-years away. Getting a lot of flak for pointing it out, I should add.
So that's the choice. An obsolete telescope we technically can refuel but probably shouldn't, and a space-based interferometer capable of everything you asked but is utterly rejected and despised by many on Slashdot.
You'll find most of Scotland was clear-cut in the Iron Age, not the Bronze Age.
You don't need one, agreed, but labs used to make 30m mirrors simulate space and making glass in space leads to higher quality glass.
Since the antagonist has offered to pay for a 30m space telescope, I'd take them up on the offer.
The idea I'm putting forward, and suggested on a discussion site elsewhere, is that you have a mirror manufacturing location. You ship raw materials and parts to it, it builds a mirror and assembles a telescope around it.
This joins a constellation of interferometers, so you can always add one. It's not a fixed system.
If the manufacturing improves, replace the modules for that part of manufacture. If a telescope fails, it doesn't take out the constellation, it only degrades the collecting area.
In principle, since assembly is in space, you could modify in space. Might be useful for fuel, but you're probably better off just adding a new telescope since you can then use them together or in different directions.
The consensus was that this was fully scaleable. You could keep adding telescopes and keep upgrading the design ad infinitum. There was no restriction on such a method and minimal restriction on each telescope.
My only concern with Manua Kea is the attitude I'm seeing from some - advocacy of things they believe will hurt others and which they would normally despise if it weren't for this belief in it causing harm.
There's an abundance of species of lichen in the mountains of Antarctica.
Unless David Attenborough has personally affirmed no life is present, it's safe to conclude it is.
The problem with chaotic systems is that you never know which variables were important. Note "were". You cannot know what the variables are in advance, nor their affect on the biosphere as a whole. You can only know after you make a change that there was zero or non-zero impact.
That doesn't mean do nothing. The precautionary principle doesn't advocate sterile minds or zero progress. It does advocate a little more understanding than is possible, so you modify it.
Considering ignorance to be a harm in its own right and harm to be only meaningful in the long term, always choose the best path of lowest probable aggregate harm.
I don't see the big, bad awful problem with that. A lack of science is a harm, so you cannot ever choose a path of little or no science. At the same time, you actually stop, observe and think about all the other variables. There aren't many, it's a bloody mountain. You perform a minimizing function to get the options of least harm, then a maximizing function on that set to get the option of greatest benefit.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than two sides spending decades screaming at each other.
Bad place to assemble a space telescope. Letting politicians fondle the critical components was stupid. Many of the difficulties were political, not technological. Those aren't optical mirrors, materials and wavelength matter.
You're much better off making the mirrors in space. It's not hard, as virtually all the technology being used to make large mirrors try to simulate the conditions of space.
There is life even in deep Antarctica. Unless you can show David Attenborough conclusively showing no life there, there's life there.
Her singing is NOT robotic, thank you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We could build a three hundred metre telescope in space today. Gentlemen, we can build it. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first optical interferometer.
In all seriousness, it's child's play in terms of the science and technology. Ship some glass into space, melt it, cool it in roughly the right shape, we know microgravity forms purer crystalline structures so we've fewer defects than we could ever achieve on Earth, we can then use machines not impeded by either air turbulence or ground vibration to actually grind and polish.
That last bit is simulated on Earth. It's how large mirrors are made. They simulate space. So we already have all that experience and hardware.
Because you're not transporting a mirror to space, you've no problems with size restrictions or damage caused by launch.
The rest is assembly. There's probably not much more dust in space than in a clean room, so once the parts are packed up and shipped, the difference is that you're not competing with gravity over where the parts go.
The ISS has limited lifespan for science and America wants out anyway. Converting the American wing to a space telescope manufacturing facility requires a couple of modules for mirror manufacture and not much more.
That could all be set up within Trump's first term in office.
Less time than it would take to get the politics sorted out in Hawaii.
Very easy to get a 30 metre space telescope.
Take the glass into space, then melt it. In space, you can get the purity higher and the defect density lower, so creating the mirror on Earth is stupid and limiting. You can get the crude shape easily enough by any number of means.
You can then grind and polish by machine, and machines work better when they're not competing with vibrations from mini quakes. You can use a mathematical model for the template.
You now have a mirror. You can have a mirror factory in space pump out mirrors at whatever rate you like. Have it as a module on the ISS, if you want. Then you just send up the parts for the rest of the telescope and have an engineering crew do the assembly work.
Once ISS is abandoned for science, why not?
There's nothing hard here. Expensive, as it would require three rockets per telescope to get everything up, but SpaceX has made it affordable.
Telescope science advances.
And if you're building an interferometer - which they could and possibly have - then no, thirteen "isn't enough" because however many you have, you essentially only have one. One that has the collecting area of all the mirrors combined and the mirror size the maximum distance between any two mirror edges. A telescope more powerful than you could imagine.
The real objection is that the mountain simply isn't big enough to do a good enough job and you still have atmospheric effects.
What you want is something like this using optical telescopes in space. Collecting area one square kilometre, virtual mirror 3000 kilometres across.
With that, you could map every asteroid larger than a thimble in a matter of months, discover the atmospheric chemistry and weather patterns of every planet in a hundred light years and plot the exact 3D location of every star in the Andromeda galaxy.
Ok, it would cost a bit more, but as the consensus amongst the right is that taking from others in the name of science is fine for Kea, I must assume they've no problems with the Feds taking everything past the first five million from the rich. It's just religion after that and we're all agreed that religion has no value. What's wrong with taking nothing?
It has enormous value for humanity, and science is the enemy of most of the industrial complex, which is why the right hate science and the left distrust industry.
Then build in space. You'll see asteroids a lot clearer from there, as Arthur C Clarke pointed out more than once. You'll also be able to see them from more directions, since a telescope in Hawaii loses the benefits of a thin atmosphere when trying to look near the horizon.
For whom?
Astronomers? They would prefer a thirty meter telescope in space, where there's less atmospheric distortion. A square kilometre optical interferometer in space would be heavenly.
For Hawaii? Degrades the environment and biodiversity. Expect unintended consequences.
For the inhabitants? I doubt you'd want a 200' skyscraper obscuring your primary view, either.
For the lawyers? Yes, they're a lot richer and happier now, thank you.
How is this rational? You know as well as I do, almost all scientists are deeply left-wing. You've just created a huge base of operations for the left.
Then nobody's land is disturbed, there's even less atmospheric distortion and you can move the telescope to point in any direction you like from any point in space you like.
Yes, it's more expensive, but the chief argument on this site for the ground telescope is that science should be done even when the ignorant object or when it affects their religious quality of life or involves taking things those people consider theirs.
I've no problems with that. Most rich people are ignorant, they consider money theirs, and money gives them a religious quality of life rather than a practical one.
Bet you ten boxes of doughnuts that right wingers will suddenly discover reasons why government would be bad for taking away their property, or for applying any of their other reasoning to them.
Mind you, I don't think that should matter. I think they should build a series of 30' telescopes in space, with interferometry. Not just in the optical range, but in other parts of the spectrum from microwave to UV.
A ten by ten interferometer would have the sensitivity to observe the surface of Proxima b. That's far more useful than a third swimming pool in a desert or a dozen McMansions nobody lives in. Give me the science.
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.
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.
The best place to build a telescope is in space. But you won't spend the money. Spoils your view, against your religion, etc.
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.
They could slowly spiral it into the sun, or they could use the fact that it has to reflect a lot of light to slowly push it into an outward spiral.
A DSV-1 with suitable payload could get there.
NASA's estimate for such a journey is 16-20 years.
Such a probe could return in a viable length of time. Easier than transmitting data 4.1 light years and you'd get better bandwidth.
Congress wouldn't pay for manned space flight.
Correction, to the manufacturer that would be $38.
Add up the retail cost of the components. The real cost will be 1% of this.
Let's look at this logically, though. Designing the board costs a lot more than etching it. You don't need gigabytes of RAM. You don't need expansion slots. These are the expensive components in a computer and they're all missing.
Even if we assume embedded costs $300 retail and 50% markup per layer of sales, you're looking at $75 for a set-top box.
I thought it meant the market drove him to the magic tree cash dispensor.
The cost of government is irrelevant. It's what you get.
If you get free health, free mental health, cheap fast mass transit, prisons that don't create criminals, free education and a police force that tackles crime rather than causes it, it's worth more than a government that does none of the above.
Cheap government advocates shut up when I point this out.
Thought it was $6.66 - you saying they lied to me?
Per unit.
In bulk, assume 1% of those costs. Mass production versus one-off. Not even wholesale, no middleman. No seller's costs to eBay. Transport covers thousands or tens of thousands, so divide by same to get what is added for each.
And those PSUs are most certainly cheap. They have a short MTBF because they pull a Sinclair.