First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System Around a Sun-Like Star Captured by ESO
eso.org
eso.org
The other "unknown" is under what conditions can intelligent life evolve? Once you know that window, the Drake equation gets even more interesting.
The notion that we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy seems more and more unlikely.
I mean, we don’t need to look outside our own planet to find traits of what I consider intelligent behavior in other species.
I have a feeling that if we find an alien species it wont be intelligent, simply because we won’t define it as such. They might even have technology we couldn’t even begin to understand, but at the same time they will probably fail at exhibiting something we consider basic. And worse, they will have no way of being taught.
Aside: I suggest in the future—if you want to avoid pedantic comment like these—that you reword your last sentence to include intelligent life on earth, e.g. “The notion that earth is the only planet to harbor intelligent life...”
In casual conversation however, per Gretchen McCulloch's book "Because Internet"[1], I tend to stick with phrases that are most accessible rather than those that are most precise.
My experience is that being overly precise in my speech can be off-putting to people. Enough so, that when I have encouraged feedback, both positive and negative, on my communication skills it came up more than once as "making you seem like you are showing off how much you know about something and making others feel dumb."
[1] Really a great read, my daughter got it for me for my birthday and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I wish we could get past this (finding intelligence offensive while finding physical strength appealing) as a species. But until then it's good advice.
It's also a bit of a double bind: if you're not precise enough, someone will be offended by your ambiguity. If you're too precise, someone will be offended by your precision. It limits the rate at which experts can convey knowledge, which can be problematic at work as teams are limited to the pace of whoever is most offended.
If you want to go all mathematical, that's similar to just sticking a checksum on tcp packets and resending vs the lengths that CD-ROMs go to correct errors.
Or to bring another analogy, compare an interactive proof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_proof_system) with a more conventional formal proof.
As an aside, people do admire intelligence in real life perhaps more so than physical strength, but a minimum of social acumen goes a long way.
File this under 'know your audience'. On HN (and other nerdy and text-based communication) precision is often much more welcome than in oral communication in real life. Even with the same sort of people.
That said, if we are ever able to establish communication with a species other then our own that evolved elsewhere in the galaxy, intelligence might at that point become an outdated concept.
If we do come across extra-terrestrial life (more likely through our telescopes, rather then by paying a visit) it will be even more alien to us then our mushroom cousins. It will have evolved in a planet vastly different from us, it might communicate in a way we can’t even think of. Our technology will have more in common with the ant colonies then with the alien technology.
If we do come across extra-terrestrial life and are able to marvel at their intelligence, then I think it will have more to do with our ability to understand things out of our scope, rather then some absolute and arbitrary metric of intelligence.
Actually, ants are frequently deemed smart and intelligent. Such suppositions are common.
The question that arises though, when we find more and more examples of intelligent behavior across the tree of of life, is intelligence actually that useful of a concept?
Humans have been roughly at their current biological level of intelligence for at least thousands of years. But our ability to detect aliens has increased dramatically. Similar, a slightly more intelligence alien species that's lagging us by a few million years would have a hard time detecting us anytime.
Or, conceivably dolphins and wales might be more intelligent than us. Or you could conceive of a highly intelligent squid like species on another world. Problem is, if their whole world is an ocean, they are going to have a harder time with metallurgy or electricity.
(It's probably not impossible to build up technology under water, but it's probably harder and requires more cleverness and time. And even if it doesn't, because there's an easy way that humans just don't see; there are probably some circumstances that make it much harder. Eg assume a world that's all ice or desert, so it can only sustain a million people instead of billions.)
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Pedantic note on "I suggest in the future": you didn't suggest it in the future. If you want to avoid pedantic comments like these, I suggest you assume good faith and stop being an ass, or, take an English class. Also, Earth, in your usage, is capitalized.
Also can people please stop attacking each others english ability, it is a really bad abelist thing to do. We don’t all come from an educated background, we don’t all have english as our native language. Please try to empathize with those of us that have a harder time using english then you.
In a kind of allergic reaction to this sort of thing, there was a movement in SF that aliens would be likely to be so different from us that we would be unlikely to even recognise them as intelligent. Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is a well known example, and the Pandora sequence by Frank Herbert was interesting. I never quite bought it though, and Nemesis by Isaac Asimov seemed to me to be a particularly lazy example that pretty much put me off the whole idea. (I'm a fan of Asimov, but this one didn't work for me).
On the one had we can look at life on earth to see the huge variety of biological forms that are possible even just on our own planet, with fundamentally the same core biology throughout. On the other hand, any life in our universe is going to be constrained by the same basic principles of chemistry, physics and emergent constraints such as thermodynamics, information theory and natural selection. The problem with most of the efforts at 'truly alien' aliens is they emphasise their alien-ness by showing them violate such principles to show how 'we don't know as much as we think we do'.
I don't buy it. Thermodynamics, natural selection, information theory, etc - we know these things. They're real constraints that any life, anywhere must contend with and they constrain what can or can't work within comprehensible limits. I'm not at all saying that genuine alien life can't be surprising, that we won't learn anything new from it. We learn new stuff form like here on earth all the time. I'm just saying we actually know a pretty decent amount about how the universe works at a basic level and this will give us a decent chance at figuring this stuff out.
That's where I am this this now, but it's a complex issue. I really need to watch Arrival though.
Von Neumann: 1) They arrived too early for us to have a chance of detecting them and they left little trace 2) One or more have arrived recently but they are discrete e.g. no active propulsion, passive sensors, tight beam communication, they only harvest a small amount of material for self-replication etc. 3) We just aren't looking hard enough, space is big and we have limited resources devoted to this pursuit 4) We've observed the activity of a probe but we mistook it for an anomaly or a natural occurrence
Bracewell: 1) Non-self replicating and arrived and left too early 2) Present but not fully autonomous and awaiting confirmation to begin contact (could be a long time waiting depending on distance from home) 3) Present, fully autonomous but we haven't met the criteria to begin contact 4) Present, fully autonomous, has attempted to contact us but we lack the ability to detect and understand their method of communication 5) Present, fully autonomous, has successfully contacted us but whoever was in contact has successfully convinced the probe to not make itself more widely known and has managed to keep their own communication with it a secret (probably the most unlikely scenario but still possible if the probe has protocols for dealing with local geopolitics)
If we're talking about colonization by the alien species itself there are still further explanations for silence:
1) All civilizations capable of reaching us have some equivalent of the "Prime Directive" where they do not forcibly colonize or contact primitive civilizations 2) No civilizations attempt to colonize the entire galaxy, perhaps they all focus on fully utilizing each solar system as they need it, maybe they eventually run out of needs that require expansion. The human population is trending towards replacement level birthrate within the next 100 years, if that is a common trend for all intelligent life then their population may simply stop expanding at some point and after a limited number of systems are colonized they may not have enough population to support further expansion. Maybe birthrates actually trend to 0 and lifespan approaches immortality. 3) Maybe colonizing planets is a dumb idea. Gravity wells are hard to get out of so once your civilization moves to space maybe it just stays in space. We are proposing generation ships as a main method of colonization but if the ship is good enough to live on for generations then why disembark? Why not just continue to live in space habitats and travel the galaxy continuously? Planets are dangerous and unpredictable with uncontrolled weather, volcanism, asteroid impacts, solar flares, etc. If you build a synthetic world you don't need to worry about that. 4) There might be other alternatives, upload to VR, conversion to another form of matter, time travel, alternate universes. These are pretty unlikely but so is the probability that we are the only life to have emerged in such a vast galaxy.
And what would such sings look like? The only conceivable sign that we could observe with our current technology is Dyson spheres. It's however entirely reasonable that intelligent civilizations can advance to quite highly technological levels and not develop Dyson spheres.
If a civilization like ours were to inhabit the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, and zip happily in rockets from one planet to another (of which there are at least 2 confirmed), and beam radio messages back and forth among themselves, would we be able to tell?
I'll start listening to people telling me about missing signs after we have a unified theory of physics that includes an interpretation of QM, quantum gravity with proper explanations for galactic rotation and inflation among other things.
One I find interesting is that we are like a chick pecking away at our egg shell. As we get closer to being multi-planetary do we get to be more or less warlike? Do we settle on one ruling class and everyone else in bonds, or do we settle on a shared bounty? Do we destroy the world that birthed us, or do we come to grips with our own needs and develop what we need to live in perpetuity on the world we started on?
On a much larger scale it doesn't seem all that much different than the growth of a person from child, to teen, to young adult, and adult. And in those stages of growth the perception of the world and one's place in it changes. Some learn self restraint, others do not, Etc. Even before young people start to drive they get to point where doing stupid things can kill them.
The theory I find interesting is that civilizations are out there watching and the history is that some civilizations "grow up" and survive, and others don't. Some do something stupid in their "teen years" and kill themselves off, some develop a personality that results in them doing something that kills them. Some make it through that and become adults with a reasonable understanding and nominal "acceptance" of the things one has to do to stay alive and be civil.
Maybe when we're "old enough" as a civilization, and we certainly will have enough science to understand that other civilizations could exist and how. They will introduce themselves.
Thanks!
I think that if we were truly the only ones out here that would be the best evidence for God..
"The image was captured by blocking the light from the young, Sun-like star (top-left of centre) using a coronagraph, which allows for the fainter planets to be detected. The bright and dark rings we see on the star’s image are optical artefacts."
I got fascinated with the challenges associated with building high precision systems (which has been an ongoing pursuit since the beginning of the industrial revolution that has led to untold scientific and economic wealth). It's not easy. Progress depends on large numbers of people working together across multiple fields to build systems that are often only a few percent better than the previous generation. Sometimes, there are breakthroughs and fields progress rapidly, only to end up stagnated as they reach their theoretical limits or other bottlenecks.
What humans have achieved, over the course of civilization is really quite extraordinary and we shouldn't ignore that what people were doing at the beginning of civilization required precision as well, but the precision depended far more on the physical skills of the artisan, than their ability to use their brain and capital to make highly precise objects.
Two of the most powerful techniques that came from the mastery of precision are interferometry (the process of collecting and combining multiple light waves) and spectroscopy (the process of collecting frequency-resolved photon distributions).
I'm building an alt-az mount for a raspberry pi solar scope at home; it weighs a few pounds. Each of the scopes at ESO (there are 4, allowing them to exploit interferometry to increase their angular resolution) is a building that is an alt-az mount that weighs 350 tons.
> 350 tons
what is the significance of this?
But if I'm reading the paper correctly ([1], table 2) the observed angular resolution -- the FWHM, i.e. the "blurriness" of an assumed point source -- was on the order of 0.05 arcseconds. Given the distance from the Earth to the Moon (about 384,000 km), that would correspond to a resolution of about a hundred meters.
[1]: https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/e...
> The two gas giants orbit their host star at distances of 160 and about 320 times the Earth-Sun distance.
For our purposes, a parsec [pc] is 3 ly, so the host star is at 100 pc. The inner planet is at 160 AU, which we'll round to 100 AU.
So the angular separation is 100 AU / 100 pc = 1 AU/pc = 1 arcsec, and their resolution must exceed this.
And then we have this handy chart:
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/20695/how-big-...
This illustrates that the key issue is not resolution itself. It's contrast, at this high resolution. Because the planet must be distinguished from the host star.
I don't know what the contrast difference here is. For Earth-like exoplanets (smaller targets at 1AU), the contrast difference is 10^10. That is, for every 10 billion photons from the host star, you get one reflected from the exoplanet.
[edited to add: using the link provided by @teraflop, Table 1, column 3 seems to show a contrast of about 10-12 in magnitude units, which is 10^4 to 10^5 in physical units like photons]
Isn't that exeedingly far? Like 10 times farther away from Pluto?
Would we even be able to detect such a planet if it orbited the Sun?
If you look at a star 300 light years away, you just have to search a couple of pixels away from the star.
But if you searched for such a planet at 300 AU from out Sun, you would have a massive amount of space to search throug -- like a massive cilindrical wall of space around the Sun(if it was not exactly on our plane around the Sun).
But in anycase, I was wondering if we had such a planet in our solar system, but obviously cold by now, could we detect it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune
Now, 300 AU is far away, but then, 14 times the mass of jupiter is heavy. But I'm not knowledged enough to do the math here.
On a 2nd thought, maybe not. How long would a year be for a planet that far outside? Maybe several hundred years? We'd need to be in the right window of time to spectate such effects in first place.
On that matter, are there any significant objects (natural or artificial) orbiting way outside the plane of the solar system?
Haley's Comet is inclined at -18 degrees, and is highly elliptic which means that most of the time it is south of the ecliptic plane.
The Kuiper Belt and Scattered Disk have a lot of objects inclined to the ecliptic, you can see a distribution here [0].
This [1] list has some even more inclined objects.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattered_disc#/media/File:The...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#...
From https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/ulysses/the-ulysses-mission:
> Because direct injection into a solar polar orbit from the Earth is not feasible, a gravity-assist is required to achieve a high-inclination orbit. As a result, Ulysses was launched at high speed towards Jupiter in October 1990, after being carried into low-Earth orbit by the space shuttle Discovery. Following the fly-by of Jupiter in February 1992 /3/, the spacecraft is now travelling in an elliptical, Sun-centred orbit inclined at 80.2 degrees to the solar equator.
And I guess the second one was announced in OP, making it a multi-planet system.
The point of this comment is to note that these 2 planets were originally detected by direct imaging, not by other techniques.
Tan^-1[(160/2 Au)/(300 lightyears)] = 2.4×10^-4° for the distance between the inner planet and the star. You can divide this by the pixel length.
With respect to your second question:
Resolution is not tied to do pixel size for this type of measurement. You can resolve an object of any size if it is emitting enough photons.
Is there any upper limit, physically, to this? Would it be possible on paper to design a system that could take pictures of the moon where you could see individual strands of hair on a human?
I'm curious if we might at some point construct enormous arrays of telescopes spanning large (human perspective) sections of space that could give us a window into our galaxy.
Here is a discussion thread with regards to the smallest lunar object visible - seems to be around 350 meter resolution for an earth bound telescope.
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/712653-what-is-the-smalle...
I am imagining some kind of internet enabled telescope that knows it's GPS location and orientation, and phones home it's imagery to a central server. If millions of people bought and used a product like that, is it theoretically possible to see the lunar rover?
TL;DR: for optical wavelengths, with typical image sensors that only detect amplitude and not phase of the electromagnetic wave, you need to do some really hard work to ensure optical coherency. For radio telescopes, it's a lot easier since you measure both amplitude and phase.
Another technique that's a lot easier to accomplish for amateurs is lucky imaging:
there is a limit to how far information can propagate. but with wider and wider scopes we can deal with the wave properties of light and how those waves get wider and wider as you go farther away. (see the inverse square law)
so, we could probably see a human hair on the moon, but the mechanism to do so would be the size of a city like LA or something.
the best way we have to deal with that is actually interferometry. you take measurements of the light wave emitted by a source at several points along it's wave front and infer what the source would look like closer up.
it's very fuzzy but gives us pictures of some very large very far away structures in the universe.
so, maybe if we had enough telescopes pointed at the moon, we could see fine structures like that? but my feeling is that a lot of that information on that scale is just lost from the perspective of each scope, so you really need to capture all of it at a weirdly large scale.
There is a fundamental relationship between wavelength of light and focus-ability/magnification.
You could in principle build an increasingly larger lense to get around the problem, but eventually that hits practical limits.
The parent star is masked off, and I’m pretty sure it’s an image generated from multiple telescopes, “interferometry”, as others have mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
Unclear if they use the auxiliaries as part of the process.
So, there was no need for the planets to pass in front of the star to be detected.
In fact, if you click on the picture in the article, you see two planets and the star quite a distance from each other. Those planets are much further from their star than any of the (known) planets in our own solar system.
(It’s ridiculous that they would publish the image cropped like this.)
Just a guess but perhaps being in the Goldilocks zone the planets are harder to discern from Alpha Centauri.
I figure the technology that blocks the star light may mean this isn't the case though.
As for Proxima, Proxima b orbits at 0.05 UA (which is very close). I don't think we could separate its light from the parent star.
- The filter is ahead us
- There is no filter
- The filter is behind us, but ahead of the other planet
- Both planets have successfully got past the filter
We'll still be debating :). Then we'll go crazy trying find evidence of life in more planets.
- We're one of the first nearby and we're going to help build a filter
The various AI we give birth to over the next two centuries are going to dominate several galaxies. There are many filters - competing standards - throughout the universe, our galaxy doesn't yet have one. Humans will cease to exist as we think of them now, within those two centuries (and not due to climate change or any other similar event).
if we detect life so near to us and _yet_ we still have yet to encounter life from another planet means there's likely still _some_ kind of filter. So I don't think the likelihood of no filter is high if we detect life
The issue is that the universe is extremely old compared to how long it took for earth to develop life. It's ample time for civilizations to develop technologies extremely far more advanced than ours. So why isn't there a single civilization that's so advanced that it builds these things?
So there must be some "filter" that prevents civilizations from doing that, whether they are alive or dead. Maybe they just don't want to, but then ALL of them have to not want to do it, which would be weird.
If we detect life close to us, it makes it more likely that there is tons of life around the galaxy, which makes it more likely that the filter is ahead of us. If we detect no life close to us, it makes it more likely that the filter is past us.
See this Kurzgesagt video about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
I don't know how you square a utterly stupid idea like exponential population growth with the word advanced in advanced civilization. Instead this sounds like blinkered mid twentieth century thinking. Or the old science fiction trope of seeing the future as like the present but more of it.
Isn't is the other way around? I though that the main argument for the filter ahead of us is that we haven't found any civilization, which means civilizations cannot develop past some level at which they can be detected by us. But if we'll have found one, this means that such level of civilization can be passed, and therefore reduces the chances that there is a filter.
It's not my domain, but there are apparently some markers of genetic complexity that give some weight to this theory: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.3381.pdf
This explanation does not work, because of the timescales.
Five thousand years ago, we built the Pyramids. Fifty years ago, we landed on the Moon.
In contrast, it took four billion years to go from single-celled life, to the pyramids.
The odds of us being first by happenstance are astonishingly small. It's much more likely that either we are unique, or that civilizations don't leave much of a trace outside of their solar systems, regardless of whether or not they die out in the blink of a cosmic eye.
You must complete energy collection on current planet for XP to advance to level 2.
Anyways, let's assume life originated at some other planet and it has started life at half of the galaxy at the time it reached earth (so we weren't lucky to be "close" to the origin).
Earth is 4500 million years old, and life is assumed to have existed here since 4400 million years. So intelligent life took 4400 million years to "develop" here on earth. Light speed allows you to colonize the milky way comfortably within a million years. What if it takes 100 million years less on some other planet? Or it took just 10 million years less?
Either earth is very close to the real origin (or has been at the start of life), or the filter is in the past, or some other explanation.
I don't buy it though -- we're in an average planet on an average star, nothing about our environment seems to be particularly rare.
There are a number of Earth's attributes that we don't understand and have poor extra-solar data on. Particularly, the following:
Technically active plates after 4.5 Byrs. Effective magnetic core after 4.5 Byrs. Large amounts of surface water, presumably from our late heavy bombardment. Small enough to leave with a chemical rocket while meeting the above.
Also, at our current tech level, planets are very hard to even observe for existence, let alone their geographical features.
We simply don’t have data to support that claim, and the parameters required to make earth habitable for life (as we know it) are vastly more numerous than most people acknowledge.
So there may be millions of civilizations that can get into orbit with chemical or nuclear rockets, but not a single one that can carry out a megaproject that could be seen from Earth.
I wouldn't call the universe very old. It's only like 13.x billion years old. If you take into account the amount of time it takes for heavier elements to be created, the time for the universe to settle down I'd say we are in the first cohort. It took us 4.5 billion years to evolve and if humanity got wiped out life on Earth would most likely continue on as it has for millions of years before with megafauna.
Looking at how life appeared immediately after the planet cooled down and had liquid oceans most likely indicates abiogenesis is common, multicellular may be much more rare and intelligence probably is exceedingly rare given how expensive big brains are. I just don't think there was enough time in the early universe for intelligent civilizations to have evolved.
according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter):
> So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.[4]
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
We're going to have a hard time dumping enough anything into the atmosphere (or causing some other kind of pollution) to kill ourselves entirely. We'd osculate around an equilibrium where we dump some pollutant into our environment to the point where our population decreases, natural processes remove it and our population increases, wash, rinse, repeat. You can see similar population and resource usage patterns in many ecosystems.
And before anyone tries to twist my words to saying global warming isn't a bad thing, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that humans as a species will likely survive it.
Maybe some other life form could have one after enough time has passed, but we can’t bootstrap ourselves a second time.
(Edit: to be clear, I’m agreeing with you.)
That's probably what someone said in the middle ages when they finished deforesting Scotland.
We still have nuclear. There's an obscene amount of energy in it. It's just not attractive while we still have other "easy" options.
If you know that radioactive isotopes exist, it sounds like steampunk, 1850s, level tech could build a power plant, but perhaps not a bomb.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/57peek/can_y...
I don’t think it’s that hard to build a vessel full of warm radioactive pebbles to boil water.
Sorting ore by chemical element, and then making a fluid / gas / solution of the fuel element to sort by isotope mass in a centrifuge may or may not be doable for “blacksmith” level technology, though. Hard to say.
My point is that we won't go extinct, we'll bounce back and get another try.
>especially if we've extracted all the easy to extract natural resources making
Would you rather hollow out a mountain to mine minerals or dredge through what used to be a major city? We've concentrated all sorts of useful things on earth's surface. If anything the next civilization will have it easy.
>harder for our ancestors to rev back up, or if large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
Large parts of the planet were more or less uninhabitable. The few people who lived in the arctic and the deserts mostly just followed food/water sources. They contributed little to civilization's progress (mostly in the field of astronomy because desert nights and polar winters give you plenty of time to look at the starts) because they didn't have the spare resources to engage in those pursuits because they were too busy surviving. Progress has always come from the places that are easy to live in and therefore have resource surpluses.
For us it's not just CO2 pollution that is a problem, there are many other resources that we are over-utilizing in an unsustainable way. And it seems that we are completely incapable of coordinating as a planet when the sacrifices are large. The hope of the techno-optimists is that technology will save us. It's a high-stakes bet that technology will figure it out before it's too late. Maybe the Great Filter is that when this bet is made across the universe the odds are generally in favor of losing.
My own speculation on the Great Filter is that any intelligent alien civilization is almost certainly a race of social predators that evolved - and thus are in competition for resources.
I worry that competition between individuals and individual states necessarily ends in the destruction of the environment on which they depend and quite likely in direct destruction in war with advanced technology.
Us humans need to find some other paradigm under which to move forward, capitalism and competition, which have brought us such amazing results to date could well also be our undoing.
Also not finding other civilizations wouldn't be a proof that we passed any filter at all, maybe plenty of civilizations have been incredibly successful already, they're just so far beyond our comprehension of the world and consciousness that we can't meaningfully interact with them.
Let's say for the sake of argument that a civilization exists in our nearest neighbor system, Proxima Centauri. Let's assume that it has developed with a similar impact to their system as humans have had to our own -- radio emissions, a handful of interplanetary and interstellar space probes, nuclear tests, etc. Could we detect them? Everything I have read concludes that we currently could not. The concept of being able to receive interstellar TV transmissions is such a sci-fi trope I don't think very many people consider that it is essentially impossible.
But all this doesn’t really matter since you can’t apply frequentist logic in bayesian situation: what we observe is exactly the same as someone in the long tail of distribution would observe, i.e. we can’t distinguish between this being unlikely situation and being first, or this being proof of Great Filter.
Our best chance of survival is finding out about one as soon as possible.
...so the only path remains forward.
Supporters of ethical hedonism hold that the enjoyment of life holds axiomatic value, and life itself is a prerequisite for enjoyment.
I want humanity to reach another galaxy someday.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
If you wanted to minimize sunlight, you'd want to put a telescope at L2 [1], which is in fact where the James Webb Space Telescope will be deployed [2].
It's launch was recently pushed back from March to October of 2021 [3] (or [4] for non paywalled version)
[1] https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/nasa-james-webb-s...
Perhaps for radio astronomy?
Or build it on the far side, near the poles, with a solar array just across the pole -- perhaps that way you could have solar power all year long.
Earth is a source of noise throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, so I think the benefits of building on the far side (eliminating Earth noise), will likely outweigh the costs (limited/more costly bandwidth).
I think a mixed array, consisting of "radio" and "light" telescopes could present very interesting possibilities, especially because you could dynamically allocate sparse sets of the array to different tasks.
All of that being said, I am an engineer (with an interest in array signal processing), not an astronomer.
Edit: I think I misread the table I was looking it, it's more like 2x or 3x instead of 10x, and that assumes a start from LEO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrangian_...