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Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

> But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run.

Infrastructure can also be maintained and last longer than this, which is why I'm personally sad. Had Arecibo always had the ~60 year timeline, it would've been a bittersweet retirement, like Voyager. In this case I just feel like it's gone before it should. Arecibo has been receiving reduced funding since the early 2000s [1].

The end of an era, although thankfully not of science mega-projects. There's still plenty of cool ones operating or under construction.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_co...

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It really depends on the structure. Giant steel objects are much harder to keep intact, to the point where non iconic objects are easier to replace once than maintain for 100+ years.

Giant steel objects are much harder to keep intact, to the point where non iconic objects are easier to replace once than maintain for 100+ years.

What about the Eiffel Tower? Or Blackpool Tower. That proves it can be done.

Those are iconic. The difference between being possible and being cost effective.

Those are both made of iron.

So they're iconic and ironic.

The word is actually "ferrous", but, yeah.

Steel is iron, with a carbon content somewhere in the range of about 0.25% to 2%.

No, steel is an alloy of iron, carbon, and other trace elements. Saying that "Steel is iron" is like saying "Bronze is copper".

It isn't, but that's beside the point, which is that there's little enough difference between iron and steel that the Eiffel and Blackpool towers being made of wrought iron doesn't prevent them demonstrating that large structures engineered in steel are quite possible to maintain given the requisite investment in actually doing the maintenance.

(Saying that, for example, 300-series stainless, around 30-40% chromium and nickel, "is iron", could be fairly criticized this way. Mild steel not so much, and that was what I really had in mind with the statement, although I concede I didn't say so.)

I think the skyscrapers in NYC would beg to differ. But there is regular maintenance on those. Which is why this sounds like more like a failure in due diligence than the natural course of affairs.

But if it is obsolete, then that is another matter.

Steel exposed to the weather is an entirely different story from steel inside a structure.

Like the (iconic) Sydney Harbour Bridge which requires continuous repainting. It’s very expensive to maintain.

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/ag-blog/2013/1...

Constant painting is also a sign of efficiency.

Rather than a large number of people painting it for a small period of time, which requires a startup and close down overhead; they have instead resourced it so that they can keep a small number of people employed permenantly who accumulate expertise and minimise the mobilisations costs.

Now I really want to know what it's like working on the team that repaints the bridge for years or decades on end.

Probably not to different from refactoring the same CRUD applications over and over to keep up with with the other poor bastards who had to do it first.

Except you get exercise and fresh air.

That’s a pretty bad analogy because you don’t refactor for maintenance. A better equivalent would be swapping out hard drives in a major storage system or servers in a data center on the scale of Google. It’s mind numbing work but it’s better than many other “pick and place” style manual labor. At least with painting a bridge the scenery is better although the temperature is more harsh.

For the Golden Gate Bridge - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-15/the-never...

Agreed, but it is still more expensive in terms of direct costs than ‘do nothing’ which seems to be the case for the telescope.

Whoever downvoted me, thanks a bunch. Not sure why.

Running a team of painters still costs more than nothing. The cost of painting doesn’t cover the cost of ongoing inspections for metal fatigue etc etc. Engineering reviews, government oversight and so on.

Large bridges, especially with vehicle traffic, vibrate quite a lot and this is causes major ongoing concerns with fatigue, which means extensive monitoring along with the painting. More costs (not saying it’s unjustified).

Keeping a team going is efficient as you say, but more expensive than nothing.

Telescopes are not typically "do nothing. I am not aware of the details of Arecibo, but the big telescope in Greenbank has a paint crew work for 8 hours a day for multiple weeks each summer. And after several years the entire telescope is repainted and they start all over from the beginning. During the day time hours when the paint crew the is working the telescope can not be moved to point at objects, but is still taking data in the form of drift scans, recording whatever passes through the field of view of the telescope. A whole bunch of pulsars has been found that way.

To clarify, I only meant that the telescope has not been maintained (do nothing) lately as per the article. My fault for not writing more clearly.

As you say, it would be a lot of work to maintain if they wanted to keep Arecibo running.

Paint is preventative maintenance. It's a lot cheaper in the long run than not painting at all.

For those that don't know, paint should be considered a non-optional component of most iron or steel objects, since paint serves the important role of preventing rust formation. It's less important in most uses of aluminum, since aluminum oxide tends to form a protective layer instead of flaking away.

"Painting the Forth Bridge" is an expression in these parts describing a never ending task. However, with better pain this is apparently not the case anymore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge#Maintenance

Another example of continuous painting is the Golden Gate bridge https://www.goldengate.org/bridge/bridge-maintenance/paintin...

Not really - steel boats easily last 100 years. A friend of mine lives in one from around 1940 and the steel is in fine shape. As long as it's properly maintained there's no problem.

Yet, Modern ships have a lifespan of 25 to 30 years before corrosion, metal fatigue and a lack of parts render them uneconomical to operate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_breaking

With smaller boats labor is a higher fraction of construction costs vs raw materials. Going big results in massive increases in efficiency which almost paradoxically shift things to a shorter ship lifespan.

Wouldn't it be infinitely cheaper to replace all the cables/fixtures and simply rebuild it? Or have the funders simply lost interest in it?

Is a GoFundMe campaign outside of the realm of possibility? I know that I'd contribute to such a worthy effort, but only if the rest of the players would pledge to fund current operations.

> Is a GoFundMe campaign outside of the realm of possibility? I know that I'd contribute to such a worthy effort, but only if the rest of the players would pledge to fund current operations.

The biggest GoFundMe campaign according to Wikipedia only raised $25 million in 2020 dollars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe#Notable_projects, Bannon's et al's fraudulent We Build the Wall project). Arecibo cost $9.3 million to build in 1963 dollars (https://ethw.org/Milestones:NAIC/Arecibo_Radiotelescope,_196...), which is about $80 million in 2020 dollars. Even after one-time construction costs, millions in ongoing operating costs and maintenance would be required as well.

So, no, a GoFundMe campaign to rebuild it is not a possibility. Even hot-button political issues can't get close to the needed funds, and this is not ever going to be a hot-button issue.

Wikipedia itself raises more than $120 million per year. I don't think a telescope could attract as much in donations as Wikipedia, but it is interesting to see how high could donations possibly go.

The only reason Wikipedia can do that is because it's at the top of 50% of all Google search results. Constant epic scale exposure that Wikipedia has been able to use to push for donations (and further to build up a routine of it, an understanding of how Wikipedia operates, to millions of people). Realistically Arecibo has nothing like that to leverage. Donating to Wikipedia is a value to action instant feedback process: you land on a nice and helpful Wikipedia page, you derive value, you give some value back; again, Arecibo can't offer that kind of in the moment, click of a mouse, value-donation gratification to large numbers of donors. Arecibo's donor pool is mostly the Paul Allens of the world.

TLAs have lots of money.

It would be way more expensive then that. You can't just inflation adjust.

Construction has a lot more costs these days - have to take care of the environment, not kill your workers...

Arecibo was in full operation before the cables broke. If you replace all the cables and hardware and reassemble it shouldn't cost anywhere near $80 million cause you're not starting from scratch.

Assuming the people supplying the operational funding want to continue to do so it shouldn't take more than low millions to get it going again.

Unfortunately, I think the article is saying that the telescope is now at a point where decommissioning it in a controlled manner is the only safe option.

The story states that there is belief that the work itself could trigger another collapse putting those doing the work at risk.

Do you have a list or link to any mega projects you are currently excited about?

Starshade is a crazy concept that could do more for the search for life than any previous approach by allowing us to block out a star to directly view its planets.

https://youtu.be/-jA2ABHBc6Y?t=3652

Non-youtube link. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/1015/flower-power-nasa...

Three that sound pretty exciting to me are ITER [1], the Extremely Large Telescope [2] and the James Webb Space Telescope. I'm sure there is also more I haven't heard of yet!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope

James Webb is the one I worry about the most. ITER has a taken a long time, but they're making steady forward progress with it.

Whereas I live in fear that James Webb will suffer a failure during launch or deployment that just turns it into a very expensive explosion.

I agree. Or even if nothing explodes, I'm worried that during the unfolding something will break or get stuck and, and unlike Hubble it won't be "easily" repairable (if at all). Hopefully this doesn't happen, because it is a once-in-many-decades project.

Roman Space Telescope, LISA.

[1] https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

[2] https://lisa.nasa.gov/ , https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/LISA

I didn't know about these two. Thanks for sharing!

I'm sad as well. I was lucky to visit the site 2006.

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