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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

So now, humans are going to be the intergalactic assholes of the universe who go and change their phone number without leaving a forwarding number. When our message sent from Arecibo is finally received, their response will go to a disconnected number. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BVbyCZXc5s

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"now" is doing a lot of work here... If I'm not mistaken, we have about a millennium or a hundred make arrangements.

the lack of interest in funding Arecibo at a level to even do maintenance to prevent this from happening suggests we won't bother within that millennium you are allowing.

Would normal maintenance have prevented this? My understanding from the initial reports is that they were unable to identify any flaw or anomaly in the steel cable that snapped that would have indicated the problem ahead of time, and that it simply wasn't designed to tolerate a failure of that nature. Sounds like a freak accident to me.

Overall it's quite a bright time for (radio) astronomy. The number of telescopes and sensing ability only increases with time. Just this year alone, a large clone of Arecibo, FAST, just became fully operational. Other telescopes like the SKA are still in construction. In the future decades, we'll likely build even more and even larger telescopes.

FAST is not a clone. It is a very big and powerful dish, but Arecibo could do things that FAST cannot (radar astronomy). Just like particle accelerators, no two telescopes are ever identical in capabilities/missions.

FASTs other difference is location: China. The community of people who would work at Arecibo is probably very different than the community that will work at FAST.

The Arecibo message was sent out 46 years ago, in 1974 [1]. We'd only miss responses from potential respondents who are between 23 and (23 + (time to build replacement / 2)) light-years away.

Fortunately, the message was sent to globular cluster M13, which is 22,000 light years away. As long as we get it done by the 47th millenium AD we should be fine.

Unfortunately, applying Parkinson's law to that task means we've got a lot of work to do!

[1] Side note: It somehow never ceases to amaze me how very year, my mental shortcut for approximating the number of years since a given date by subtracting it from 2000 gets less and less accurate.

>[1] Side note: It somehow never ceases to amaze me how very year, my mental shortcut for approximating the number of years since a given date by subtracting it from 2000 gets less and less accurate.

Remember when partying like it was 1999 was something to achieve? The one that gets me every year is my graduation date from high school gets further away. It is now more easily measured in decades.

>> Fortunately, the message was sent to globular cluster M13, which is 22,000 light years away.

Unfortunately, the message was aimed at where M13 appears to us today. By the time the message gets there it will have moved. The message was, is, doomed to miss.

That's an evocative way of writing, but I'm sure you know that Arecibo doesn't usually spend much time pointed in that direction, so there's no actual practical difference.

I may have read too much Douglas Adams. Also, Arecibo doesn't spend anytime looking anywhere now.

Aricebo isn't the only radio telescope. The message is already sent, we have other installations that can listen.

Humans have an incredible way of elevating their universal importance to hold the conviction that an alien species capable of receiving such a message and actionably responding would have any desire to do so, let alone that the loss of one observatory would leave the species thinking that they were being ghosted and that humans are assholes. We're really nothing more than flatlanders at this point and we need to work on our humility toward the situation.

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