US opts to not rebuild renowned Puerto Rico telescope | Hacker News Reader

US opts to not rebuild renowned Puerto Rico telescope

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38 pointskentlyons19 comments

"For science, James?"

"No, for budgetary reasons."

I don't know Elon Musk gets out of bed in the morning, having blown $40 billion on Twitter when 1% of that would probably be enough to endow an institution like Arecibo for generations if managed properly.

I'm projecting my own preferences on him, of course, but still. He seemed to be more of a genuine space geek than he turned out to be.

He's in fact the most irresponsible human on Earth, perhaps in all of human history imo. At this pivotal moment, he is wasting tens of billions of dollars on a vanity acquisition because he is profoundly insecure, rather than taking that capital and using it to address some of the pressing threats life on Earth faces now.

If he really gave a shit about "expanding the light of consciousness into the cosmos", he'd be working on ensuring a viable biosphere locally before blowing billions on dopamine clickfarm. As it stands we don't seem likely to have time to establish self-sufficient off-world human presence before we render Earth unable of sustaining much in the way of life or advanced civilization, and as the (second) richest man on Earth, he is uniquely positioned to have a quantitative impact on that outcome. Everyday he wakes up and chooses not to, and people still think he's anything but a mercurial egomaniacal robber-baron, should be considered a coup for his PR staff.

I dunno, that seems a bit over the top. If Musk were inclined to do exactly what you or I would do, he'd never have gotten as far as he has. So the whole question is largely moot.

He's done a lot of good, and could do a lot more, but instead chooses otherwise. It's his money... well, some of it is, anyway. I don't harbor him any ill will for spending it as he sees fit. It's just a bummer, is all.

At least he is not trying to build a 100 mile long linear city in the middle of the desert.

cold comfort

Musk is exchanging some assets and liabilities for other assets, leaving him with a similar balance sheet afterwards. That's not the same thing as "spending" money the way you and I do it.

You could use the same reasoning to buy lottery tickets. That's basically what he's doing, by buying Twitter at a premium.

One of the more memorable 90s 007 action scene venues.

Rest in peace, friend.

If they could not scare up the scratch even to maintain the first one, what are the chances of building a new one? And of them maintaining that one?

That said, the I-35 bridge in Minnesota could have been maintained, but was re-built at ruinous expense. Is the new one now maintained properly? Or does it need less maintenance?

Apparently the old one was built with certain metal plates that were too thin by half, such that had they been of sufficient thickness, the abysmal state of maintenance would not have led to wholesale collapse, and we would today still be using the ill-maintained bridge.

So maybe collapse is a solution, not a problem? Presumably the money to build a new bridge did not come from the same account as what is used or fails to be used for maintaining bridges. Though maybe that account should be drawn down for maintenance, which would seem a radically better use of the money.

The US is in decline. Can it be turned around? Probably not so long as fully half the population is easily persuaded to throw its full-throated support behind an out-and-out grifter for its chief executive office.

Yeah the USA seems to have problems when the entire internet seems to head nod at statements of its impending demise. On the internet, birthed and still largely dominated by firms, tech, and research based and US funded.

People in past decades said Japan was going to overrun the US. Didn’t happen. China and India are themselves floundering in their own ways - but I suspect it’s simply their population having been out moved by their governments. Further, I don’t see people in foreign nations clamoring to mirror the Chinese systems nor to immigrate there. Theirs isn’t a system with widespread appeal. Corporations are learning doing business in China is more likely to get your business nationalized by the CCP than enriched. And of course Russia would be a laughing stock if it didn’t look like a monkey that had just picked up a fully loaded automatic rifle in a filled room.

I think it’s more that the internet has brought a wide recognition of where humanity really is nowadays. And the autocrats are attacking the world with the internet.

Please stop pushing against stability and towards world war.

Being self-critical means world war? If I say I am flawed, I do not mean that others are perfect.. just that I am flawed. This kind of exceptionalism that US can do nothing wrong and even it does something wrong, we should not talk about it since others are worse does not make sense.

> Corporations are learning doing business in China is more likely to get your business nationalized by the CCP than enriched.

I can think of many foreign companies that are doing a massive amount of business in China (VW, GM, Toyota, Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Apple, just to name a few).

I can't think of a single one that's been nationalized.

I think the issue is less that half the population supports Donald Trump's lies and more that half the population supports Reagan's lie. We have a full generation of people now in a party with power that lives by the mantra that "big government doesn't work, I'll show you".

They get into power and dismantle projects, don't provide enough funds, etc and then point to how bad the project is and say a private profit driven company should do it instead.

Well, you're doing a really great job reducing polarization and helping to improve the country by adding your partisan political hate into the mix and denouncing half of your fellow countrymen. Everybody else is the problem though.

Back in the 1990s, I read a book about genomics by an English scientist who, in the introduction, remarked that it was a well-known but little-discussed secret among researchers that it really does help to throw money at a problem.

Regarding profit-driven companies, I worked for GE's Space Division on a big NASA contract back in the early-to-mid-1980s (and it was a great experience). Unfortunately, the defense side of the division was caught cooking the accounting books and the entire division, defense and civil, was barred from bidding on new government projects. Temporarily, of course, but long enough to result in our facility being dissolved after finishing a couple of smaller commercial projects already in the pipeline. (Coincidentally, one of my friends at GE had a master's in astrophysics and had spent a summer or two at Arecibo.)

At about the same time, Rockwell (I believe was the company) was caught charging defense project cost-overruns to its Shuttle contracts. On the plus side, private-sector personnel don't have that "lazy" gene that public-sector personnel have, so, aside from the cheating left and right, we're better off channeling money to the private sector, who are well-known for the superior quality of their goods and services.

It's foolish to use this as evidence that the US is in decline when it was the US the contributed $8-9B and other space agencies <1B to the brand new James Webb Space Telescope. The majority of it was also built in the US.

Why spend money on a terrestrial telescope when there are significant issues with atmospheric distortion and many other sources of interference?

The US could easily rebuild this old telescope if it wanted to, it just doesn't make sense to do it.

Radio telescopes don't care about the atmosphere. And only Arecibo was powerful enough to send messages for SETI, or do radar imaging of solar systen bodies.

So the new bridge is a sign of decline and the under-built bridge that was poorly maintained was a sign of better times?

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