A new era for Arecibo
nature.com
nature.com
> Arecibo’s prowess at astronomy was a source of pride in Puerto Rico, and many have been disappointed with the NSF’s decisions.
Such a contrasting view compared to the long fight in Hawaii over the Thirty Meter Telescope project [1], where locals have continually fought and protested. It’s tied up in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, and a lot of cultural connotations, but I can’t help feeling like the Arecibo case should be a lesson for the TMT movement: you’d miss the telescopes if they went away.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/07/31/1114314076/hawaii-mauna-kea-t...
There are more options than just "build more telescopes" or "let the existing telescopes rot". Of course, just letting them rot would be playing to the standard colonial practice of extracting value, then leaving consequences of that extractive effort to the remaining indigenous people.
That is exactly what they are doing. It is a condition of the conservation district use permit [1] and has already begun [2].
1. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/mk/files/2017/09/882-BLNR-FOFCOLDO.p..., p. 30, sec. E; p. 66 #351
2. https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2023/08/28/removal-of-caltech-te...
Generally when people are fighting for their sovereignty I don't presume to know what is best for them. That's kind of the whole point of fighting for one's sovereignty.
I mean I think this is underselling it a little. It seems like the main difference is that Puerto Rican colonization and subjugation started like 350+ years before Hawaiian overthrow and annexation, so there are just very few descendants of indigenous people left in Puerto Rico. Conversely, a significant portion of Hawaii is descended from indigenous people, and some of them probably had grandparents who grew up in an independent nation and remember them talking about it. The wound is still relatively fresh.
I think what happened with TMT would have also happened with Arecibo if the Spanish hadn't already killed nearly all of the indigenous people, to be blunt. It's definitely about sovereignty and not about a distaste for telescopes. There's a lot of infrastructure I'd like to see built in my own country, but that doesn't mean I want another country to invade and then build it.
I'm sure there are plenty of good books on the subject but I don't have any recommendations unfortunately.
Edit: Actually maybe the US government's own account is a better place to start: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-107/pdf/STATUTE-...
> Whereas, in pursuance of the conspiracy to overthrow the Government of Hawaii, the United States Minister and the naval representatives of the United States caused armed naval forces of the United States to invade the sovereign Hawaiian nation on January 16, 1893, and to position themselves near the Hawaiian Government buildings and the lolani Palace to intimidate Queen Liliuokalani and her Government;
> In 1899, industrialist James Dole moved to Hawaii. James was the cousin of Sanford B. Dole, who had helped overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893, and became the governor of Hawaii in 1898. Two years after James Dole's arrival, he formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (HPC).
The term "Banana Republic" refers to UFC's complete domination of most South American governments through criminal activity.
Only a portion of the community still actively talks about the overthrow. Many Native Hawaiians also support the TMT.
>but that doesn't mean I want another country to invade and then build it.
A lot of the people who overthrew Queen Liliuokalani were subjects of the Kingdom [1]. It's a common propaganda point of the sovereignty movement to just label them as Americans, to imply they were some foreigners that just came in and overthrew the Queen. The calling in of the Marines wasn't really sanctioned by the US and later on the US attempted to give Hawaii back to the monarchy.
The sovereignty movement like to play it like the US just invaded, took over the land, and forced out the Native Hawaiians, just like they did with tribes on the mainland. But that's really not true at all. More importantly, it has nothing to do with Maunakea, as the mountain itself never really belong to the people.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Safety_(Hawaii)
I understand there is some debate about how involved the US government was in overthrowing the Hawaiian government. It seems like everyone agrees that there was a coup with the express purpose of achieving annexation by the US, the majority of Hawaiians did not support annexation, and the US government did it anyway. That happened relatively recently, a lot of people are still mad about it, and it's a legitimate thing to be mad about. The US took over a weaker nation against the will of its people. The most generous view we can take is that a minority of Hawaiians requested annexation and the US agreed, which would still be unjust.
I don't think historical details about how exactly the coup happened are relevant to this discussion, and if they are I'm definitely not qualified to argue about them.
I'm generally pro-telescope, and I've worked with people who have spent a lot of time at Mauna Kea (Keck, especially). But the more I learn about this, the more the Mauna Kea telescopes feel an awful lot like Mt. Rushmore: colonists moving in and saying that the natives' claim to a place is less legitimate than whatever "progress" the colonists have planned.
Simultaneously, Hawaii has an ugly history of colonization that's not talked about enough. The area is sacred to native Hawaiians and indigenous people deserve say in how their ancestral land is used. The TMT is also a comparatively easy target for activists to push back on colonization compared to large corporations with continents of lawyers, or the tourism economy that provides revenue for the island. Folks know that chaining elderly folks across construction access works, and it would be a PR nightmare to forcibly remove them.
Scientific progress should be something that transcends politics but we're stuck with the legacy of colonization, and that makes us all a little poorer.
Mauna Kea is sacred to the world’s scientists too - it’s a perfect observing site; a spectacular volcano; a unique glacial environment; an isolated habitat for plant and animal life; it feels like there ought to be some way to share the gift of this improbable piece of land with the world.
But yes, the way things have been done in the past affect the relationships we can have now.
This is ugly phrasing given the history. I don’t think scientists use words like “sacred” to describe objective qualities. Its a false equivalence that undermines the real cultural damage.
the mountain is the dwelling place of the goddess Poli'ahu, it is associated with the Hawaiian deities Lilinoe and Waiau, and the summit is considered the realm of the gods.
If the group holding up the development of this telescope was white Christians claiming it would bring about the wrath of God, we would call them backwards, and barbaric, but because it's a non white culture, we wear kid gloves when talking about them.
The double standard is shocking.
In other words, a group of people whose internationally-recognised sovereignty was taken from them under threat of arms is not engaging in ethnonationalism by demanding that some portion of that sovereignty be restored. That's not the part of Nazi Germany that people object to, either.
Regarding the Native Hawaiian's say, they do. This is a liberal democracy, and their voice is heard, quite loudly, especially the fraction that support the sovereignty movement. If we start parceling out the use of public land by ethnicity, we go down a dark road. But from an electoral point of view, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs is an elected body, and in recent history those that are either pro or neutral on the TMT have been getting elected.
>The TMT is also a comparatively easy target for activists to push back on colonization compared to large corporations with continents of lawyers, or the tourism economy that provides revenue for the island.
That's true. They are picking on an easy target that is not harming them or their movement. They are delaying progress for an idea (sovereignty) that most of the people in Hawaii do not agree with. It's politics impeding science, yet again. But since it's done from the "right" side of politics, it seems to get a pass from people where it would not be in other instances.
I will say that I don't think it's a question of the "right" side. Rather it's a question of trying to right a historic wrong, and to practice what the US preaches. Absent all else, I'm pro-telescope. I worked with a bunch of people who collected data on Mauna Kea, and one of the few astrophysical publications I worked on used data collected at Keck. But the history of American colonization is much too recent to ignore, and I think every interaction with native Hawaiians is necessarily done in the shadow of that history.
A through line of American interventionism is the claim that small nations ought to be free to chart their own course (be it freedom from Spain, or communist Russia, or the concept of communism). I generally advocate for the US to practice what it preaches, because another through line is that the US almost always operates according to the idea that it's only self-determination free of foreign meddling if the small nation works in concert with American ambitions. Queen Liliʻuokalani was overthrown in the midst of a campaign to restore suffrage to her subjects. The colonizers had previously forced her brother to sign a constitution that stripped most native Hawaiians of the right to vote in their own country, and grant the vote to non-native, non-subjects with sufficient wealth and/or land holdings. That constitution is frequently called the Bayonet Constitution because of the circumstances surrounding Kalākaua signing it.
But blocking the TMT won't do anything to further that goal, as it has nothing to do with it.
> But the history of American colonization is much too recent to ignore
> The colonizers had previously forced her brother to sign a constitution that stripped most native Hawaiians of the right to vote in their own country, and grant the vote to non-native, non-subjects with sufficient wealth and/or land holdings. That constitution is frequently called the Bayonet Constitution because of the circumstances surrounding Kalākaua signing it.
I'm familiar with the Baynoet Constitution but I take issue with the blanket use of the term "colonizer". As far as I've seen, it's been used by the sovereignty movement and their (largely) progressive supporters to mean anyone at the time (and even today) that lived/s in Hawaii and is not Native Hawaiian. Many of those that were involved in the overthrow were subjects of the Kingdom. They and their families, not to mentions all the non-Hawaiian plantation workers - came there legally and were even encouraged. The sovereignty movement would have you believe that the story of Hawaii is exactly like the story of mainland tribes, but it's just not true. There was no colonization in the way that it happened on the mainland and the use of the Marines in overthrowing the Queen was illegitimate, even per the US government. A lot of the issues with Hawaii and Native Hawaiians can be traced back to the Kingdom times (but not all).
In any case, this is the major problem. People are trying to litigate past political issues by involving the TMT, a scientific project that has nothing at all to do with it, on a mountain that also had nothing to do with it and never really belonged to the public until after the monarchy.
Its kind of irrelevant that the Marine intervention was illegitimate, since the US government still accepted the new regime as legitimate. A lot like the US's eventual intervention in the Black Hills, after settlers ("colonists" if the parallel is too opaque) illegally entered the area and then required protection from the natives they were displacing. If my kid steals a toy from another kid, and all I do is say "gee, sweetie, that was mean", but I don't force my kid to return the toy, its still theft.
Its also irrelevant that the coup was led largely by Hawaiian subjects (6 subjects, 7 foreigners, according to wikipedia), since the committee of safety was, to a man, non-native, whose explicit intent was to disenfranchise native Hawaiians.
I also want to highlight this: > A lot of the issues with Hawaii and Native Hawaiians can be traced back to the Kingdom times (but not all).
As in, the Kingdom times that started less than a century prior with the unification of the Hawaiian islands? The same era that coincided with the first century of European contact with Hawaiians? Even if the modern problems are directly related to the policies of the Kingdom, saying that its just the Kingdom is like saying that Titanic sank because of low quality metal in the hull, while completely omitting the iceberg.
Also, Mauna Kea is arguably unique in US territory for seeing conditions, but it's by no means unique in the world. A lot of the same people I worked with who had collected data at Mauna Kea also did so at Cerro Tololo and other telescopes in the Atacama desert. But it's definitely unique to the Hawaiians. In that sense, it and Rushmore are very similar.
In my opinion, cultures that pursue deeper learning and understanding of the physical world are superior to those which do not. I think perspectives other than this are harmful to humanity.
“Culture” should not be a veto over human progress and the ability to have your superstitions respected by others or even your culture survive is not a human right.
The Hawaiian Kingdom fell to a coup, because some white guy thought that the native Hawaiians were too primitive to govern themselves, and that that was why he and his friends were not allowed to setup sugar plantations on the scale they wanted to, and to own the land outright. The story of the US annexing Hawaii is unambiguously the story of a colonizer telling the indigenous people that their priorities (whatever they are) are childish or superstitions or what have you. And when the indigenous people didn't immediately acquiesce to the colonizer's (patronizing) demands, the colonizer resorted to violence. The queen makes it explicit in her document of surrender that the only reason she is doing so is because of the explicit threats of violence made by (all white) insurgents and the US Navy.
There's some implied sexism thrown in for good measure, although it's not clear to what extent it mattered that the white insurgents overthrew a queen and not a king.
Dismissing, I dunno, the Sarmations as a "defunct society" is one thing. Whatever society destroyed them is almost certainly destroyed themselves. But there are people alive today whose grandparents remember living in the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. The conquerer of Hawaii is very much still alive and kicking.
This all happened in 1898 or something, didn't it?
And Hawaiian Kingdom was itself not even 100 years old at the time, itself being the product of a (native) military conqueror who took over the Hawaiian islands and displaced whatever local societies there were.
I just reject the premise that colonialism was bad and that we are automatically obligated to preserve, respect or maintain these ancient cultures just because they...existed?
Modern democratic societies are healthier, wealthier, safer, more just, and more equal than the societies they replaced. We shouldn't restrain our progress because old superstitions mean someone doesn't want us building scientific instruments on top of some dirt. This is a value judgement and I'm not afraid to make it.
Obviously I feel pretty strongly about this. But I don't know how to convince you that colonialism is bad. But on the off-chance you're willing to be convinced, read on.
The unification of Hawaii was a military conquest by the natives from one Hawaiian island onto the other Hawaiian islands. Those islands were settled by Polynesians about 1000 years previously, and the culture was pretty uniform, even as it was a collection of kingdoms. This is less "Norway conquers England" and more "unification of England".
Moreover, the unification of Hawaii happened 17 years after first contact with Europeans, and the kingdom era basically coincided with the era of whalers, foreign plantations, and foreign immigration. Which makes the "unification of England" metaphor more apt, when you consider the role Scandinavian immigrants/colonists played in the unification of England.
To be super clear, the issue with colonization has never EVER been "we should let less advanced cultures develop at their own rate". The issue is that whatever development occurs does not happen in collaboration with the "less advanced" culture. Its always "I have guns, so therefore I have superior moral knowledge in all things". Its barring natives from voting, because they don't own enough property, when the concept of property ownership is less than a century old in the "less advanced" culture (and was forced on them by the "more advanced" culture). Its forcibly removing children from their families and even barring them from speaking the language of their parents [0].
0. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2022/06/23/congressional-heari...
I'm sorry but this is completely not true.
Firstly, Maunakea never belonged to the Native Hawaiian people as a whole. It really belonged to the monarchy. Mass access to the mountain didn't really happen until the astronomers put in the access road.
Secondly, there are no "colonists" like there were on the mainland. People did not come in and forcibly remove people. Immigration from all over happened during the monarchy and was even encouraged by it due to the needs of the plantations.
Thirdly, no one is saying the claims of the Native Hawaiians that are protesting the telescope are less legitimate. Great care was taken to make sure community concerns were addressed and that the TMT is not actually on the summit or near and spots that are broadly and historically considered sacred [1] (interesting fact, Liluokalani's book doesn't mention Maunakea, and mentions only Mauna Loa as really sacred; Native Hawaiian historian David Malo mentions it, but only is passing as an adze quarry).
Reference 1 are the findings of the hearing officer representing the Board of Land and Natural Resources regarding the permit to build (CDUP), which was subsequently upheld by the Hawaii Supreme Court [2].
1. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/mk/files/2017/09/882-BLNR-FOFCOLDO.p...; pg. 59, beginning with 322 of section k.
2. https://law.justia.com/cases/hawaii/supreme-court/2018/scot-...
In Hawaii the location is the top of the mountain and considered sacred land.
The small natural dip where the Arecibo telescope was built did not have particular society-wide historical significance so it's not comparable.
This is simplifying the issue too much. Mauna Kea is the most sacred mountain in Hawaiian culture, Arecibo wasn't built in particularly special land as far as I know.
A vocal minority of locals. There are less noisy groups in favor of the TMT https://www.imuatmt.org/
They can fit a lot of biology and computer science schools at the base of that road, I bet.
It’s unfortunate since there’s a lot of pride about what it used to be on the island, but I feel like this is more of an emotional grasp than something that actually requires that site.
There's almost no space on-site for more parking without tearing up more of the natural environment. Though perhaps without the need to maintain the superstructure any more they could repurpose the Physical Maintenance yards into more parking.
I can't really think of a suitable site for parking within say 10min of the site, so it'd be a long shuttle ride.
Some of that money would have to be spent on the road, right away, if there is any hope of it to be a general attraction.
If that’s accurate, it seems penny wise and pound foolish to have spent ~$300 million on the DART test but then not spend the extra ~$50 million needed to actually detect an asteroid coming towards us.
In the grand scheme of things, this type of mission wouldn't cost that much, but so far, nobody has made the decision that making sure Earth doesn't get hit by an asteroid is worth an investment of a few hundred million dollars.
This is not true. NASA spent over $300 million to test DART, an anti-astroid planetary defense system.
Like the mayor giving a press conference in front of the zoo saying “Most of the large, maneating lions are thought to have been located”.
Late last year, NASA approved development of NEO Surveyor, an infrared telescope that will search for near-Earth objects from Sun-Earth L1. NASA estimates that it will launch in 2028 and cost $1.2 billion.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-confirms-neo-surveyor-for-2028-la...
Government spending on the other hand, is mostly decided by poor people (majority of voters) who are more worried about tomorrow than 1000 years from now.
Government spending is decided by Congress and the President, who are not poor people. There is a convoluted selection process in which rich people (donors) select the pool of candidates from a group of rich people, and then they let poor people vote on which of the rich people selected by other rich people they would like to have make decisions for us.
On a practical matter it is clear poor people do not make decisions because poor people want things like universal health coverage, but we do not have that.
Government spending is mostly decided by huge corporations, firstly the arms industry. If poor people controlled our budget we wouldn't have throngs of homeless people in every city in the country.
I’m fairly sure studies of voter sentiment & positions vs. legislative activities and executive priorities do not back up this guess.
I see the homeless living on their tents, the inner city blacks and the white unemployable rednecks gnashing their teeth in unison: "Don't you dare buy a single F-35 less to give us some fucking stinking doctors!"
That's exactly how it is, a perfect democracy.
China built a similar radio telescope that went into service in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
This was still a lot more limited than the horizon-to-horizon of the other iconic radio telescope type: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CSIRO_ScienceImage_8...
Arecibo wasn't used for detecting asteroids—it was used to characterize asteroids that were detected by other means. Arecibo observed asteroids via radar. The power necessary for a radar observation goes up very quickly with distance to the target (proportional to distance to the fourth power), so radar would generally be a poor choice for hunting for asteroids.
As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered.
Sure, it's not like we have a fleet of Asteroid Redirection modules lined up ready to go .. but it is an actual capability we have and something we have already done.
Suggesting we have an "actual capability" is just conjecture. It's a NASA project. According to them, the Space Shuttle was a successful program.
What's the tl;dr on the math here?
If you leave "gaps" in your array elements, that's not a problem receiving strong, periodic signals. You can physically move the elements to fill in the gaps to remove those lobes; the equivalent of an equivalent time oscilloscope or a synthetic aperture radar. The problem is you can't do that when transmitting since you only have one opportunity to send something (non-periodic).
There are other disadvantages with phased arrays. Each amplifier has to be matched in amplitude and phase. I've had to bin lots of amplifiers as some have phase compression and some phase expansion over amplitude. That distorts the pattern over the pulse.
On the receive side, each receiver has thermal noise un-correlated with the others. So for N antenna elements, you received signal-to-noise scale proportional to sqrt(N) instead of N like you have on transmit, or with a big reflector. This is why arrays suck for very weak signals. Notice NASA keeps building big dishes for their DSN instead of "cheaper" arrays.
Then there's the whole timing and phase noise issue with distributing an oscillator.
Tough you can only make a reflector with about 100 dB gain.
> The thinned-array curse (sometimes, sparse-array curse) is a theorem in electromagnetic theory of antennas. It states that a transmitting antenna which is synthesized from a coherent phased array of smaller antenna apertures that are spaced apart will have a smaller minimum beam spot size, but the amount of power that is beamed into this main lobe is reduced by an exactly proportional amount, so that the total power density in the beam is constant
So you can transmit with a sparse array, but the power you can deliver with it (for a set synthetic aperture size) decreases with the degree of sparseness. No free lunch.
"And then, when all radio telescopy was driven to the far side of the Moon by a thousand too many radio-dispatched taxicabs and a million too many radar ovens, the observatory no longer served a function and was abandoned."
The events in the tale take place in ~2048 and Pohl imagined that even at that future date the rusted cables were still holding the catwalk aloft. He did not live to see the facility's collapse.
Passing the baton...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_...