The Collapse at Arecibo

March 30, 2021 2:00 PM

Daniel Alarcón on the collapse of Puerto Rico’s iconic telescope (The New Yorker). "Many Puerto Ricans ... fear that Arecibo will be yet another illustration of the abandonment and neglect that have colored many aspects of life on the island. It’s been decades since Puerto Rico was the prosperous tropical outpost of American capitalism, used as a contrast and a cudgel against socialist Cuba. The brightest years of the island’s economy corresponded with the golden age of Arecibo, when the observatory was buzzing and the science was at its most revolutionary." (Previously)
posted by adrianhon (20 comments total)

Footage of the collapse, from the ground and from a drone.
posted by blob at 3:14 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Footage with commentary by Scott Manley. Explains what you're seeing during the collapse.
posted by blob at 3:29 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

So glad I made to Arecibo when we were on the island in 2019. Hoping to go back for a week in December - assuming all is cool with the virus by then.
posted by COD at 3:33 PM on March 30, 2021

😢
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:44 PM on March 30, 2021

.
posted by lalochezia at 3:44 PM on March 30, 2021

Arecibo was my first observatory as a graduate student, and a telescope that we continued to observe with on a weekly basis until the cable break.
This beautiful and deeply personal article by Nadia Drake captures some of my feelings.
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:50 PM on March 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

So much good science was done there! And doing that science tied PR to a wider world, belying the idea that it was fated to be a colonial backwater exporting capable young people to Miami. I hope the telescope can be repaired or replaced with something even better.
posted by homerica at 3:54 PM on March 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

I loved this bit:

Gordon, who died in 2010, described the rather arbitrary nature of the site-selection process in a 1978 interview: “Our civil-engineer man looked at the aerial photographs of Puerto Rico and said, ‘Here are a dozen possibilities of holes in the ground in roughly the dimensions you need.’ And we looked at some and said, ‘Well, that’s too close to a town or a city or something.’ Very, very quickly he reduced it to three, and he and I went down and looked at them and picked one.”

It feels (to this non-expert) that there's still a lot of science to be done from that hole in the ground, so I hope they're able to get funding for a new observatory on the site. My wife and I honeymooned in Puerto Rico but we opted not to rent a car on the main island, so we didn't get to see the observatory. We've talked about going back, so I'd look forward to seeing a new observatory if one were built.
posted by fedward at 5:10 PM on March 30, 2021

The fact that we let a scientific treasure like Arecibo just rot away due to neglect is just infuriating. It really speaks to the level of intellectual rot and social myopia that holds sway in our current political age.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 5:40 PM on March 30, 2021 [34 favorites]

I thought this was going to be about a metaphorical collapse, so the videos were...shocking.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 5:45 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

As Big Al 8000 pointed out, the metaphorical collapse preceded and precipitated the literal collapse. Not that it's any less shocking for all that.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:08 PM on March 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

Didn't make it to Arecibo either time I was in Puerto Rico. It seemed so monolithic, like it would always be there. īn nīz bogzarad I suppose.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:36 PM on March 30, 2021

I work on some federally funded research projects, and I have to fill out paperwork that says I will report if any foreign governments offer me funding for our research. Europeans are ok, but it's pretty much verboten to take anything form China, Russia, Iran... pretty said that we have to worry about China overpaying our scientists.
posted by CostcoCultist at 6:44 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also of note is that corporate funded research like Bell Labs is largely a function of high taxes. How sad not just for Puerto Rico but the whole US
posted by CostcoCultist at 6:49 PM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

I saw Arecibo when I was visiting family in Puerto Rico in the summer of 1980, the same time I was obsessing over The Empire Strikes Back. Arecibo looked for all the world like the Death Star’s planet-destroying laser’s non-evil twin. Between how impressive it was to behold, and knowing that it was the best bet we had for actually finding alien intelligence, Arecibo took up permanent residence in my mind and heart. Watching the video of its collapse was painful, and when I learned it happened I immediately texted my brothers with the news, as if a family member had passed away. I’m comforted by the idea that even after we as a species have Great Filtered ourselves, some other civilization may yet receive the Arecibo Message and be introduced to my old friend.
posted by ejs at 7:49 PM on March 30, 2021 [9 favorites]

Now I am imagining aliens flying to Earth, seeing what we let happen to Arecibo, and then flying away with all of their solutions to our issues.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:29 AM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

The Chinese were "inspired" by Arecibo to build FAST, the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope. It's a marvel of engineering. There's no airborne platform to walk up to, like we used to be able to do with Arecibo (a dizzying, vertigo inducing trip), but it's astonishing to look at anyway.

I visited FAST for its inauguration a few years ago, and the situation with the tribal population who had been displaced to build it made me a bit queasy - they were constructing a city next door to re-home the people. But what made me really sad was the bus ride to and from the telescope, where we passed giant billboards celebrating the telescope - "Marching into the future with FAST" - and the enthusiasm of the politicians at the inauguration. They were so excited by the prospect of big leaps forward in science and engineering capability, and this was a demonstration of their determination.

The contrast with the US and Puerto Rico - the dilapidated state of Arecibo, our apparent inability to scrape together money to keep a unique national facility operating well - it was deeply sad.

(Arecibo cost about $10-15M to run per year. The National Science Foundation could no longer commit to that funding because its budget was stretched so thin - it had to choose between funding new facilities, keeping the old ones running, and providing research grants to actually use those facilities. Pick one and a half, not even two. So Arecibo was already on a glide path to ... mothballing? Private funding? Some option that didn't involve much NSF money, in any case - before its collapse made those discussions moot.)

FAST just announced that it is going to accept proposals from astronomers worldwide. It's going to be a small, very competitive allocation, and the grapevine is pretty clear that you need to have Chinese co-investigators on the team, which is fair enough, right? But the FAST chief scientist (a former Ivy League grad student) just let it drop in a private aside that he'd been approached about the possibility of building several more FASTs in China.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:34 AM on March 31, 2021 [3 favorites]

FAST isn't a complete replacement, unfortunately. Arecibo was capable of receiving higher frequencies, but more crucially, it was capable of transmitting, which FAST is not.
posted by i used to be someone else at 10:34 AM on March 31, 2021 [2 favorites]

(Right, I'm absolutely not implying that FAST replaces all of the Arecibo capabilities. It does complicate the case for a new telescope at Arecibo, though, even if we had the political will...)
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:17 PM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

If a new Arecibo was online or in the works somewhere else then this wouldn't be quite as depressing as it is. The part that got me was the general reaction from the U.S. gov't which was basically "meh."
posted by drstrangelove at 3:55 AM on April 1, 2021 [1 favorite]