telescope worthless by 2050

March 2, 2006 9:41 AM

via BBCGround-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.
posted by goldism (17 comments total)

Gilmore is an astronomy professor. Shouldn't they talk to a climatologist?
posted by Pollomacho at 9:49 AM on March 2, 2006

I imagine a good-sized metorite hit could fuck up their whole day. Err, night.
posted by mischief at 9:56 AM on March 2, 2006

Maybe they just need to enlist the aid of some benevolent Sylphs.
posted by basicchannel at 9:56 AM on March 2, 2006

I imagine a good-sized metorite hit could fuck up their whole day.

Or a volcano.
posted by JekPorkins at 10:35 AM on March 2, 2006

The Earth seen from space was one of the most profoundly affecting images in Human history. Sadly, it was also a transient one. Within a few centuries, the accumulating pollution and oribital crap precluded a clear view of the ground, and made low earth orbit an impossibility. Gone were the beautiful "Blue Marble" shots that had shown generations that they were part of a glorious miracle; gone were the instant weather and military snapshots. Gone was that vision of our world from outside. Like the adolescence of a growing person, it was a brief period - before it, the ability to see oneself from without was not possible; after it, our own constructions and obfuscations prevented such literal introspection.

Of course, no one ever considered what this might mean for any cold, inhuman intelligences looking in from much further away - with much less thoughtful, philosophical intent. No one guessed that the very waste and garbage befouling our globe would be the factor that saved Us from Them.
posted by freebird at 10:40 AM on March 2, 2006

No one guessed that the very waste and garbage befouling our globe would be the factor that saved Us from Them.

whoa..That was almost...Bush-esque in it's beauty.

>jon stewart bush voice on<
"ya see...it's not a flaw...it's a feature! It's our space
defense initiative visual shield!
Pollution? good!
Smog? Keeps them damn terrists from Mars from doing their worst!
And it's working too! I mean, we haven't been hit by a death ray in over 1000 days now!"
posted by exparrot at 11:21 AM on March 2, 2006

"You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both."

What a lot of navel gazing -- won't someone think of the astrononmy! My gosh. I hope future astrologers will think to write of the golden times between asthmatic wheezes and wading through molten ice caps. The future is on a path to "Fucked" that goes beyond a few telescopes.

Nevermind that though -- what about astronomy!
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:19 PM on March 2, 2006

The atmosphere is a pain in the ass to get through as is. Atmospheric distortion (some of the light from the sun diffuses in the atmosphere and never reaches Earth, etc.), and the fact that many infrared and ultraviolet emissions cannot penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere, are both reasons why space-based telescopes are superior. Still, R.I.P. the environment, that's the big loss here.

"You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both."

Talk about overly dramatic. Astronomy will go on. Still, it is a pain in their ass, there is a lot of money invested with ground based telescopes. They should have seen this coming though, they've already been having light pollution problems for years, as there are not many places left on Earth dark enough to build these ground telescopes.
posted by banished at 3:39 PM on March 2, 2006

Meh. They should quit whining and just look through the ozone hole. (kidding, folks)
posted by JekPorkins at 3:56 PM on March 2, 2006

Let's plan on being off the Earth in 40 years.

posted by jfuller at 4:05 PM on March 2, 2006

Smog? Keeps them damn terrists from Mars from doing their worst!

Hrm. Well, Dubya did say we're going to Mars in the next couple of years... Sure, it seemed a non sequitur at the time, but maybe it's really part of the War on Terrism...

I hope future astrologers will think to write of the golden times between asthmatic wheezes and wading through molten ice caps.

Hey, hey -- don't knock astronomy. It's one of the things we need to get us off this planet, now that we've screwed the whole place up.
posted by Amanojaku at 5:04 PM on March 2, 2006

The Earth seen from space was one of the most profoundly affecting images in Human history.

I think this is only true if you grew up before it was taken.
posted by Mars Saxman at 9:35 PM on March 2, 2006

I have to disagree with you Saxman. I'm pretty sure I grew after the first such images - though I can't say I know exactly when they were first taken, I'm pretty sure they've been around my whole life. Yet those images without a doubt changed how I think about the universe and my place in it. And I think they same is true for large swathes of society.

Why would you need to have grown up before them for them to be affecting? I also find the work of painters dead long before I or my grandparents were alive to be very powerful...
posted by freebird at 10:40 PM on March 2, 2006

I grew up looking at photos from satellites and space probes, and it never occured to me that people would attach any larger significance to them until a few months ago, when I read something about Stewart Brand's earth-photograph campaign from the late sixties. I assumed that people found earth photos powerful back then simply because the whole idea was so new. I've never heard any hint, from my peers or from the generations following us, that pictures of the earth continue to have a comparable emotional impact.
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:33 PM on March 2, 2006

You could be right, but it would make me sad.

I don't quite believe you though - those images show up far too often for them to not have emotional content. There's also the fact that people don't always recognize things that have affected their world view. Lots of people who grew up listening to dance music and rock might not think that the Beatles, Jazz or Mozart play a big part in their cultural landscape, since they don't listen to them much themselves. They'd be wrong, though, wouldn't they?

I'd certainly agree with you about the "wow! Holy crap!" aspect of seeing the images for the very first time. But that's not what I'm talking about.
posted by freebird at 11:50 PM on March 2, 2006

Let's plan on being off the Earth in 40 years.

I'm actually planning on being earth around that time.
posted by srboisvert at 4:15 AM on March 3, 2006

I'm a graduate student with research experience in adaptive optics, I've worked on two ELT projects (TMT in the US and OWL in Europe), and I believe there's still quite a bit left for ground-based telescopes to do. If we ever want to fi

For one, the cost scales of sending even a small space-based telescope into space are well, astronomical. Adaptive optics technology (correcting with fast-adjusting mirrors) for the effects of the atmosphere have reliably produced better images from the ground than Hubble at infrared, at a savings of several millions of dollars. Don't knock space-based telescopes though; as mentioned above, UV light can't get through our atmosphere, and visible (to humans) light doesn't do so well either, so Hubble definitely deserves to stick around.

Finally, I think this article needs to be taken with a huge tablespoon of salt. I've flown into the Hilo International Airport on the Big Island over a hundred times, and we never fly OVER the telescopes, we fly around them. Plus, the number of flights going into Hilo is limited to interisland travel, whereas Kona gets all the direct flights from other destinations and the bulk of the tourists.

I've never been to La Serena, but I assume similar flight plans are in place. And lets not discount Antarctica, where a telescope could be built under almost no atmospheric turbulence and near-perfect seeing for 6 months of the year :-D.
posted by onalark at 5:05 PM on March 3, 2006