TMT Support!!!!

[kalakoa]

Nothing needs to be done here, because it will be done somewhere else.

Nor do we need any local jobs; those who remain here will gladly pay more taxes to make up the difference.

[geochem]

quote:

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Originally posted by imagtek


That starship and a habitable destination might be the only thing that prevents human beings from becoming extinct forever.

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reading some of these posts, I'm having a hard time finding a downside to that prospect. Maybe with a do-over we'd have a better outcome...

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Starships? "Leonardo da Vinci, Sir George Cayley... Data falling from the heavens abounds?
Oh boy, leaving civilization this weekend is going to be hard...

I don't believe a starship, or even leaving civilization is necessary with the coming planetary doom about to shroud terra firma in a suffocating heat and CO2 death chamber, covering the surrogate head of our Mother Earth like an old style plastic grocery bag before the advent of punched in safety holes, and then their outright ban altogether.

Because there is another solution, first put forth in the 1960's by eminent scientist Dr. Richard Starkey* in which he suggested a self contained underwater civilization. In his first well received paper, which I believe was peer reviewed at #1 for several weeks, he suggested it would be possible for large populations to exist together beneath the ocean waves:

We all live in a yellow submarine
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
And our friends are all on board
Many more of them live next door

A few years later he expanded on this theory, even going so far as to suggest humans could move into the ocean depths not as colonizers, but a peaceful co-inhabitants of the realm:

I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade
He'd let us in, knows where we've been
In his octopus' garden in the shade

Think of the advantages of an underwater city as compared to building a starship:

* Water or H20 can be desalinized for drinking, and the molecule's constituent parts, oxygen and hydrogen can be extracted for breathing, and to provide clean power.
* Abundant seafood (although given that the octopus has let us into his garden, I would suggest tako should not be on the menu)

Now, back to the subject at hand. I'm certain some Punaweb armchair astronomers would find the seabed an ideal location to build the TMT, and this idea will receive their full support. After all, it is remote, and the ocean floor is not a mountaintop. The drawback as I see it, might be the limitations of current "adaptive optic" technology to adjust for ocean wavefront distortions rather than atmospheric wavefront distortions. I'm quite sure, however, if an underwater military application is deemed necessary that problem can be solved. However, the fish and the algae swimming and floating past the lens of the telescope may be difficult to account for even with advanced software programming and large computational abilities of new generation computers.
Any... observations... on the subject, TomK?

* a.k.a. Ringo Starr


“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
-Joseph Brodsky