02-25-2011, 03:31 PM
I do love apples, and I would never accuse you of overusing the knowledge that you have, anthonyf. And you call that a wrench? : )
Anyway, the Thirty Meter Telescope is a wonderful colloboration between two incredible places: California and Canada, with participation from India and China as well. The design is gorgeous and it will be the most powerful optical telescope on earth. Seeing far is good and I think it is safe to say that anyone who is lucky enough to peer through it (and I believe that will be all of us through various methods) will have a new sense of the sacred. The quest for knowledge is sacred to me. No one ignores the present and its harsh realities by learning to play Clair de Lune, or by looking through the world's most advanced telescope to see the light from moons beyond our galaxy. Instead, by reaching higher we elevate ourselves, and pull away from the brutishness of which we are capable.
Imagine a 14 year old math wizard with a drunken lout of a father and an ex-stripper mother. He is a bookish boy and is in his room studying his heart out while his mother throws a frying pan at his father and his father breaks a bottle on the tile floor. With his great powers of concentration, he tunes it out, promising himself he will rise above this all by pursuing the truths and mysteries of mathmatics. Do you want him to stop, get real and go address the anarchy in the kitchen? I don't.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (90 feet baby!) will see almost to the origin of the universe, as we know it. The intelligence that allows us to create such a telescope, that permits us to set aside superstitions to place it on Mauna Kea, and that allows us to interpret what we see through it may well lead us out of some of our other problems as well.
Intelligent endeavors are good. Science is good. We are stardust, gazing up on stardust. The sacred path is flanked my stars, passes through a Magellan cloud and is illuminated by immense nebulae and stars-a-borning. Watch out for wormholes.
And yep, Punatics are individualistic. That's what we like about each other.
Anyway, the Thirty Meter Telescope is a wonderful colloboration between two incredible places: California and Canada, with participation from India and China as well. The design is gorgeous and it will be the most powerful optical telescope on earth. Seeing far is good and I think it is safe to say that anyone who is lucky enough to peer through it (and I believe that will be all of us through various methods) will have a new sense of the sacred. The quest for knowledge is sacred to me. No one ignores the present and its harsh realities by learning to play Clair de Lune, or by looking through the world's most advanced telescope to see the light from moons beyond our galaxy. Instead, by reaching higher we elevate ourselves, and pull away from the brutishness of which we are capable.
Imagine a 14 year old math wizard with a drunken lout of a father and an ex-stripper mother. He is a bookish boy and is in his room studying his heart out while his mother throws a frying pan at his father and his father breaks a bottle on the tile floor. With his great powers of concentration, he tunes it out, promising himself he will rise above this all by pursuing the truths and mysteries of mathmatics. Do you want him to stop, get real and go address the anarchy in the kitchen? I don't.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (90 feet baby!) will see almost to the origin of the universe, as we know it. The intelligence that allows us to create such a telescope, that permits us to set aside superstitions to place it on Mauna Kea, and that allows us to interpret what we see through it may well lead us out of some of our other problems as well.
Intelligent endeavors are good. Science is good. We are stardust, gazing up on stardust. The sacred path is flanked my stars, passes through a Magellan cloud and is illuminated by immense nebulae and stars-a-borning. Watch out for wormholes.
And yep, Punatics are individualistic. That's what we like about each other.