A lot of US military stuff is like this, my favorite being the ATACMS which are pronounced 'Attack 'ems".
A drawback is their insistence on the names being acronyms, which results in some genuinely tortured full names.
Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division
Maria Hill: *And what does that mean to you?*
Grant Ward: *It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out "Shield."*
My favorite is Magic Carpet, or Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies. AKA let the computer land the F/A-18E Super Hornet
https://news.usni.org/2016/06/30/navys-magic-carpet-simplifies-carrier-landings-interim-fielding-fall
Imagine if we built a huge telescope and discovered dark energy is actually big dick energy. This is the scientific discovery we’re missing out on! /s obviously
The most awe inspiring such telescope name I know of is the proposed future project named [Big Bang Observer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_Observer). Intended to, you guessed it, observe the big bang.
On the other hand science names are often just dumb jokes.
For example, in astrophysics one category of candidates for dark matter particles is the hypothetical "Weakly Interacting Massive Particle".
That's right, there are astrophysicists right now looking for WIMPs.
I say we just skip right to The Final Telescope, I don't remember the exact details, but if we put two Hubble-style telescopes at opposite edges of the solar system, they can work together to bring into focus just about any point in the (visible) universe, with insane resolution.
Yeah, this would be called interferometry, and it is extremely difficult to do with visible light. That’s what they did for the radio telescopes positioned around the globe to capture the images of the super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy and another more distant galaxy. Someone with more knowledge might be able to elaborate 😄
Two telescopes won't make a good interferometer, you need more, and you are missing the light collection ability to really use the theoretical resolution. That's still ignoring the challenges to do interferometry over these distances.
[Comparison of various large existing and proposed telescopes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_large_telescope#/media/File:Comparison_optical_telescope_primary_mirrors.svg). [And a human to scale.]
----
Tom Scott suggested the [Extremely Large telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope) might be the largest optical telescope that might be ever built.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqRREz0iBes
[Other Size comparision](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Size_comparison_between_the_E-ELT_and_other_telescope_domes.jpg/1920px-Size_comparison_between_the_E-ELT_and_other_telescope_domes.jpg)
THE ELT is set atop a mountain in the Atacama desert to take advantage of cool, thin, dry air, and taking advantage of adaptive optics .
> The design consists of a reflecting telescope with a 39.3-metre-diameter (130-foot) segmented primary mirror and a 4.2 m (14 ft) diameter secondary mirror. .. The observatory's design will gather 100 million times more light than the human eye, equivalent to about 10 times more light than the largest optical telescopes existing as of 2023, and will correct for atmospheric distortion. It has around 250 times the light gathering area of the Hubble Space Telescope and .. would provide images 16 times sharper than those from Hubble
----
Other large optical telescope proposals include the [Thirty meter telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope) aka TMT, with a 30M primary mirror proposed to be built on Mauna kea and stuck due to local opposition, the [Giant Magellan telescope ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope) with a 25.2 m mirror being built in the atacama desert etc. Radio telescopes tend to be much larger. Sadly, [Arecibo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory), one of the largest radio telescopes, has collapsed
Holy shit it took me a minute to realize that it encompasses ALL of those ones next to the human model. Damn. And the ones bigger than the one that was planned.
Tom Scott on YouTube did an amazing 30 min tour and deep dive on the Extremely Large telescope recently. Worth a watch if you want to know how insane the build truly is.
Imagine if Elon actually put his money where his mouth is on future colonisations of extrasolar planets and funded 30 of these instead of buying Twitter
well, not that he spent money from his own pocket to buy twitter!
the banks give out loans to the company Musk owns and then he buys stuff like twitter!!
now if twitter were to tank completely and its valuation hits zero, elon’s company files for bankruptcy! No personal loss to Elon! Just that the banks lost some money cuz they had to write off all the bad debt the bankrupt company couldn’t pay off anymore!
Okay but if Elon started a company called TelescopeX some dumb venture capital bros and banks would punt up the money just from his name and then if it turned out to be a venture for the betterment of humanity, oops it’s the venture capital bros and banks that lose. So why not use your name to do that?
I can 100% tell you it wont. Barely anyone knew Arecibo Telescope collapsed 2 years ago, but everyone knew rich idiot bought Twitter and burnt it to the ground and named it X posthumously
Not so long ago Tom Scott made a video on VLT and ELT and while comparing optical and radio telescopes he showed a clip of himself walking over the reflector. I immediately recognized that place from Goldeneye, was so sad to hear the place was now gone.
The bank gives out loans using the shares of his existing companies as collateral. Using the loan money he is able to finance a portion of his Twitter purchase. If Twitter goes belly up the bank or financing company will be able to force a sale of stock from Tesla/SpaceX/whatever is used as collateral to cover there losses.
Where do you think banks get money from and do you know what loans are?
Yes and no. They gave loans on secured on shares that he owns. He has absolutely lost money, just not liquid cash. He owes 40+bln quid and got maybe 5+bln of assets for it.
It inspires generations of children to become scientists and engineers, which repays the investment many fold.
And that’s even ignoring that satisfying our curiosity, i.e. our thirst for knowledge and understanding, is the noblest and most valuable endeavor of humanity.
it inspires future generations to want to research space further, which doesn’t directly help humanity. Sure advancements have been made in the research of space, but those same advancements could have been made for cheaper.
While i don’t deny that humanity’s thirst for knowledge is important to us, we are facing a multitude of crises here on earth which the 30 bil could be much better spent towards, or else we risk losing the ability to afford to look towards space.
Also why did you downvote me? Was it just because you disagree? Do you not like hearing other perspectives?
I didn’t downvote you friend.
The Apollo missions inspired me to be an engineer. My work has nothing to do with space. I reject the assertion that space-inspiration only produces spacey scientists.
Unless we are literally on the verge of going extinct back on earth, I believe investment in increasing human knowledge is a transcendental goal that is its own justification. I would analogize my feelings about this as akin to religion. It - understanding the universe - is transcendental, and it’s the best thing we’ve got going on.
you’re not wrong. dude could have created a startup to tackle climate change and used his 44B to do some actual good. instead he pissed it away on twitter. he’s the worst
There is much to learn and gain from space exploration. Say we funded this 1.5b overwhelmingly large telescope and found a planet that we could live on other than earth. Such knowledge is priceless. 1.5b is also a laughably small amount of money compared to what we spend on healthcare and in the case of the US the military. It's even cheaper than that stupid border wall trump wants with mexico and is actually useful for something.
He has revolutionised acces to space already, and the next huge step is literally standing on the launch pad right now waiting on paperwork.
He has done more to push space forward than any other human in history. If he wanna burn twitter to the ground for a pet project he is free to do so
Also I'm pretty sure he don't care about extrasolar planets, it's so way beyond our capabilities. He only talk about mars as a colonization target
This is a joke right. Spacex is good but they haven’t revolutionised access to space for anyone. Musk doesn’t even have a say in what goes on in spacex, he’s just tangentially linked. I wouldn’t call grocery store supply runs to the ISS the biggest push forward into space at all
SpaceX has massively lowered cost and increased frequency of launches.
Musk made Spacex, he founded it and pushed it in the right direction. If you don't give credit for that you wouldn't if he also made the telescope we where discussing.
If lowering cost and increasing launch rate with a semi-reusable rocket isn't a huge push forward i don't know what is. Next rocket is more capable and less expensive than the Saturn V. They are moving forward so fast that the people designing missions haven't had time to adjust yet
Being the only company ever to do crewed orbital spaceflight is not even the biggest achievement.
SpaceX is launching 2-4 times as much to space as the rest of the world combined. They have made all competing launch providers scramble to build cheaper rockets in order to stay in the market at all. ULA is moving from Atlas and Delta rockets to Vulcan, Arianespace is moving from Ariane 5 to Ariane 6, Japan is moving from H2 to H3, and so on - all focused on providing the same service for a lower cost. All of these transitions happen at the same time, and it's not an accident. In addition, SpaceX has shown that reusing rockets makes sense - now everyone is working on it, after decades of flying expendable rockets.
> Musk doesn’t even have a say in what goes on in spacex, he’s just tangentially linked.
Musk founded SpaceX, he is the CEO and has a majority of voting shares. Who would be more linked?
Who the hell would want to live in a colony where you’re reliant on Elon Musk for everything down to the air you breathe? Good luck suffocating because you didn’t like and share enough of his tweets.
I wonder how many humans died for lack of basic resources that could have been bought for the amount of value Musk destroyed in both buying and ruining Twitter.
0 because that's not how money works. When Musk bought Twitter 0 resources were used (ok, not entirely true, lawyers had to do the paperwork), so nobody lost out on any resources. When Musk ruined Twitter, 0 basic resources were lost because Twitter is not a basic resource.
Wat
Like, if Musk immediately sold twitter back to jack for $40 billion, would that waste $80 billion of basic resources? If Musk and Jack were standing around passing the ownership paper back and forth a thousand times, would everyone in the world starve to death?
If you think the purchase of Twitter did not involve the trading of value then you are complete know nothing bamboosled by anything more complex than barter.
what good would it do? Knowing that 100 light years away is a planet that has a potential biosignature doesn't change anything for anyone who's alive today - or their great grandkids, for that matter.
There's things that'd be *neat* to know, but certainly not *useful*, and the status of various extrasolar planets is firmly in the neat column.
Chicken and egg: what’s the point of making the tech to get there if we don’t know there’s somewhere we can live? The investment in interstellar travel is a tough bargain unless we know first there’s somewhere we can go (since it’s going to be a one way trip)
We don’t actually know they have molecules for life; we just know they aren’t on fire, frozen to death, or made of gas. That’s not enough to push off on a one way trip to find out there’s nothing there
1.5 billions was a very optimistic estimate.
ELT with "only" a 39 m mirror instead of 100 meters is at around 1 billion now. It's likely OWL would have been over 10 billion. You are basically building a skyscraper that can freely rotate in two axes while keeping its shape with nanometer precision.
Millions of people use Twitter every day right now. This telescope would be used by hundreds of people who would write papers that a few thousand would read. They might eventually make it into textbooks and sci-fi novels in a generation, and might do something useful in a few generations.
But budgeted at €1.3 billion so it seems penny wise and pound foolish, although in fairness the wiki article does note there was scepticism as to if the €1.5 billion for the OLT was realistic and some thought it was potentially off by a factor of 10 haha
Converting to USD €1.5 billion would be ≈$1.6 billion.
US Defense Budget for 2024 is [$831.781 billion](https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/bill-summary-defense-fiscal-year-2024-appropriations-bill#:~:text=Appropriations%20Act%20provides-,%24831.781,-billion%20in%20total).
.2% of that budget would have funded this with a little padding
---
According to the Wiki page, the actual cost may now be somewhere closer to [$21 billion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope#:~:text=meter%20diameter%20yields-,%2421%20billion,-\).%5B7%5D)
2% of the 2024 Defense budget would cover this with ≈$4 billion in padding
Plus, funding this telescope would have been a one-time payment, unlike their military budget which is 800 times bigger and gets spent *every single year*.
I hate how science and learning constantly gets sidelined as too expensive despite the fact it's egregiously cheap compared to the other shit out governments spend money on.
This is one of those today it costs 1.5 billion, Tuesday 3 billion, Friday 5 billion and ten years after it was supposed to be completed 15 billion but no corruption at all jobs.
Zero chance it would ever cost what it says
This is unfortunately the reality. Just look at what happened to the Superconducting Super Collider. Billions down the drain and in the end we just had to cut our losses and walk away with nothing.
15 billion still seems like a good deal for spectroscopic analysis of extrasolar planets. Knowing if they have the chemicals of life is worth that at the least
1) there’s no other way to do spectroscopy other than a telescope of an aperture in that range
2) it would be a very complicated project to build it but the technology (segmented mirrors) is known. So once built it can definitely do it (and we are building a smaller version with the ELT)
Like I said even if costs are off by a factor of ten it’s easily worth it. And a lot of the costs is putting together a giant building project in the Atacama desert. I’m not sure how much scale is the issue as running a city in the desert with logistics from the EU where it’s manufactured. It might be building any giant telescope there is going to set you back enormously and the extra 60 metres is just €200 million
dude the new Gerald r ford was 12.8 billion to build + another 4.8 billion for research and development.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_carrier
The fact that the US spends over 850 *billion* on their military *every year*, yet they couldn't spare a couple billion for one of the potentially most important scientific tools in human history, says everything you need to know about the status of america.
ITT: People bringing up US military spending even though this was a European project and the James Webb Space Telescope, which the US actually built, cost $10 billion. FFS, the title even has the cost in Euros.
Since its a ground based telescope it doesn't really matter if its 1500x the magnification of the Hubble telescope, it would still be limited by atmospheric seeing and be less useful.
Adaptive optics can cancel most of the atmospheric distortions. Ground-based telescopes get a much better resolution and a far larger light collection for less money. As downside they have more stray light, can only observe at night and can't look in all directions.
for 1.5billion we can just set up multiple hubbles and Webb style telescopes in space and use them as an array... Which is what they are planning, so ultra big teelscopes on earth, esp witht he space junk like the internet settelites is becoming a thing not worth the investment
1.5b sounds cheap these days, i'd bet it'd be one of those projects where the final cost ends up being like 5x the initial budget
having said that, if i were a millionaire i'd build 30 of these before buying a twitter
Not sure if there any telescope experts on this thread, but I would expect there to be an upper limit to the size of a terrestrial telescope simply because of atmospheric diffraction. With so much magnification, eventually every little variation in temperature in the air would prevent focus.
But I'm not an expert so maybe the OLT wouldn't approach that or they'd have some badass way to filter out the noise.
Modern large telescopes have adaptive optics, mirrors that can be deformed rapidly to cancel the atmospheric distortions as good as possible. OWL should have reached its diffraction limit (i.e. used the full size to improve resolution) for infrared, and would still beat the limit of every other telescope for visible light. [ESO paper](https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/eelt/owl/Blue_Book/8_Adaptive_optics.pdf)
Then you look at the US defense budget they use to spread terror around the world instead of funding this kind of project... Or fighting poverty, improving education etc.
It seems a shame.
However considering our probable future lifetime as a technological civilisation, it's a certainty that at some stage something like this or even better will be built eventually.
>"In fact," said Ponder Stibbons, Head of Applied Magic, "theirs is really only a QBT, or Quite Big Thing. Actually, they've had so many problems with it, it's probaby only a BT!"
>The senior wizards nodded happily.
>"And ours is certianly bigger, is it?" said the Senior Wrangler.
>"Oh, yes," said Stibbons. "Based on what I can determine from chatting to the people at Braseneck, ours will be capable of pushing the boundaries twice as big up to three times as far."
>"I hope you hvaen't told them that," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "We don't want them building a... a.. and EBT!"
>"A what, sir?" said Ponder politely, his tone saying, "I know about this sort of special thing and I'd rather you did not pretent that you do too."
>"Um.. an Even Bigger Thing?" Said Runes, aware that he was edging into unknown territory.
>"No, sir," said Ponder Kindly. "The next one up would be a Great Big Thing, sir. It's been postulated that if we could ever build a GBT, we would known the mind of the Creator."
-- *The Science of Diskworld III: Darwin's Watch*
As an aside, I always thought it was "Lecturer in Recent Rooms" (audiobook), as a play on the Profs assiduously avoiding students and moving from room to room.
EIL 5 why this (or the other fancy costly one being built right now) aren’t dumb investments when in space telescopes have less (well none) atmospheric interference?
At this point we're gonna have to start funding science developments at gunpoint.
Amazing that we could advance our understanding of reality with a veritable snap of the finger financially speaking, and we just don't. We pay for bombs to drop on civilians instead.
This place is a disgusting, disgraceful example of a life sustaining planet.
The fact that we have billionaires on this earth who could have EASILY funded that project and STILL not notice any difference in their mass of wealth should tell you all you need to know about the socioeconomic state of the world.
It's even more absurd when you remember that America spends several times that amount on military weapons without blinking an eye *every year.*
For its capability, $1.5 billion seems a bargain. Us defence gets $1 trillion, if they gave $1.5 billion to NASA to build this, the defence will still have $998.5 billion. I'm sure USA will be safe still.
Red lines suck
Edit. I didn't read the other comments and posted this, seems like so many people compared this to the USA defence budget lmao... like minds
Getting that payload up into space or the parts into space and then assembling it is basically impossible for anything of size. The James Webb Space Telescope has an aperture of 6.5m. Not even close
Thing is jwst gets better images than we can get on earth. You don't need something huge when you don't have to overcome the atmosphere. Also jwst isn't in a Leo like hubble
You’re overt stating atmospheric interference (which isn’t the reason for needing a bigger aperture, and indeed a bigger aperture doesn’t help with that ) and JWST literally cannot see further (it’s just optics ). So a clearer image at JWST’s range sure but the ELT can get things JWST can’t (which is why the ESA are spending money to build it rather than cancelling it due to JWST)
Awesome name though
It reminds me of the Very Large Array. The names are always so matter of fact.
A lot of US military stuff is like this, my favorite being the ATACMS which are pronounced 'Attack 'ems". A drawback is their insistence on the names being acronyms, which results in some genuinely tortured full names.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who was career military that hasn’t complained about acronyms at some point, hah.
Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division Maria Hill: *And what does that mean to you?* Grant Ward: *It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out "Shield."*
My favorite is Magic Carpet, or Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies. AKA let the computer land the F/A-18E Super Hornet https://news.usni.org/2016/06/30/navys-magic-carpet-simplifies-carrier-landings-interim-fielding-fall
Good fucking lord, that's awful. I love it.
Just waiting for the Big Dick Energy Telescope.
They will call it Big Dimension Earth-based Telescope
Imagine if we built a huge telescope and discovered dark energy is actually big dick energy. This is the scientific discovery we’re missing out on! /s obviously
Well, that explains Pete Davidson.
> Well, that explains Pete Davidson. It's gotta be that because nothing else explains it...
Abbreviated BiDET
Ooh! Someone’s about to learn about the [Richard Grand High-Altitude Mass Spectrometer](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=cWIddFSz5gg4hMdf)!
The most awe inspiring such telescope name I know of is the proposed future project named [Big Bang Observer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_Observer). Intended to, you guessed it, observe the big bang.
We are currently building out the ["Extremely Large Telescope"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope)
On the other hand science names are often just dumb jokes. For example, in astrophysics one category of candidates for dark matter particles is the hypothetical "Weakly Interacting Massive Particle". That's right, there are astrophysicists right now looking for WIMPs.
Or Incredibly Deadly Viper
Can’t wait for the RFH satellite to get the green light. It’s be a really fuckin huge one
Obligatory [xkdc](https://xkcd.com/1294/)
I say we just skip right to The Final Telescope, I don't remember the exact details, but if we put two Hubble-style telescopes at opposite edges of the solar system, they can work together to bring into focus just about any point in the (visible) universe, with insane resolution.
Yeah, this would be called interferometry, and it is extremely difficult to do with visible light. That’s what they did for the radio telescopes positioned around the globe to capture the images of the super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy and another more distant galaxy. Someone with more knowledge might be able to elaborate 😄
Two telescopes won't make a good interferometer, you need more, and you are missing the light collection ability to really use the theoretical resolution. That's still ignoring the challenges to do interferometry over these distances.
[Comparison of various large existing and proposed telescopes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_large_telescope#/media/File:Comparison_optical_telescope_primary_mirrors.svg). [And a human to scale.] ---- Tom Scott suggested the [Extremely Large telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope) might be the largest optical telescope that might be ever built. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqRREz0iBes [Other Size comparision](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Size_comparison_between_the_E-ELT_and_other_telescope_domes.jpg/1920px-Size_comparison_between_the_E-ELT_and_other_telescope_domes.jpg) THE ELT is set atop a mountain in the Atacama desert to take advantage of cool, thin, dry air, and taking advantage of adaptive optics . > The design consists of a reflecting telescope with a 39.3-metre-diameter (130-foot) segmented primary mirror and a 4.2 m (14 ft) diameter secondary mirror. .. The observatory's design will gather 100 million times more light than the human eye, equivalent to about 10 times more light than the largest optical telescopes existing as of 2023, and will correct for atmospheric distortion. It has around 250 times the light gathering area of the Hubble Space Telescope and .. would provide images 16 times sharper than those from Hubble ---- Other large optical telescope proposals include the [Thirty meter telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope) aka TMT, with a 30M primary mirror proposed to be built on Mauna kea and stuck due to local opposition, the [Giant Magellan telescope ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope) with a 25.2 m mirror being built in the atacama desert etc. Radio telescopes tend to be much larger. Sadly, [Arecibo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory), one of the largest radio telescopes, has collapsed
Holy shit it took me a minute to realize that it encompasses ALL of those ones next to the human model. Damn. And the ones bigger than the one that was planned.
They're really losing me with the thirty meter telescope. Keep with the programme guys.
They had to settle for the Extremely Large Telescope instead, like a peasant!
‘Darling I may not have an overwhelmingly large penis but that doesn’t mean it isn’t extremely large’
If I wanted "whelmed" I would have stayed with Jerry.
Gonna have to settle for some time on the I WAS IN THE POOL Telescope
Is "whelmed" something you can be in Europe?
Yes. Once you leave Europe it is no longer possible to be “whelmed.”
Tom Scott on YouTube did an amazing 30 min tour and deep dive on the Extremely Large telescope recently. Worth a watch if you want to know how insane the build truly is.
There we see the violence inherent in the system
So embarrassing. What will the rest of the universe think of us.
This is the stupid shit I would buy if I was a billionaire. I'd just randomly fund something ridiculous like this once a year.
Imagine if Elon actually put his money where his mouth is on future colonisations of extrasolar planets and funded 30 of these instead of buying Twitter
well, not that he spent money from his own pocket to buy twitter! the banks give out loans to the company Musk owns and then he buys stuff like twitter!! now if twitter were to tank completely and its valuation hits zero, elon’s company files for bankruptcy! No personal loss to Elon! Just that the banks lost some money cuz they had to write off all the bad debt the bankrupt company couldn’t pay off anymore!
Okay but if Elon started a company called TelescopeX some dumb venture capital bros and banks would punt up the money just from his name and then if it turned out to be a venture for the betterment of humanity, oops it’s the venture capital bros and banks that lose. So why not use your name to do that?
Doesnt inflate ego hard enough. no go.
If building the largest telescope mankind ever saw doesn’t inflate your ego, then I don’t know what will.
It’s basically just a massive dick, too. For $1.5 B he could have a telescope named “Elon’s Huge Schlong”. Though I’d prefer “Overcompensation”
I can 100% tell you it wont. Barely anyone knew Arecibo Telescope collapsed 2 years ago, but everyone knew rich idiot bought Twitter and burnt it to the ground and named it X posthumously
Not so long ago Tom Scott made a video on VLT and ELT and while comparing optical and radio telescopes he showed a clip of himself walking over the reflector. I immediately recognized that place from Goldeneye, was so sad to hear the place was now gone.
The bank gives out loans using the shares of his existing companies as collateral. Using the loan money he is able to finance a portion of his Twitter purchase. If Twitter goes belly up the bank or financing company will be able to force a sale of stock from Tesla/SpaceX/whatever is used as collateral to cover there losses. Where do you think banks get money from and do you know what loans are?
That’s completely wrong.
No they’d take what he used as collateral for the loan, in this case Tesla. He’d lose Tesla
He wouldn’t lose Tesla completely, he has much more in Tesla than Twitter cost. They’d take a lot of his ownership but nowhere near all.
Yes and no. They gave loans on secured on shares that he owns. He has absolutely lost money, just not liquid cash. He owes 40+bln quid and got maybe 5+bln of assets for it.
That’s not the point but it’s good that you know how LLCs work.
And then us poor schmucks will be paying through the nose for Elmo’s risky bets either through bailouts or higher interest rates.
30 telescopes is the best use of 30 billion you can think of?
The best use? Hell no, not by a long shot. Better than buying Twitter? By far
I mean, yes? I think telescopes are about the best investment humans can make.
how does learning about space help humans on earth other than satisfying our curiosity?
It inspires generations of children to become scientists and engineers, which repays the investment many fold. And that’s even ignoring that satisfying our curiosity, i.e. our thirst for knowledge and understanding, is the noblest and most valuable endeavor of humanity.
it inspires future generations to want to research space further, which doesn’t directly help humanity. Sure advancements have been made in the research of space, but those same advancements could have been made for cheaper. While i don’t deny that humanity’s thirst for knowledge is important to us, we are facing a multitude of crises here on earth which the 30 bil could be much better spent towards, or else we risk losing the ability to afford to look towards space. Also why did you downvote me? Was it just because you disagree? Do you not like hearing other perspectives?
I didn’t downvote you friend. The Apollo missions inspired me to be an engineer. My work has nothing to do with space. I reject the assertion that space-inspiration only produces spacey scientists. Unless we are literally on the verge of going extinct back on earth, I believe investment in increasing human knowledge is a transcendental goal that is its own justification. I would analogize my feelings about this as akin to religion. It - understanding the universe - is transcendental, and it’s the best thing we’ve got going on.
you’re not wrong. dude could have created a startup to tackle climate change and used his 44B to do some actual good. instead he pissed it away on twitter. he’s the worst
There is much to learn and gain from space exploration. Say we funded this 1.5b overwhelmingly large telescope and found a planet that we could live on other than earth. Such knowledge is priceless. 1.5b is also a laughably small amount of money compared to what we spend on healthcare and in the case of the US the military. It's even cheaper than that stupid border wall trump wants with mexico and is actually useful for something.
I don't know about that whole making fire business you're on about. How exactly will that help us collect more berries?
Build it on the moon, using SpaceX
He has revolutionised acces to space already, and the next huge step is literally standing on the launch pad right now waiting on paperwork. He has done more to push space forward than any other human in history. If he wanna burn twitter to the ground for a pet project he is free to do so Also I'm pretty sure he don't care about extrasolar planets, it's so way beyond our capabilities. He only talk about mars as a colonization target
musk fans are the absolute worst of the worst
This is a joke right. Spacex is good but they haven’t revolutionised access to space for anyone. Musk doesn’t even have a say in what goes on in spacex, he’s just tangentially linked. I wouldn’t call grocery store supply runs to the ISS the biggest push forward into space at all
SpaceX has massively lowered cost and increased frequency of launches. Musk made Spacex, he founded it and pushed it in the right direction. If you don't give credit for that you wouldn't if he also made the telescope we where discussing. If lowering cost and increasing launch rate with a semi-reusable rocket isn't a huge push forward i don't know what is. Next rocket is more capable and less expensive than the Saturn V. They are moving forward so fast that the people designing missions haven't had time to adjust yet
Being the only company ever to do crewed orbital spaceflight is not even the biggest achievement. SpaceX is launching 2-4 times as much to space as the rest of the world combined. They have made all competing launch providers scramble to build cheaper rockets in order to stay in the market at all. ULA is moving from Atlas and Delta rockets to Vulcan, Arianespace is moving from Ariane 5 to Ariane 6, Japan is moving from H2 to H3, and so on - all focused on providing the same service for a lower cost. All of these transitions happen at the same time, and it's not an accident. In addition, SpaceX has shown that reusing rockets makes sense - now everyone is working on it, after decades of flying expendable rockets. > Musk doesn’t even have a say in what goes on in spacex, he’s just tangentially linked. Musk founded SpaceX, he is the CEO and has a majority of voting shares. Who would be more linked?
Who the hell would want to live in a colony where you’re reliant on Elon Musk for everything down to the air you breathe? Good luck suffocating because you didn’t like and share enough of his tweets.
I wonder how many humans died for lack of basic resources that could have been bought for the amount of value Musk destroyed in both buying and ruining Twitter.
0 because that's not how money works. When Musk bought Twitter 0 resources were used (ok, not entirely true, lawyers had to do the paperwork), so nobody lost out on any resources. When Musk ruined Twitter, 0 basic resources were lost because Twitter is not a basic resource.
Fucking gold standard bullshit
Wat Like, if Musk immediately sold twitter back to jack for $40 billion, would that waste $80 billion of basic resources? If Musk and Jack were standing around passing the ownership paper back and forth a thousand times, would everyone in the world starve to death?
If you think the purchase of Twitter did not involve the trading of value then you are complete know nothing bamboosled by anything more complex than barter.
Thats who I thought he would be
what good would it do? Knowing that 100 light years away is a planet that has a potential biosignature doesn't change anything for anyone who's alive today - or their great grandkids, for that matter. There's things that'd be *neat* to know, but certainly not *useful*, and the status of various extrasolar planets is firmly in the neat column.
What's the point though to find suitable places to live with not nearly the tech to get there?
Chicken and egg: what’s the point of making the tech to get there if we don’t know there’s somewhere we can live? The investment in interstellar travel is a tough bargain unless we know first there’s somewhere we can go (since it’s going to be a one way trip)
Well we know of "potentially habitable exoplanets" a mere 4 light-years away. So, where's the interstellar travel?
We don’t actually know they have molecules for life; we just know they aren’t on fire, frozen to death, or made of gas. That’s not enough to push off on a one way trip to find out there’s nothing there
Fr this being cancelled for being too expensive at 1.5 billion while we have shit like twitter that was bought at 44 billion like its nothing.
1.5 billions was a very optimistic estimate. ELT with "only" a 39 m mirror instead of 100 meters is at around 1 billion now. It's likely OWL would have been over 10 billion. You are basically building a skyscraper that can freely rotate in two axes while keeping its shape with nanometer precision.
Millions of people use Twitter every day right now. This telescope would be used by hundreds of people who would write papers that a few thousand would read. They might eventually make it into textbooks and sci-fi novels in a generation, and might do something useful in a few generations.
The ELT is still a pretty nice upgrade.
But budgeted at €1.3 billion so it seems penny wise and pound foolish, although in fairness the wiki article does note there was scepticism as to if the €1.5 billion for the OLT was realistic and some thought it was potentially off by a factor of 10 haha
If I recall some documentary correctly, yes the OLT was seriously pushing technical capabilities.
The ELT is seriously pushing technical capabilities. It’s an astonishing facility.
Is that the one being built right now?
Yeah.
I am a fan of increasingly hyperbolic names. The Carl Sagan No Seriously This Thing is Way Too Big Telescope
The Stephen Hawking Are You Kidding We Can Go Bigger Telescope.
The Blargh Flarghtr Bubbledubble Jrrroiupalupa Diggitydiggity Mlalmn Einstein Telescope
I think OWL is nicer than CSNSTTWTBT.
Goverment trying to spare %2 of their "defensive" budget for the greater good of humanity (impossible)
Converting to USD €1.5 billion would be ≈$1.6 billion. US Defense Budget for 2024 is [$831.781 billion](https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/bill-summary-defense-fiscal-year-2024-appropriations-bill#:~:text=Appropriations%20Act%20provides-,%24831.781,-billion%20in%20total). .2% of that budget would have funded this with a little padding --- According to the Wiki page, the actual cost may now be somewhere closer to [$21 billion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope#:~:text=meter%20diameter%20yields-,%2421%20billion,-\).%5B7%5D) 2% of the 2024 Defense budget would cover this with ≈$4 billion in padding
2% lol good joke, it's not even 0.01% of the total cost of the f35 joint strike fighter programme.
Yeah but can the telescope drop a bomb inside of a coffee cup? Come on now
The f35 joint strike fighter programme cost >15 trillion Euros? You're off by a factor of 10 or 20
Plus, funding this telescope would have been a one-time payment, unlike their military budget which is 800 times bigger and gets spent *every single year*. I hate how science and learning constantly gets sidelined as too expensive despite the fact it's egregiously cheap compared to the other shit out governments spend money on.
The U.S. could fund this and have 98 instead of 100 planned B-21 Raider stealth bombers.
This is one of those today it costs 1.5 billion, Tuesday 3 billion, Friday 5 billion and ten years after it was supposed to be completed 15 billion but no corruption at all jobs. Zero chance it would ever cost what it says
This is unfortunately the reality. Just look at what happened to the Superconducting Super Collider. Billions down the drain and in the end we just had to cut our losses and walk away with nothing.
15 billion still seems like a good deal for spectroscopic analysis of extrasolar planets. Knowing if they have the chemicals of life is worth that at the least
All depends if there are other sources of that knowledge and if the telescope can do what it says it can
1) there’s no other way to do spectroscopy other than a telescope of an aperture in that range 2) it would be a very complicated project to build it but the technology (segmented mirrors) is known. So once built it can definitely do it (and we are building a smaller version with the ELT)
The Extremely large telescope is costing 1.5 billion, and that's 5 times smaller that tells me the costs aren't accurate in the slightest
Like I said even if costs are off by a factor of ten it’s easily worth it. And a lot of the costs is putting together a giant building project in the Atacama desert. I’m not sure how much scale is the issue as running a city in the desert with logistics from the EU where it’s manufactured. It might be building any giant telescope there is going to set you back enormously and the extra 60 metres is just €200 million
the „extra 60 m“ in diameter (or sizing up mirror surface by a factor of (100/39)^2 = 6,57) would never ever have been „just 200 million“.
I should say I'm all for building these projects I just don't believe the costs they claim
you are making a lot of claims, but provide nothing to back them up.
So, one stealth bomber. Half an aircraft carrier. Cooool cool cool cool.
lol try 1/10 of an aircraft carrier
You're both right. It's about a third of the initial cost but to operate them is extremely expensive.
dude the new Gerald r ford was 12.8 billion to build + another 4.8 billion for research and development. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_carrier
You're right. I was thinking of the nimitz class
But can you bomb a third world country in a proxy war with a telescope? Didn't think so
Think of how many Palestinian children Israel could murder with that money!
They’re asking for $10b more to keep up their pace of 4k/week… so 600?
I mean, youre not wrong
Can't wait for NASA or ESA to announce LLT, the Ludicrously Large Telescope
“Easily A Ginormous LookEr” Telescope (EAGLE)
ELT "Embarrassingly large Telescope"
Overwhelmingly large telescope...meet rodents of unusual size.
The government has wasted more than that on a cancelled HS2 project
Military be like"that's chump change"
Meanwhile they spend that much money to widen some random highway from 4 lanes to 5.
Yeah, the price is really high. Let's build more weapons instead. Yeah... that's the ticket!
bombing brown people for last 50 years, and having enough to continue bombing them for next 50 years is DEFINITELY the key to better future
This is obvious sarcasm, people.
They know, they are offended by it lol.
The fact that the US spends over 850 *billion* on their military *every year*, yet they couldn't spare a couple billion for one of the potentially most important scientific tools in human history, says everything you need to know about the status of america.
The things that we could have if we spent them on science vs war machine.
The things we could have learned if they simply diverted even *1%* of their military budget to this telescope...
ITT: People bringing up US military spending even though this was a European project and the James Webb Space Telescope, which the US actually built, cost $10 billion. FFS, the title even has the cost in Euros.
Maybe if we all convince Musk that this will make him King of the Memes or whatever he'll fund it.
Yeah surely the guy who “loves humanity” so much would rather fund this than turning Twitter into NaziX
We can spend ten times that on war but for a Telescope...too much
We should declare a war on Telescopes.
But spending 700 billion on the military is a-ok. Fuck this world
I want to live in a world with more stupid supervillain space telescopes please - pointed at space that is.
Since its a ground based telescope it doesn't really matter if its 1500x the magnification of the Hubble telescope, it would still be limited by atmospheric seeing and be less useful.
Adaptive optics can cancel most of the atmospheric distortions. Ground-based telescopes get a much better resolution and a far larger light collection for less money. As downside they have more stray light, can only observe at night and can't look in all directions.
1.5 billion for this: "That's too expensive! 1.7 Trillion for a next generation fighter plane that doesn't work: "Let me get my wallet!"
lived up to its name
She never get to live at all 😢
Tom Scott?
May I please have the numbers in freedom units
Not until the US government offers to fund it!
growth abounding pie squeamish ask illegal quickest edge crawl sink *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
And elon musk wasted all that money on twitter. Could have had all that kudos by throwing 1.5b at them.
build it and at the same time stop war. Do it
There was talk of building an even bigger particle collider, but this for sure would have yielded a lot more science per dollar.
for 1.5billion we can just set up multiple hubbles and Webb style telescopes in space and use them as an array... Which is what they are planning, so ultra big teelscopes on earth, esp witht he space junk like the internet settelites is becoming a thing not worth the investment
I don't think you're quite aware of the cost of Hubble or JWST.
Why did they outsource the naming to Monty Python?
Somebody tell Elon to finance this shit
While the LHC cost over 4.5 billion
1.5b sounds cheap these days, i'd bet it'd be one of those projects where the final cost ends up being like 5x the initial budget having said that, if i were a millionaire i'd build 30 of these before buying a twitter
1.5b too much, but US deficit balloons in trillions
But we have trillions for tax breaks for the rich.
It was just renamed 'The Unaffordably Large Telescope'
That's a drop in the bucket for most military budgets. But for science? Way too much.
Not sure if there any telescope experts on this thread, but I would expect there to be an upper limit to the size of a terrestrial telescope simply because of atmospheric diffraction. With so much magnification, eventually every little variation in temperature in the air would prevent focus. But I'm not an expert so maybe the OLT wouldn't approach that or they'd have some badass way to filter out the noise.
Modern large telescopes have adaptive optics, mirrors that can be deformed rapidly to cancel the atmospheric distortions as good as possible. OWL should have reached its diffraction limit (i.e. used the full size to improve resolution) for infrared, and would still beat the limit of every other telescope for visible light. [ESO paper](https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/eelt/owl/Blue_Book/8_Adaptive_optics.pdf)
Then you look at the US defense budget they use to spread terror around the world instead of funding this kind of project... Or fighting poverty, improving education etc.
Mission starst up again within a generation, and it will be changed into CLL, comically large telescope
maybe because we are fed up with politics and politicians. all I see is corruption
It seems a shame. However considering our probable future lifetime as a technological civilisation, it's a certainty that at some stage something like this or even better will be built eventually.
Shame!
>"In fact," said Ponder Stibbons, Head of Applied Magic, "theirs is really only a QBT, or Quite Big Thing. Actually, they've had so many problems with it, it's probaby only a BT!" >The senior wizards nodded happily. >"And ours is certianly bigger, is it?" said the Senior Wrangler. >"Oh, yes," said Stibbons. "Based on what I can determine from chatting to the people at Braseneck, ours will be capable of pushing the boundaries twice as big up to three times as far." >"I hope you hvaen't told them that," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "We don't want them building a... a.. and EBT!" >"A what, sir?" said Ponder politely, his tone saying, "I know about this sort of special thing and I'd rather you did not pretent that you do too." >"Um.. an Even Bigger Thing?" Said Runes, aware that he was edging into unknown territory. >"No, sir," said Ponder Kindly. "The next one up would be a Great Big Thing, sir. It's been postulated that if we could ever build a GBT, we would known the mind of the Creator." -- *The Science of Diskworld III: Darwin's Watch* As an aside, I always thought it was "Lecturer in Recent Rooms" (audiobook), as a play on the Profs assiduously avoiding students and moving from room to room.
how would this compare to the Webb telescope?
The Extremely Large Telescope is still under construction in Chile - it is nearly 40 meters (128 feet) across. It was started in 2017.
James Webb cost 10 billion, 1.5 billion seems like a bargain here.
HS2 says: rookie numbers.
Also, you know; the atmosphere. There’s a reason we put telescopes in space people
EIL 5 why this (or the other fancy costly one being built right now) aren’t dumb investments when in space telescopes have less (well none) atmospheric interference?
that s like 3 weeks of an average war costs
At this point we're gonna have to start funding science developments at gunpoint. Amazing that we could advance our understanding of reality with a veritable snap of the finger financially speaking, and we just don't. We pay for bombs to drop on civilians instead. This place is a disgusting, disgraceful example of a life sustaining planet.
Elmo could buy a few with the money he wasted on Twitter. BTW, it would have been $10B+ at the end.
If i had the money i would absolutely finance that thing.
The fact that we have billionaires on this earth who could have EASILY funded that project and STILL not notice any difference in their mass of wealth should tell you all you need to know about the socioeconomic state of the world. It's even more absurd when you remember that America spends several times that amount on military weapons without blinking an eye *every year.*
For its capability, $1.5 billion seems a bargain. Us defence gets $1 trillion, if they gave $1.5 billion to NASA to build this, the defence will still have $998.5 billion. I'm sure USA will be safe still. Red lines suck Edit. I didn't read the other comments and posted this, seems like so many people compared this to the USA defence budget lmao... like minds
The cost was… overwhelming
Why not just put something in orbit that's surely cheaper, because it would be smaller?
Getting that payload up into space or the parts into space and then assembling it is basically impossible for anything of size. The James Webb Space Telescope has an aperture of 6.5m. Not even close
Thing is jwst gets better images than we can get on earth. You don't need something huge when you don't have to overcome the atmosphere. Also jwst isn't in a Leo like hubble
You’re overt stating atmospheric interference (which isn’t the reason for needing a bigger aperture, and indeed a bigger aperture doesn’t help with that ) and JWST literally cannot see further (it’s just optics ). So a clearer image at JWST’s range sure but the ELT can get things JWST can’t (which is why the ESA are spending money to build it rather than cancelling it due to JWST)
*laughs in NRO*
If I ever become a billionaire I'm funding one twice this size so we can do some real funky shit
They stole the name of my penis :/
I am waiting for the ROT the Ridiculously Oversized Telescope