[ExI] Update on the Hawaiian observatory shutdown

[SR Ballard]

>now used to make mushrooms because it wasn’t a Magic death ray.

Wow, I’m glad I was too young to understand at that time. I would be even more upset about that than I am about the telescope. 

SR Ballard

> On Aug 25, 2019, at 6:00 PM, John Clark via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 4:37 PM William Flynn Wallace  <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> 
>> > are there any things we could find out from it if it were built that we cannot find out by other means?
> 
> I suppose when our descendants look back on it a century or two from now it won't make a lot of difference, but that huge telescope could see things 10 times dimmer than anything we can see today and I want to know about those wonders now when I'm still alive. And that mighty telescope would be coming online right about now and we would be discovering those wonders now except for one thing, construction briefly started 4 years ago but then barbarians shut it down.  
> 
>> > Is that the only location from which we can learn whatever they want to learn? 
> 
> The 3 best astronomical observing positions on the surface of this planet are Dome C in central Antarctica, the Atacama desert in Chile, and Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Mauna Kea is the only one in the northern hemisphere and that's half the universe. 
> 
>> > And those things - are they important in any practical way? 
> 
> Back in the 1990's Fermilab was building the Superconducting Super Collider, it would have dwarfed the LHC which discovered the Higgs particle 20 years later. The machine was about half finished when congress started talking about canceling it. Fermilab director Robert Wilson went to congress to try to talk them out of it. A senator asked him if it could be useful in national defence. Dr. Wilson really wanted them to finish the machine but he was a very honest man so he told them the truth, "No" he said "the Superconducting Super Collider has nothing to do with defending our country except to help make it worth defending".
> 
> Perhaps he should have lied and said it would make a nifty death ray because the machine was canceled and the half finished tunnels that would have housed it are now used to grow mushrooms. 
> 
>  John K Clark
> 
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