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Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico Collapses Weeks After Suffering Major Damage:
The renowned Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico, closed because of damage, completely collapsed Tuesday morning.
"Friends, it is with deep regret to inform you that the Arecibo Observatory platform has just collapsed," tweeted Deborah Martorell, a senior meteorologist for WAPA-TV and El Nuevo Dia in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Martorell, who was at the observatory on Monday, received a call from a scientist at the site Tuesday saying the giant reflector dish and the Gregorian Dome that held instruments above it had both collapsed, El Nuevo Dia reported.
The Associated Press also reported the collapse and said many scientists and Puerto Ricans mourned the news, with some tearing up during interviews.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:12PM (37 children)
My question is why was it so fragile in the first place? Was it lack of maintenance, like corroded cables or connections that should have been replaced / upgraded long beforehand, etc? Overloading due to new equipment not being properly analyzed? What?
It seems very strange to me that an auxiliary cable breaks, then an actual main one a couple months later.
There must have been some ongoing serious structural issues with those support cables. WTF?!
(Score: 1) by bobmorning on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:17PM (4 children)
Government owned and operated. Nuff said.
The NSF leadership should be held accountable for the lack of programmed maintenance on the facility.
(Score: 3, Touché) by drussell on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:36PM
Do you have any actual data of any kind to back up your "assessment," or is this just your own pure speculation??
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:46PM (2 children)
Care to wager on how much funding NSF requested/demanded for maintenance and were denied?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:28PM
It should have all been denied.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @07:29AM
the NSF has been trying to defund Arecibo for years (since the 90s?).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:40PM (25 children)
I'm going to go with budget cutting by Donnie Trump. Not only was it a science project, it was a science project in Puerto Rico. Hurricane damage didn't help, but there was plenty of time after Maria to address the aging/damage issues.
Now, when we don't have an accurate collision track on the next inbound asteroid, we can thank a conservative for cutting our high resolution asteroid trajectory prediction capacity in half.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:48PM
Thanks, Donald!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:01PM (4 children)
The budget cutting began long before Trump. I read elsewhere they haven't been doing the needed maintenance on it for some 20 years.
But yeah, it collapsed because it wasn't maintained properly.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:03PM (2 children)
Let's see, 2000, who was president from 2000 to 2008? Hmmmmm.....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday December 02 2020, @12:53AM (1 child)
Hmmm, I thought it was Congress the one authorizing expenditures for the Federal Government?
(Score: 2, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 02 2020, @02:42AM
That doesn't seem to have stopped Cheeto from shutting down science programs (like WHO monitoring for pandemic outbreaks around the world) with executive orders, appointment of wrecking ball directors, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @11:23PM
Thanks, Ronnie! Basically, "Thanks, Republicans!"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:40PM (15 children)
Now, when we don't have an accurate collision track on the next inbound asteroid, we can thank a conservative for cutting our high resolution asteroid trajectory prediction capacity in half.
No, we can thank ourselves. You get the government you vote for.
I imagine that, in the future, alien schoolkids will be taught about this primitive race in a nearby star system where they managed to develop limited spaceflight capability, whose scientists figured out that their planet had been bombarded with asteroids over its history, including a very large one that mostly wiped out the dominant lifeforms of the time and leading to this own race's evolution, and even developed the ability to track incoming asteroids, yet was so dumb they didn't bother properly funding facilities needed for tracking asteroids or deflecting them, and instead cut the budgets for these things, and so was unable to see a large incoming asteroid that struck and caused such damage that its effects, while not immediately causing the species' extinction, destroyed their civilization, causing them to later evolve into a less-intelligent aquatic species.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:42PM (2 children)
In many cases, we have voted ourselves governments which represent the interests of minorities - sometimes 48-49% minorities even on binary choices - more often very small minorities who purchase influence with surprisingly small amounts of money, but money that they have to spare while the majority of the population can ill afford to organize and compete financially against them.
Take an open survey, a vote if you will, among persons "old enough to know" say minimum 18 years of age, but not so old that they don't give a F what happens 20+ years in the future. Ask them: "should we fund science" vs "should we reduce taxes."
When you let people who are already basically dead make decisions impacting the future, you're almost always screwing up.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:17PM
Money! Moneeeeeeeeeey!
The richest corpses in the cemetery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @01:15AM
You are half right. Age isn't the factor, but all actual control resting in a few influential hands. The 0.01% are admittedly very good at deceiving the general public into thinking elections matter when they get to decide who runs. BSABSVTB. It's the only way to retake control.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:49PM (11 children)
It would take a rather radical collapse of civilization to create evolutionary advantage for less intelligent species. Continued advanced civilization, particularly with unlimited procreation rights granted to a single species that is guaranteed food, shelter and healthcare but with no other qualifications, may well rapidly devolve intelligence. I believe we have already measured declining intelligence in the "first world" over the last 50 years.
As long as clever use of limited resources grants a reproductive advantage, I think intelligence will survive and thrive. Of course if we bomb ourselves back to a situation so desperate that H. sapiens' cleverness can no longer adapt to the environment and thrive, yeah, reboot, who knows what will come next? I suspect some variant of Douglas Adams' advanced dolphin intelligence will survive as long as we don't wipe out all the fish, too.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:33PM (1 child)
One of the theories is that civilizations need easy resources to reach some basic level where it can develop more complex things and reach a good understanding of the universe, at least enough to keep the level for long time. We have used those easy resources in great measure; for some things we are already going for the hard to obtain cases, like deep sea oil wells. So if we collapse, any future civilization will have it harder, maybe impossible to reach our level again and, less so, go further.
Maybe there are other paths/theories, like water species developing metal working by biochemistry... but this one seems rather probable. And not very encouraging seeing how "smartly" we are doing things. But you said it in other post above, "miniorities in power not giving a fuck about next decades, and even less about centuries" is a good path for downward path of the species.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:41PM
Water worlds are fucked. No land, no complex civilization. Intelligent dolphinoids will have to wait until some other species with interstellar travel comes along to give them an uplift.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:38AM (3 children)
Prosperity is proven population control. All the rich countries have very low birth rates.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 02 2020, @01:10PM (2 children)
Correlation != Causation
The "rich" countries all have rather oppressive regimes over the middle class and poor, massive incentives against large families that overwhelm the outdated but still standing income tax incentives for children. When "rich" means men AND women working at basically anything but raising their children for 30+ years 40+ hours a week to achieve their indoctrinated concept of a minimal standard of living, sure that fosters low birth rates among the educated.
Meanwhile, birthrates among the uneducation, those with poor or absent impulse control / long term planning and executive abilities continue at much higher than replacement levels - and what does that do to your gene pool?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday December 02 2020, @02:55PM (1 child)
Biology is not accustomed to prosperity, which is a relatively new phenomenon. Evolution takes time. Birth rates will fall as survival rates rise, and that is happening
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:34PM
Genetic evolution necessarily takes several generations, often thousands but sometimes surprisingly fewer.
That's the popular theory.
If you look at the data a particular way, sure, there is a correlation between rising survival rates and falling birth rates. Causation is not so simple, and there are thousands of co-factors along with rising survival rates that may be the more significant contributors to falling birth rates.
I've only lived a little over 53 years, all in the "developed" world. From this perspective, I see plenty of couples with great infant survival rates who still have 3 and more children. Even moreso, serial monogamists seem to feel obligated to procreate in each new pairing, again resulting in greater than replacement birth rates.
The only way I have seen falling birth rates "caused" around me is DINKs who are more fulfilled by hobbies/travel than they are by child raising, and even in those couples the female drive to pro-create in the 30-36 year age range is very strong, unless they are in a stable relationship with a partner who remains steadfastly devoted to their DINK lifestyle they sneak in a pregnancy, or two or three, before menopause puts an end to it.
And of course if conservative politics continues to hold sway, that message of abstinence to the children is a reliable way to ensure procreation early and often.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by helel on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:44AM (3 children)
I am glad to inform you that you are wrong [wikipedia.org]. If anything proving the basic needs of all humans would increase the procreative benefits of intelligence.
In economics this is often discussed in terms of entrepreneurs. When someone is struggling to get by and quitting or getting fired means they lose food, shelter, and healthcare they cannot afford to start their own business no matter how good their ideas. Their intelligence dose nothing to improve their fitness beyond the base level needed to keep the job they have now.
On the other hand a strong social safety net allows anyone who thinks they know a better way of doing things to strike out on their own and try it. They can leave their old boss and found their own business because in the time it takes to get set up and find clients they have their necessities met. Therefore a high intelligence has a much better chance of allowing them to raise their social status and attract more potential mates.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 02 2020, @01:14PM (2 children)
Choose [americanexperiment.org] your [edweek.org] news [usnews.com].
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by helel on Wednesday December 02 2020, @02:41PM (1 child)
Look, I know 2020 has felt like a really long year for some people but... 2017 is NOT 50 years ago.
More broadly, you'll notice that the drops in scores all align with cuts in social services. As your edweek article talks about, in the 90's scores had been rising ever since we started recording them. Then, legislators of both parties axed welfare effectively forcing millions of children into (worse) poverty and ever since scores have been slipping. If you want scores to rise again the way to do it is to make sure that every child in America has enough to eat, a roof over their head, healthcare, and these days a computer and internet connection to do their school work.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:23PM
All perfectly reasonable goals, unless you want cheap servants.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @07:24AM
A major asteroid impact would be rather radical. The brain is an expensive organ, it burns a quarter of all the calories we eat. Combine the inital purge of "scientists" for failing to stop it with resource scarcity for a few hundred years of jocks eating the nerds and intelligence is going to plummet.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:49PM
Crap. I just now connected Arecibo in "Puerto Rico" as a "*U.S.* scientific obligation". Always knew Puerto Rico was a U.S. territory, just didn't think of that in the Arecibo context for some reason.
This time, how about going the Agile route, start with a Dish TV antenna, and work our way up?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @07:29PM (1 child)
Oh please. PR never has been able to run their own affairs. We do nothing but dump money into that slave colony.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @09:11PM
Puerto Ricans know it which is why more Puerto Ricans live on the US mainland than in PR.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:17PM (2 children)
"My question is why was it so fragile in the first place? "
Fragile is not really a word to use for something hanging in the air that weighs 800Tons plus.
Likely reasons are something wrong in the design of mods done in the 90's., poor maintenance, or some problem in the control system.
Some say that the root cause was lack of funding.
While it does cost serious money to work on things at this scale, it shouldn't cost much to monitor the state of things.
Those in charge here seemed clueless as this happened.
Lack of attention to detail seems a more fundamental problem than lack of money.
Perhaps the old folks that built it retired and nobody stepped up?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:35PM
I applied to work there and they offered me an unpaid internship. When I told them I needed at least a meager salary to live on they told me to stop eating avocado toast and buying iPhones. 0/10 would not apply again.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @07:33PM
Yeah, the fucking *White people* who built it are gone, and now the mutts are acting like they are running it. Same throughout all history. Whites engineer and build civilizations, but let the slaves stick around until they breed into the population, and eventually are left to maintain what Whites have built. Except they can't/won't.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:54PM
Lack of funding mainly.
Military and police steal all the wealth of the country in service of the rich parasite class, scraps for everyone and everything else.
The University of Florida adopted the observatory and was to fund its maintenance, but after the first cable failure, they needed help for the renovation costs. When the second cable broke, they decided to scrap the observatory for the stated reason that it was too unstable/dangerous to have a crew work on it.
The observatory also sustained damage in the hurricane that flattened Puerto Rico.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:18PM
They've found aliens and now the evidence needs to be destroyed.
I'm only joking, but it would make a nice plot.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 02 2020, @10:06PM
I suppose if you don't have the budget to replace them there's no point in monitoring them.
The engineering was sound in the sense of graceful failure, it took a long time and multiple cable failures for it to collapse as engineered; its not like it "looked fine yesterday then fell over" like actual historical engineering disasters. This thing slowly broke over the course of weeks until the final collapse; supposedly had a "no humans" exclusionary zone set up for a long time waiting for the collapse.
From what I understand there was no long term plan for the dish as part of the initial engineering. Eventually it was coming down.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Username on Wednesday December 02 2020, @01:03AM (2 children)
It might have been end of life. Equipment is only engineered to last for a limited period of time, and something this large needs expensive parts replaced with heavy machinery.
Though, I have a feeling it did not get maintained/repaired because the people who worked there didn't feel it was their job, and were not motivated to do it. Even if it meant doing the job right. If someone gets paid to sit there and not do anything since "it's broken," they will do it. I've known some people who create more work trying to get out of work, than they would have by doing the work. There was most likely other types working there, who were willing to fix it, but were prevented by these union types. Sometimes all it takes is paint to prevent corrosion, some grease on a bearing, putting a nut back on, etc.
Should have just sold it off to the private sector in that case. Better in the hands of some millionaire hobbyist or NPO, that will do everything to maintain it, than overpaid public employees who tend to segregate and segmentate work while giving the least amount of effort.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @01:24AM
People don't do work that they aren't paid for, and I'm pretty sure that, like so much US infrastructure, maintenance wasn't properly funded. As for selling it, to whom? The public sector has little interest in scientific research and none at all in something that won't yield profits, no matter how important it might be. The astronomy supply market builds telescopes, it doesn't operate them. That is why government funded science exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @07:32AM
no, the people who work there were not given the $$$ to hire the people who do that mechanical and maintenance work.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Wednesday December 02 2020, @04:25AM (2 children)
When you detect a leak in your roof, you don't wait until it is caving in to consider fixing it. By 2016, it was likely already beyond repair.
President Obama had EIGHT YEARS to provide proper repairs to it. Why didn't he do anything to fix it?
Let's all blame President Obama, even though it's not really his fault either. It's not the president's job to go around looking for maintenance projects to fund.
Arecibo collapsed because of gross negligence on the part of those responsible for maintaining it. This is not something that happened overnight or even over a presidential term.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @10:19AM (1 child)
Thanks, Ronald! And the Georges. And Slick Willie. All the Republicans, in fact. Fank you!
(Score: 2) by EJ on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:16PM
You forgot Bill.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @07:55AM (1 child)
It is a superior though almost identical design and brand new.
One empire rises while another crumbles..
Sort of like the USSR in its dying days.. the Buran shuttle in the snow after the roof collapsed because government no longer really functioned.
The loss of the telescope is very symbolic at least, like when the Fonz jumped that shark..
Maybe the American empire is over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @08:13AM
Arecibo was superior in some ways. China also had to recruit a foreigner to run their telescope.