ICYMI: Hawaii Thirty Meter Telescope Gets New Setback, No Colony Beyond Mars?

ICYMI: Hawaii Thirty Meter Telescope Gets New Setback, No Colony Beyond Mars? - The Supreme Court of Hawaii puts halt to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, a $1.4 Billion facility atop the state’s Mauna Kea volcano. Meanwhile, co-founder of The Planetary Society, Louis Friedman, says the human civilization may eventually terraform Mars, but won’t colonize more worlds beyond the Red planet in the next hundreds or thousands of years.

The Thirty Meter Telescope or the TMT atop the Mauna Kea Volcano in the state of Hawaii has encountered another serious setback after the island’s Supreme Court revoked its building permit.
According to the report published in The Atlantic on December 3, the court’s ruling says the government didn’t follow the right process when it granted a permit to build to the University of Hawaii for the $1.4 Billion high-altitude telescope.

In its written opinion, the Supreme Court of Hawaii in Honolulu noted that “quite simply, the Board put the cart before the horse when it issued the permit before the request for a contested case hearing was resolved and the hearing was held.” 

For many Native Hawaiians, the volcano is a sacred place. The 5-acre site located in the largest island of the archipelago is also a designated state conservation land, the source article added.

In a statement published Wednesday, the TMT International Observatory Board of Directors chair Henry Yang says they respect the decision of the island’s high court, and thank them for their timely ruling. He also promised that the board will “follow the process set forth by the state, as (we) always have.”
In November, the court temporarily blocked the construction of the observatory after local activists, environmentalists and Native Hawaiians challenged the project in court.

Astronomer Doug Simons, the executive director of the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope has told the aforementioned source site that the setback is absolutely devastating for the Northern Hemisphere astronomy.

Astronomers say the location of the Thirty Meter Telescope is one of the best places to see the cosmos simply because of its distance to urban areas with too much light pollution. When completed, the telescope will enable astronomers to ‘see’ the Milky Way, its neighboring galaxies, and see in greater detail the structures of our own Solar System. Astronomy experts also added that the Thirty Meter Telescope would help them investigate the poorly understood dark matter and dark energy that dominate the known Universe.

The consortium headed by the California Institute of Technology and the University of California wants to open the observatory by year 2020.

No Human Colony Beyond Mars?

And speaking of the Solar System..
American Astronautics engineer Louis Friedman, co-founder of The Planetary Society and its current executive director emeritus has told the Discover Magazine that building cities and other megastructures on Martian soil is not impossible, but it makes “little sense.”
In the interview, Friedman said transforming Mars into an Earth-like world requires too much engineering works.

“They would have to be built with material brought from Earth at much pain at much cost,” he said.
On the Red Planet, future colonies would protect themselves from radiation, he said, and it will be done using resources from Mars and not from Earth.

About terraforming Mars, Friedman, author of the new book “Human Spaceflight From Mars to the Stars,” says he believes the human civilization would eventually terraform the Red Planet. He also added that transforming Mars into “second home” is a part of human evolution - and our civilization would “eventually adapt to living on Mars and then to make it better and better.”

Friedman is optimistic that in the distant future, the human civilization will expand its borders beyond Earth, but colonizing Mars alone would keep humans busy “for hundreds, even thousands, of years” - so the exploration and colonization of other worlds beyond Mars is far off the list of priorities of future space explorers. Source: StGist
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