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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