Pretty cool seeing this here. I recently met someone who works at the observatory here in the island in a Python user group meeting. I was intrigued by the kind of work he did over there with Python. But was instantly bummed out when he told me how their budget has been so dramatically cut during the past few years. There's some interesting things regarding budget, and one of the latest repairs that had to be done after an earthquake north from Puerto Rico damaged one of the suspension cables that support a 900 ton telescope platform here http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2014/0409-arecibo...
..based on 500 public photos, taken between 2000-2014 by tourists - sadly that means the receiver moved around. So if you can capture hundreds of photos please go and upload the photos on flickr.com
The NSF has supported Arecibo for decades now, along with a bunch of other observatories (http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/nato...). NSF has re-evaluated its commitment to these observatories and decided to pull out of several of them so they can pursue new observing opportunities, such as LSST (sky survey for transients) and ATST (solar telescope).
Some scientists are unhappy. The complaints I have heard are that these less-centralized telescopes allowed small investigations to get off the ground, and the new ones are large consortia.
The LSST is an incredible project. I toured their lab at Brookhaven and one of the lead scientists offhand commented "Yeah, the only problem so far is we're going to have to make something flatter than anyone has ever really made something flat" (referring to the CCD array).
> As the National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns Arecibo Observatory, cannot legally carry insurance on its facilities, there is no clear source of funding to carry out such a massive repair.
This seems so absurd. Why cant NSF facilities be insured?
I cannot understand why these kind of projects lack funding. Is there no super rich person on this planet who is obsessed with the thought of extraterrestrial life?
I think you misunderstood what I said. I only facetiously pointed out that given these projects lack funding one could conclude that there is no super rich person on this planet which cares about extraterrestrial life (e.g. as a hobby).
I was simply trying to point out that "the rest of us" could try and contribute a little more to various goals rather than rely on the super rich. Most readers here are much better off than most other people on the planet.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a better way to contribute to "citizen science", for example?
Ultimately, as evidenced by history, most super-rich reach a stage of life where they realise the riches in themselves were just a way to keep score and large philanthropic contributions ensue.
It's a serious philosophical question; once [1] family financial security and [2]a high quality of life has been secured there is very little left to spend money on other than initiatives that benefit mankind or the natural world.
Funnily enough, greed seems to occur more often in those who don't really need it anymore.
> once [1] family financial security and [2]a high quality of life has been secured
.. you stop focusing on accumulating more wealth - unless those aren't the real goals, and the driving force is something less wholesome. There are natural limits on the wealth a sane person can achieve, unless they inherit or get incredibly (un?)lucky, but numbers can keep rising long after they lost any connection to anything "real", and just like in gaming, people can get and stay stuck to that. And as long as they keep "winning", only the very best get a chance to pause and reflect.
"Most"? Certainly "some" - most is debatable. I'd like to see some numbers. There is certainly no shortage of super-rich who hit that point and... just keep going, because for those types it was never about the money - it was about the power. And while more wealth might give diminishing returns, power really doesn't, yet remains directly proportional to wealth.
(For me, this is the best reason to tax the rich - it's not about revenues per se, rather it is about avoiding extremely dense accumulations of political power.)
While I totally agree with the call for more responsibility from the rest of us, the effort require to convince, coordinate and collect such money from 1 billion people would be extraordinary. Better to convince a few people that have already done the "cash aggregation" throughout their lives :)
