Telescopes Useless by 2050?

Wellerite writes "Gerry Gilmore, from Cambridge University, has told the BBC that ground-based telescopes will be worthless by 2050. This is due to more and more cloud cover caused by climate change and increasing numbers of aircraft vapour trails. It seems to be time to start preparing to launch more orbit-based telescopes."

What would society want more.

[Drakin030]

You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both

I am sure the fat lady at walmart driving her H2 wouldnt give a shit about astronomy.

I don't believe this

[Eightyford]

Maybe ground based telescopes will not be as efficient 50 years without taking into account advances in technology, but I doubt that they will be obsolete. And what about the huge telescopes that are being planned today? They aren't going to be built where cloud cover will make them obsolete.

Anyways, I guess a little more cloud cover and vapour trails combined with "light pollution" will make today's designs less efficient, but I can't see how there is any way that ground based telescopes will become obsolete.

WTF?!?

[itwerx]

It seems to be time to start preparing to launch more orbit-based telescopes.

Er, yeah, let's treat the symptom and ignore the cause!

SP-500

[FuzzyDaddy]

Given that you need to do astronomy in the winter when there's no sun, it's probably not an issue. That and exposed skin has other problems in Antartica besides sunburn...

This is Pure BS

[wsxyz]

There is no way that ground-based telescopes are going to become "worthless" by 2050. This is just a false sensationalist claim intended to stir up trouble.

It is possible that cloud cover will increase in some places, and I can believe that jet contrails reduce the visibility of astronomical objects, but unless cloud cover increases to 100% over the entire surface of the earth and/or atmospheric jet travel increases by many orders of magnitudes, there will still be plenty of cloudless night sky on the planet earth in 2050.

Light pollution will probably be a bigger problem for ground based astronomy over the next 50 years.

Re:WTF?!?

[nasch]

So astronomers should stop being astronomers and instead fight growing air travel and global warming? Or should they maybe work around their external limitations and find ways to keep being astronomers? I don't think the article implied that nothing should be done about any of the problems mentioned.

Re:Antarctica?

[tukkayoot]

Yeah, but Antartica is located on the bottom of the world. We won't be able to see anything from there!

Re:Could be a joke but more likely...

[drinkypoo]

a liberal ecofreak troll reference to the fact that us Americans are fat, wasteful, materialistic boobs whose culture will eventually be the downfall of mankind. An opinion that I won't fully agree with.

I'm one of those type of people. I don't think we need to give up our technology. I know people like that, and I think they're pretty lame. You can't maintain a large population without technology. Of course, most of those people are planning for the aftermath of a crash of civilization, not working to actually improve what we have here.

What we need to do is use our technology. There's technology decades old that we're not using today because corporations are able to lobby politicians to feed 'em pork and step on their competition for them. Rudolf Diesel ran his first demo engine on peanut oil but here we are burning dino juice. We could be using oils extracted from hydroponically grown algae - topsoil-based fuels are damaging to the environment.

However, I agree that the fat chick in the H2 is an excellent example of the conspicuous consumption that's contributing to the destruction of the biosphere. Or at least, noticable changes that are making things worse for living organisms that we're interested in, not least of all ourselves. For example, humans put out like 500 times as much CO2 as volcanoes every year. The system is self-balancing, sure, but part of that balance may involve crushing humans, if we keep going the way we're going.

The H2 is a heavy piece of shit that's good for nothing whatsoever. The best "off-road" feature is that it's got locking differentials, which you can get for just about anything that's not front wheel drive. It's just a fucked over rebadged tahoe. And being fat means you're eating too much, or the wrong things, but usually too much. Food has to come from somewhere. Agriculture has done more damage to the biosphere than anything else, ever. Egypt used to be green! And meat - which I happen to belive in - with our current methods of food production, it's horrible as well. Overgrazing leads to the depletion of native grasses which hold down the topsoil. This leads to the soil washing away into rivers. This causes the rivers to be choked with silt, causing fish to die. Once enough of the dirt washes away, it means that less rain can soak into the soil, so more of it runs off, leading to increased flooding.

Still think the fat chick in the gas-guzzling H2 is AOK?

ObDisclaimer/Disclosure: I am a 320lb. American male who occasionally eats fast food. I drive a 1981 MBZ 300SD, which is a 3500 lb turbo diesel 4-door sedan getting 25mpg real-world mileage. (I got 26.25 on my last tank, actually, but it tends to bounce between 24 and 26 depending on driving habits.) I intend to convert my fuel system to heat and inject WVO, but it's not free...

Re:WTF?!?

[nizo]

It seems to be time to start preparing to launch more orbit-based telescopes.

Or better yet, moon or mars based telescopes. The happy side effect is that a few astronomers will survive for awhile on the moon/mars after the earth becomes uninhabitable.

Actually if you think about nearly every problem we have, we almost always concentrate on the symptoms instead of the cause. Which brings us back to why a few astronomers on the moon/mars would be a good thing....

nature of research

[bcrowell]

I did physics research for a few years as a grad student and postdoc, and one thing I learned was that 95% of all research (including 95% of my own) was correct but unimportant. If scientists have access to incremental improvements in technique, they'll still keep on writing grant proposals, taking on grad students, and publishing papers, but very little of the scientific output will be all that earthshattering. All the really big exciting results tend to come out when some new technique is found. In physics, a good example is the groundbreaking experiments (like the discovery of the nucleus) that happened once the Curies purified radium. In astronomy, Galileo's introduction of the telescope itself to astronomy led to a huge amount of progress in a short time.

If there's observing time available on a 10-meter ground-based telescope, you'd better believe there will be competition for that observing time, and papers will be published. But if really amazing things are going to be discovered, it's probably going to come from techniques that are a big leap ahead of what we have now, like telescopes in space. Telescopes in space can have apertures as big as you like without buckling under their own weight, they can probe parts of the spectrum that don't get through the atmosphere, and they're not affected by issues like clouds and contrails.

I don't find it hard to believe that contrails could be a major issue. Every time I go backpacking and spend a lot of time in a remote spot in the Seirras looking up at the sky, that's what I see a lot of -- jet contrails. If ground-based astronomy is already being pushed to the limits of what it can do, then presumably they're often working at levels of sensitivity a gazillion orders of magnitude beyond the naked eye, so I can easily imagine that contrails that would appear to the naked eye to have completely dissipated could be an issue.

Re:Oh NOES!

[SetupWeasel]

I believe that we need to reduce pollution as much as we possibly can. That said, I am tired of people on the right and the left trying to scare people into believing their argument.

Strong regulations against pollution will not destroy America. On the other hand, the apparent warming of the Earth will not incinerate us all.

There are many people invested in the idea that we alone are to blame for this "crisis." Respected scientists publish graph after graph showing that the temperature is rising with the rise of CO2 levels. These same people ignore that Mars appears to be warming too. [space.com] Maybe, just maybe, we stumbled upon a coincidence. It is time to put some focus on the Sun's luminosity.

Does this mean that we should lower emmission standards? Of course not. There are many other good reasons to ensure our air, water, and soil are clean. However, I'm tired of being told half-truths and lies. The claims of this Professor are complete nonsense and only give opponents of responsible environmentalists ammunition.

Re:Could be a joke but more likely...

[Sparr0]

I think its hilarious when people keep track of fractional mpg. I am a valet, and I see brand new F350s with digital mpg gauges reading "14.95". It is like a small child telling you they are "five and three quarters years old!", such a miniscule amount that the fraction matters. I get 45 MPG (yes, 45. Not 45.1, not 45.27349.) on a mixed commute and normal daily driving, and I would get 50 if I ever bothered to have my seals replaced. Anyone driving a vehicle that gets less is being irresponsible, AND wasting money. And mostly endangering my life, but that's another matter.

Re:It's not that simple.

[ceoyoyo]

The worst light pollution tends to be in fairly specific bands (such as from sodium street lights) and can be removed with filters. General skyglow can be removed fairly effectively digitally. Light pollution is undesirable, but it's not going to make ground telescopes obsolete.

Large telescopes also tend to be built high on mountains, both because there's less atmosphere to look through, but more importantly because they're above the clouds.

Big space telescopes would be cool all right, but it's kind of tricky... how do you launch a 100' mirror?

Re:It's not that simple.

[jd]

I can think of four options:

1. Use a non-glass-based mirror and send the thing as a series of segments which you then recombine
   
2. Make the glass in space (microgravity allows for purer products) and then use a robot arm to grind it a-la the Hubble mirror, only using a computer simulation for the template (so you don't get imperfections from a defective template, as happened with Hubble)
   
3. Same as for 2, but use moon dust - it's much higher quality silica and you won't have to use so much fuel to get it into space.
   
4. Send a very large number of very small flat panel mirrors into space, then use software correction to adjust for the errors that would creep in. Since I'm assuming the use of software correction anyway, this adds minimal overhead.