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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

As an amateur astronomer, I would greatly prefer preserving radio astronomy to allowing folks to have faster facebook crap streams on mobile devices.

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Area Man Prefers His Own Interests Over Interests of Others

Are you referring to the astronomer or the 5G user? ;)

that doesn't make his interest invalid. In fact, it's the basis of democracy - we add up the number of people with interest A vs. interest B and do the one with the most votes.

That's important. Our own interests are important. It's equally important that we discuss why our interests are important enough to disallow others from pursuing theirs. And then persuade others to our side. So don't dismiss someone for having an opinion in contrast to anyone else, argue the opinion itself.

Obvious solution: we designate one half of the planet as reserved for astronomy. The earth rotates, providing an opportunity to see everything. Then the people who want to look up can move to that half of the world, and the people who want to look down can move to their half.

Sounds like a great SF plot. Please do send me a copy of the book!

All things considered, I'm glad we don't live under an amateur astronomer dictatorship.

Radio astronomy has never had a better moment to push for its interest than now - just fire up the PR machine, and say: "Seen that black hole pic? Want more things like that? Better pics? Well, then let us keep our spectrum!"

There have got to be other solutions for radio astronomy. Let's look at options like putting telescope relays at lagrange points, or in orbit of other planets where there is no spectrum interference.

The black hole pic was cool, but you know what would make it even cooler and higher-res? Using the same technique with an even wider array (interplanetary) telescopes.

I'm all 100% into that. Wish there was a way to help make this happen.

> Let's look at options like putting telescope relays at lagrange points

That's precisely what Millimetron/Spektr-M aims to do, but it still needs the ground part. You can't put the 100m Green Bank Telescope into orbit.

Sure, but what is important for me or you individually is not how we make decisions on policy affecting everyone collectively

No, we look at what makes the rich people richer, whilst giving occasional appeasements and not going too far so as to ensure there are enough "slaves" to do the work.

If it were about collectivism copyright would be about 5 years and noone would get paid more than a few times the median.

I'll rephrase my comment.

> Sure, but what is important for me or you individually is not how we should make decisions on policy affecting everyone collectively

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