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Comment by wthomp | Hacker News Reader

There’s a bit more to it than that. GMT is further along but its design has many compromises versus TMT. Also, a second ELT in the southern hemisphere is less useful than one in both Hemispheres. The situation for TMT on Maunakea is definitely tricky, but it’s also a better site than either of GMT’s or EELTs.

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I've been told (but can't confirm) that the GMT instruments are farther along, as well. I agree that a northern hemisphere telescope is necessary and I'd like to see both get built. I'll defer to others on whether Mauna Kea is superior to the EELT site since Chile hosts a lot of extremely successful observatories.

I like to think I'm sensitive to the wrongs done to indigenous populations but can't come to grips with the Native Hawaiian's protests. Nevertheless, they have worked and there is no end in sight. Isn't TMT still hedging with a backup site in the Canary Islands?

It looks like NSF has to arrange a shotgun wedding between Carnegie and Caltech the way it did with Caltech and MIT over LIGO.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-tomorrow-s...

My understanding is that the AO system for GMT is going to pose quite a challenge. A big topic of ongoing research is dealing with “petaling” where the separate primary mirrors in phase due to the atmosphere.

For combining the projects, it does seem like that may be the only option funding wise, but it’s hard to imagine what the resulting observatory would look like. Maybe it would have to be a completely new design?

Thanks for the pointer. I am interested in instrumentation so I'll look up the AO papers. Naively it seems like that would be an issue whether the primary is a few large segments or a lot of small ones.

If the resulting project winds up as a redesign, it would presumably add years to the project and that will only increase costs. Some philanthropic organizations and partner countries will see their generosity go for nothing which won't help matters. EELT will be operational in that time and getting results.

I also wonder about the growing LEO satellite problem. I get that these enormous telescopes have narrow fields-of-view compared to Rubin and similar wide-field survey facilities. The possibility of these being overwhelmed by spaceborne light pollution seems very real.

> like to think I'm sensitive to the wrongs done to indigenous populations but can't come to grips with the Native Hawaiian's protests.

It’s “holy land”. History is paved with mass death and destruction fighting irrationally over specific pieces of land that have nothing more than “societally sentimental” value.

I can understand it better when people have lived in a place, built structures, raised families, and so on. AFAIK, the top of Mauna Kea was not settled that way and in fact, is pretty inhospitable to humans who are not very well prepared to be there. I've never been to Hawaii but understand that rampant development and tourism are big problems on some islands. I could understand knocking down massive hotels and returning that land to nature. The telescopes at least to me are an entirely different situation.

It might be similar to the way there are unclimbed peaks in the Himalaya because the summits are considered holy. For example Kailash is considered holy by several religious groups, and there are pilgrimages to the base of it but there is no record on anyone climbing it. People in Hawaii may have considered the summit holy without building anything up there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Kailash

That's a good point. Not that it changes my mind about the worth of the telescopes but I can see that the peak could have been left alone by Native Hawaiians for those reasons.

Isn't the exploration of the mysteries of the universe a great way of putting a holy place to use?

If we're going to be making utilitarian arguments, I'll point out that almost everything you own could be put to better use by someone else.

In this particular case of native Hawai'ians, and there's a long history of mainlanders deciding, without asking them, that their stuff could be put to better use by them.

No. You should read "Hawaiian Antiquities" by David Malo, a Native Hawaiian historian who lived during the early Kingdom. He documents what happened on the mountains, and as far as I can recall, he only mentions Mauna Kea to mention an adze quarry that was used. You can also read Liluokalani's book. She mentions sacred mountains, but it's Mauna Loa, not Mauna kea. That's not to say there hasn't been religious significance but that it never stopped things like rock quarrying or hiking, or even the early telescope building.

This idea of the mountain being tabooed for anything but Native Hawaiian religious practices is a recent invention by the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement in the form of the TMT protesters, as well as a new "sacred" name they cooked up for it "Mauna a Wakea".

It's not just that it's a holy site, it's also that Hawai'i was annexed by the US and its population disenfranchised with most of the land increasingly being owned by rich foreigners and foreign investors. The telescope may be benign by comparison but with growing cultural awareness of Hawai'i's status and history, I'd imagine it's more about the symbolism than the immediate harm. Context matters.

Since statehood, Hawaii has been much more democratic than it was during the Kingdom. Under the Kingdom, a large share of the population was made up of migrant workers without much rights. The initial US takeover was illegitimate, but Hawaii later became a US state with much greater rights for the general population.

It's not simply a holy land, it is also a historic burial site, so it is covered with graves that have historically simply been bulldozed over

The TMT site was chosen because archaeological surveying showed that that particular location does not have any ancient artifacts (such as burial sites).

> I like to think I'm sensitive to the wrongs done to indigenous populations but can't come to grips with the Native Hawaiian's protests.

For me it's especially hard given all indications are they rather recently got to the island themselves.

Of course, these things don't obey logic, so not an argument as such.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hawaii

>I'll defer to others on whether Mauna Kea is superior to the EELT site since Chile hosts a lot of extremely successful observatories.

Mauna Kea is special as a site because it sits in the middle of the Pacific. Their air travels for miles unobstructed before reaching the island, so it flows more smoothly over the mountain. It is also above 40% of the Earth's atmosphere and very dry [1]. This makes for much less distorted viewing than any other telescope site in the world. It is also in the Northern Hemisphere, which has a different sky than the Southern Hemisphere in Chile. The two sites complement each other in this way.

> but can't come to grips with the Native Hawaiian's protests

That isn't surprising. The protest movement, particularly their leaders, are great at manipulating the media. I rarely see balanced articles, or articles telling the real story behind the protests.

The claims of the protesters are ostensibly about the environment and religious sacredness. But most of their claims have been debunked during extensive administrative and legal hearings [2].

What it's really about, particularly for the protest leaders, is Hawaiian sovereignty. They want to restore the monarchy. They are like Hawaii's version of the Sovereign Citizens. But unlike them, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement has its hooks in major institutions, like the University of Hawaii Manoa, the state's flagship campus, where the dean of the Hawaiian Studies school is a pro-sovereignty activist. They are also very good at social media, so many media organizations pick up their media and take it as gospel, without actually investigating their real motivations. This even is true of orgs the Sierra Club, unfortunately.

They are targeting the telescopes because they cannot target the military, a more logical choice with respect to their actual goals, or the tourism industry, because a lot of them make money there. So the telescopes get the knock even though they are the most environmentally and community friendly of the three. They are good at getting attention by bullying astronomy and have even duped people like Jason Mamoa, The Rock, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elizabeth Warren into supporting them. They have all the "woke" college students backing them, even that TMT member institutions (including astronomy students).

The delays in construction that are largely caused by them has caused the project cost to balloon and it's now seeking NSF funding.

1. https://about.ifa.hawaii.edu/facility/mauna-kea-observatorie...

2. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/occl/files/2019/08/3568-TMT-Final-De...

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