The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System | Hacker News Reader

The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System

schmidtsciences.org

70 pointspppone58 comments

Lots of weird marketing speak on here for an astronomical observatory. “Modular design that leverages economies of scale” what? These are telescopes, not telephones. There’s a very small amount of scientific grade ones in existence and they are all different.

Best of luck to them anyway.

Edit: it looks like the Argus array at least is a project out of Chapel Hill. Better info here: https://argus.unc.edu/specifications

Schmidt probably helping fund it.

> what? These are telescopes, not telephones. There’s a very small amount of scientific grade ones in existence and they are all different.

Have you not been following modern satellite and telescope bus architectures? Both planet and spacex have been using this model to great effect over the last decade.

Neither of those companies are producing astronomical telescopes as far as I can tell.

As you can see by the name of the thing, they are married

Tell that to Bill and Melinda.

At the time the foundation was formed, they were married

Not sure why that's relevant. But if that's interesting then it's probably also relevant that it's an open marriage.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-13439603/eric-...

Besides the quality of the source, that's been slightly overtaken by more recent events:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-20/former-goo...

Likely Schmidt's repentance for his unbridled Burning Man trips.

Interesting. Wayne Rosing (Silicon Valley pioneer and early engineering lead at Google) has been working on a global telescope project for a long time now also.

https://lco.global/

Ben you still have code running here.

Ha, thanks for letting me know! I hope it's not causing too many problems out there :-)

The level of negativity in these comments is surprising. We can certainly debate whether billionaires should exist at all, but given that they do, here’s one who’s putting his money towards advancing cutting edge science instead of buying a third mega yacht. I am strongly in favor.

Schmidt has done more damage than he ever will undo with his philanthropy.

And one yacht should be enough, especially if it is like this:

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/eric-schmidt-and-his-wi...

> The level of negativity in these comments is surprising

Maybe not so surprising:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46512881 "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform" (2026-01-06, 456 comments)

I agree with you. I clicked into this hoping to hear what new things we could learn or discover with the new observatories. Commenting on the more positive and informative side would be a better use of time and energy I think :)

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/former-google-ce...

The broader availability of data from astronomical observations starts to become relevant in the present time of coding agents that can help hobbyists.

The age of plausibly buying a legacy is gone, so these vanity projects inspire more cynicism than anything else.

Well, this is better than what Bezos is using his surplus money for.

You don't support trying to save the planet?

The Bezos Earth Fund: https://www.bezosearthfund.org/

The planet will be just fine. It measures consequential time in many millions of years. You mean: support saving humanity.

I mean, yeah. When people way saving the planet they mean saving humanity. That's exactly it. A barren rock does no one no good. I don't get it why people hang onto this expression, it's as if you heard that George Carlin bit and now that's your anchor to reality.

For the past 50+ years there really has been a somewhat significant and quite influential body of people who genuinely want to preserve the planet’s ecosystem even at the expense of the people living on it.

It's not like the dinosaurs had a save the earth campaign. Yet, before humans the rock had life forms that died out while the rock itself continued being a viable planet supporting life. If humans die off, the planet will continue on with life continuing in new ways.

Bezos is one of the best, though? Blue Origin, the Long Now foundation, and I could go on all day. I don't know of too many other billionaires so willing so spend vast sums on the Heinleinian dreams of their youth.

I don't believe it's a net benefit to the world when a single person fundamentally changes entire economies, captures a significant portion of the resource stream and then maybe a some point redirects a portion of of it to their pet projects. Although I strongly support shooting tech bros and politicians into space (one way; even better)!

I am not understanding how this is bad. Other than a guy made a bunch of money and is spending it how he wants. Or is that the whole reason?

> Other than a guy made a bunch of money and is spending it how he wants.

A guy has woken up to the fact that he'll be remembered as a villian and is trying to whitewash his reputation.

I don’t know that the vast majority of Americans know who Eric Schmidt is. And unless they find little green men, no one will care about this project, so it won’t affect his (essentially nonexistent) reputation.

It’s not unlike if you had a blog post about a gardening project in your backyard. Perhaps interesting to gardeners, but approximately no one cares.

Low effort cynicism.

It worked for Alfred Nobel.

It seems to have worked for Bill Gates as well. He definitely did some not so nice things when starting and running MS - I think it unfortunately goes with the territory of running a successful company at scale. But subsequently he has become more know for his philanthropy.

I forget why he’s a villain. Did he do something at Google?

He’s sort of a lesser known figure to me.

He was responsible for a bunch of the anticompetitive hiring agreements with Jobs at Apple and he’s a fairly well known lothario, but otherwise benign IMO considering his competition at that wealth level.

He is also the man who said ”If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.” as if people are not being hunted for being LGBTQ even in the west, or persecutions of various kinds are a thing of the past, or spousal abuse doesn’t matter.

Eric Schmidt is, in his own words, an arms dealer now and is driving the R&D of autonomous A.I. weapons.

For the vast majority of non pacifists, that is not a bad thing.

I would go even further: Not only the vast majority, but 100% of non pacifist like AI weapons.

For the bottom 99.9% of wealthy people, it is not a good thing.

> For the vast majority of non pacifists, that is not a bad thing.

Speak for yourself. I'm a non-pacifist, and I think "autonomous A.I. weapons" are a nightmare.

Sure, all lethal weapons are a horrific nightmare on some level.

But you also have to keep in mind that China, Russia and Hamas will gladly develop them anyway. Until we've figured out the worldwide peace thing, we need to keep running the race, awful as it is.

But AI weapons aren't horrific in some way common to "all lethal weapons." They have that and more.

AI weapons are specially horrific in the way they have potential put massive and specific lethal power under the total control of a small number of people, in a way (like all AI) that basically cuts most of humanity out of the future (or at the very least puts them under a boot where no escape is imaginable).

In some ways, they're even worse than nuclear weapons. A nuclear attack is an event, and if you survive there's some chance of escape. Station 100,000 fully automated drones around a city with orders to kill anything that moves, and the entire population will be dead in a couple months (anyone who tries to escape = dead, everyone else sees that and stays inside out of fear until they starve).

Manpower and attention limitations have been and important (and sometimes only) limit on the worst of humanity, and AI is poised to remove those limitations.

I think that's exaggerated.

But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?

> I think that's exaggerated.

Honestly, I think the tech is probably getting pretty close to what I described. You don't need AGI or anything like it. Just autonomous surveillance drones watching for movement, and attack drones that can autonomously navigate to the area and hit the target (the latter is just stringing together a lot of drone tech I've seen implemented, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...).

> But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?

That doesn't mean the tech isn't scary (a bad thing) or that I want SV people like Schmidt developing it. There's something weirdly misanthropic and unhinged about many in SV.

Apparently, none of them have seen any of the Terminator movies.

Maybe they wear two million sunblock?

Right now he's mostly spending it on weapons and AI to control people

> a guy made a bunch of money

Through the systemic abuse and exploitation of countless individuals' privacy and autonomy. The context is everything.

The 'how' matters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com