Many observatories and there’s still no light
This letter is in reference to Leningrad Elarionoff’s article stating his belief that the Thirty Meter Telescope may be the light the kupuna envisioned in regards to Mauna A Wakea.
I would think that if you bought this idea about the observatories that after the first four or five observatories and no light went on, one would learn no light is going to go on and to stop buying them. To construct 12- to 13 observatories and still expecting to see the light “no make sense.”
Christopher J.I. Roehrig
Waimea
Big companies make the money off TMT
I am writing in response Joel Aycock’s letter to the editor published May 2.
Here we are. Ideals at battle. The University of Hawaii culpable and in the crosshairs.
As far as money is concerned, those with the ideas for building the machine, software, hardware, tools, chemical processes and the list goes on, are all held as intellectual property by the companies that provide the up-front capital — the bantered-about $1.7 million.
The spin-off technologies that make it into the defense budget or the mass market, let alone the ideas and patents generated from the building of the machine, are enough to garner a faster return on investment than renting time to astronomers on the finished product.
Even the astronomers are getting duped. Once the thing is built, only the astronomers will care about it and time driving the machine is expensive, yes, but it is all funny-money. At the end of the semester, term, research project or study, the accounting is thrown away. That’s why no one outside UH ever sees a return in terms of dollars from the eyesore.
The big companies will go make their chief executive officers billions more with the gained intellectual capital.
UH refuses to clean up after itself.
The idea that a few elite astronomers will get to drive the machine they want to put up there versus the right of its indigenous people to say “no” to that type of “industry” on grounds that is supposed to be in conservation with limited and controlled easement is like saying the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. That is not the way it works.
The Thirty Meter Telescope is one of a new breed of machine that claims a 100-fold increase in sensitivity in some measures. Another goes into space — like Hubble — looking into the infrared spectrum. The rest goes to Chile.
As far as government, defense and aerospace benefit? Show me another place in the endeavor to build a telescope that makes it worthwhile for every soul having lived.
Bruce Howell
Fern Forest