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Arecibo is the latest leap in ambitious publicly funded efforts to understand the universe
When news broke that Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo radio telescope was about to be demolished, it sent the scientific community into the kind of mourning typically reserved for its beloved human heroes and pioneers. For many, Arecibo was more than the second largest radio telescope in the world and a key tool in our efforts to probe the cosmos and canvas the universe for extraterrestrial life – it was an iconic monument to the last 50 years of astronomy, science, also human fulfillment.
Now, it’s a death knell.
Arecibo’s ofccommissioning marks yet another sign that we are in a twilight era for a certain way of undertaking ambitious scientific investigations and space exploration; the kind run by public organizations like the National Science Foundation, which, with tight budgets and cut wings, owned the huge telescope until it made its fateful decision Thursday.
I can’t help but hear that another baton has been passed: For years, NSF has sought private investment to keep the facility running, as it had long since fallen into a state of disrepair. Now, the ascending lights in space exploration are fewer public institutions and more private companies like SpaceX, designed to serve the profits and interests of a CEO rather than an audience.
Like many large-scale projects of the time, Arecibo started out as a project for the US military. Conceived and directed by Cornell University professor William E. Gordon in 1960, the original goal was to study the ionosphere to better understand radar detection. (It was also used for intelligence purposes: the National Security Agency used Arecibo to intercept radar signals sent by the Soviets on the Arctic coast during the Cold War.)
But Arecibo soon became a larger and extremely important tool for the study of space. He has spent most of his life under the helm of the NSF and devoted to astronomy: he is famously tuned to hear signs of alien activity in the universe, but also to search for comets and asteroids. He has become a symbol of our research into space science, of our dedication to understanding the universe – he has appeared in films and TV shows such as Contact, the Bond movie Golden eye, the horror movie Species, is File X, like a beacon of that symbolism. Its sheer scale and futuristic aesthetics embodied our foresight. And it has been a cultural landmark and source of inspiration for the Puerto Ricans he shared an island with.
Now, having withstood time, storms and the decline in public funds, it is gone.
When I heard the news of its closure, my first thought was Ted Chiang’s excellent speculative fiction story, The Great Silence, about a Puerto Rican parrot living near Arecibo complaining that while humans have built this vast apparatus to explore the universe for the intelligent life it could hear, they are deaf to the intelligent life speaking to it right here. The parrot doesn’t blame humans for neglecting its species, though – they aren’t driving extinct birds out of malice, but ignorance, after all – and argues that any species capable of erecting Arecibo must be capable of greatness, even if it isn’t. able to recognize the generosity of life on their doorstep.
But what, then, while I was reading the elegiac tributes to Arecibo following its closure – what does it say about us, if we are capable of neither?
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