You see giant protests occupying cities for weeks and your first thought is that americans are totally OK with the state of things? All those folks on the street in Hong kong - they must just be out there celebrating their loss of liberties! It's a big party!
Continued gerrymandering keeps the incumbents in power. Ongoing voter suppression targeted at minorities silences their political voices and swings elections, denying democracy its due. Since 1990, the Republican party has won the popular vote for president once, but won the presidency 3 times. 2018 was a wave year where the left picked up a huge number of seats in the house. And the federal government isn't everything. State and local governments hold enormous power, and where progress can be made, progressives are elected. Theres also huge amounts of money in politics thanks to a really destructive supreme court ruling. And do you really think the people in Minneapolis protesting are going to vote for trump and support officials that refuse to serve their interests? I understand you might not be familiar with why people are protesting and the ways the political system is broken. Hell, I don't know what's going on in the UK with brexit and their protests everything for example, and I dont know what the electoral dynamics and structural problems are. And that's fine, because I'm not going around oversimplifying issues I dont understand and saying "wow these dumb Brits are so self destructive why do they keep voting for dumb stuff." Same thing. I'd recommend actually understanding what's going on before making sweeping incorrect statements about how America works. Again - Americans electing leaders that refuse to serve "their" interests. Do you think this deeply politically divided country is some sort of monolith? Do you really think the people protesting are the ones that voted for Trump?
Indeed.. When the public has only two candidates to realistically choose from, both of whom represent parties which run on massive legalized bribery ("donations") and coordinate to systematically keep incumbents out - it's not fair to blame the American public for "electing" leaders that maintain and strengthen the status quo. They don't really have much of a choice.
Not really. When you ignore all the marketing material about "freedom" and such that accompanies a discussion about the US, you see that we are an extremely authoritarian country.
Well to be fair. If more population were concerned an actively participating in democracy, by at the least get out and go to vote, some thing would change, for sure.
USA has the lowest participation on any democracy I know.
Universal obligatory vote is something that does wonders and produce actual change.
I do vote but I also live in a gerrymandered district so my representative is pre-chosen for me. I also live in a non-battleground state where essentially my president is pre-chosen as well. My vote actually doesn't matter much at all.
Maybe not enjoy, but there are certainly people who are much less affected, or not affected at all, by it.
These media stories always focus on those who picked the wrong job for their caracter, and then make a big drama of it.
I mean, there are people cutting open other humans daily. We call them surgeons. I would puke right there and could never do that. Different people have different abilities. Simple.
However, it has planets thought to be in the Goldi-locks zone around one of the stars. Seems like if they can get that kind of resolution at 300ly, they should be able to do infinitely better at 4. Just a thought, I am sure I am missing something.
A comment upthread mentions that one of the biggest obstacles to detecting planets is the huge contrast between the planet and its host star: detecting 10-14 orders of magnitude difference between the luminosity of a star and orbiting planet cannot be made simpler by adding in 2 additional stars.
The dark side is only dark from our perspective on earth. It still receives two weeks of sunlight a month.
If you wanted to minimize sunlight, you'd want to put a telescope at L2 [1], which is in fact where the James Webb Space Telescope will be deployed [2].
It's launch was recently pushed back from March to October of 2021 [3] (or [4] for non paywalled version)
And at L2, we'll never be able to upgrade it or even service if something were to go wrong before end of scheduled mission. Something on the moon would be much more accessible for upgrades or basic servicing missions. Even with 2 week on/2 week off schedule, it would be so useful. During those 2 weeks off, it would be charging its batteries. Never would it suffer from cloudy nights.
OTOH, a trip to the moon requires about 10x more fuel than going to L2. Although I suppose a moon telescope could synergize nicely with other lunar activities
Edit: I think I misread the table I was looking it, it's more like 2x or 3x instead of 10x, and that assumes a start from LEO
The dark side of the moon would be much better for a telescope array; given that the moon has no atmosphere and isn't seismically active, you could form a massive, scalable array with incredible resolution.
Most large telescope arrays (that I know of) are for radio astronomy, largely for geographical reasons (as far as I know).
Earth is a source of noise throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, so I think the benefits of building on the far side (eliminating Earth noise), will likely outweigh the costs (limited/more costly bandwidth).
I think a mixed array, consisting of "radio" and "light" telescopes could present very interesting possibilities, especially because you could dynamically allocate sparse sets of the array to different tasks.
All of that being said, I am an engineer (with an interest in array signal processing), not an astronomer.
I believe the dark side of the moon would be more apt for radio astronomy. The obvious reason being that the Moon is blocking interference of artificial radio signals on Earth.
The moon is interfering with radio signals? Doesn't this only happen if the moon is literally blocking line of sight? It seems like being outside of earth's atmosphere and ionosphere would be the biggest benefit for radio.
The moon is basically a giant reflector for (many bands of) radio. The reason the US government funded so many radio telescope arrays was to monitor Soviet ballistic missile tests, by looking at signals reflected off the moon.
The point is: do you want to live in a world where a handful of authoritarian corporations decide, what you can publicly say and what not?