🧵 Hypothetical trillion dollar space telescope.
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 18:36:55 UTC No. 16283859
Imagine that tomorrow humanity collectively decided to work on designing and constructing a new telescope in space. Magnum opus of humanity's space exploration journey. The US spends close to a trillion buckaroos on their military yearly. Imagine that for just 1 year all of the worlds global powers pool their military budget towards this telescope. Brightest engineers, mathematicians, physicists, logisticians are collected from the masses and a preparatory 10 year education course is given. At the end of the 10 year mark hierarchy is established and work begins on the telescope. What could we produce with current day technology with limitless budget like this? Can we get detailed high resolution images of exoplanets?
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:17:27 UTC No. 16283916
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta
>Two characteristics of someone with narcissistic personality disorder are:[28]
>A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior)
>A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, wealth, beauty, or ideal love.
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:19:14 UTC No. 16283919
>>16283859
>Imagine that for just 1 year all of the worlds global powers pool their military budget towards this telescope
I’d use Medicare. $1.7 trillion. The US government spends more on healthcare (despite it supposedly being “private”) than any nation on earth.
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:24:35 UTC No. 16283924
>>16283916
Except I'm talking about humans dealing with astronomy and not me. I don't know enough about astronomy and don't plan to so I wouldn't be a part of these grandiose fantasies. I'm just curious. Anyway thanks for the bump
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:26:48 UTC No. 16283927
>>16283919
Any trillion dollar project having its financing redistributed would do.
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:42:20 UTC No. 16283952
>>16283924
Make a JWST with 2,500m2 area I guess.
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:43:37 UTC No. 16283954
I’ve no idea how collecting area translates to magnification.
Anonymous at Wed, 17 Jul 2024 02:38:08 UTC No. 16284437
>>16283859
>Can we get detailed high resolution images of exoplanets?
yes, but it wouldn't be very useful data since the pictures of the planets would be images of them tens of thousands of year ago due to the sheer distance between the two points. A planet which is super green and full of life may appear to be a magma world to us, and a planet which is destroyed and empty may look lush to us.
Anonymous at Wed, 17 Jul 2024 03:08:50 UTC No. 16284466
>>16283859
>trillion buckaroos
The brightest engineers will get a few 100k each for their efforts. The other $999990000000 will revert to the military.
Anonymous at Wed, 17 Jul 2024 06:00:35 UTC No. 16284580
>>16284437
10k years or even a million years doesn't mean much about life as it takes a long time for life to appear and become complex. So if you see a lush green planet 100k light years away even if you see an image from 100k years ago the odds are good that the planet is still teeming with life because if it got like that in the first place then conditions on the planet were favorable for billions of years and a 100k in the past or future won't show a drastic change unless there's been a world destroying event which should be rare considering the planet was fine for so long to sustain complex life
Anonymous at Wed, 17 Jul 2024 19:04:33 UTC No. 16285435
>>16284580
If the goal here is to PROVE life exists on another planet, the only way for that to happen is to actually send a probe to inspect a planet. We can check readings of oxygen levels and water levels to get a pretty good idea, but making telescopes with high res isn't inherently difficult like a dyson sphere. We have the tech to do it, we just don't do it because we don't have any economic reason to.
Anonymous at Thu, 18 Jul 2024 05:50:08 UTC No. 16286073
>>16283859
>What could we produce with current day technology with limitless budget like this? Can we get detailed high resolution images of exoplanets?
Yes we could, you could build either Colossus telescope or a flotilla of hypertelescopes
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/201
Anonymous at Thu, 18 Jul 2024 06:12:45 UTC No. 16286089
>>16283859
Work smarter, not harder. If you had the money and were willing to take the risk, you could get much better resolution by building a terrestrial atmospheric lens or a solar gravitational lens telescope.