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by culi 526 days ago
This isn't just about getting rid of the last place on earth you can sometimes get a truly dark sky. This is about progress itself

> Since its inauguration in 1999, Paranal Observatory, built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has led to significant astronomy breakthroughs, such as the first image of an exoplanet and confirming the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 was awarded for research on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, in which Paranal telescopes were instrumental. The observatory is a key asset for astronomers worldwide, including those in Chile, which has seen its astronomical community grow substantially in the last decades. Additionally, the nearby Cerro Armazones hosts the construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world’s biggest telescope of its kind — a revolutionary facility that will dramatically change what we know about our Universe.
1 comments
modeless 526 days ago
It's not literally the last place on Earth with dark skies. It's just one place with dark skies where they built a telescope. This isn't about protecting the sky and it's not about "progress", it's about protecting an investment of money in a telescope.

The price of launching giant telescopes to space is set to plummet in the next few years with Starship and New Glenn coming online. IMO we should be focusing on that rather than blocking development on Earth to preserve previous investments in ground based telescopes.

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phinnaeus 526 days ago
Launching telescopes is not a viable alternative to ground based telescopes. They are completely different scales. We would need large scale orbital construction facilities or a space elevator to bridge that gap. We don’t need to develop every square inch of the planet to support humanity, we don’t take up that much space.
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SiempreViernes 526 days ago
No, but it's one of three places on Earth that have dark skies this good.

The fact you don't know Paranal host many more than "one telescope" doesn't surprise me, as your are obviously very ignorant of modern astronomy.

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