[hacker_9]

"The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we currently have"

"Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The SKA will be able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very, very distant planets."

"visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at the data this place produces. Long before you get to Boolardy, the 346,000-hectare pastoral station on which the Murchison observatory stands, the radio-quiet restrictions start. Anyone approaching is asked to turn off all electronic devices."

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them. I'm glad the Australian government is getting behind something like this and look forward to seeing what they uncover.

On a side note, the actual writing of the article irked me a bit as the reporter is clearly non-technical, and when I saw Moores overquoted Law get a mention it did make me reconsider the accuracy of other statements made by the writer.

[onion2k]

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them.

We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the universe is the way it is, and that makes it more likely that we'll be able to solve problems we have here on Earth.

Ignoring the fundamentals, the desire to do astronomy has lead to more than a few useful inventions. Figuring out how the sun works is the basis for our research in to fusion, which could lead to solving humanity's energy problems forever. The charge-coupled device in every camera in every smartphone was originally developed for astronomy. GPS only works because we can use satellites to track deep space objects. Aperture synthesis in MRI scanners (combining several images in to one image the size of all the cameras combined) came from combining the results from telescopes together.

A big field in Australia is a tiny price to pay for what the SKA could come up with.

[DanBC]

I read it as "this is a good thing, an incredibly good thing, that we devote land to pure science".

[steve19]

Many things result in technology being developed. War, for example, creates vast amounts of technology (including rocket technology, satellite etc) , but that is not a good reason to engage in warfare.

[onion2k]

That's not the same thing at all. The benefits of a destructive pursuit don't make it a more attractive thing to do. They're in opposition to the negatives of the original action. The side effects of a constructive pursuit do make it a more attractive thing to do because they are in addition to the already positive result of the original action.

[steve19]

I don't disagree! In fact I firmly believe that the ends never justifies the means.

But I wonder how many people would consider a major war to be beneficial if it lead to real fusion ie. limitless clean energy for the world, the end of energy poverty, of nuclear fission, and end of global warming.

[fijal]

It's maybe worth noting that while the space is indeed large, it's not actually used for anything much. The human impact of turning of electronic devices is negligable, given there is no cellphone reception anyway. In Karoo (where most of SKA will stand, in South Africa) they indeed turned off a few radio towers for cellphones and the site is radio-free (you can only use computers in isolated containers) but it only affected a few farmers. Asking people to turn phones off in one plane is probably far more of a hassle :-)

[mturmon]

This is an interesting point. It can work out the other way. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a very large segmented mirror optical telescope, is being built on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Construction is being protested by activists for desecrating the mountain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protest...

and a pretty good listicle here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/hawaii-telescope-pr...

[ceejayoz]

You may be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...

Residents in this part of West Virginia can't have cell phones, Wifi, and you can't even drive a car with spark plugs within a mile of the telescope.

[semi-extrinsic]

It looks like all the restrictions on common consumer equipment are only within a 20 mile radius. The restrictions in the major part of the zone are on high power transmitters (i.e. TV and radio broadcasts).