Which Continent to Put the Largest Radio Telescope On? Why Not Share It

Im not sure on what the chllenge would realy be, its seems like a win win situation cause ou basicaly hace two vertaul seperate telescopes that can ccombine at any time a high and a low..With all those dead sleeping out of commision or funding sattelights floating up their buy 3-5 old Military...Communication...Wheather...Cable...classifyed...sattelight and recomission and if possible reprogram and now you have a dedicated no cable data pipe...

Hundreds of thousands of miles?
the circumference of the Earth is roughly 24,900 miles.

the moon is 238,855 miles away.

Sydney to Cape Town is 6861 miles.

I think separating it would be great... then other countries can add "nodes" over time. And who knows what tech would come out of figuring out the communication issues.

Figure that out and then the moon can have dishes too.

/troll

Sorry but having it in Africa would be a mistake..
With the problems of pirates,bandits and unrest..
Building it there will be over budget and have parts and supplys going missing..

I just think it would be unsafe, unless they can promise it will be well guarded and safe..and not hijacked by the gorvenment of the area its in..

Having a 100 men guard it from warlords etc would be a real pain. Australia is the sanest choice atm, hell you probably would need nothing more then a fence. If even that. The locals would only be interested if there was meth/pet or drugs on site.

I agree with prime Australia is like 70% unusable anyway and they could build a 2km X 2km with room to spare. I don't think South Africa is stable enough to maintain something like this yet.

@blitz32,

I don't think you quite comprehend the amount of data that this project will have to handle. Aside from supercomputers so advanced that they don't even exist yet, it will require long-haul data links with a capacity greater than the entire current global internet traffic. Not quite so simple as you portray it.

I, for one, am glad that my country (US) did not sign up to fund anything the first decade. There are far more practical ways for our government to be spending billions of dollars. Or better yet, don't spend them, since we're rapidly going broke.

Considering that major funding is coming from developed counties with serious current and future budget problems, there is a decent chance that this thing will never even get built.

Warlords in South Africa?? Ok look, maybe you can point out other challenges but warlords in South Africa!!?? You just read the Africa... Go to google quickly before you make another dumb comment please. I wish God put different nations in different planets so we wouldn't have had to deal with people like you.

I don't know why I still bother . . I guess sometimes the morons on the web post comments so excruciatingly bad that my head hurts, and I HAVE to reply . .

I live in South Africa, and I don't care if we get the SKA or not. But the reasons listed above as to why SA would not be a good place to build it are so stereotypical of idiot westerners' view of the world it borders on cliché.

@Areuthinking
"With the problems of pirates,bandits and unrest.."

The pirates you are referring to are on the Somali coast, about 8,000km and 7 countries from the proposed SKA site. In this map, A is Somalia, B is near Cape Town

www.maps.google.com/maps?saddr=6.053161,+50.185547&daddr=-33.358062,19.335938&hl=en&sll=-9.449062,34.365234&sspn=62.987441,79.013672&t=h&mra=dme&z=4

"I just think it would be unsafe, unless they can promise it will be well guarded and safe"

The build site a few hundred kilometers from Cape Town, voted world's top tourist destination last year www.africanbusinessreview.co.za/lifestyle/travel-food/cape-town-voted-worlds-top-tourist-destination

South Africa hosted the soccer world cup in 2010, the largest sporting event in the world (larger than the Olympics) and there were no tourists were attacked by the savage hordes.

@prime2011

"Having a 100 men guard it from warlords etc would be a real pain."

Send me one article link on "war lords" in South Africa? This is not the Congo, not Uganda, you effen moron. We have never had a Civil War, closest being a liberation war against the English colonists in 1899.

Unrest in central Africa is thousands of kilometers away and once again separated by 3 or 4 countries. Africa is bigger than the North- and South American continents combined, complaining about war in central Africa makes SA unsafe is like saying don't visit New York because of Colombian drug lords.

@porsche469

"I don't think South Africa is stable enough to maintain something like this yet."

Based on what, your own assessment? Why yes, here the locals just charge any structure they see with paint on it!

And in case you are wondering, I am a .NET developer (among other things) working on transactional software with a turnover in the Billions of USD per year, and no I didn't need to kill a lion to get to work this morning.

We all ready have a rich astronomical research history as we have not completely polluted our skies:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_African_Large_Telescope
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Astronomical_Observatory

Several of our universities are ranked in the top 500 in the world:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellenbosch_University#Ranking

And our scientists have done ground breaking stem cell and cancer research:

www.southafrica.info/about/science/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_Africans#Academics

www.google.com/search?q=cape+town+south+africa&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=6d2HT8PnI-Sk0QWS9ITlCQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CDUQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=865&sout=0

www.google.com/search?q=the+karoo&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=QN6HT8-EAYu6hAf2tcnLCQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CBYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=865

And (brace yourself), the Titanic was a REAL ship, not just a movie.

@SouthAfrican

Welcome to Popsci, wish it were under better circumstances of course :)

In general, I think the instability and strife common to central Africa is perceived by most (most Americans at least) to be representative of Africa as a whole. Not excusable, just how it is over here.

Unfortunately, it's also likely that a majority (though a pessimistically expect that it's likely a vast majority) of my fellow countrymen don't realize that South Africa is actually a nation, rather than 'southern Africa'. Try not to patronize the lot of us though. Call out the posters above for what they are, but there are many of us with our head in the right place.

I am bias for USA. I think something like this should be develop and controlled no USA soil. I like to see USA keep its dollars in USA and give more opportunity for our scientist and engineers. It is often said in the USA we are deficient in scientist and engineers and too much of our money goes over seas. I like to see more jobs in USA too. Besides scientist and engineers working this facility, it will take a lot of other people to maintain it as well.

There are those will make the complaint of too much background noise from the USA. I just see that as an obstacle to be overcome.

GOD USA!

..........................................
See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!

@ Areuthinking

Hahaha, you idiot. Did you just refer to South Africa as a place with pirates, bandits and unrest?

In the history of South Africa, there has never been pirates. Also, antennas generally get deployed in the mainland, making it a little difficult for pirates to attack.

South Africa is safe and ready. We haven't had any political unrest for over 20 years and there is no change of political unrest in the foreseeable future.

While were on the topic of South Africa, I would like to point out that South African women are pretty hot.

Cookiees453,
I understand your concern about the HOT woman in Africa. POPSCI recently ran an article about how exercise might cause organisms. Perhaps these ladies should exercise less. And if that does not do the trick, another POPSCI article was about a robot that was developing by the NAVY to put out fires. I sure some kind of technical solution can be found to help these hot ladies! ;)

Though, I think were really off topic now. Take care!

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!

According to a survey for the period 1998–2000 compiled by the United Nations, South Africa was ranked second for murder and first for assaults and rapes per capita.[47] Nearly 50 murders are committed each day in South Africa.[48] Total crime per capita is 10th out of the 60 countries in the data set.[citation needed] Middle-class South Africans seek security in gated communities.[citation needed] Many emigrants from South Africa also state that crime was a big motivator for them to leave.[49] Crime against the farming community has continued to be a major problem.[50]

It is estimated that 500,000 women are raped in South Africa every year[51] with the average woman more likely to be raped than complete secondary school.[52] A 2009 survey found one in four South African men admitted to raping someone[53] and another survey found one in three women out of 4000 surveyed women said they had been raped in the past year.[54] Rapes are also perpetrated by children (some as young as ten).[55] Child and baby rape incidences are some of the highest in the world and a number of high profile cases have outraged the nation

Crime against the farming communities would include things such as theft, arson, kidnapping ect ect. While I whole heartedly agree with you that there are no pirates, warlords or anything else like that going on. The rate of regular crime that happens is astronomical esp in the the rural areas. Which is where the telescope would be constructed...not to say it would be hard to prevent but who wants to eat up more of their budget, paying for a larger security force..

USNDonahue,
Little footnote to your comments. You only were reporting of the things that get reported and not of all the other crimes that never get reported. In other words, I am sure the situation is much worse!

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!

doesnt matter where it goes, itll be built in china and assembled onsite lol

starting to think popsci should be renamed popsci+numpties.com;
with all the useless comments above;

but as far as the idea of splitting SKA between countries,
this is a great idea;
1) expanding apparent aperture of telescope,
2)splitting costs between countries,
which could either lessen overall funding for each country;
or if they so desired, up the funding greatly;
as far as data crunching goes; maybe there is the possibility of doing what NASA does with different programs & crowd source ; or cloud source;
whereby NASA gets 1st look @ data & then data is out sourced to web, where people can sign into NASA & go through data finding things that NASA may have missed;
another option that maybe a possibility that i have heard being used,
Is linking PS3 gaming consoles together,
to make cheapo supercomputers;
a number of articles on popsci have mentioned this method