ELT gets go-ahead.

[Leonhard]

For seeing real distances with any resolution, 39 meters really is too small. We would be much better off with a distributed telescope, consisting of smaller individual units spread around the solar system, sending their signals to a central location with a really good clock, to sync them all into a single view.

Phew.

It would be a neat idea to do it digitally sure, unfortunately it would require that we could sample the incoming signals fast enough to get their phase as well as their amplitude, and there's really no way for that to be sampled when it comes to light. We can do this with radio waves, but our instruments are capped out around 80GHz for something like this. There's a couple of orders of magnitude up to visible light. I guess you could do something similar to lightfields, but I'm not sure it would be practical without ending up costing you all the resolution you hoped to gain.

Or combining it with lenses over such distances? Now you're talking focal arrays the size of Earth or greater, and one gigantic assembly to combine it all... all while controlling for telescopes moving around in slightly irregular orbits... this is a project for a much older civilization than ours... but the result would be a telescope with enough angular resolution (presuming no real kinks emerge at that scale), that it could image the face of a coin, on the moon, in nearby star system.

[rwatts]

For seeing real distances with any resolution, 39 meters really is too small. We would be much better off with a distributed telescope, consisting of smaller individual units spread around the solar system, sending their signals to a central location with a really good clock, to sync them all into a single view.

Now that would be neat.

I still like Sparko's idea. Combine a bit of science with some science fiction and we can all be happy.

[phank]

For seeing real distances with any resolution, 39 meters really is too small. We would be much better off with a distributed telescope, consisting of smaller individual units spread around the solar system, sending their signals to a central location with a really good clock, to sync them all into a single view.

[Sparko]

We could just polish the far side of the moon and use it as a combination telescope and deathstar.

[rwatts]

Video: The ESO approved European Extremely Large Telescope gets go-ahead for construction






I still think 39 meters is way too small. :)




If you look at the technology on these new telescopes, and compare their ability with telescopes of 50 years ago, then one wonders where this will end up, presuming technological advancement carries on at its current rate.



And no wonder aliens don’t visit. If they have the ability for interstellar travel, then their telescope technology probably means that all they need to do is stop at home and spy on us.