These are way more powerful than Hubble but being terrestrial they are limited by atmospheric turbulence etc. But interferometric methods even buy you mitigation for that. With adaptive optics you can probe turbulence with a laser and adjust your segmented mirror to compensate.
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It sometimes makes me very sad that so much of the universe is read-only. You can see it but not reasonably expect to get to it. Still the fact that we can read so much more than we can write creates a kind of life poetry out of our instruments.
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“Ah, but a man’s teach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?” — Robert Browning. This is not a universal sensibility though. One of the weirdest life experiences for me is that there are people who are simply completely disinterested in things they can’t act on.
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Sherlock Holmes was one. He didn’t know that the earth revolves around the sun, and when Watson tells him, he days he’ll do his best to forget the fact. There’s many people like this. Agency or nothing. The read-only universe might as well not exist.
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‘The purpose of humanity is to build bigger telescopes’ isn’t a bad philosophical axiom. It’s certainly more meaningful than ‘build bigger computers’ or ‘create more material comfort’ or ‘relieve more suffering’ imo. Ground species purpose in boundary conditions of consciousness.
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Damn. TIL NRO spy satellites are probably more powerful than Hubble in raw optical terms though designed for spying on your phone rather than distant galaxieshttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1292596559184420864?s=21 …
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End of conversation
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I never enjoyed optics