The Arecibo Telescope: Puerto Rico's Iconic Instrument (That Didn't Survive 2020) 

U know Battlefield 4 have it destroyed...

Too bad the theoretically to be released new James Bond flick didn't sponsor this vid. How cool would THAT have been? Not that there's anything wrong to your actual, magnificent sponsor whom I am indeed thinking about trying out. Bud GOLDEN EYE, man! 😉

I love your content, but I dislike the way you talk about things like the search for aliens. The kind of haughty way you say "needless to say, there hasn't been a response" especially irked me since you had JUST mentioned that it was sent to a location 25k light-years away. That info is traveling at roughly the speed of light, and any response would be be doing the same. And since a lightyear is literally the distance light travels in a year, the round trip of information would take AT LEAST 50k years. Sorry for the mini rant, it just bothers me how dismissive of aliens you are, even though I typically agree with the sentiment that even if they're real, they're not here.

Say my name Simon.... check your Twitter @s to see what I mean lol.

Please make a video about Bar Lev Line, costing around $300 million in 1973.

According to info from the site, there were drone flights on a regular basis to monitor the status of the cables.

@@abpsd73 Yes, but even so, it could have snapped at any other time. It just happened to snap when we could learn something form it.

Like the opposite of the guy waiting for his drop of pitch to fall

Remember when you would shoot him in the game and it pissed Natalia off and she'd go running back the caves

@@darrelvincent970 that game and Perfect Dark were my introduction to FPS's. Yeah, I think I'm gonna get another 64 😏

Narrator: He was not invincible

Slugheads!

BISSSHHHHHHHHH The cryogenic coolant bursts behind him

The Krabs Nebula with the Krusty Krab😁

Seeing same sort of thing on Just Cause I thought it was like a radar or thing that talk to satilites

Let's hope they rebuild it (and give you guys statehood too)

@@bimblinghill I wish was closer to me, love to just stand near or in middle just to see the scale of it, all games I played with it in made it seem smaller than think it is

Same here

Great sniper map on BF4.

Fucking fun map in BF4

Just Cause :3

I loved standing at side with my semi auto sniper with iron sights

Goldeneye

glad they didnt try to launch the jwst last year!

I live in Canada, and I feel the same. One day, Hubble will either die, or be de-orbited, and we'll feel the same loss. We all felt the heartbreak at Oppritunity's dying breath, as she froze in the Martian winter sandstorm. The Voyagers are still sending back telemetry and scientific data, but like the Pioneers, their RTGs have a limited lifespan. They will continue to shut off instruments to conserve what little power remains, but one day will fall silent, unable to provide enough power to send a signal to Earth. The good thing is that Governor Wanda Garced has committed $8M to rebuilding the Arecibo telescope, and the observatory's data centre is going to be churning through that data for years, even as the telescope is being rebuilt.

@@BlackEpyon Thank god that hey are doing something to rebuild it.

@@tommyadkins844 It will probably take more than $8M, that's just from Puerto-Rico. But they sent a petition with 100,000 signatures to Congress, and there's a hell of a lot of interest, both in the scientific community, and due to it's status as a pop-culture icon in it's own right. So, fingers crossed.

lol, Puerto Rico could not even be bothered to build a decent road to the site. It was managed by a mainland American University. How many Puerto Ricans even bothered to go there?

@@DeputyNordburg Puerto Rico is American.

Based

Underrated comment

@Maximillian Wylde yes, enough to fulfill their full mission plan

@Maximillian Wylde Venus just isn't one of those places where NASA expects to have a decade of mission extensions. It's the sort of place that will turn your lander into a bubbling pool of liquid metal in under a day. If you can get even an *hour* of science out of a lander on Venus before it catches fire, you've done an *extremely* good job.

"Venus is made of lens caps!"

The entire Russian space program is under rated. They basically beat America at everything... except landing humans on the moon. From my understanding, they didn't even have that goal. Basically America "won the space race" by moving the goal posts until they finally won. Reminds me of Bill and Ted...

You're wrong. The Russian space program is an antiquated joke that barely functions. The USSR space program was groundbreaking.

I am wondering if anchor point failed on last cable and not the cable

You are correct in thinking it was the anchor point which failed first. I would recommend everyone watch Scott Manley’s video on it.

If you watch the drone footage, you will see strands of the cable stressing and snapping, as seen by the white paint stripping away. As more and more strands break, remaining strands are further loaded, either breaking them or pulling them out of the cable end. The remaining two cables likely exceeded the design limits of the anchor point at the top of the tower, and catastrophic failure was in full swing, either snapping the cables or destroying the anchor system. Once all the support cables failed or tore out, the tower was no longer balanced and was toppled by the tension of the guy cables that were used to counteract the force of the support cables.

@@mlee6050 as far as I remember, 2 cables went before the whole thing went down, I believe the first came out of the socket while the second fully snapped, one or both were secondary support

The Chinese built a radio telescope larger than Arecibo

@@Flubberbutter Yes but the chinese F.A.S.T is not a Radar telescope like Arecibo was. This is often overlooked

The radar capability made it uniquely qualified for the task of analyzing the shape and size of potential earth crossing asteroids. Apparently it's unclear how this will now be done. So I guess we just get to unexpectedly all die from an extinction level impact because we have better ways to spend our science dollars. Like finding life on far away planets that have no effect on us whatsoever. That sort of thing.

@@mntbighker Too think that Arecibo was the only radar tracking NEO's is wrong. There's a larger part of the viewing community that are looking out for these asteroids. Even though I say a large part of the community, it's not enough. More and more NEO's are being found everyday

@@licencetoswill Did not know that, gunna read a paper on the differences between the two now

There are so many areas where it just becomes impractical to maintain an aging system. Sometimes it's best to just do some occasional work to milk a little more out of it before scrapping and starting over. This thing's foundation was SOOO antiquated that it had become impossible to modernize it any further. Other sites around the world had passed it by, and there was just no way to keep it in the race. It had a great history and did many great things, but like a stallion that had won many derbies, it was old and way past its prime and was time for retirement. Looking on the bright side, the reduced budget that it was still getting can now be redirected into more modern telescopes, or toward building a new one that will reclaim the title of Best Telescope on the Planet.

Yup. Snapped because the whole thing was neglected and didn't get the money it needed to be kept up. Damn shame.

They obviously snapped because of rpgs and c4 detonating on them

@@Real28 Also turns out the cables werent as strong as they thought either. Combined with a couple of bad storms and it was toast unfortunatly

@@nicosmind3 The cables weren't as strong because they hadn't been taken care of and had pretty significant rust on them. The final cable survived more than it's design weight for a surprisingly long amount of time. Granted, in this scenario a surprisingly long amount of time is a second or two, but given it was holding several times it's design weight, I'd call that pretty impressive

Details, outside the 5% of the population that thinks like engineers doesn’t need such details

They should cut it up into little chunks and sell them. I'd pay $10 for a piece.

Money has been found aka some money funneled from elsewhere since no one is gonna give up their embezzled government funds.

I agree. I also enjoy all 12

but you think the spiffy ones could be called cool frank spinwhoop or something

Just Cause Rico: “I fly over with my wingsuit”

I made it collapse dozens of times xD

*he apparently has a lot of expendable clones to work with*

Equilibrium

That's biographics

@@mrh1663 true!

Every year 1.4 Sean Beans die, only you can stop the killings

Paintball mode was the shit!!!

Notice that, did you.

/r/whooosh

One of the best movies ever

*i'm not saying the collapse was caused by aliens...but...*

Or Chinese moving industry West

I have... the beautiful Palais Garnier (Paris Opera House)

It’s unfortunate but nothing to emotional about

I grew up 10 minutes from it so yeah a bit sad

It was breath taking & important, only war lords, & warmongeries wont see an issue with this, as they see to keep developing lasers, & more advanced KKV's (Kinetic Kill Vehicles).

the BF4 campaign is set in the year 2020 so uh yeah....

The radio message won’t even arrive in M13 for 250 thousands of years. It’ll be about half a million years before we receive one.

@@FaZeDuSk You're assuming there are no alien spacecraft between here and there.

If aliens existed, Trump would have leaked it.

@@carschmn Or one of his disloyal subordinates.

Well, there was a plan to say there were a response... back in The X-Files - please don't ask for the season and episode, too long ago I've seen it. Although the aliens replied to the Golden Records on Voyager 1 and 2. @Simon Whistler: Just having that in mind, this telescope featured in quite a few movies and series, a quick dive into its influence on the culture would have been nice as well.

Yeah I let them have a lot of my idle computer time as well.

Dish seems more intuitive but in architectural terms it was an inverted dome, English weird. :D

I'm British & it's a dish.

I'm American and dishes are flat. That thing looks like a bowl. Or maybe a wok pot.

*let's not forget the Nisei (The X-Files) episode that opened up in Knoxville TN...good episode...even better since it took place in my region of the south*

@@scottmantooth8785 I had not thought of that one. I myself live in Murfreesboro (for those outside the US that's just SE of Nashville) and should have remembered that episode. Thanks for the reminder.

@@jeffashley5512 *actually here in Knoxville so seeing the location mentioned during the episode was pretty cool...even if the series is filmed in Vancouver (mostly)*

The movie Contact is also a good movie where the Arecibo Observatory is showcased

That X-Files episode really pissed me off. They depicted Arecibo as having been shut down because NASA had stopped funding the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. That reflects profound ignorance on the writers' part, because SETI was never more than a small part of Arecibo's mission.

"To Serve Man".

@@harrietharlow9929 "It's a cookbook!!! It's a cookbook!!!"

@@cripplegunsmith1 LOL

Typo, 'to all'

*that's a lot of gorillas and even more bananas to contend with* *actually i think you meant to say guerrilla fighters as in para-military fighters and not actual forest dwelling gorillas that are known to sling their poo as intruders when distressed or agitated...not that i want to encounter either*

Excuse me i need to go hook my n64 up for a trip back in time

Both are.

Alien: "You think so? So what's this then?" *points to image representation of Solar System*

So you’re saying it’s your fault?

@@counterfit5 The UCF wasn't providing the inadequate funding, they were doing their best to wisely spend the piddling amount they received.

I second this. I’d take it a few steps further tho, let’s keep at it until anytime anyone, anywhere turns on a screen they seem Mr. Whistler. In all seriousness I like your idea, I’d watch that.

I love gold!

"My name is Pussy Galore." "I must be dreaming." Yes, best Bond movie ever. Goldeneye was predictable. Cast Sean Bean, Sean Bean gets killed.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the best all around for character development. 007 does his mission, retired, fell in love, got married, wife from a respectful family...then BOOM! His entire world is forever changed. His dark persona was forever defined by that tragedy. George Lansbury's only Bond film, but he pulled it off rather well.

@@cripplegunsmith1 They did cram a lot in that on film.