Jodrell Bank
No, its not rhyming slang. Every Tuesday I drive up to Cheadle through the lovely countryside around Alderly Edge. And I pass this baby.
This is the Lovell telescope, built between 1952 and 1957 she remains the worlds second largest fully steerable radio telescope. And its beautiful. Not just as an incredible piece of architecture as it towers above the trees. But as a symbol of mankind's greatness. This will never pay for its self. This wasn't done for profit. It was done for knowledge, and because we could. As well as collecting data on stars this telescope is used to monitor space for signs of life. And get this, on 16 November 1974 the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico transmitted a radio message to the M13 globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. It will take 25,000 years to get there, and another 25,000 to get a reply. And lesser men might say why bother. Those incapable of looking past the next election might question its worth. Thank god there are still men of vision.
Sometimes I get depressed about the state of our planet. The most powerful man in the world refuses to do anything about global warming. Amphibians will go to the wall unless someone coughs up half a billion and no one wants to pay. We produce more food than we can consume and a short flight away people starve. There are less sparrows than there were when I was young. But on Tuesdays I drive past the magnificent radio telescope at Jodrell bank. And I smile. Because I realise what we are capable of. I know the bacteria brained monkey president of the USA, the career polititians, the bean counters and buck makers don't really matter. They wont stop our visionaries. The great and the good can, and will, turn our planet around. Hope comes in all shapes and sizes. And on Tuesdays, for me, its a giant steel dish.
This is the Lovell telescope, built between 1952 and 1957 she remains the worlds second largest fully steerable radio telescope. And its beautiful. Not just as an incredible piece of architecture as it towers above the trees. But as a symbol of mankind's greatness. This will never pay for its self. This wasn't done for profit. It was done for knowledge, and because we could. As well as collecting data on stars this telescope is used to monitor space for signs of life. And get this, on 16 November 1974 the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico transmitted a radio message to the M13 globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. It will take 25,000 years to get there, and another 25,000 to get a reply. And lesser men might say why bother. Those incapable of looking past the next election might question its worth. Thank god there are still men of vision.Sometimes I get depressed about the state of our planet. The most powerful man in the world refuses to do anything about global warming. Amphibians will go to the wall unless someone coughs up half a billion and no one wants to pay. We produce more food than we can consume and a short flight away people starve. There are less sparrows than there were when I was young. But on Tuesdays I drive past the magnificent radio telescope at Jodrell bank. And I smile. Because I realise what we are capable of. I know the bacteria brained monkey president of the USA, the career polititians, the bean counters and buck makers don't really matter. They wont stop our visionaries. The great and the good can, and will, turn our planet around. Hope comes in all shapes and sizes. And on Tuesdays, for me, its a giant steel dish.
posted by Old Man Rich at 6:24 PM
7 Comments:
It's ace innit. I'm reading Bill Bryson's short history of everything at the minute, and while it's not an accademics choice it's helped me get my heard round things or confuse/asstound me even further, for instance:
On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.
Very cool.
good post, made me feel all warm...
No Dan,
You've just pissed yourself.
this was refreshing... living over here it's hard to remember there are people who have some influence outside of our bacteria brained monkey president (god i love that phrase, btw) and his cronies. thanks for the wee shot of hope...
some times when we do look we begin to get a feel of just what we may be capable of. It is amazing.
It always amazed me how every weekend thousands of people would drive north on US395 thru the Owens Valley and never notice the VLA radio telescopes or understand what happened at Manzanar and Lone Pine, let alone appreciate the engineering marvel the LA Aqueduct is. Still they are there, telling us what we can do. Some good, some bad but incredible when you think about it.
So *thats* where I left my Meccano set.
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