6 ms·

Hawaii telescope protest shuts down 13 observatories on Mauna Kea

42 points by headalgorithm 7y ago

cglee 7y ago
Some context for the protests: https://medium.com/@akkagawa/maunakea-redirecting-the-lens-onto-the-culture-of-mainstream-science-5d3a5a12376a https://medium.com/@akkagawa/maunakea-redirecting-the-lens-o...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mirashii 7y ago
  From what I can tell, this doesn't actually provide any context on the protests. There's precious little information on who is protesting (I gather from context native Hawaiians), no information on why they're protesting, and a lot of talk about how this set of protests is actually a battle for the heart of mainstream science. This article [1], linked from the original article, seems to actually have some context for the protests. [1] https://www.nature.com/news/the-mountain-top-battle-over-the-thirty-meter-telescope-1.18446 https://www.nature.com/news/the-mountain-top-battle-over-the...
nerdponx 7y ago
Interesting how differently this is unfolding compared to the Keystone XL pipeline.
- azernik 7y ago
  Turns out local government matters.
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    Turns out money matters. There's less profit in telescopes than oil pipelines.
- protomyth 7y ago
  The Keystone XL pipeline protest didn't stop it, and the hatreds that resulted will probably last. I do wonder if some family members will ever talk to each other civilly again. The funny part for me is some of the same people are doing the protesting at both places. The paid trip to Hawaii was a nice bonus. I do hope someone charts to fortunes of the reservation businesses before and after the protest to show the economic impact to the tribe.
batmansmk 7y ago
I visited some telescopes there 2 months ago. The researchers are doing a fantastic job. The place has no life on it, it's barren due to the altitude and the lack of oxygen. No animal, plant or human ever ever lived up there. Those observatories are mostly remote-controlled and only 4 researchers were up there to monitor the 13 observatories the day we went. Ironically, the largest traffic going up there are actually people going there to take instagram pictures about the sacred mountain. So sad that a very unique scientific spot, with very high altitude in the middle of an ocean is getting in trouble for religious motives.
- ars 7y ago
  > is getting in trouble for religious motives. That is a very ignorant way of putting it. Personally, I feel they should build it, but to belittle people that way is not right. And besides religious reasons some people consider Hawaii as Occupied by the US, and the land is theirs, and not for use by the US for observatories. (I don't agree because it's annexed (they can vote), not Occupied.) But despite my feelings on the matter, I'm not going to go around disregarding people's beliefs.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- omegaworks 7y ago
  There is an incredible land pressure on Hawaii. People that have lived there for generations have been pushed to the margins. Homelessness is all-time high, and it impacts native Hawaiians disproportionately[1]. This isn't just about "religious motives" it is about land rights. What is reserved for the indigenous people and what can be appropriated given the "right" motivations. 1. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-research-072417.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-research-072...
  - morpheuskafka 7y ago
    Homelessness isn't really a relevant response given that OP states this land is not suitable for habitation.
magduf 7y ago
This is what happens with religion: it impedes progress, and makes people behave completely irrationally. These observatories aren't causing environmental problems (AFAIK); they're great tools for humanity to understand our universe. There aren't many locations on Earth that have the advantages this location has, yet these people want to stop this for what? Irrational superstitions? If this were some corporation trying to do mountaintop removal mining (like they do in West Virginia), it would be perfectly rational to oppose that: that's an environmental catastrophe. But this is not, this is one of the most benign things humans can do.
- baq 7y ago
  make widening our understanding of the universe into religion, problem solved. (i thought about making the scientific method into a religion, but it doesn't make any sense :))
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    Everyone takes things on faith. For instance most could quite trivially prove PV=nRT, but most just take someone else’s word on faith. In a universe where you can never really know something unless you’ve proven it yourself, you take nearly everything on faith from someone else who claims to have proven it.
    - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
      I don't think 'faith' covers both things. Yes, a lot of people accept lots of things as being true on the authority of others, but there's lots of other evidence that those authorities are trustworthy. The details, i.e. the specific differences, of religious claims aren't correlated with any other evidence, or even possible evidence, which is why it's so much easier for so many different creeds to exist even given that they make different, and often contradictory claims. As an example, most people haven't directly carried out all of the relevant experiments needed to discover the laws and theories of electromagnetism, but the evidence of TV, radio, telegraphs are easy enough to perceive and thereof trust. There doesn't seem to be nearly anything similar for religious beliefs, that would make any specific religion more likely than any other. Most of the evidence that does exist for religions seems to be common to any or all of them, e.g. the benefits of group cohesion, common morality, etc..
PopePompus 7y ago
I worked at the observatories on Mauna Kea for 30+ years. I would very much like to see the Thirty Meter Telescope built there. But I've made a lot of bets with other people that it won't get built in Hawaii. You can make an argument for building the TMT. You can make an argument for not building it. But there's no argument I can think of to support what the state is doing. The first time that the TMT tried to start construction, back in 2015, a fairly small group of protestors was able to halt construction by standing in the road and blocking vehicles. The police would come up the mountain, stand around for about 5 hours waiting for instructions from sea level, arrest perhaps 5 percent of the protestors, which did not allow the contruction vehicles to pass, and then everyone would drive down the hill again. The protestors built a small, unpermitted building (illegally) near the point where they wanted to block the road, and the state made no effort to prevent them from doing so. The protestors would pile stones in the access road to the TMT site, and then claim the pile of stones was a sacred alter. The state would remove the alters after a very long period of dithering. So the protestors could build, in a few hours, a physical obstruction that the state would take days or weeks to move. In general, the state made about 1% of the effort that would have been required to allow the TMT construction vehicles to reach the site. This time, the group of protestors is far larger. They have camped out at a place that is more convenient for them, logistically. Unlike the situation in 2015, they have shut down all of the observatories on Mauna Kea. If the state made 1% of the required effort to open the road in 2015, this year they are making 0.01% of the required effort. The police drive up, hug the various protestors for a few hours, join the protestors in prayer. Then drive back down the mountain after having no effect at all. Yesterday, they made some token "arrests" which involved issuing misdemeanor citations. Some of the persons who had been escorted away from the road blockage immediately returned to block the road after the citation was issued. This is a wonderful example of asymmetric warfare. At first glance it looks like the state is the powerful entity, but the protestors have all sorts of levers they really haven't started using yet. How long will the University of California remain a member of the TMT collaboration once UC students start having sit ins? The University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Studies Program (most of the members of which oppose the TMT) is far stronger politically than its Astronomy Department - how long will it be before student protestors force the University of Hawaii to drop out of the project? How long until protestors on other Hawaiian islands start blocking state facilities? There were at least 1000 protestors involved with blocking the road yesterday; some estimates put the number at 2000. There is no facility on the island of Hawaii where that many people could be incarcerated. And there is no indication that the state is willing to incarcerate anyone who is blocking the road. If the state actually makes a serious effort to open the road for the construction vehicles, there will be many consecutive days where the television coverage will show weeping, elderly ladies in mumus being hauled away to sea level. Day after day after day. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the state is willing to do that, and recent history shows that they will not. Even if the state had the nerve to forcefully open the road, for how many weeks could that go on before some member of the TMT collaboration decided that TMT is not worth the black eye Astronomy is getting in the court of public opinion? In addition to blocking the road, the anti-TMT protestors are still filing frivolous lawsuits to stop construction. I think they would be wiser to drop their legal efforts and just let the current sutuation play out. If they get a court order to stop construction (as they did in 2015), the state could still pretend that it would have eventually cleared the road and allowed construction to begin. The TMT management might be deluded enough to think they could still build on Mauna Kea. But if the protestors drop the lawsuits, and just allow it to become crystal clear that the state won't clear the road and get the construction equipment to the site, then everyone will finally know that the TMT won't get built on Mauna Kea. As I said, I'm a TMT supporter. But sometimes you have to admit defeat and go on to plan B.
rfwhyte 7y ago
I sincerely hope the TMT gets built regardless and in spite of this opposition. It would be an absolute shame to allow a special interest group to use superstition to stop a project that would contribute such a tremendous amount to the advancement of humanities understanding of the cosmos. It also genuinely makes my blood boil that as a society we've come to a point where we allow superstitions and fairy tales so much space in public discourse, as it legitimizes fundamentally irrational viewpoints and places them on equal footing with rationally based systems of knowledge, which is frankly a death knell for progress.
respectculture 7y ago
Astrophysicists students associated to this telescope are condemning the arrests and ask for a pause on the project. https://earther.gizmodo.com/hundreds-of-astronomers-denounce-arrest-of-native-hawai-1836497851 https://earther.gizmodo.com/hundreds-of-astronomers-denounce... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YR8M4eboRjJSsfvVtmukb6dDgUonDBdmj9AU0h1rkmY/preview https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YR8M4eboRjJSsfvVtmukb6dD... They also apologize for being descendants of people who conquered native territories: > Finally, we acknowledge some of our positionalities as settlers occupying unceded ancestral territories of multiple Indigenous groups on the continental US (including but not limited to that of the Chochenyo-Ohlone people and the Tongva-Gabrielino people). It's impossible to do science in the West anymore. The idea that if I say something is offensive, then it is has thoroughly infected universities. So it takes just one person to say "it offends me that you painted the building blue" to shut everything down. Hopefully Russia/China/India/... will pick up the baton.
- criley2 7y ago
  >It's impossible to do science in the West anymore. The idea that if I say something is offensive, then it is has thoroughly infected universities. So it takes just one person to say "it offends me that you painted the building blue" to shut everything down. Hopefully Russia/China/India/... will pick up the baton. This is pretty ridiculously ignorant propaganda from someone who is obviously far more versed in far-right politics than they are in anything approaching science. There is a lot more to science than what 18-22 year old kids in undergrad say or do, so perhaps you need to find new political websites to get your information and worldview from. Ironically, this has nothing to do with "universities being PC" and everything to do with traditional conservative religious folks and their anti-science message basically attacking liberal university projects. Ironic that you would use your far-right politics to recast this in your own favor.
  - respectculture 7y ago
    Are you calling hundreds of astronomers "traditional conservative religious folks and their anti-science message"? That is pretty ridiculous.
jimmaswell 7y ago
When are telescopes going to be built on the moon or mars?
- zamadatix 7y ago
  When it's cheap enough to feasibly do it better than elsewhere. L2 is a better though and we have some there already.
shawndrost 7y ago
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." This argument is about sovereignty. Hawai'i was overthrown 125 years ago, and today's zeitgeist calls that injustice. Of course, the overthrow was not something that happened once, then ended. We choose daily whether to reaffirm the ethos of overthrow, or how to reject it. When Akaka convened the working group described in the article, that is one way to grapple with the question of sovereignty. When people talk about whether Native Hawaiians support the telescope, that is another way to do it. In this thread, I see a lot of comments that don't seem aware of the undercurrent. To describe the opposition as superstitious makes sense if you're dismissing some weird part of your own polity. If you were talking about opposition to a cow science facility in India, you probably wouldn't describe the opposition as superstitious. (Not because they aren't, but because sovereign people are entitled to their beliefs.) People are welcome to dismiss the sovereignty of Hawaiians on a message board, but I thought I'd write this comment for anyone that doesn't get what the conversation is about. Similarly, to say that the opposition is "small but vocal" fails to comprehend why the state does not simply remove them. It's because the public (while conflicted) does not love the ethos of overthrow, and the state cannot cart away the protestors without reaffirming that ethos in a very public way.

42 points by headalgorithm 7y ago

Some context for the protests: https://medium.com/@akkagawa/maunakea-redirecting-the-lens-onto-the-culture-of-mainstream-science-5d3a5a12376a https://medium.com/@akkagawa/maunakea-redirecting-the-lens-o...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mirashii 7y ago
From what I can tell, this doesn't actually provide any context on the protests. There's precious little information on who is protesting (I gather from context native Hawaiians), no information on why they're protesting, and a lot of talk about how this set of protests is actually a battle for the heart of mainstream science. This article [1], linked from the original article, seems to actually have some context for the protests. [1] https://www.nature.com/news/the-mountain-top-battle-over-the-thirty-meter-telescope-1.18446 https://www.nature.com/news/the-mountain-top-battle-over-the...

nerdponx 7y ago

Interesting how differently this is unfolding compared to the Keystone XL pipeline.

azernik 7y ago
Turns out local government matters.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Turns out money matters. There's less profit in telescopes than oil pipelines.
protomyth 7y ago
The Keystone XL pipeline protest didn't stop it, and the hatreds that resulted will probably last. I do wonder if some family members will ever talk to each other civilly again. The funny part for me is some of the same people are doing the protesting at both places. The paid trip to Hawaii was a nice bonus. I do hope someone charts to fortunes of the reservation businesses before and after the protest to show the economic impact to the tribe.

batmansmk 7y ago

I visited some telescopes there 2 months ago. The researchers are doing a fantastic job. The place has no life on it, it's barren due to the altitude and the lack of oxygen. No animal, plant or human ever ever lived up there. Those observatories are mostly remote-controlled and only 4 researchers were up there to monitor the 13 observatories the day we went. Ironically, the largest traffic going up there are actually people going there to take instagram pictures about the sacred mountain. So sad that a very unique scientific spot, with very high altitude in the middle of an ocean is getting in trouble for religious motives.

ars 7y ago
> is getting in trouble for religious motives. That is a very ignorant way of putting it. Personally, I feel they should build it, but to belittle people that way is not right. And besides religious reasons some people consider Hawaii as Occupied by the US, and the land is theirs, and not for use by the US for observatories. (I don't agree because it's annexed (they can vote), not Occupied.) But despite my feelings on the matter, I'm not going to go around disregarding people's beliefs.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
omegaworks 7y ago
There is an incredible land pressure on Hawaii. People that have lived there for generations have been pushed to the margins. Homelessness is all-time high, and it impacts native Hawaiians disproportionately[1]. This isn't just about "religious motives" it is about land rights. What is reserved for the indigenous people and what can be appropriated given the "right" motivations. 1. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-research-072417.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-research-072...
- morpheuskafka 7y ago
  Homelessness isn't really a relevant response given that OP states this land is not suitable for habitation.

magduf 7y ago

This is what happens with religion: it impedes progress, and makes people behave completely irrationally. These observatories aren't causing environmental problems (AFAIK); they're great tools for humanity to understand our universe. There aren't many locations on Earth that have the advantages this location has, yet these people want to stop this for what? Irrational superstitions? If this were some corporation trying to do mountaintop removal mining (like they do in West Virginia), it would be perfectly rational to oppose that: that's an environmental catastrophe. But this is not, this is one of the most benign things humans can do.

baq 7y ago
make widening our understanding of the universe into religion, problem solved. (i thought about making the scientific method into a religion, but it doesn't make any sense :))
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Everyone takes things on faith. For instance most could quite trivially prove PV=nRT, but most just take someone else’s word on faith. In a universe where you can never really know something unless you’ve proven it yourself, you take nearly everything on faith from someone else who claims to have proven it.
  - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
    I don't think 'faith' covers both things. Yes, a lot of people accept lots of things as being true on the authority of others, but there's lots of other evidence that those authorities are trustworthy. The details, i.e. the specific differences, of religious claims aren't correlated with any other evidence, or even possible evidence, which is why it's so much easier for so many different creeds to exist even given that they make different, and often contradictory claims. As an example, most people haven't directly carried out all of the relevant experiments needed to discover the laws and theories of electromagnetism, but the evidence of TV, radio, telegraphs are easy enough to perceive and thereof trust. There doesn't seem to be nearly anything similar for religious beliefs, that would make any specific religion more likely than any other. Most of the evidence that does exist for religions seems to be common to any or all of them, e.g. the benefits of group cohesion, common morality, etc..

PopePompus 7y ago

I worked at the observatories on Mauna Kea for 30+ years. I would very much like to see the Thirty Meter Telescope built there. But I've made a lot of bets with other people that it won't get built in Hawaii. You can make an argument for building the TMT. You can make an argument for not building it. But there's no argument I can think of to support what the state is doing. The first time that the TMT tried to start construction, back in 2015, a fairly small group of protestors was able to halt construction by standing in the road and blocking vehicles. The police would come up the mountain, stand around for about 5 hours waiting for instructions from sea level, arrest perhaps 5 percent of the protestors, which did not allow the contruction vehicles to pass, and then everyone would drive down the hill again. The protestors built a small, unpermitted building (illegally) near the point where they wanted to block the road, and the state made no effort to prevent them from doing so. The protestors would pile stones in the access road to the TMT site, and then claim the pile of stones was a sacred alter. The state would remove the alters after a very long period of dithering. So the protestors could build, in a few hours, a physical obstruction that the state would take days or weeks to move. In general, the state made about 1% of the effort that would have been required to allow the TMT construction vehicles to reach the site. This time, the group of protestors is far larger. They have camped out at a place that is more convenient for them, logistically. Unlike the situation in 2015, they have shut down all of the observatories on Mauna Kea. If the state made 1% of the required effort to open the road in 2015, this year they are making 0.01% of the required effort. The police drive up, hug the various protestors for a few hours, join the protestors in prayer. Then drive back down the mountain after having no effect at all. Yesterday, they made some token "arrests" which involved issuing misdemeanor citations. Some of the persons who had been escorted away from the road blockage immediately returned to block the road after the citation was issued. This is a wonderful example of asymmetric warfare. At first glance it looks like the state is the powerful entity, but the protestors have all sorts of levers they really haven't started using yet. How long will the University of California remain a member of the TMT collaboration once UC students start having sit ins? The University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Studies Program (most of the members of which oppose the TMT) is far stronger politically than its Astronomy Department - how long will it be before student protestors force the University of Hawaii to drop out of the project? How long until protestors on other Hawaiian islands start blocking state facilities? There were at least 1000 protestors involved with blocking the road yesterday; some estimates put the number at 2000. There is no facility on the island of Hawaii where that many people could be incarcerated. And there is no indication that the state is willing to incarcerate anyone who is blocking the road. If the state actually makes a serious effort to open the road for the construction vehicles, there will be many consecutive days where the television coverage will show weeping, elderly ladies in mumus being hauled away to sea level. Day after day after day. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the state is willing to do that, and recent history shows that they will not. Even if the state had the nerve to forcefully open the road, for how many weeks could that go on before some member of the TMT collaboration decided that TMT is not worth the black eye Astronomy is getting in the court of public opinion? In addition to blocking the road, the anti-TMT protestors are still filing frivolous lawsuits to stop construction. I think they would be wiser to drop their legal efforts and just let the current sutuation play out. If they get a court order to stop construction (as they did in 2015), the state could still pretend that it would have eventually cleared the road and allowed construction to begin. The TMT management might be deluded enough to think they could still build on Mauna Kea. But if the protestors drop the lawsuits, and just allow it to become crystal clear that the state won't clear the road and get the construction equipment to the site, then everyone will finally know that the TMT won't get built on Mauna Kea. As I said, I'm a TMT supporter. But sometimes you have to admit defeat and go on to plan B.

rfwhyte 7y ago

I sincerely hope the TMT gets built regardless and in spite of this opposition. It would be an absolute shame to allow a special interest group to use superstition to stop a project that would contribute such a tremendous amount to the advancement of humanities understanding of the cosmos. It also genuinely makes my blood boil that as a society we've come to a point where we allow superstitions and fairy tales so much space in public discourse, as it legitimizes fundamentally irrational viewpoints and places them on equal footing with rationally based systems of knowledge, which is frankly a death knell for progress.

respectculture 7y ago

Astrophysicists students associated to this telescope are condemning the arrests and ask for a pause on the project. https://earther.gizmodo.com/hundreds-of-astronomers-denounce-arrest-of-native-hawai-1836497851 https://earther.gizmodo.com/hundreds-of-astronomers-denounce... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YR8M4eboRjJSsfvVtmukb6dDgUonDBdmj9AU0h1rkmY/preview https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YR8M4eboRjJSsfvVtmukb6dD... They also apologize for being descendants of people who conquered native territories: > Finally, we acknowledge some of our positionalities as settlers occupying unceded ancestral territories of multiple Indigenous groups on the continental US (including but not limited to that of the Chochenyo-Ohlone people and the Tongva-Gabrielino people). It's impossible to do science in the West anymore. The idea that if I say something is offensive, then it is has thoroughly infected universities. So it takes just one person to say "it offends me that you painted the building blue" to shut everything down. Hopefully Russia/China/India/... will pick up the baton.

criley2 7y ago
>It's impossible to do science in the West anymore. The idea that if I say something is offensive, then it is has thoroughly infected universities. So it takes just one person to say "it offends me that you painted the building blue" to shut everything down. Hopefully Russia/China/India/... will pick up the baton. This is pretty ridiculously ignorant propaganda from someone who is obviously far more versed in far-right politics than they are in anything approaching science. There is a lot more to science than what 18-22 year old kids in undergrad say or do, so perhaps you need to find new political websites to get your information and worldview from. Ironically, this has nothing to do with "universities being PC" and everything to do with traditional conservative religious folks and their anti-science message basically attacking liberal university projects. Ironic that you would use your far-right politics to recast this in your own favor.
- respectculture 7y ago
  Are you calling hundreds of astronomers "traditional conservative religious folks and their anti-science message"? That is pretty ridiculous.

jimmaswell 7y ago

When are telescopes going to be built on the moon or mars?

zamadatix 7y ago
When it's cheap enough to feasibly do it better than elsewhere. L2 is a better though and we have some there already.

shawndrost 7y ago

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." This argument is about sovereignty. Hawai'i was overthrown 125 years ago, and today's zeitgeist calls that injustice. Of course, the overthrow was not something that happened once, then ended. We choose daily whether to reaffirm the ethos of overthrow, or how to reject it. When Akaka convened the working group described in the article, that is one way to grapple with the question of sovereignty. When people talk about whether Native Hawaiians support the telescope, that is another way to do it. In this thread, I see a lot of comments that don't seem aware of the undercurrent. To describe the opposition as superstitious makes sense if you're dismissing some weird part of your own polity. If you were talking about opposition to a cow science facility in India, you probably wouldn't describe the opposition as superstitious. (Not because they aren't, but because sovereign people are entitled to their beliefs.) People are welcome to dismiss the sovereignty of Hawaiians on a message board, but I thought I'd write this comment for anyone that doesn't get what the conversation is about. Similarly, to say that the opposition is "small but vocal" fails to comprehend why the state does not simply remove them. It's because the public (while conflicted) does not love the ethos of overthrow, and the state cannot cart away the protestors without reaffirming that ethos in a very public way.