Archive for May 6th, 2011

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA)

May 6, 2011

Australia and New Zealand have together been short-listed, as has South Africa, to host a revolutionary new radio astronomy facility: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). I attended two talks about SKA recently, one hosted by RiAus, another by the Australian Computer Society.

The SKA will provide a sensitivity that is about 50 times greater than any radio telescope before it. The sheer size and complexity of this thing is staggering. It will consist of 3000 dishes spread across a couple of thousand kilometres with a combined collecting area of about 1,000,000 square metres (i.e. 1 square kilometre).

There are plenty of technical challenges to solve in areas like data storage, database technologies, and the need for green energy to handle the SKA’s power requirements. A super-computer will be required on-site to process the signals collected by the SKA in real-time.

Here are some factoids from SKA publicity material:

  • The SKA will generate enough raw data to fill 15 million 64GB iPods every day.
  • The SKA will use enough optical fibre to wrap around the Earth twice.
  • The SKA will be so sensitive it could detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away.

Some questions the SKA will be help to answer, or provide more insight into, are:

  1. How were the first stars and black holes formed?
  2. How do galaxies evolve?
  3. What is the nature of Dark Energy?
  4. Are there Earth-like planets around other stars?
  5. What generates giant magnetic fields in space?

As mentioned at the RiAus talk, part of the excitement lies in what the SKA may be used to discover that we had no clue about in the first place, i.e. serendipity.

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A true revolution of values…

May 6, 2011

A track on Linkin Park’s latest album (A Thousand Suns) includes excerpts from a Martin Luther King speech given during the Vietnam War. You don’t have to share King’s religious convictions (as an atheist, I don’t) to agree with this:

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. 

I’m not sure why, but this came to mind when I heard about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Somehow I expected better of the Obama administration. Should governments really be in the business of assassination, no matter how hateful the target?

Granted, the Australian government has been party to some ethically questionable actions (think of the Baxter Detention Center), but I’m fairly sure that a random Australian plucked off the street would be a little shocked if Canberra suddenly ordered a targeted assassination of a terrorist. I realise that the scale of the Bali night club bombing was much smaller than 9/11, but Australia is not immune to terrorist acts any more than other nations.

The well-known Australian lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has called the killing of bin Laden a perversion of justice, making Osama a martyr and giving Obama the next election.

In the more than 40 years since King’s speech, we still seem to be totally clueless with respect to wisdom, justice, and love…

If we were the inhabitants of a planet seeking entry into something like Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets, we should expect to be ignored as the savages we still are.

Posted in Atheism, Life Musings, Religion, Secular Humansim | Leave a Comment »