Project Magnet (1950–54) was the brainchild of Wilbert Smith, a radio engineer with the Department of Transport. Both came about for the sake of caution and to allay public concern. In theĮarly 1950s, the government launched two separate projects devoted to UFOs. The Canadian government was at first concerned that UFOs might present a security threat if they turned out to be advanced Soviet technology. Canada’s first postwar UFO sightings occurred that same year. On June 24, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny flying discs over Mount Rainier in Washington State. The modern era of UFO sightings began in 1947. Reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada (2020). But if no solution to the standoff at Mauna Kea can be found, there may be an alternative: the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands.© Government of Canada. The path aheadīolte says he's sympathetic to the activists, adding that the TMT consortium has worked for years to address the indigenous community's concerns at a cost of about $300 million. "These are young people who grew up learning the language, learning the culture and learning the history in ways that their parents and grandparents were denied,” Goodyear-Kaʻōpua says. That cultural groundwork has created a new generation of Hawaiians, including some who say their land was wrongfully annexed by the U.S. Goodyear-Kaʻōpua says her parents’ generation began embracing their native traditions, learning about their past and teaching the Native Hawaiian language in schools. Altars and burial sites can be found on Mauna Kea, and it's still used for traditional native Hawaiian ceremonies.Īs astronomers began erecting observatories on Mauna Kea in the 1970s, a cultural renaissance was sweeping Hawaii. In the Native Hawaiian tradition, the mountain is considered the dwelling place of the Hawaiian deities. That includes Mauna Kea, the islands' tallest landmark. Hawaii's state constitution requires all land originally belonging to the monarchy be held in a public trust and used to benefit native Hawaiians. backed an overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, annexed the islands in 1898 and made Hawaii the fiftieth state in 1959. The Hawaiian islands were self-governed by native peoples until the U.S. And we are returning extraordinary hospitality by trampling on sacred traditions." A contested mountain "We have been invited into someone else’s home. "I fear we have forgotten that we are guests," astrophysicist Franck Marchis, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, said in a blog post. It's a point of view that resonates even with some scientists who long for a massive telescope like the TMT. Fifteen years earlier, a political battle permanently halted construction of the Superconducting Super Collider, another particle accelerator that scientists wanted to build in Texas. In 2008, two men unsuccessfully sued the organizations building the Large Hadron Collider along the Swiss-French border, arguing that the giant particle accelerator could open up a black hole that would swallow Earth. (The launch went off without a hitch.) An illustration of the proposed giant telescope on Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island. Protesters descended on Florida again in 1997, when the nuclear-powered Cassini spacecraft was poised for launch to Saturn, sparking fears that an accident would cause an environmental disaster. In 1969, as NASA prepared to launch astronauts to the moon, black activists protested at Kennedy Space Center, arguing that NASA funding would be better spent fighting poverty. "Ever since the federal government became the leading patron of both basic and applied research after World War II, the funding of science entered the political realm,” he said. This isn't the first time a big science project has run into public opposition, says Robert Kargon, a science historian at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "In our lifetime, we could discover life - evidence of life - off the Earth, which would be one of the biggest things that's ever happened in science," says Michael Bolte, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the TMT board.
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