Spain Offers $1.14 Billion To Get Thirty Meter Telescope Moved To Canary Islands (behindtheblack.com)
- Reference: 0184838200
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/08/04/0040200/spain-offers-114-billion-to-get-thirty-meter-telescope-moved-to-canary-islands
- Source link: https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/spain-offers-more-than-1-billion-to-get-the-long-delayed-thirty-meter-telescope-to-move-to-the-canary-islands/
> In a [2]new bid to get the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to move from Hawaii, which has blocked its construction for more than a decade, the Spanish government has [3]put together a $1.14 billion package that would not only pay for construction on the Canary Islands, but would finance an additional half century of operations.
Tech Times provides some additional details:
> The package is conditional on the TMT International Observatory formally choosing La Palma as its construction site. The financing architecture has three pillars and two additional contingent instruments. The first pillar is 400 million euros (approximately $456 million USD) from Spain's Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, routed through the Centre for Technological Development and Innovation (CDTI). This figure was first pledged a year ago in July 2025 as Spain's initial bid.
>
> The second pillar is a 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) loan from the EIB [European Investment Bank] itself -- subject to satisfactory completion of the bank's technical, financial, and legal due diligence and approval by its governing bodies.
>
> The third is a potential 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) participation from the Instituto de Credito Oficial (ICO), Spain's state development finance institution, evaluated under equivalent conditions to the EIB loan but subject to its own separate analysis. Spain's export credit agency, Cesce, may also provide coverage instruments, and the EIB has left open the possibility of expanding its support through intermediated financing mechanisms or guarantees.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~schwit1
[2] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/322067/20260729/spain-bids-11-billion-win-thirty-meter-telescope-away-mauna-kea.htm
[3] https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/spain-offers-more-than-1-billion-to-get-the-long-delayed-thirty-meter-telescope-to-move-to-the-canary-islands/
Reminds of old joke: Why is divorce so expensive? (Score:4, Funny)
Because it's worth it.
Sounds like the smart move (Score:3)
Ancestor spirits - saved, astronomy project - saved.
Win/win.
Re: Sounds like the smart move (Score:1)
Why not? Some of them could be the next great astronomer.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Actually, that rampage on Spain's territory might have been bought and paid for by the U.S.'s alleged administration. The U.S. recently gave Morocco $40 Million. Given the alleged administration's ability to foment problems and Spain's refusal to help la Presidenta in his stupid war, it is well within the possibility that the Ceuta crossing was part of a campaign by Stephen Miller to claim that is what is in store for the U.S. They know Americans do not pay close attention to the news, all they need do is t
Re: (Score:1)
I know a guy who is robbing you blind while blaming your financial woes on immigrants.
Re: (Score:2)
> I know a guy who is robbing you blind while blaming your financial woes on immigrants.
The amount of countries that could describe is shockingly depressing.
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Spain is a little older than the USA... by maybe 300-500-2200 years years, depending how you count
Money is the same in every place, if you are giving money that you will receive back, you will slowly gather the money. It is not that you have to pay all that on one huge payment... And the money Spain saved by investing in renewable energy can be used in this instead of paying for more expensive OIL
Cue more spooky woo-woos (Score:1)
How long until some people of a particular wont move to Spain and start whining about local spooky woo-woos who will be angry with this ?
It's 2026. Fuck religions, all of them.
Re: (Score:1)
We'd all be better off if everyone followed the advice the Bible quotes him as giving. Unfortunately, very few of the people calling themselves "Christian" actually do as their God commands. Is ICE being kind to it's neighbors?
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The New Testament instructs believers to submit to governing authorities and respect the laws of the land, as God establishes these systems for order (Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-14).
Sacred Mountains? (Score:1)
Wow! I read the article and the reasons why the project got stuck. Not a problem with "Environmental Impact", more like "Spiritual Impact to small groups", or should that be "Imagined Spiritual Impact ..." Of course, you can't be too sensitive! That's what I'm told....
Re: (Score:1)
> Wow! I read the article and the reasons why the project got stuck. Not a problem with "Environmental Impact", more like "Spiritual Impact to small groups", or should that be "Imagined Spiritual Impact ..." Of course, you can't be too sensitive! That's what I'm told....
Inclusivity only goes one way with today's sensitives. Somehow Religious freedom and the woke got tangled together, in similar fashion of how Feminists and fundamentalists become bedfellows about pR0n.
So a mountain they consider sacred to some gawd more ridiculous than the angry desert gawd trumps science that is about the most innocuous version of science.
However, these are perhaps not the peaceful people of faith, wishing only to make their way amid the world. They do not like the Haole, which is al
Re: (Score:3)
Plot twist: All Gods are bullsh!t invented by humans to try to explain a world they don’t understand. Organized Religion is just stateless dictatorships (if you are lucky) who levy taxes enforced by guilt and cohesion. They use your emotions to manipulate you into doing what they want.
I have certainly met many religious people who are kind, good, and try to leave the world a better place. But I have met far more who use religion to exclude and condemn others. Few self proclaimed Christians will lov
Re: (Score:2)
*Zeus. My neighbors used to have dobermans named Zeus and Venus. Which was awkward, since my daughter is also named Venus.
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You underestimate the capacity of natives to sabotage a scientific operation in a remote location...
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Remaining Hawaiian natives fantasize a primitive paradise, where volcano gawds and warlords & priests slaughter sacrificial victims much like the Azteca to ensure bananas, coconuts and pineapples fall from the trees. Just another pretentious neo-stone age culture riding Western industrialization while bitching incessantly. Spiritual sensitivity my azzwhole; rise early, grab a beer and sit on the beach; remind you of anyone ? Most Hawaiian natives who wante
Let them choose (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for keeping a nice environment, but whenever someone trots out the word 'sacred' I want them to fuck all the way off.
You know what should be sacred? Science and discovery. Even before it had a name and was formalized, science was advancing humanity's state. It's the reason we're not still wandering the savannahs and forests of the world in small groups, subject to every random whim of Nature.
It's a bad time to invest in anything knowledge-based in the US anyway.
Re: Let them choose (Score:2)
Why not let the people who were first on the land choose? Europeans decimated indigenous Americans with disease and war. Or perhaps the intangibility of justice means it, too, should bend the knee to science.
Re: Let them choose (Score:4, Insightful)
Because those people lost the war and they are not actually harmed by it being there.
Re: (Score:2)
Because none of the people who were first on the land survived to the present day. All the people there now were 'on the land' at approximately the same time.
Re: Let them choose (Score:1)
Wow man, don't confuse these poor idealistic confused youngsters with your sensibility.
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For the same reason you can't just drop in at your former childhood home to dig up Sparky's corpse: Not yours anymore. It sucks what happened to Hawaii, but the opportunity for the people to say "yeah, not happening" and send a handful of American stuffed shirts on a long trip in a short canoe expired 130 years ago.
The idea that we're sacrificing basic science in the interest of not offending ghosts is utterly insane. Mauna Kea is uniquely suited to ground-based observatories; if we were talking about any
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> Why not let the people who were first on the land choose? Europeans decimated indigenous Americans with disease and war. Or perhaps the intangibility of justice means it, too, should bend the knee to science.
Better check out the people you are bending the knee to. Unless you are a "Native Hawaiian" they consider you as the enemy.
Does inclusivity and liberal guilt include supporting people who have a special "Kill Haole Day" Or do we support racists because at one point we were pretty racist as well, and must be punished. The pendulum of racism won't ever eliminate it.
Re: Let them choose (Score:5, Informative)
> Why not let the people who were first on the land choose? Europeans decimated indigenous Americans with disease and war..
Right, the land rightfully belongs to whoever owned it second-to-last! Not to the people the second-to-last owners forcibly ejected from it, of course, and not to the people who own it now, only to the second-to-last.
I think we should have more respect than we do for the indigenous peoples, but pretending that there was no war and no forcible land grabs before the Europeans arrived is not just ahistorical but ignorant of human nature. Polynesian history, which includes the Hawaiians, is incredibly bloody. The Europeans dominated when they arrived not because they were more violent -- there's a good case to be made that they were less, though it's a question of degrees, not kind -- but because the Enlightenment gave them much better tools. And, of course, because centuries of city living had bred up a bunch of diseases, but that's part of the same story.
Did European arms and power make it "right" that the natives were conquered? No. But it wasn't "right" that the natives conquered each other, either. Humanity -- also as a result of the Enlightenment and the long, slow development of humanism -- has become more moral and less violent, and we now have more respect for other cultures and other peoples. And that's a good thing! But it doesn't make sense to project our own moral views back in time, and it definitely doesn't make sense to do so selectively, demonizing the winners and lionizing the losers.
The only thing that really makes sense is to apply our improved (though still very imperfect) morality to the situation we have now, messy, complicated and conflicted as it is. It's nice to give the native Hawaiian culture some respect, but it's wrong to give it more respect than that of Hawaii today.
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All property rights are ultimately derived at gunpoint (or whatever weapon was popular at the time). The white man had better guns.
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You're not wrong. That doesn't make it just. But it is a reasonable argument to make that justice is merely some combination of a tool of those with guns to make it less costly to manage those without guns, together with a figment of false hope for those same vanquished populations.
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Because nobody was every "first" on any land. Current residents butchered-off the bronze-age farmers who offed stone-age gatheres which itself had butchered off a hunter/scavenge culture which itself had butchered off some of homo-sapien.x which in turn had butchered-off a homo.erectus batch of wanderers. Do you think <10-K BP> Beringian migrants thru the ice-sheets treated much earlier < 40-K BP > kelp-highway explorers with respect? And so on ...
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> Because nobody was every "first" on any land.
Are we talking Wheel of Time, Battlestar Galactica or some version of Hindu or Buddhist infinite cyclic time?
Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. Finding it is a very long shot that seems to have happened only twice. By the best evidence we have, Hawaii was first settled by Polynesians around a thousand years ago and stayed pretty isolated up until James Cook stumbled upon it in 1778. The queen of Hawaii was overthrown in 1893 by US marines and US fruit growers, a
I thought this had finally started in 2019 (Score:2)
[1]https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
I guess not.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/divisive-giant-telescope-cleared-construction-hawaiian-peak
Re: (Score:2)
> [1]https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
> I guess not.
It has gone on for decades as you note. They just want "white" people out. The sacred mountain thing is just a symbolic avenue of attack. In irony, people who probably consider themselves inclusive and support the Native Hawaiians are supporting a group that would presumably leave them aghast. People who have a "Kill Haole Day" while denying it aren't terribly inclusive.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/divisive-giant-telescope-cleared-construction-hawaiian-peak
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It has nothing to do with any of that. This is a project that came out of CalTech and quickly became a multinational affair, funded by the university, a foundation, Japan, India, China, and Canada. The Canary Island observatory was one of the original proposed locations, but in 2009 they chose Hawaii. Some Hawaiian locals protested the location and have had it tied up in State courts ever since.
The NSF has decided to focus funding on the "Giant Magellan Telescope" instead. It is being built (and is t
No move.. (Score:2)
Just built it for your own/EU scientists, stop caring about the US. In the end they can built the one in Hawai too, more telescopes is better for the science community.
Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:2)
“Mauna Kea is the most sacred dormant volcano of Native Hawaiian religion and culture, and in Knaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) tradition is home to the sky god Wkea and other gods.” [1]ref [wikipedia.org]
I don't see what the problem is. Once the TMT is built, the khuna can sacrifice the astronomers to the sky father Wkea /s
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protests
Re: Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point is that now scientists donâ(TM)t even want to go there anymore, and Spain is hijacking the project as a more palatable location.
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i actually do not want to visit Hawaii or any place in the USA, even before Trump... it got worse after 9/11 and even worse now with Trump
While it have some nice things to see, specially nature ones, there are much better places all around the world to see first and that are cheaper, safer and specially now, with less arrogance... and also, with much better historic buildings/ruins (not just steal and concrete jungles, even 150-250 years old is recent compared with many other world locations)
Many people wa
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It didn't start with Trump. The US has a lot of enemies and sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between a dispute with a competing nation and individual scientists from that nation. Trump definitely made it worse though.
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Sure, but why didn't they build it when the other guy was in charge.
Re: Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:1)
The poor demented other guy was not really in charge, which is why very little got done in his term.
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Why not toss in arrogant billionaires instead? Astronomers have use.
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Can't billionaires still be used as speed bumps? Or is the smell a problem?
Re: Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:2, Troll)
I donâ(TM)t understand - what better monument to the sky gods could you build than an absolutely fecking mahoosive telescope?
Re: Hawaii blocked the TMT for more than a decade (Score:4, Insightful)
> I donâ(TM)t understand - what better monument to the sky gods could you build than an absolutely fecking mahoosive telescope?
The "Native Hawaiians" want us the Haole out of there, the blocking of the Space Telescope is just a way of messing with those they hate.
Business Interests (Score:4, Informative)
At least some of the most vocal opponents organize, in collaboration with energy drink maker Red Bull, motocross races on the slope of the volcano, right up to the top. These will have to stop because of the dust they produce. Just maybe there are real religious objections, but certainly there is money.
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Good plan! Should be a LOT of virgins working in the observatory!