Don Greer

Everyone is entitled to my opinion.

(DMs will likely be ignored, so just say no.)

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@davidasinclair Best of luck, @davidasinclair ! Exciting times!

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@infantrydort Another thought just occurred to me: These people came into Europe and acted Medieval; they forgot what Medieval Europeans were like.

Now, they may find out.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@elonmusk @TheAliceSmith They are worried that the populace will decide to take it out of the hides of those who perpetrated this abomination.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

As I told the numbnuts earlier today, for all the talk about the Chinese, historically, Europe is the proximate source of all the really major wars we've had to deal with. Anyone with a halfway decent knowledge of history worries way more about what's happening in France, Germany, and Moscow than Tehran, Saudi Arabia or Beijing.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@deaflibertarian It's only my second block, but there's a certain level of obnoxious retard where I'm no longer interested in second chances. He hit it.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

Yeah, like I said, similar to Arecibo, you could have a medium-sized building suspended from anchors around the rim of a crater (adjustable by moving the cables at the anchor points). Considering it would be 1/6 the weight, you could have all kinds of useful bits in there.

But don't worry too much about cooling; just simple reflective insulation, similar to what was on the Lunar Lander, will do just fine-very thin foil, maybe a couple of layers. Have a cradle in the middle of the crater that the thing can be lowered down to for repairs and upgrades with an access panel. If everything is modular, and you set up an array of mirrors to distribute the image, you could have maybe a dozen or more instruments in there at any given time. With regular trips back and forth to the moon (which will be necessary for a base), concept to implementation for a new instrument would be less than a year and maybe a few million dollars.

Like I said above, once you prove out the first one, you put in 4 or 5 more at different latitudes and scattered around the moon, and you could basically have a full spherical observation with absolutely ridiculous sensitivity and resolution, probably several orders of magnitude better than anything we have now.

Add to each one of these a radio telescope in a nearby crater, and the amount of observational astronomy we could do would go up exponentially. A couple orders of magnitude in magnitude and resolution on the visual wavelengths, and we could do some Arecibo-style radio antennae for radio, combined with fast networking for interferometry, and you basically can do observations with a hard-vacuum telescope ~ the diameter of the moon. It will make Hubble images look like kindergarten finger paints, and a HELL of a lot easier than trying to build several satellites of similar size to fly in formation at a Lagrange point to get a similar effect, and also a LOT easier to maintain.

Not that I've thought about this much. :)

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@james_ptweets1 @davidpattersonx Not a problem.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@BowTiedMara That's gonna be a very interesting negotiation with the Brits.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@james_ptweets1 @davidpattersonx I'm aware... I taught Astronomy labs in college. That's not the dumbest thing they believe.
I've been accused of taping a photo of Jupiter or Saturn on the front of the telescope.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@deaflibertarian Just block the bastard.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@james_ptweets1 @davidpattersonx I didn't say there was. Reread what I wrote. I distinctly said: robots cleaning the mirrors when it's in the light, and observation when it's in the dark.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@rustyrockets Maybe they should have paid attention to all the St. George Crosses over the last year. Might have avoided what's coming, and I'm pretty sure ... it's coming.

The interesting thing is, this time, the Catholics and many of the Protestants will be standing shoulder to shoulder.

[I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 @ImMeme0]

This is pure gold😂☠️😂

A woman programmed her phone to handle scam calls with an AI voice assistant using Trump’s voice.

“You sound like a cheap Indian scammer, baby boy, sitting in a dirty call center in Mumbai, right there with your 47 cousins.”

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@RealDeanCain @Spider_Mike12 Twenty bucks is twenty bucks!

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@LuckyMcGee @ph409hhh: Soooo, what would be "extreme" in comparison to an attempt to publicly behead an innocent man?

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@atensnut We got plenty of Rangers. "One Riot, one Ranger."

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@US_OGA White-collar jobs aren't going away either. They just aren't the same jobs as we had yesterday.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

Well, I was thinking about building the bulk of it in situ; there should be plenty of material to build mirrors, and there's lots of aluminium in the regolith.
For cleaning, small robots crawling the primary mirrors when it's on the sun-side could do a good job using electrostatics. After the initial cleaning (after construction), as long as you don't have things like rockets operating anywhere nearby, dust shouldn't be much of a problem.
The whole thing could be built in a crater, with the objective suspended (Arecibo-style), and would give you the ability to adjust the focal vector by +/- 20-30 degrees, giving you a really good swath of the sky for observation. Build several of them at different latitudes, and you could get full coverage of the sky with observation times in the days, and a resolution that would be hard to imagine: again, surface features on planets 10s of light-years distant using two or more such telescopes and interferometry techniques.
Beats the hell out of trying to pack the thing up into a rocket and unfold it out in the deep, dark nothing.

[Don Greer @theDonGreer]

@ThomasSowell This is something that 90% or more of people get wrong, and even when you explain it, they just don't get it. And it has nothing to do with IQ or Education; I've had this discussion with people with advanced degrees, and they simply don't understand how this works.
Amazing!