I'm noticing that the reporting on this, including the ESO press release, is vague on exactly what this "industrial megaproject" happens to be. Ordinarily, there is no hesitation to disclose this, unless it's a military matter. Or a sacred cow.
A sacred cow, indeed. It's a green energy operation powered by both wind and solar to generate hydrogen, electricity and ammonia. Here[1] is the AES Andes press release about this project, if you care to read the opposing spin on this matter:
"AES Chile submitted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to Chilean permitting authorities for a proposed industrial-scale green hydrogen project called Inna. The project, which is in early-stage development, could include a variety of solutions, including green hydrogen for export or domestic consumption, aligned with Chile’s National Green Hydrogen Strategy."
[1] https://www.aesandes.com/en/press-release/aes-andes-submits-...
Land use. It's not just a fossil fuel shill talking point.
I doubt that "land use" is a big issue in one of the least densely populated countries on earth. Surely one could find a place for an industrial site that is not within 5 km of the world's prime telescope site. Using the existing infrastructure probably makes it slightly cheaper though.
> I doubt that "land use" is a big issue in one of the least densely populated countries on earth.
All evidence to the contrary, apparently.
One report I found cited "50 km" as sufficient separation. Applying this as a radius you get 7854 square kilometers of land.
> Using the existing infrastructure probably makes it slightly cheaper though.
"it", here, could mean either the "green energy" operation or the observatory site.
The omission of this information is partly why I'm suspicious of the article. A well written article would have included things such as the above information about what the project was and additionally why it was being proposed for the given site. Omitting any information on the other side of the equation, and talking only about the impacts it will have on the observatory sure sounds like activist propaganda to me.
Unless the article has been updated there is no omission.
Are you saying that the article does include both A) what the proposed industrial project is, and B) why it is being proposed at this site?
Or did you misunderstand me and think I was suggesting it should say those things about the observatory? In which, yes, it very clearly makes the case for the value of the observatory and what will be lost with the construction of the Industrial Park. And that's the only information it provides. That's the point I was maknig. It's a nakedly one sided article, with a clear activist agenda. Every story has two sides.
It is entirely possible that the other side could be "it's a facotry that digs holes and fills them back in and it was chosen by throwing a dart at a map" in which case every single person would rightfully agree that it shouldnt go there.
Or, it could be a factory that is going to store the entirety of South America's CO2 output underground safely and cheaply and it can literally only go there because of a completely unique geological formation.
In which case, a reasonable person might think it's worth it.
Or, more likely, something well in between those two things.
But the reader doesn't know because the article says nothing. That's a bad article. I would hope that no matter what ones views on the importance of dark skies and earth-based astronomy, one should still hope for better articles than this.
> Surely one could find a place for an industrial site
Has anyone proposed one?
I thought space was the the world's prime telescope site.
think that might be stretching the definition of “world” a bit far
Not really, due to the costs and constraints of space-based telescopes
But I could always tell if a space picture is from Hubble, or some lowly earth based one. In other words, with the fallen costs on rocket launchs, I do hope for a ton of new space telescopes.
Till then we have to balance things out. Space research is important. But so is investment in green technlogy as climate change is speeding up. It is not specially mentioned - but I believe the project is basically about transforming sunlight into liquid fuels on scale. Not the worst industry project by itself. (even though it might mainly exist, to greenwash conventional cars)
The article says "It includes constructing a port, ammonia and hydrogen production plants and thousands of electricity generation units near Paranal."
To be fair, green hydrogen in a fossil fuel shill talking point (so that they can sell more blue/grey). Hydrogen shipping and end-end efficiency are terrible. Make ammonia instead, if you're into that sort of thing.
Everyone I know in environmental activism hates hydrogen and sees it as green-washing the petrochemical industry.
When I lived in the Welsh countryside, there were occasional nights where I could not see my hand in front of my face. The requirements were that it was new moon, and that there was slight fog. We also lived deep in a valley, which helped. I had great fun navigating my way to the local pub in complete darkness.
The odd thing is that when I recount that experience, some people refuse to believe me. Of course they are all city dwellers.
I've experienced that once in a simulated environment; there's a museum in Nijmegen that has an indoor setup to simulate being completely blind, you get a stick and a guide and have to navigate a living room and the like. Can recommend if you're interested in accessibility and the like!
During a new moon parts of West Texas out in the chihuahua desert are like this. If you wait a solid 45 min with no light for your eyes to adjust it’s amazing how much you can see in the sky.
peril-sensitive sunglasses wouldn't help!
I live that experience daily. I live in a very remote corner of Portugal - we are between bortle 2 and 3 - in the bottom of a deep, steep valley.
And yes - when it’s a new moon and the haze from the river blots out the stars, the experience is quite akin to having gone blind. In fact, it’s so dark I’ve used some of those nights to develop film at the outdoor sink.
One thing I’ve noted is that wildlife needs to see just as much as we do - I mean, obvious, right? - but those nights are always dead silent. No birds, no insects, no rustles of this that or the other in the undergrowth. Every little noise one makes seems an affront to the cloying, thick darkness. Perhaps it’s the same instinct at play.
My place in wales used to have dark skies, even fairly recently - but LED street lighting along rural roads has put paid to that. I earnestly don’t understand why a lane that sees zero foot traffic and perhaps one car during darkness hours needs a streetlamp every ten meters - while waste collections only happen every six weeks.
Ah, I have become a grumpy old astronomer.
Would it be unthinkable to just NOT have bright lights pointed at the sky all night? Could they still do this project with severe restrictions on light emissions? If there’s some reason it absolutely must include hundreds of outdoor sodium vapor lights then build it somewhere else.
> Would it be unthinkable to just NOT have bright lights pointed at the sky all night?
That's possible, and directed/shielded lighting is commercially available.
However, the project's critics have already said that no plan the project comes up with will be good enough - “Even if [AES] do a perfect job, using perfect lights that probably don’t even exist and perfect shielding, there will be an impact and that will be significant [0]
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/chilean-energy-megap...
It’s not just industrial sites. My “local” (4 hours away) dark sky spot is constantly battling light pollution. There’s an industrial complex that’s made an agreement to turn their lights off at midnight. They’ve made deals with the county to replace the lighting to be dark sky friendly, but they still have private land owners that refuse to cooperate and replace their lighting. I have many images of the Milky Way with ranch lights dotting horizon.
I did a bunch of astrophotography in the Atacama desert last year, it was an absolutely phenomenal place. There are a lot of celestial objects you cannot image from the northern hemisphere and there aren't many other places in the southern hemisphere with weather conditions that good (maybe Namibia but it doesn't have the altitude advantage).
The only thing I wish is that some of the parks would be open after dark to shoot landscapes. Most of the parks closed before sunset, so I had to mostly image from roadsides, which was kind of sad.
I think there’s ways to get out there at night. I know people host ‘clandestinos’ aka parties out there.
Not sure this would be affected:
The Vera Rubin scope, which cost $600+ million, will see first light this July. It's capable of creating a map of the entire available sky every few days. Containing 40B objects, several times more than all previous sky surveys combined.
Half of those images are already threatened by constellations of comm satellites. Another concern is spy satellite imaging. https://archive.is/RzCNI#selection-779.4-779.14
So what compels AES, a US power company, to build a facility there, in all the world ... which would pump out that much pollution?
No, the Vera Rubin Observatory is on Cerro Pachón (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory) rather than Cerro Paranal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope), the maps on the right hand side show the difference (~6° latitude). Similarly I wouldn't expect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Silla_Observatory to be affected, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope would be I expect (noting that I haven't seen anything beyond the ESO press release).
On a longer time horizon, we need to figure out how to conduct astronomy without holding large regions (countryside, LEO, etc.) as test articles to control. Constellations like Starlink have already blown through that roadblock and rather than backlash we now see various governments / firms following them. LEO will only become more crowded.
In a more extreme case we have planetary protection where entire celestial bodies like Mars should remain sterile to preserve the possibility of their further study. It is easy to advance that policy while those bodies remain remote, but if we obtain the capability to develop the inner solar system then, much like LEO, we will do it regardless of the difficulty it imposes on xenobiologists.
The best solution is to reduce the global population. Don't call me crazy. It's already happening in almost all developed countries. It's reasonable to predict that the remaining countries will follow in like 50 years. With a decline of population, the places that need to be lit up would also gradually reduce. More space for nature, for astronomy, for everything.
A local story about it: https://radio.uchile.cl/2025/01/11/proyecto-inna-la-iniciati...
Pair this with impact of mega constellations with 10k+ satellites , which not only destroy optical imaging, but also interfere with radio-astronomy
Luckily we can stick telescopes in space (partially enabled by those constellations), where the sky is even darker and clearer.
If you were wondering if there was any issue even less important to Americans than the lives of pedestrians and cyclists, it is dark skies.
Disagree. Or at least it’s a different set of people generally very supportive of dark skies.
There are many dark sky communities in the southwest that are otherwise standard car centric unwalkable american towns.
I would say quiet.
Every place I've moves to in recent years looks nice, but you can't enjoy it because passenger cars and trucks have gotten louder without restraint or consequence. This doesn't mean right next to a major freeway, either; half-a-mile (about a kilometer) or more away from most 4-lane roads isn't far enough.
For an example, look up how many tickets in any given city have been issued for an improperly maintained exhaust system.
Police only care about speeding tickets. So much so, that even if a noisy "sports" car is pulled over for speeding, they won't be issued a noise citation in concert.
Why? ACAB.
Cops probably drive around in noisy cars/trucks after work (and some jurisdictions have police cruisers with a throaty exhaust because of course they do), so ticketing those violations isn't in their own best interest.
Anyway, noise is way more of an IDGAF issue for any city in the US.
why is this downvoted? the specific cities (notably in Arizona) that have taken deliberate action on this are exceptions proving the general rule that light pollution is demonstrably less of a policy concern even compared to the notorious American disdain for walkable infrastructure.
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Which is too bad, because it takes a special kind of heartless, empathy-lacking ghoul to disregard such things that make life on this Earth worth living to so many people.
On another piece of the electromagnetic spectrum, the ALMA radio telescope is also in the Atacama desert, north east of Paranal.
The government agreed to a radio quiet zone in the areas surrounding ALMA.
But now there's Starlink and other satellite constellations coming on line at an unprecedented pace.
Are those satellites broadcasting while over those areas? I don't see the connection here.
In fact it looks like there's extra effort to let them keep running without causing problems https://public.nrao.edu/news/astronomers-satellite-internet-...
Definitely a hard choice between an industrial complex generating thousands of jobs and a glorified camera.
Difficult to tell the economic / geographic context from a short article like this, but they mention the possibility of relocating the project. If possible that's a win / win, no? Sounds like it may just be the case that the dark sky aspect of this wasn't taken into consideration.
Exactly, this sounds like when europeans and americans go to africa to keep the local people from using their resources under the guise of protecting wildlife. There's plenty of local sources about it but a documentary that does a great job for a foreign audience and really made me think is 'Black Mambas' https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18351318/
If us Europeans and Americans want to look at the sky undisturbed, why don't we build telescopes at home? We can expropriate or block businesses in however big of a radius we want. Or we can buy up all the land around the site we are using in a foreign country instead of keeping the development of the land of the local people. It feels like exploitation.
It's easy to make this about science vs business and I hate light pollution just as the next guy, but it feels gross to shame the local population for wanting to do what we've done with our land already when we can do it at home as well, or pay them to be worth their while to not develop around the site. They should not have to keep their country pristine just because we want to be "pure" with other people's home when we're not with our own. Or pay them enough if it's so important (it is).
Gee, mapping every object in the observable universe (and possibly saving us from catastrophic meteor strikes) or pumping out a few more tons of ammonia?
Framing does an awful lot of work.
let's go back to pre industrial society
The skies may be brightening, but it seems the world is turning darker.
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From TFA:
> It includes constructing a port, ammonia and hydrogen production plants
Ports and especially chemical plants are basically lightbulb arrays.
Hampering industry that will bring prosperity to thousands to avoid having to wait to do some specific types of astronomy until Starship is working doesn't seem like a good trade-off.
A cynic would read this as as "I can't believe our (AES) luck. There's a good chance we can squeeze the Europeans for lots of money. We'll gladly share some of the proceeds with the new US president's cronies for having them do the haggling."
You want a real conspiracy theory? How about this: some rich Thirty Meters Telescope patron saw the peril the project has been in and set out to sabotage the ELT!
Of course, the ELT is proper funded, so the best he can do is making it useless by ruining it's sky for a decade with construction dust and light.
BANANAs in action, can't even build a green energy facility in the literal middle of nowhere without complaints.
This isn't just about getting rid of the last place on earth you can sometimes get a truly dark sky. This is about progress itself
> Since its inauguration in 1999, Paranal Observatory, built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has led to significant astronomy breakthroughs, such as the first image of an exoplanet and confirming the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 was awarded for research on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, in which Paranal telescopes were instrumental. The observatory is a key asset for astronomers worldwide, including those in Chile, which has seen its astronomical community grow substantially in the last decades. Additionally, the nearby Cerro Armazones hosts the construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world’s biggest telescope of its kind — a revolutionary facility that will dramatically change what we know about our Universe.
5 km from infrastructure critical to Chilean science isn't really "nowhere".
It’s nothing to do with the merits of the project itself but that it would destroy a singular planetary resource.
It’s an industrial plant with an attached power plant, it’s not like families will be using this power.
Headline is dramatic but misleading. Essentially the entire 7/10 of the planet in the ocean has skies as dark as this. Clarity significantly reduces the footprint, but there are massive chunks of mountain ranges untouched by human development in both hemispheres that would be just as clear as here.
If clear skies are important enough to block a new development, they should just unlock some land in the Himalayas or Rockies to replace this observatory.
This spot in the Atacama desert isn't special for it's lack of light pollution alone. The sky is rarely, if ever covered in clouds or haze. And the temperature gradient in the air has a shape that prevents random atmospheric distortions that would make long term exposures blurry. This combination of properties is exceedingly rare on Earth.
I recommend reading up on why these observatories and telescopes are where they are in the Atacama. It’s not just about the lack of light pollution, it’s a specific geography that “smoooths out” the air. Something about the high elevation prominence coming up directly from the coast creates a unique situation that allows for longer exposures, something that is less possible out in the open ocean. The only other comparable place are the high peaks of Hawaii, but these are mostly off limits due to native protections.
Destroying an aspect of the dark skies in Chile will absolutely hurt astronomy. No, they would not just be able to move their operations out onto a different mountain range or into the open ocean.
> they should just unlock some land in the Himalayas or Rockies to replace this observatory
That "just" is sure doing a lot of work in this suggestion.
This place has an elevation of 5000m and the air is super dry.
Who is paying for this move and all the requisite supporting infrastructure? You aren’t just dropping it from a helicopter and calling it a day.
Sure. But building a stable platform out there?
who pays for moving the observatory?
could you move the industry there?
Who’s “they”.