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.
> green hydrogen in a fossil fuel shill talking point
I'll stipulate that. None if this is my sacred cow.
Apparently, however, your view isn't operative among establishment Powers That Be. Otherwise "they" wouldn't hesitate to name it, and instead employ euphemisms like "huge industrial complex" and "industrial megaproject." If this were some evil, no good, very bad mining operation or gas and oil field, it would be featured prominently in all of the reporting. And you know it.
Instead, we get euphemisms. One report I read about this specific matter used the term "electrical generation units." A coal plant? Nat gas? Nuclear? No. If it were any of those things "they" would say so, in clear, bright terms everyone would be eager to hate on. But it's wind and solar, so "they" carefully demur, and straightforward terms like "solar panels" an "wind turbines" are deliberately avoided.
It's not any sort of conspiracy, mind you. Everyone just somehow knows that wind, solar, hydrogen, whatever, is sacred and must be spoken of with only the greatest deference, adopting however much linguistic gymnastics seems necessary.
I can really understand. It's quite clever marketing and non-experts (media and politicians) are quite easily drawn in. Then of course, they can't admit they're wrong so they'll build a multi $B boondoggle with little to show at the end.
And maybe they'll destroy the dark skies while they're at it. Lot's of horrible outcomes are just stupid mistakes that profit no one. If they CAN discredit solar for a while longer then more money for them.
Everyone I know in environmental activism hates hydrogen and sees it as green-washing the petrochemical industry.
They may feel that way, but that seems emotional rather than rational. The choices for small-scale energy sources are: batteries with all their dirty mining, biofuels taking away lots of arable land from food/textile/etc production, or fuel cells which can still involve petrochemicals (but don't have to). There are no perfect options, and strapping enough solar panels or wind turbines to a vehicle (car, bus, train, airplane, etc) to make it drivable is just not even remotely feasible.
No doubt the petrochemical companies want to continue existing, but shifting the transportation infrastructure away from directly burning gasoline and natural gas is a net win even if in the short term there are still hydrocarbons involved. Going all in on electric vehicles only is not diversifying the solution space enough.
What dirty mining for batteries? Please be specific. This story was always a PR drive that focused on the "dirtiness" of batteries but never compares it to the dirtiness of all the other parts of competing technologies.
And talking about the "dirtiness" of batteries but not every other single part of our industry (steel for everything, all the nasty stuff for electrolyzers, etc.) is all part of prioritizing emotional over rational. Public discussion of our energy system is definitely more emotional than rational, and I would argue that the emotional side of things means that we do a lot more fossil fuels and dirty tech, whereas a more rational approach would have us on far more solar and storage than we currently are, or plan to do.
There’s a lot of pressure for batteries to become cleaner too, which has resulted in a lot of money going into R&D of more effective chemistries comprised of more readily available materials. It’s difficult to express the sheer momentum we have in this field right now and it would be a shame if cold water got dumped on it by negative public perception, cooling investments. It’d be a textbook example of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good and of squandered potential.
Batteries require specific minerals that are largely unique to them. The amount of lithium, for example, needed for all other purposes combined is dwarfed by the amount used to make batteries. Of course all industry and mining is dirty, the question is of unique costs to each solution. You don't need to mine nearly as much lithium, even if you account for all the infrastructure and logistics, to make and distribute biofuel. But then you need to dedicate a lot of arable land, which will have other effects. The point is not to remove batteries from the discussion but to include all solutions.
The dirty mining and manufacturing of batteries is the dumbest red herring there is. It's like saying we need to get rid of toilet paper because it cuts down so many trees.
Hydrogen on the other hand clearly is pushed by fossil fuels since it leaves the door open for them to be a major player.
Hydrogen/syngas right now is the only way forward for long distance sea or plane travel, since batteries are too heavy.
hydrogen definitely not the only way for long distance sea, nuclear would just make so much more sense. and for place travel it also such the same as batteries, first of all its an explosive gas and second we only get less than 20%. hydrogen is just not a good solution to anything other than being a byproduct in the natural gas industry.
Though it may never prove viable, hydrogen from electrolysis of water creates no emissions other than oxygen. While large ships may be able to use nuclear power directly, the risks of a tenfold increase in small floating nuclear reactors in civilian hands are not trivial. Hydrogen provides a way to keep power generation centralized, secure, and efficient while also distributing it where needed. But this assumes an extreme excess of power, something only possible with nuclear or large-scale renewables, which may never come to pass in sufficient quantities or without even bigger problems.
I don't disagree that nuclear propulsion has a long way to go before becoming safe enough for civilian use and might require extra security and regulation forever, but we need to do something other than dumping bunker fuel waste into the sea and atmosphere even coubting in several terrorist attacks and accidents it might still end up killing less people using nuclear. As you say going with hydrogen and by extension ammonia, which is probably the only viable way to fuel ships, will require unthinkable amounts of renewables which is mostly intermittent energy meaning hydrogen electrolysis plants will have to be ramped up and down as the wind blows or the sun shines. this makes the efficiency calculations even worse for an already super wasteful undertaking. i guess we could potentially use nuclear but why waste 80-90% of the energy created by converting and then using hydrogen ? My opinion is that we need to throw much more money at making nuclear fission safer.
I think most of the heat and fuel will get wasted anyway. A nuclear-powered cargo ship is going to be closer to a nuclear-powered submarine than a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in terms of the number of people being supported and the needs beyond propulsion. That means running the reactor below its optimal fuel efficiency, and then intentionally discarding a portion of its heat most of the time to retain some spare capacity for demand spikes and emergencies. Of course, small-scale nuclear reactors are an active area of research, but AFAIK the results haven't been promising yet. So it's an avenue, but not the only one.
Running a reactor full-bore on shore, pumping ocean water, desalinizing it, electrolyzing it to hydrogen, cryogenically separating nitrogen from air, and combining the result to produce ammonia, might look really inefficient in isolation, but might be efficient enough when compared against the alternative. When the costs of logistics, personnel, and capital are accounted for, it might even come out ahead. That having been said, the amount of waste oxygen this would produce is immense, and could create risks of its own. Ammonia is also more likely to produce NOx when combusted in air than hydrogen is, so that's not great, either.
Nuclear would not make sense at all for long distance sea travel. Naval reactors require highly enriched fuel in order to be compact enough, so they could never be widespread on civilian ships for fear of proliferation. They're also extraordinarily expensive and require a specialized crew, and their power output is overkill for a cargo ship (but they can't really be scaled down much further).
The only real synthetic alternative is ammonia which brings it's own host of problems and potential for malicious use. while your arguments are valid, i think we can overcome most of the problems you mention with more research. at some point we'll need to make the hard decision to either give up on the environment or go nuclear and accept the extra cost of safeguarding it. It simply seems there's no other realistic alternative.
> The only real synthetic alternative is ammonia
This is untrue.
Maersk launch a commercial 172-metre container ship running on run entirely on green methanol a bit over a year ago and has 25 more new green methanol ships in the build pipeline.
Australian companies have already contracted to supply green methanol sourced from solar farms after their build and trial of methanol shipping (tugboats) in Singapore.
> It simply seems there's no other realistic alternative.
You say that, the world disagrees.
There are plenty of options that are more realistic than ship-based nuclear, such as sails and biofuels.
biofuels are not green and require huge land mass and come on dude, sails, really ?
Biofuels are carbon neutral. They require land, but a single engineered biofuel crop could grow on land that other crops couldn't. It's a promising use for the Canadian tundra that's melting.
Sails are very promising - a cargo ship would need enough fuel to maneuver in port and to generate electricity en route, but for most of the trip it could rely on (computer-controlled) sails.
Neither of these options are mature today, but they're a lot closer than nuclear-powered cargo ships.
We're going to get a 4x energy density improvement from lithium sulfur batteries, just as soon as production ramps up.
Wikipedia lists the energy density of kerosene as 9.7k Wh/L, and lithium sulfur at 550 Wh/L, which is not great.
But burning kerosene is much less efficient, and turbine engines have a much lower power density than electric motors, so knock 2/3rds off the the kerosene number.
550 Wh/L would also be for the first lithium sulfur batteries to market, they'll double that down the road.
Hydrogen isn't so great either.
> It's like saying we need to get rid of toilet paper because it cuts down so many trees.
Better not to trigger the bidet crowd.
> choices for small-scale energy sources are: batteries with all their dirty mining, biofuels taking away lots of arable land from food/textile/etc production, or fuel cells
Storage also includes flywheels and pumped hydro. Hydrogen is mostly a farce.
The key adjective there is "small-scale". There are many more alternatives when size is not an issue. Flywheels are very useful but their energy density is too low to be the primary power source for a vehicle.
Mining affects a limited local area. CO2 emissions affect the whole planet.
I understand it if you look at the receiving end. Say in Germany they built natural gas plants shortly before the war under the premise that they must be Hydrogen ready, aka right now we use natural gas but promise in a few years when Hydrogen production is there, we'll switch to Hydrogen. That can be very easily criticized as green washing of the gas plants (although a gas plant is much better than what it would have replaced, brown coal). Now with the war and the pipelines destroyed, Germany went a different route and instead runs the coal plants for a longer time.
But if you look at the production side, they are building a solar power plant. How is that green washing? There is no way to use a solar power plant other than to collect renewable energy. Either it is operational and collects renewable energy, to send it to various places, or it is not operational, but then it's been a bad investment for the investors. Now, maybe it could be part of some greater scheme where one uses this plant as the "source" of a multiple of the ammonium it can actually produce, and sells ammonium from fossil sources as made by Chilean sun. But that should then be addressed on its own, and not hamper the project itself (although of course a different location would be better that doesn't risk the operations of scientific instruments worth billions).
There's two types of hydrogen: 1) ammonia for fertilizer production and perhaps other industrial decarbonization, and 2) fantasies of energy storage, fuel, etc.
Environmentalists know of the necessity of ammonia, but push back hard on the second.
Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder is fairly good at summarizing an honest assessment of where hydrogen will be useful:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-ladder-version-50-mi...
And you'll see that it gets pushed in lots of very inappropriate places.
It's funny how much benefit of the doubt is given to really bad tech, like hydrogen and large nuclear reactors, despite decades of data showing that they always underperform expectations and that people who implement them always overpromise and underdeliver. It's a stark contrast to solar and wind and storage, which always seem to underpromise and overdeliver, and these technologies face huge amounts of undue skepticism not only from decision makers but also the press and the public. There's a lot of decision making in energy that is extremely disconnected from data and reality, and most of hydrogen decision making these days is disconnected from reality.
You state that energy storage is a fantasy, liebreich puts Long Duration Grid Balancing as a B on the hydrogen ladder. Sure it's going to be extremely expensive, but I don't see any cheaper alternative for countries without dark winters where also the wind can sometimes be not enough.
I agree though that it gets pushed in lots of inappropriate places, where better alternatives exist.
you are right that hydrogen is a fantasy.. but wait.. what is this solar and wind plus storage you speak of that overdeliver, specifically what storage are you talking about? the wind industry has heavily been pushing hydrogen as this storage at least in Germany and Denmark and as far as i know there's absolutely zero success here despite maasny years of trying
Environmental activists have their own biases and blind spots.
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!
In Switzerland, there are two restaurants called "Blinde Kuh" (blind cow), where it's completely dark and you'll get served by blind/visually impaired people. There even work visually impaired people in the kitchen (besides "regular" seing people). It's a fascinating wxperience.
There's a similar experience at Tochoji Temple in Fukuoka city.
Highly recommend the experience, it was darkness unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Excuse the phrasing.
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.
I looked up bortle and Portugal, and Google gave my a light pollution map. I still don’t know what bortle means…
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...
The plan of "don't build a major industrial centre 5km from the best site for optical astronomy in the world, build it somewhere else" seems like a perfect viable one to me.
Well, local people probably care about economic development and don’t give a rat’s ass about astronomy. So the question becomes, who’s going to compensate for the loss of economic development? (By local I don’t mean strictly local, in case of counter arguments along the line that there are no/very few local people to begin with.)
Disclosure: I’m a former physicist and I have personally operated an optical telescope with a 15’ dome, as well as a 60’ radio telescope, which probably puts me among 0.01% of world’s population. So I do know a thing or two and care about astronomy.
This is in the middle of the desert at high altitude. There are basically no local people who aren't associated with the telescopes.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/cWgWx1RKjEUjavPn8
Whether the facility is built there or 50 km away, it's going to have to draw people from more than a few km away. The entire Taltal district only has about 11,000 people.
At Las Campanas, most of the staff from the cooks to the techs and a number of the researchers were all local. I found quite a bit of interest in the country as a whole as it's a source of national pride being the best location for astronomy.
Allowing this to proceed will affect _all_ future astronomy projects in Chile. No one is going to splash out on a shiny, new 100m optical telescope (OWL) if anyone can come along and park a city's worth of light just down the road.
My understanding is ESO uses local labour where possible (e.g on building the ELT, maintenance, catering, transport), so it's not like it's one guy in a shed, there are jobs and economic benefits. That's why this seems so confusing to me, I can't see why you can't have both?
Do you mean that the economical output of astronomy and this industrial project is comparable?
If most of the local people are going to move to that location, they could also move to a different location which is a bit further away from where it's planned now.
So that would be Mauna Kea. I don't believe there is any industry being built near there.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I though Paranal beat Mauna Kea (and some basic google searches aren't throwing up anything that makes me question it, e.g. https://www.eso.org/gen-fac/pubs/astclim/espas/espas_reports..., though that's from more than 20 years ago, so site quality has likely changed since then). There's also the issue of northern vs. southern sky.
> That's possible, and directed/shielded lighting is commercially available.
Given the size of the site (over 3000 hectares), even lights purely pointed at the ground will still create large amounts of bounce lighting. The ground reflects light up in the sky.
It’s possible to go more restrictive than shielded lights. What if all outdoor lights must be turned off from 9pm to 5am? If the conditions were something like that, would the developers still want to build?
Have you ever seen a heavy construction site involving land preparation? Like a new road being built?
Dust everywhere. Backhoes with 360 light coverage that makes a lighthouse envious. Trucks, trucks everywhere! Floodlights! String lights! Crane lights! Temporary light poles! Service lights! Warning lights! A dictionary of lights!
Can they work in the dark without producing so much dust? Can a tiger be a vegan?
Also the development is part wind power, this alone causes wake turbulence. So even if regulation demanded complete blackout after sunset on the penalty to of death the observational quality is still permanently degraded.
I suspect the real concern is there would be a push to relax the restrictions once the industrial facility has been built. Astronomical observatories have faced such problems in the past, to the point where research goals had to be fundamentally altered or where they ceased to be research facilities.
That said, if the goal is to reduce the lighting to the point where it has no impact, one has to ask: what is the point of having lighting at all? I suppose lighting could be restricted to indoor use only, but most commercial operations will expect some outdoor lighting.
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.
Yeah the guards go home for the evening and then you can probably walk in after dark. You'd have to walk a really long distance in some of them though, because the vehicle gates are usually a very long walk from the scenery, and that's at high altitude.
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.
The telescopes are 8,000 miles south of America. Why does American policy matter?
Because the goods made will be sold to American consumers directly and indirectly and are priced to reflect all kinds of costs including EPA compliance in domestic markets.
European markets also demand European norms to labour and health and environment are met, even if tokenistically. To some it is a form of protectionism.
It's also the "why can't we make it here" reasoning. If you tried to make it in the US it would be white anted out by lawfare. That's what happened to BHP when they proposed metals and minerals processing plants on the Californian coast.
Ammonia and hydrogen are essentially energy export mechanisms. They'll be exported to energy poor places, aka Asia, not America. they can and are made in America without fanfare. You wouldn't have states fighting to exlude green hydrogen or ammonia plants, you'd have states competing on how many subsidies they could give them.
Arguably, very likely true. But the fertiliser (the other ammonia product, the one we do mostly now the others being somewhat futurological) will I am sure sell worldwide. I'm personally sceptical about the hydrogen economy I can't see it working. It's biggish in some Australian circles, both because of IPR around the processes and people in related fields looking at uses for surplus solar power. Twiggy Forrest was big in it, wanted the sun cable proposal to pivot over, its partly why the JV with Cannon Brookes fell apart.
My comment was to the more general "why can't we have nice things" about industrial placement. I spent time in Culpeper and the number of "no more Datacentre" signs were amazing. Old folks who retired to the country don't want them build nearby. It's a large federal and private investment in tech services. And growing.
I know the crowd here (mostly from USA) hates this kind of comment, but as a SOUTH AMERICAN, can I point out the absurdity of this kind of sentence? Chile is a South American country, in the American continent, and is 8000 miles south of America somehow. I know the why's and the meaning intented, no need to explain. Wont stop pointing this out though, as it will always feel to me as a example of the general disregard USA has for its neighbours.
> in the American continent
I think it's worth pointing out that "the American continent" is not how geography is taught in the US. There's seven continents, one of which is North America and one of which is South America.
So you're making a point which only makes sense in Spanish, in the context of your own education. There's no ambiguity in the US since the only thing "America" can refer to is the USA.
I'm curious how it's taught for you about Europe and Asia. We learn those as separate continents, too, even though it's one land mass. For that matter, Africa is as connected to Asia as South America is to North America, but I'm almost certain you consider Africa its own continent, right?
Despite not asking for an explanation, I’ll give one anyway since you seem not to have resolved your grievance.
“American” is the correct adjective in English to describe the United States’ people and government. There is simply no equivalent to the Spanish “estadounidense.”
Furthermore, North America and South America are considered to be separate continents, and if you want to refer to them both together, you say “the Americas”, plural.
It's also an American company building the project. The cultural values of the US are relevant.
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I don't know of any Americans that advocate for shooting of school children.
They said it's low importance to a ton of people, not that those people want the opposite.
I don't think that's really supported. It's not number one above all else, but I don't think you can infer ranking from action.
I would argue that for most people their personal safety and that of their family is near the top of the list over 90% of the issues. Gun murder still exist, but that just goes to show that safety isn't the number one goal
> I don't think you can infer ranking from action.
classic case of watch what they do, not what they say.
what does that mean in this context? What do you think it is above or below?
did you miss the "not" in the sentence?
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.
Pretty fucked up to say that people that don't have dark skies even on their radar with everything going on right now are heartless and lacking empathy. It shows a gross misunderstanding of the average person today and really shows your lack of empathy.
I shoot astro, I love it. I wish skies were darker. But I certainly don't blame my comrades for not giving two fucks about how the sky looks when they are asleep after working two jobs to pay rent.
"...when they are asleep after working two jobs to pay rent."
No one else sleeps or works, right?
Plus, who knows why they work more than one job. Maybe they were "too smart" for school, found out later that they weren't, and now are grasping to close the gap due to hubris and ignorance early on in their life. No shame in making up for lost time/wages, but that's not our fault and we shouldn't have to constantly bend and bow in order to appease the LCD crowd.
If you're surprised the night sky isn't top on people's minds today, you live in a very different world than most.
This is a pretty crazy comment
> so many people
How many people get "things that make life worth living" from the Paranal Observatory every year?
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-...
Thanks for the press release link. My knowledge is outdated. So reading the linked research paper:
The 2023 experiment with the single-dish Green Bank Telescope (GBT) demonstrated that Starlink beam-forming could reduce radio interference at the primary telescope beam (the "boresight") by as much as two orders of magnitude.
This experiment required coordination between StarLink and the GBT operators at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
Another NRAO telescope in North America, the Very Large Array (VLA), has been conducting experiments of its own, in coordination with StarLink and the Navajo Nation. An enclave of the Navajo Nation, the community of Alamo is northeast of the VLA site. Isolated from the main extent of the Navajo Nation, Alamo has close ties to the nearby village of Magdalena, home to many of the VLA workers. This region surrounding the VLA could benefit greatly by StarLink internet services.
The VLA StarLink tests showed that most of the interference comes from the satellite, rather than the terrestrial user terminals.
Tests to automate the process of avoiding interference are ongoing. It will involve sharing observation scheduling and telescope configuration data from NRAO to derive beam shaping modes for the StarLink satellites.
I know that the VLA RF chain has the flexibility to handle this, and that the VLA correlator was built specifically to handle interference of this nature. The design stems from the early 2000's and was informed by increasing interference from GPS satellite constellations.
The process has yet to be automated, but there's cause to believe that it can work.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6b24
(I worked on the VLA monitor and control system software design 1999-2005. Many design reviews. Shared an office with the engineer who designed the correlator configuration API.)
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).
The word "local" is strange. There are almost no real "local" people as to local to that region. As to the other Chilean people, they can go to any other major Chilean city and build whatever they want there instead of building it right at Atacama. Nobody is stopping that.
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.
Telescopes in space are much better for saving us from catastrophic meteor strikes.
99.9% of asteroid discoveries are done by ground based telescopes. The world is still a long way away from having many (and large) space based telescopes for this purpose due to the economics and sheer complexity involved.
That is because most of our telescopes in 2025 are ground-based, not because they're better at it.
And we're not very far from having many telescopes in space at all. Every year the cost of payload to orbit is getting cheaper. Blue Origin is launching their New Glenn rocket today and SpaceX is having their 7th flight test of Starship in a few days. Starship specifically will drastically reduce the cost of a kg to orbit if it pans out, and this is looking more and more likely.
A significantly reduced launch cost in turn drastically reduces the complexity and cost profile of the actual satellite telescopes.
Still, space based telescopes will probably not be able to compete with ground based (mega)projects for at least a decade, if not many
Operations and maintenance costs will still be much higher even if the hardware and deployment would become equally affordable
A constellation of low (relative) cost telescopes can definitely compete with a huge terrestrial telescope. Genuinely doubt it will take us a decade to get one.
Someone just needs to take a page from SpaceX's Starlink playbook and mass-produce telescope satellites. Or someone should pay SpaceX to do it.
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.
They're not going to build a port "just 5 to 11 kilometers from telescopes" (from TFA) when the telescopes are 15km from the ocean. A chemical plant wouldn't be inland either because it will want access to the port.
You think a port and industrial plant that requires 3/4 of a gigawatt of electricity will be built within a limit of less than 4000m from the ocean port? Every port I’ve seen took at least a few kilometers of inland space. I also don’t think a few kilometers makes much of a difference to the light reduction, basically any light at all will harm the telescope.
I am surprised at the “meh” response from the commenters here, they want to build an industrial plant in one of the best places for astronomy. Can’t the plant go elsewhere? The telescope cannot go elsewhere.
The problem is that, remarkably, there’s always a reason not to build. A different site in Chile will probably have some obscure species of beetle, or rocks that someone has interpreted as an Indigenous site, or some minor highway that can’t handle the traffic, etc etc etc, so that we can’t build there either.
Well then I guess we’ve run out of land!
The world is trade offs. Some are worse than others
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.
Of course this is not about someone having for sole purpose to sabotage the ELT. Someone at AES could have had a run-of-the-mill business plan. They go ahead with it despite scientific objections because their profits > science. Then the election happens, and it's a win-win for them from a business point of view. They get unexpected free leverage from a more transactional presidential administration to either drop the plan and get extra compensation.
I like that conspiracy ! They should be careful about retribution if the TMT lands on the Canary Island, sombebody could conspire to put another industrial facility next to it
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.
It's not literally the last place on Earth with dark skies. It's just one place with dark skies where they built a telescope. This isn't about protecting the sky and it's not about "progress", it's about protecting an investment of money in a telescope.
The price of launching giant telescopes to space is set to plummet in the next few years with Starship and New Glenn coming online. IMO we should be focusing on that rather than blocking development on Earth to preserve previous investments in ground based telescopes.
Launching telescopes is not a viable alternative to ground based telescopes. They are completely different scales. We would need large scale orbital construction facilities or a space elevator to bridge that gap. We don’t need to develop every square inch of the planet to support humanity, we don’t take up that much space.
No, but it's one of three places on Earth that have dark skies this good.
The fact you don't know Paranal host many more than "one telescope" doesn't surprise me, as your are obviously very ignorant of modern astronomy.
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 not "destroyed". If a dire need for dark skies arises, you can always... turn the lights off.
Turn the windmills off too because turbulence.
Actually turn the entire facility off because again being a hotspot causes turbulence.
Why don't we build an all night biker bar next door to your home? It won't cause you any problems like noise or nuisance because they cal always turn off the music or keep closed all night?
Energy for the many is more important than astronomy for the few. Hopefully in the future we have more robust energy production (this is a great example of why green energy proponents need to support nuclear – it has far fewer externalities like this) and then we can reclaim the area for astronomical use. That is my point. Nothing is actually destroyed, unlike with other types of pollution. Light pollution is literally the most reversible disruption I can think of. "Destroy" is definitely the wrong verb, unless your goal is for people to ignore you due to histrionics.
The problem is that the industrial project will attract more people to the site, and a new town would be built with families living there. So even in the imagined best scenario, when you shut down this project, lots of people would lose their jobs. They would have to do some other businesses to support themselves. The light pollution won't be eliminated.
Actually, in my imagined best scenario, we would develop better means of producing energy that make a solar farm in the middle of the desert less attractive, causing working there to become less lucrative and encouraging people to find new jobs. The megaproject winds down naturally due to that changing economic landscape (like how I expect the town where I grew up in Texas to die when the oilfield workers no longer frequent it), and the dark zone is reclaimed for astronomy or whatever.
It’s a lot easier to move a project that hasn’t started than to turn off a project that’s become necessary. Once a project like this is built the investment is so large and returns so desired and the workers lives have moved there it’ll never - in any meaningful sense - be turned off.
Or, they could just build elsewhere.
Astronomy and science is not for the few - it’s for everyone everywhere until the end of history. The energy produced in this project is for the project not for the many. The project is for profit, and the output is short lived consumed by the relative few compared to science which benefits all people from then on.
I’m not saying don’t build the project. Just build it somewhere else where we’ve fucked it up already. The fact this is a singular resource means that’s literally everywhere all over the earth other than this one location.
It’s an industrial plant with an attached power plant, it’s not like families will be using this power.
How is it you think families get power, goods, and services?
Ammonia makes fertilizer - this plant will help feed millions, dropping food costs. Even if the power this plant is generating won't go directly to families, it will be going into the things they eat and the things they buy in place of power they can use directly.
is this the last place on earth to build that kind of industry?
I think its fair enough to not build it here, but everywhere there will be arguments made against all projects so it can get old fast
Again, not much use for the locals at this elevation . That’s super dry area
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”.