Telescopes of the World, Unite!

by phil on Tuesday May 20, 2003 10:48 AM

Telescopes of the World, Unite! In the past 25 years, the number of CCD pixels (each acting as a miniature astronomical instrument) in all the world's telescopes has exponentially increased by a factor of 3,000, a beneficiary of Moore's Law.

The resulting total amount of astronomical data collected every year is doubling; surveys of millions of astronomical objects now contain about 100 terabytes of distributed data in the "National Virtual Observatory." (kurzweil)

Someone should offer a system whereby all these telescopes could be controlled by a system when not in use, sort of like SETI@home. This would start to make this blue marble of ours obtain a sort of omniview vision of its surroundings. Anybody else find it amazing that we are manifesting on a macrocosmic scale a neural network with the Internet and communication. If an asteroid were to come into our vicinity, the whole world consciousness would wake up, and our defense mechanisms would kick in, respond, and eject some matter-re-constituted (missles), and destroy the threat.