Science Friday - Famous Arecibo Observatory Decommissioned, Biden’s Climate Change Plan. Nov 20, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

Puerto Rico's Famous Arecibo Observatory Decommissioned The astronomical observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has been standing since 1963. It has weathered hurricanes, earthquakes, and time itself. But in August, a large cable—holding up one of three towers that help suspend the telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform above the collecting dish—slipped out of its socket. It fell into the dish below, leaving a trail of broken panels. One broken cable seemed like a fixable problem, but in early November a second cable broke. Now, after engineers assessing the damage said it’s likely these breakages have increased strain on the remaining cables, and pointed to fraying strands on additional cables, scientists and others worried of the odds of an accelerating spiral of broken cables, which would cause the massive receiver to collapse onto the dish below and destroy the observatory beyond repair. On Thursday, it seemed the National Science Foundation agreed with these worries: The agency announced it would decommission the historic observatory, and plan for a demolition process that could eliminate the portions at risk of collapse while preserving as much of the structure as possible. As National Geographic contributor (and daughter of one-time observatory director Frank Drake) Nadia Drake wrote Thursday, “It’s game over.” SciFri producer Christie Taylor talks to Drake, former observatory director Mike Nolan, and astronomer Edgard Rivera-Valentín about the damage, as well as the telescope’s irreplaceable role in detecting Earth-threatening asteroids, and its huge importance as a symbol for Puerto Ricans. What Our Climate Can Look Like Under Biden The transition from a Trump presidency to a Biden administration will be a stark contrast for many sectors—perhaps most notably for climate change. While Trump spent his time in office rolling back environmental rules and regulations and setting the country’s climate progress back, president-elect Joe Biden has promised the most ambitious climate plan of any incoming American president in history. The plan is sprawling: investing $400 billion over ten years in clean energy, conserving 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030, and prioritizing environmental justice are just the tip of the plan. Biden also promises to take executive action to reverse the harmful climate rollbacks made during the Trump administration. But is this plan realistic, or even possible if Republicans continue control of the Senate? Joining Ira to talk about the Biden plan is Emily Atkin, author and founder of HEATED, a daily newsletter about the climate crisis, and Rebecca Leber, climate and environment reporter for Mother Jones. What The Latest Promising Pfizer And Moderna Vaccine Trials Mean After a long ten months, the moment we’ve been waiting for is almost here. This week, drug companies Moderna and Pfizer both announced that clinical trials on their respective COVID-19 vaccines had concluded, and both were found to be 95% effective against the coronavirus. While that may be very welcome good news, it comes in the same week that deaths from the coronavirus surpassed 250,000 in the United States. The Atlantic staff writer Sarah Zhang joins Ira to talk about what we can expect over the coming months as these vaccines roll out—with more still to come. Plus, the prehistoric parasites that likely killed a dinosaur, and a scientific debate is sparked on TikTok.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. After a long 10 months, it's the moment we have been waiting for, well, almost. This week, drug companies, Moderna and Pfizer, both announced that clinical trials on their respective COVID-19 vaccines had concluded, and both were found to be 95% effective against the coronavirus. And while that may be very welcome good news, the bad news is that they are months away from reaching us, and coronavirus cases are at a record rate. here in the U.S. All of this means that we can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel itself is still long and dark. What can we expect over the coming months as these vaccines roll out, with perhaps more still to come? Here to fill us in is Sarah Zang, staff writer for the Atlantic. Welcome back to Science Friday. Good morning. Good to be here. Now, the last numbers I have, or 187,000 new cases, 11.8 million total cases and 252,000 deaths yesterday. But we finally got some good vaccine news. Tell us where we stand with the two drug trials that reported positive results this week. Yeah, I think this is some of the best news we've had about COVID amidst, as you say, some still pretty

dark numbers. So Pfizer-Moderna have both released results that their vaccines are 95% effective, which is great. It's actually far more effective than many scientists thought or even dare to hope. So what that means is that if you get this vaccine personally and you get the two doses, wait the two weeks for the immunity to build up, your chances of getting sick are reduced 95%. But what's even more important, perhaps, is that it means once enough people get the vaccine will reach what is called herd immunity, which we're hearing a lot about recently. But it just means that enough people are immune that the virus stopped spreading and this pandemic ends. That is still many, many months off. But the fact

that these vaccines are very effective means we have to vaccinate fewer people through each herd immunity. So that's good news as well. Now, the vaccines, though, are tested under very strict conditions. Can we expect the same kind of results once they get out in the wild, so to speak? Yeah, that's a really great question. So as I said, these vaccines require two doses. And they also required to be stored at frozen temperatures, one of them at actually ultra-cold temperatures. So you could imagine that these vaccines are being shipped, you know, maybe one batch gets a little bit too warm, maybe some people forget to come back for their second dose or wait a little bit too long. So, you know, you might see the effectiveness go down slightly under real-world conditions,

but it's great that we're studying from a baseline of 95% already. And there have been a large number of people in these trials, which is good news too, right? Yeah, exactly. And actually unusually large because we're trying to do these trials very fast. One of the things you do when you are doing these trials is, of course, try to figure out how safe the vaccines are. Normally what you might do is you just kind of wait a long time. Now we are seeing, you know, these trials have tens of thousands of people compared to usually just thousands. So we have a pretty good idea. These vaccines, they're not totally side effect-free. You might kind of feel a little not so hot for a day or so, but there are no serious events. Could these

vaccines be in competition with each other? Well, I think over the next couple of months, Pfizer-Moderna said they can collect a new supply enough doses for maybe a little bit over 20 million So I think we're going to need all the vaccines we can get over the next few months. One of the things we might see is that these vaccines are very similar, but they do have slightly different shipping and storage requirements. So Pfizer's in particular needs to be stored at negative 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which is much, much colder than your average freezer. And a lot of your CVS or your rural clinic might not have that capacity.

So what you might see is maybe Pfizer's vaccine goes to a large hospital that does have a deep freezer. and Modern's vaccine goes to smaller places that don't quite have the storage requirements. And there could be other vaccines, too, that are in the works. Yeah, exactly. Some of the, you know, one of the other kind of really exciting things about this data is that a lot of the other vaccines use a very similar strategy. They target what is called the spike protein of the virus.

So the fact that these two look pretty good is a case for optimism that more are down the line and hopefully they will work out as well. Now, Pfizer said that they're requesting emergency authorization today. What does that mean? So what's going to happen now is that the FDA is going to convene a outside group of scientists that are going to meet in what looks like early December. They're going to have a series of public meetings where they're going to very publicly put all this data through the paces and scrutinize it and make sure it says everything that the company says it's saying. So we're going to have this really public discussion of how good these vaccines are. and then the FDA gets to make a decision. And, you know, this is a pretty rigorous process.

So by the end of it, I think if it all works out, we showed pretty good confidence in these vaccines. That's great. Let's move on to other news. Some of it not so happy to report. And one is that the Trump administration said that they plant a sell off land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil companies. And it will happen just three days before the inauguration.

What's going on here? Why are they doing this? Yeah, this is actually a really good question. And so the administration has put in place this process that the pretty much earliest day, the sale can happen is January 17th, which is three days before the inauguration. Oil and gas is a part of the economy in Alaska. And drilling in this refuge has kind of been a controversy for years. Back in 2017, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski had kind of put a provision into the tax bill to open up drilling in the Arctic. Can they actually get this done, though, before.

Biden becomes president? So what needs to happen after these sales go through is actually the Justice Department and various agencies need to review them. And that's something that should take a month or two. So once Joe Biden becomes president, it's very possible that something may come up in that review process. Environmental groups are also likely to bring lawsuits, given that this is a really unusual timeline. So it seems pretty likely that something will probably get thrown up. Can't know for sure. But in reality, this might not happen for another. 10 years, right? The time frame here is that the drilling could take 10 years to start.

Yeah, that's right. You can't just, you know, say we're going to build an oil well and it gets built the next day, right? So it's going to take many years for these wells actually start producing oil. And that's actually one of the other big unknowns are oil companies actually going to want to drill. A lot of them have kind of seen the writing on the wall, you know, and are investing in renewable energy instead of oil and gas. And you've also seen a lot of big banks in the U.S. actually say they're not going to fund oil and gas projects in the Arctic region. So there's still a lot of uncertainty even whether companies want to do it. As we can hear, Sarah, the garbage men are busy this morning, but let's move on. Two papers out this week confirmed that the biggest

mass extinction, 250 million years ago, was caused by burning fossil fuels. How does that happen? Yeah, so this is called the Great Dying. which is apt because what happened is that a bunch of volcanoes over what is now Siberia were spewing just tons and tons of magma enough to cover what would have been the continental United States in the kilometer of magma. So essentially sterilized, almost sterilized the earth. But what happened was not just the volcanoes themselves as they were erupting. They were also igniting a lot of oil and gas and fossil fuels that were underneath the land as well.

And so one of the lines of evidence for this is that you see a molecule called coronin, which you sort of only see when fossil fuels burn at really, really high temperatures, like in magma. What happened after that is that this, of course, released a lot of carbon dioxide. And that carbon dioxide got absorbed in the oceans, and that turned the ocean is really acidic. And another group of scientists found that if you just look at the fossils that around that time, you see evidence of this acidifying ocean. So this maybe sounds a little bit familiar, right? burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide is in the oceans. It's essentially what's happening right now

with man-made climate change. How does that compare, though, to the burning of fossil fuels that humans have done? Do we have a scale or a range or a comparison? So these volcanoes and the fossil fuel release way, way more carbon than we humans ever have. But that's process also happened over a million years, which is a blip in geological time for a long time in fossil time. But if you look at the rate of how much carbon dioxide is being released per year, we're actually doing it 10 times what the volcanoes were. Of course, we're probably not going to be doing this for a million years, but it's a really unprecedented rate.

There is some silver lining here in the UK. Boris Johnson just announced that the UK planes to go green by 2030, moving to all electric cars in 10 years. That's a pretty ambitious plan, isn't it? Yeah, and it is pretty ambitious. You might remember the last time I was on. We also talked about California was looking to end gas and diesel cars. So this has actually been, I think, a really kind of worldwide phenomenon.

We're moving away from gas power cars to electric cars. And, you know, I think that's great that we are kind of seeing more worldwide action on this. Okay, now sticking with the ancient world for a bit, some paleontologists unearthed some strange-looking dinosaur fossils. Tell us about what they found. Yeah, so these paleontologists found a dinosaur bone in 2006 in Brazil. And sort of right away, it was kind of clear that this bone was unusual. there were these lesions on the surface.

And it looked like maybe it was maybe bone cancer, which had actually been found by other paleontologists and other dinosaur bones. Recently, they were able to do a CT scan of the bone. And when they looked inside, they found that it wasn't cancer, but it didn't seem like the bone had been infected when the dinosaur was alive. And in fact, you could actually see parasites, like tiny, less than a millimeter long parasites inside the bone. They found about 70 of them. Wow. So they're pretty sure that the parasites were there when it died. It did not enter the bone after it died.

Yeah, so the bone itself wasn't broken and it had, you know, these signs, it's kind of spongy growths of this bone being infected when the dinosaur is alive. So it definitely seems like it was there when the dinosaur had died and maybe was part of the cause of how that dinosaur ended up dying. Finally, I'm told there has been some discussion on the social media platform, TikTok, This sounds crazy, about people able to smell dead ants. You've got to tell me more about this one. I just missed it, I guess. That's right. So this began with a user who made a video saying,

wow, did you know that people can't smell dead ants? And I don't know about you, Ira, but I've actually never sell the dead ants. I've never tried. How do you know if you can smell a day? But apparently to some people and some ants, the smell is very pungent and very obvious. So actually kind of depending on the species of the ant, they can smell anything like blue cheese. There's another species of ant that releases something called formic acid when it's taxed. So you try to go squash it.

It's going to spray this acid. And that can smell like vinegar. There are others that might smell like citrus. So it depends on the species of the ant. It depends on maybe how observant people are. But maybe also a little individual variation from person to person. Does TikTok say whether you need a whole pile of dead ants or just one? Some people said it's just one.

Really? I know. I think it's so fascinating just over the past few years. With the blue and white dress, for example, that you found these phenomena where like you maybe tell one friend like, hey, this weird thing. And now we're finding out lots and lots of people experience it. So it's just funny to see kind of this phenomenon and merge online and scientists maybe finally getting a chance to think and study it.

Sarah Zang, staff writer for the Atlantic. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, President-elect Joe Biden has promised the most ambitious climate plan for an incoming American president. We'll go through what we know and what we can expect. We'll be right back after this short break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. Hi, My Refledo. The transition from a Donald Trump presidency to a Joe Biden one is going to be dramatically different for a lot of reasons. And a big one, while President Trump spent his time in office rolling back important environmental protections, President DeLek Biden has outlined an ambitious climate plan he says will start on day one of his time and office. At face value, this is undoubtedly the most ambitious climate plan for an incoming American president ever.

There is a lot here. So joining me today to unpack what we know and what we can expect from a Biden presidency in terms of climate, are my guests. Emily Atkin, author and founder of Heeded, a daily newsletter about the climate crisis. She's based in Washington. And Rebecca Lieber, climate and environment reporter for Mother Jones also in Washington. Welcome back, both of you to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having us. Great to be back on. Let's get into the Biden plane, because as I say, there's a lot to digest here, Rebecca. Give us an outline of what has been laid out. As you said, it's a ambitious plan for for incoming president, he's tackling climate emissions from a number of sectors, including

public lands, electricity, transportation, and infrastructure. So he has targets for eliminating climate emissions from the electricity sector by 2035, conserving 30% of lands by 2030, and a number of other very ambitious dates to basically move us forward in our climate ambitions at the same time that he restores the roughly 100 rules that President Trump has rolled back in his four years. Does any one part of the plan stick out to you? I think a few things to watch in his plan is his emphasis on executive action. As we know, the makeup of Congress is still up in the air with two Senate seats in Georgia. We're still waiting for the final results on that.

And he will probably have to use the power of the White House and has already indicated. 10 executive actions he will issue within his first days of office. And I think the other things to watch here is how the Obama era influence kind of carries through with a lot of the appointments that he has started to hint at or make on his transition team that there is going to be a lot of voices that we've heard from in the Obama era and how that matches up or clashes with progressive activists who want Biden to go even further, like banning fracking, like aggressively targeting the oil industry. So I think those are two areas to watch, especially as we find out what, I guess, the makeup of the Senate is and his other challenges facing a conservative Supreme Court.

Emily, same question to you. What jumps out? Well, I think at this point, what I'm more interested now that we're in this transition era. What's sticking out to me is not the plan itself because a plan is not policy, but how Biden is starting to stack his administration to potentially implement this plan and how progressives, climate activists, climate scientists are sort of having bigger influence in that than ever.

At the same time, you're also seeing pretty quickly a rhetorical mobilization from the right against efforts to tackle climate change. Certainly some signals from the oil and gas industry. That's what's sticking out for me now is sort of how we're going to move forward with this plan. Emily Biden says he specifically wants to hold polluters accountable. What do we know about what that could look like? On that specific front, the only thing we really know is what's in the plan.

It definitely wasn't something Biden talked a lot about on the campaign trail, because that means almost talking smack about the oil and gas industry in a campaign, which which could get you in trouble. But if you look in the Biden plan, there's actually pretty strong language about holding polluters accountable. There's a part where he says he's going to establish a Department of Climate Justice within the Department of Justice. And it notes that under Trump, the EPA has referred the fewest number of criminal anti-pollution cases to the Justice Department in 30 years. So Biden has specifically promised not only to pursue cases against polluting corporations to the fullest extent with this new office, but to potentially seek

legislation to hold corporate polluters accountable and hold corporate executives personally accountable. I think one thing that hasn't been talked about a lot is that in the plan, it says we'll seek to hold corporate executives personally accountable, including jail time where merited. So Biden has actually had pretty strong language on this front. Very strong. Very strong. Rebecca, you wrote an article about what it will look like for the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. Can you walk us through why that might be a complicated venture? Yeah, so rejoining the Paris Agreement is the easy part. All Biden has to do is sign back on and after 30 days the U.S. is back in. But there's a lot more here that makes a lot more.

this more complicated. And one is Biden would have to submit a new target because the U.S. is now off base with the Obama era target by 2025. So if he follows the science, that would mean at least a 40% cut in carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, which is a really difficult goal to accomplish. He also has to get funding for the rest of the U.S.'s commitments to help developing countries tackle climate change. Trump never delivered on the rest of the promises for a $3 billion commitment. And probably the biggest challenges here is to restore trust and faith in the American commitment on climate change and that we wouldn't just see a complete reversal and the U.S. withdraw four years later if a Republican were to take over the presidency. So he has,

a lot to do on multiple fronts to restore that faith. And in the meantime, we've seen countries like China really take center stage in fostering those alliances while Trump has pursued this isolationist policy. Emily, of course, there's also the problem of not having control of the Senate at this time, even though there is those two Senate seats still up for grabs in Georgia. that means I would imagine that President-elect Biden will have to handle it with some kind of executive orders. Yeah, and there are a ton of executive orders that he can do. The group Evergreen Action actually came out with this list of, I think, 49 executive climate orders that Biden can put through the first day he gets in office if he really wanted to. But at the same time, that's not a substitute for legislation.

You saw how far the Obama administration could go on climate change just using executive. of power and it wasn't very far. And we have the evidence of that just at the state of the climate that we're in right now, the sort of dire and urgent state that the science tells us that we're in and how little time we really have to keep us under a safe level warming. So there are certainly things he can do, but it would be much easier if there were not a lot of people who are really antagonistic to the science of climate change in power in Congress. Are there stimulants for green energy development? I know one of the things that's happening is some of the green energy tax incentives are slowly going away.

Is there something in the Biden plan to restore those and to restore more incentives to develop green energy, solar, wind, things like that? I mean, the entire Biden climate plan is basically a renewable energy stimulus plan. And I think he went to great lengths to frame it that way and frame it almost less as a. a plan to solve this awful crisis that is in front of us, which it is. But you saw him politically frame it as a way to bring jobs and stimulate a green economy. And I think it would be weird if we didn't see a lot of action to that front, especially given the amount of money that clean energy, renewable energy donors gave to the Biden campaign. We saw renewable energy interests give at least $25 million to Biden over the course of the 2020 campaign, which is more than the industry

has ever given. They had almost oil and gas-like private donor events for Biden. I would be very surprised not to see some sort of incentives for renewable energy. Let's talk about the cleanup from the massive amount of Trump administration rollbacks of environmental rules, Emily. What do we know about how the Biden team plans to handle those? Well, if Democrats were in control of Congress, it would be real easy. They could just wipe out the regulations, push through any regulation in the last 60 days of Trump's term because of the Congressional Review Act. Republicans use that act at least to review and undo at least, I think, 14 of the Obama administration's rules, which is kind of wild because before Trump, that had only been used one time. And Biden, he plans to roll back more than 100 Trump administration public health regulations.

And that would be a little harder if Republicans have the Senate. But there are other ways he can do that, too, including he can file litigation with the Department of Justice to stop some of the ongoing lawsuits against Obama administration rules that there's a ton he could do. Rebecca, you touched on this a little earlier. during this election, progressives played a big role in securing the presidency for Biden. A lot of them wanted to do the Green New Deal. He said he has the Biden sort of new deal. How do you foresee progressives playing into Biden's presidency when it comes to climate? Right. Progressives really propelled climate as a campaign issue. I think we wouldn't have seen Biden come out with such comprehensive policy coming. into office if groups like Sunrise Movement weren't pushing him so hard during the primary.

But what Biden did during the campaign was especially after he secured the nomination, was to bring these activists and to bring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the fold of his campaign as advisors on climate. And I think that went a long way to assure activists that he would be serious on climate. Now, I think that as he comes into office, we're going to see those tensions flare up again. You're already seeing that as Sunrise has criticized some early appointments on his transition team for some ties to the oil industry. And I think a lot of it's going to depend on his personnel. If he is appointing all familiar names from the Obama administration that might anger activists a bit more than if he brings fresher voices into the fold, especially people who prioritize

environmental justice. I think his appointments is really an area that activists are seriously watching because, as Emily said earlier, plans are not policy, but personnel typically is. Do you think perhaps there might be a case being made that as he brings Obama-era appointees to posts that will probably touch climate change, that you can make the argument that The Obama-era climate people have grown also and become a little bit more radicalized over the years. Right. I think that's definitely true. I think the economy is in a completely different place than where it was during the Obama administration. That was a time. We were still hearing Democrats talk about gas as a bridge fuel and talking about transitioning from coal. Now, coal is shrinking. And we know that for a fact that clean energy is.

out competing the coal industry. And I think Democrats have moved on from thinking of gas as a bridge fuel. There are still some tension points, especially when it comes to what to do about existing fracking. There still will be some areas that Democrats do disagree on, but you're completely right that we are in a different place from the Obama administration. And I think the experts that Biden is bringing in also recognize that. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about rolling back some of President

Trump's environmental regulations. I was just going to jump in. Go ahead. I would even go one step further than what Rebecca is saying, because I've explicitly talked to former Obama-era officials in the EPA and across his administration who worked in climate posts who have told me that they regret their time in office, work. on climate just because they wish that they had done more, that they did not act with the urgency that they know that they should have. Very specifically, I even have this on the record in an

article I wrote in 2019 for the New Republic. Judith Anck, the EPA Region 2 administrator, said to me that she knows that they could have done more and that they should have done more and that they look back on the climate actions that they did and wish that they had done more. So I think that, again, that's just rhetoric, but that also doesn't necessarily mean that these are the same people with the same understanding as they were eight years ago. And that is probably just because of personal things, but also because the state of the climate is different than it was eight years ago. The situation has changed. has gotten eight years more urgent. And at a certain point, I think you actually do want some people with experience in administration in how to work in the government to be able to push some of

these more aggressive climate actions through. You need that. You can't have people who don't know who have never served in government before if you really want to get this stuff fast-tracked. So I have potentially a little more hope than the average person that some of these officials have changed their tones a bit. Emily, one last question to you. Right now, the administration is rushing to auction off drilling rights to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Could Trump continue to leave even more of a mess for Biden administration to clean up?

Absolutely. And first of all, it would be naive not to think he was going to just push through a bunch of stuff in this lame duck era. But second of all, it's been pretty explicit that that's exactly what he's going to do. There are, I think, over 20 outstanding actions at the EPA right now that are under review. And most analysts and observers have told me that they expect the EPA to speed up their long-term priorities that could, you know, it's not just opening the Arctic to drilling. There are some policies they're trying to push through that could really fundamentally change how future regulations are drafted. there's one plan to restrict the use of scientific research at the EPA that they plan to sort of push

through. There's one to impose sort of cost-benefit forecasting requirements for new error rules. There is just so much stuff that analysts and experts are bracing for in the coming weeks. And we'll just, we'll see how well it works. I think one thing, if you're worried about that, is that the Trump administration's bureaucracy so far has not actually been the, that great at their legal justifications for undoing a lot of these rules. Their legal justifications have been pretty flimsy, so it might be a little easier than we might think to get some of those reversed. That's about all the time we have for today. Great discussion. I'd like to thank both of you, Emily Atkin, author and founder of Heeded. That's a daily newsletter

about the climate crisis. She's based in Washington. Also based in Washington is Rebecca Lieber, climate and environment reporter for Mother Jones. Thank you. Both for joining us today. Thanks for having us. Thank you. We're going to take a break and when we come back, an iconic telescope

has been damaged and at risk of collapse why this threatens both the mission to understand Earth-threatening asteroids and a beloved cultural icon.

We'll be right back after this short break. Hey there, folks. It goes without saying this has been a challenging year, no? And if there's one thing we know for sure,

it's that the need for fact-based journalism and the need for science are stronger than ever. At a time when science is continually called into question, Science Friday remains committed to filtering out the noise and discussing the evidence, supporting the science that you need to make informed decisions.

You know that demand for Science Friday this year was higher than ever, but you may not know that your donations are what's keeping us running. And right now, Science Friday has a dollar-for-dollar donation match, which means that any donations will be doubled. So, if you have a few dollars to spare and agree that this world could use more science, please support Science Friday with a donation. Any amount makes a difference. Go to sciencefriiday.com slash give. That's science friday.com slash give. Thank you and stay safe. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you're a a fan of the movie Contact, you have in some sense visited the Arisibo Observatory. Near the city of

Arisibo, Puerto Rico, it sits in a giant sinkhole in the island's mountains. More than 50 years old, the telescope has been a tool for astronomers who've made historic discoveries there, and it's been invaluable in the hunt for Earth-killing asteroids. But now, the telescope is in danger of total collapse. Two key cables have broken, putting escalating strain on the structures that remain. And just yesterday, the National Science Foundation announced that the instrument would in fact be decommissioned, possibly even dismantled. Sci-fi producer Christy Taylor took a look at the telescope's scientific value, cultural importance, and what we know so far about the end of the line for Aresibo. The Aresibo Observatory was, until very recent,

the world's largest single aperture radio telescope. And at nearly 60 years old, Arasibo was still collecting radio data and radar at levels of detail that no other instrument can match. It's iconic, it's long-storied, its weathered time, hurricanes like Maria in 2017, and increasingly earthquakes. All of this possibly leading to its downfall. And after yesterday's NSF announcement, it is apparently done as a scientific observatory. Here to explain the decision to decommission is Nadia Drake, a contributing reporter for National Geographic who has been following the story about the telescope. I should also note that she has personal ties to Aracibo. Her father, astronomer Frank Drake, was the observatory's director years ago, and her partner currently conducts research using data from the telescope.

Nadia, first of all, how bad is the damage that's led to this really final seeming decision? So the situation at Erescebo is dire. It's dangerous. If you look at the telescope, you see that there's this enormous dish and there's a suspended platform above it. And that platform is held up by cables running to it from three different towers. And so what happened in August was that one of the auxiliary cables coming from what they call Tower 4 slipped out of its socket. It fell onto the dish and it damaged the dish. It took out some of the panels. And then on November 6th, a primary cable coming from that same tower snapped. And that left that particular tower in a really bad situation. So instead of having six cables, now there are four that connect that tower to the platform. And folks are really worried that if one more of those cable snaps, there's a really good chance that the platform is going to go crashing into the dish. and that would be the end of the telescope for sure.

And what's been happening is that engineering firms on site are looking at the telescope, they're evaluating it. And they're seeing that some of those cables that remain are showing signs of damage and degradation. And so nobody really wants to make any bets on how long it's going to be before another cable snaps. It seems kind of like an inevitability, which makes the whole situation extremely dangerous. What then does it mean that the National Science Foundation will be decommissioning this observatory? So NSF has decided to decommission the telescope at the Arcebo Observatory, which means that they're going to shut it down. It's not going to be operational anymore. The agency said it's just not safe to have people up there working on the telescope or trying to repair it.

And so the best thing to do now is to just shut it all down. We have information from three engineering firms that were on site to evaluate the current situation. And one of the firms said that there's basically absolutely no way to save the telescope safely. They were predicting that in the absence of any work whatsoever, it will fall down on its own in the near future and said that it was just an unsafe situation. So that firm is actually recommending what they're calling a controlled demolition of the instrument. So essentially, I guess, blowing it up in a controlled manner. I'm not actually sure what that means or what that would look like. A second firm had proposed some options for stabilizing the structure.

And one of those is essentially kind of tipping the towers inward a little bit, removing tension from the lines. the third firm said, yeah, there's really no way to do this safely. And so NSF, I think, looked at all of that information and decided that they were going to decommission it. Do you think that they made the right choice or not? Yeah. I think they made the conservative choice. I think they're certainly choosing to prioritize safety, which makes sense. we don't want anybody to die trying to save a telescope. That seems like a tricky calculus to make. I do, you know, wish, as a lot of people do,

that they had tried to stabilize the structure. You know, this telescope is so recognizable. Someone called it a monument to human curiosity. The role that it plays, not just in movies, but in people's lives is profound. And so I think that's why this is a surprise for a lot of people. But the fact is it's old. A lot of these cables have been there since it was built.

Replacing all of them is going to be really expensive. It's going to take a while. And as the structure continues to age and potentially degrade, there's just more and more things piling up that are going to be needing money for repairs. Right now, my thoughts are. really with the people of Puerto Rico, for whom this telescope is so symbolic. It's such an inspiration and a source of pride. And so I'm just really feeling the loss for the island. And, you know, I'm thinking about the observatory staff and how, what they're going to do next.

That's Nadia Drake, contributing writer for National Geographic. The day before the NSF announcement, I talked to Nadia and an astronomer, former observatory director. Dr. Mike Nolan about why this telescope's loss is such a big deal, both for science and for the people of Puerto Rico. And I started with asking Nadia about what the research world will lose. So in addition to being a radio telescope that actually collects radio waves from the cosmos, Eresibo also has the world's most powerful planetary radar. And basically what that means is that it can zap asteroids in the solar system. And by doing that, it can characterize those asteroids and tell us a little bit more about what types of object might be on Earth crossing orbits.

And so that's really important if you're considering how to deflect an asteroid that might be on an Earth crossing orbit in the future. You want to know how big that thing is. You want to know what its composition is. You want to know what its surface looks like and then come up with a mitigation strategy. And what Eresepo does is it allows us to do that kind of mitigation planning. And it also gives us a very, very, very precise orbit for asteroids. You know, we talk about planetary defense, it can feel maybe a little bit like science fiction sometimes.

But Mike, how seriously do scientists take this possibility of an asteroid threat? It's sort of an interesting natural disaster kind of question. It's in a sense that the odds are low. It has definitely happened before that an asteroid has done horrendous damage to the, well, the planet survives, but the creatures on it. And so the odds of something doing significant damage are small, but unlike like earthquakes or volcanoes, it's something we could specifically do something about. If we did say this asteroid has a, you know, 50% chance of hitting, we would have ways to deal with that problem and eliminate that risk. Right now, the two most likely objects to hit will hit in of order 100 years and have like a 1 in 1,000-ish probability of hitting.

And those are the asteroid Benu, which the Osiris Rex mission is just returning from, and that's what I'm working on now. And the other one is the asteroid apophosin. Both of those have, of order, one and a thousand chance of hitting. And by making these very precise measurements, we can say, oh, yes, it will, or yes, it won't, or no, it won't. And then we could do something about it. And so that's how it's different from other kinds of sort of more likely events, is that there's concrete ways we can address the problem and solve them. Yeah, speaking of other kinds of observing too, I talked to Dr. Ed Rivera-Valentine, who is a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and they worked at the observatory until very recently. They were going to use the telescope in September to examine the surface of Mars at its closest approach to Earth, which is this really rare opportunity that won't repeat until 2067.

So previous work with Adisibo and Mars was able to identify like these ancient volcanic provinces on Mars. and it was actually able to show like these flow features connecting them, connecting these different terrains, which we did not see with the spacecraft we had orbiting Mars. If Addis B.E.O. Remain and it's operational. In 2023, I can see Mars, that it's going to be, the level data I'm going to get is about, if you think about it in terms of signal strength, it's going to be a quarter of the signal I would have gotten this year. So that really weakens our ability to help out. Nadia, Mike, what other kinds of observing opportunities could we be losing out on if this observatory stays down?

So I study asteroids, and most of my work at ERAC, but was staying asteroids. And so you observe them when they come close to the Earth, right? When you're using radar, basically you're using your own flashlight to illuminate an object, and then you take a picture of it. But because the light has to travel both out and back, it has to be pretty close to you to do that. So every few months an asteroid will come by that could present a hazard that we can't measure, or actually could present an opportunity, for example, to plan a space mission too. The US-Ireservex mission used very heavily the radar observations that we did in 1999 in 2005 to plan that mission.

So a billion-dower space mission was planned using these Erescebo radar data, and that's the sort of thing you won't get. And we were expecting to do a couple of different objects over the next six. months that clearly are no longer in the carts. Yeah, one of the projects that comes to mind is actually the one that my partner works on, which is looking for gravitational waves that are produced by colliding supermassive black holes. And Erecebo is one of the two telescopes that they use primarily. And what they're doing is they're looking at pulsars.

And Erecebo is a fantastic instrument for pulsar observations. They're very dense neutron stars that spin very, very quickly, and they emit radio waves that essentially look like a lighthouse when they wash over Earth. They're periodic. You can time them. And if you have enough pulsars, you can look for deviations in timing that indicate that gravitational waves are passing through and stretching and contracting space time. They think they're getting actually pretty close to a detection. It'll just take longer for them to get there. Yeah. And back to Dr. Ribeira Valentin, who is, by the way, Puerto Rican, they also had a lot to say about the value the telescope has to the people of Puerto Rico. It's comparable

in its sheer iconicness and value to say how a New Yorker might feel about what would happen if the Statue of Liberty was broken or had disappeared? I'm pretty sure a New Yorker would be incredibly heard. They would take that personally because the Statue of Liberty is used nationwide as a symbol of New York City. So for us in Puerto Rico, the Adisville Observatory is the same thing. But from a cultural perspective, it goes beyond that because it is a symbol of our our ability to go beyond our limits.

It's the symbol of, look, we can do science too. We can be involved in this, right? It's that motivational symbol. In Spanish, we'd say it's the meta. It's that reach icon. People in PR, when you tell them you work in the observatory, they're like, what? They're super happy for you. Oh, you work at the observatory.

You must be amazing. Okay, let's help you out. Just a reminder that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm Christy Taylor. Dr. Rivera-Valentine also grew up in the city of Aracibo right by the telescope, and they credit the Observatory, which also offers the summer science programs to local youth, as the big inspiration for them entering the field of astronomy. You have to understand that when you come from a majority impoverished culture, when people come from that background and they think of progress and they think of science,

They think of the medical sciences because your day-to-day interaction with science is really that medical professional. So having the observatory there, as a person who is incredibly squeamish to blood and did not want to do anything with medical science, having the observatory there was that example of, no, there's other things in science that you can do. I got the opportunity to manage a program there for high school students. We'd work with them. They'd get to do research at the observatory with us. And I got to see that. They too were as inspired as I was a kid when I was a kid.

That whole inspiration of looking out at the dish and going, wow, like one day I could do this. I got to see that on them. And that, that itself is amazing. Nadia, when we talk about this telescope having a personal connection for you, what does it feel like to be reporting on its potential collapse? It's scary. When I first heard that the second cable had come down,

I started imagining what it would look like if that platform were to crash to the ground. It's 500 feet up. And so just the images in my mind are kind of terrifying. What is that going to look like if it comes down? I hope nobody's up there or around it because it's a very precarious. situation. It's the kind of reporting that, you know, nobody ever wants to do. Like, you never want to be reporting the bad news stories. And I just feel like Erecebo deserves a better end than this, if it comes to that. Mike, you were there for 20 years. How about you?

Yeah, it's just hard to really imagine because what we always did was when faced with a problem, which we've had been having, I mean, there's always problems or something like that, that we've always had funding problems. The solution has always been, buckle up and fix it, right? Just, just, we'll get through this. And this is the first time when I've been not quite sure that we're going to. And it's difficult to know what to do, right? As Nadia said, imagining it after it falls is just, I can do it intellectually,

but, yeah, I don't know where we would go. I'm back with Nadia Drake. And Nadia, we've talked about the NSF's decision to decommission the observatory. But what actually happens next? I know I saw a NASA administrator tweet, for example, that the visitor's center would remain open, that they might still run school programs. But what actually might happen? I don't know what kind of timeline they're looking at.

I would find it incredibly improbable that the telescope would remain upright for, for a while, just given how precarious the situation is now. One of the firms that was on site had also mentioned that in their estimation is just a matter of time before it comes down on its own. So if you're considering that, it's probably better to dismantle it as safely as possible so that places like the visitor center can remain intact and can be places for people to come visit. that definitely one of the ideas that they're considering is keeping the site and using it for educational purposes. It's tough for me to imagine how that would work without an actual telescope there. Nadia Drake is a contributing writer for National Geographic.

She's been covering the RASIvo Observatory this week. For Science Friday, I'm Christy Taylor. And to everyone in the science community mourning this announcement, especially Puerto Rican scientists, we are all very sorry for your loss. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. B.J. Leederman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Wishing you a safe and happy holiday. I'm Ira Flato.