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Related: About this forumAtop a sacred mountain, a skirmish between pure science and religion
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/05/30/could-science-and-religion-two-sides-same-coin/qQr3rrM5RpkvArCbdg5lTJ/story.html#By Thomas Levenson MAY 31, 2015
DAN ZEDEK/GLOBE STAFF
By Thomas Levenson MAY 31, 2015
AT 13,796 FEET, Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii is the tallest point in the Pacific Ocean. Its a confounding place. Like the Grand Canyon, it takes a surprising amount of time simply to believe your eyes. The summit and the valley immediately below the top are barren stretches of red-black rock. Its hard not to think of Mars.
But then at least for me, on my first visit in 1991 the view opens up. Look north across the strait between the Big Island and Maui and theres Haleakala, the next giant volcano in the chain. To the south, Mauna Keas twin, Mauna Loa, bulks across half the sky. West, past the golf courses and beach hotels of the Kohala coast, theres nothing but the broad Pacific on a clear day, a sheet of utterly, impossibly cobalt blue stretching to the edge of the earth.
No mere photograph prepares you for first sight on Mauna Kea. For me, the experience was shot through with two truths: how almost impossibly small each of us is within the natural world and how utterly interconnected that world is, to itself and to each infinitesimal self peering though it.
Look at the peak rather than from it, though, and the scene shifts. Mauna Kea possesses a unique combination of attributes: usually clear skies, high altitude, stable air, almost no light pollution. The first astronomical observatory appeared on the mountaintop in 1970, a gleaming white dome visible for miles. In the 45 years since, the near-perfect observing conditions have brought a flock of telescopes to land on and just below the summit ridge, 13 in all, including the two largest optical instruments now in use.
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Atop a sacred mountain, a skirmish between pure science and religion (Original Post)
cbayer
May 2015
OP
?
skepticscott
(13,029 posts)4. There is no "and"
Just "more at link" and if the thread doesn't go the way she wants it, she abandons it and tries to peddle her agenda some other way.
skepticscott
(13,029 posts)2. Despite a lot of flowery words by the author
he fails to show how this is anything but another instance of people demanding that they be deferred to because their religious sensibilities have been offended. Well, so fucking what? So they're offended. Why does that entitle them to any kind of deference or accommodation? The telescopes have been up there for 40+ years, so it's not as if they are suddenly preventing them from exercising their religion.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)3. That picture is obviously fake.
edhopper
(33,615 posts)5. I think we should let
Pele decide.
If she doesn't do anything to prevent it, that means she is okay with it.