When the Arceibo telescope Is Demolished, It Will Take an Era of Space Exploration With It

When news broke that Puerto Rico’s famed Arceibo radio telescope was going to be demolished, it sent the scientific community into the kind of mourning typically reserved for its most beloved human heroes and pioneers. For many, Arecibo wad more than the world’s second largest radio telescope and a key instrument in our efforts to probe the cosmos and canvas the universe for extraterrestrial life-it was an iconic monument to the last 50 years of astronomy, to science, even human achievement. Now, it is a death knell.