Save Our SALT

I have to post this long lecture-thing here. Have to, because I haven’t heard anything more about this issue lately and I fear somebody may be Sweeping It Under The Carpet. Maybe not enough people know about it, and so it’s probably my duty to post it up. Even if only 2 more people in the world hear about it. If Phil Plait gets to hear about it, then I’ll count him as a hundred people because he’s the only real Astronomer I know (and I don’t even know him and he doesn’t know me either), and maybe he can talk to Other Astronomers and maybe they can, I don’t know, do a petition or something. Something. Anything.

Sutherland, Karoo, South Africa. Desolate, and in the middle of nowhere, but famous in certain circles, because of SALT. The Southern African Large Telescope was built in Sutherland for specific reasons: no light pollution, minimal radio pollution. Crisp, clean air and all the stars you could ever hope to see in a southern night sky. It has a very important job, and it should be one of our most treasured possessions, but most (80%?) South Africans don’t even know it exists and if they did, they wouldn’t care much, or realise how important it is. (“Oh, look, it’s a telescope, that’s nice. Where’s the mall?”)

So “they” are now looking to do a golf course development in Sutherland. The reasons for "them" actually even thinking about wanting to do this in the first place are unfathomable to me... someone must have been pissed or stoned after work one evening and said, "hey bru let’s do a golf dev at Sutherland it’ll be fun." And so, a Proposed Golf Estate Development, a blazing thing sprawled out for kilometres, with state of the art irrigation plumbed straight into the water table and a dedicated power-plant (how else would they DO this? Call in David Copperfield? Factoid: Golf courses can use around two million litres of water a day. The Karoo is desert, and water-challenged as it is) festooning the night with bright garlands of light. Dubai-innie-Karoo, with all that goes together with that. No doubt they will go on about “upliftment of the community”, “job-creation”, etc etc but those are such empty, easy words to pull out of a hat when the schpiel comes to town. Please. This is all about Gary Player’s god-complex and the money to be made around it.

Observatory is a Johannesburg suburb, so called because that’s where the observatory was, way back when. Technically, the observatory is still there, although there isn’t any telescope anymore. How can there be? On an average night in Jo’burg you’re hard pressed to find the moon behind the light and smog, nevermind attempt a glimpse of the cosmos beyond. Now it’s a dome-shaped party venue. EXACTLY! That’s the point! It’s in Jo’burg. But we’re talking about Sutherland here, and we're talking about SALT, and the mere fact that the proposal is even under consideration by council is very, very scary. (Maybe they don't understand - maybe they think astronomers are the people who write the daily horoscopes in the paper and maybe they quite rightly suppose that you don't need a telescope to do that.)

Am I just being miserable here? Killjoy? Is SALT that important? Should we lay down in front of the bulldozers? Is that over-reacting? Should we hire an assassin? Would that be more effective?

There's hardly any noise being made about this. Two articles in the Cape Times and that's that. The astronomers at SALT didn't even KNOW about it. I think they weren't supposed to - "Project scientist at Salt, David Buckley... spotted the golf course proposal almost by accident on the Platinum Planet website..."
I don’t think this should just be allowed to go by without some sort of uproar.

Phil?