If I understand it, this class of “telescope” is made up of arrays of telescopes spread as widely over the hemisphere as possible. We can only get data like this by collaborating with as many different sites as possible. It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.

As one of the scientists said in the interview, the next step is a telescope bigger than the earth. Hopefully we can collaborate on those too but if that involves a lot of satellites in a heliocentric orbit that may limit contributions considerably.

Constructing a telescope on Mars would be a valuable investment when a permanent presence is based there.

Mars is smaller than Earth, so planet-wide radio interferometry would be a smaller "aperture" than possible on Earth. If you're talking about extending the telescope to include both Earth and Mars, I imagine that doing the interferometry over changing speeds and distances would be challenging to say the least.

The speeds and distances of the planets are well known at this point and easily predicted. By the time of establishing a permanent presence on Mars the requirements of communications would already put in place the information needed if the DSN isn't already capable of it now. The compute needed would be greater, but so would the availability of it in the future too.

I hope one day we'll construct a telescope that uses the Sun for gravitational lensing. I've seen this paper once that claimed you could use it to image surface of exoplanets directly with pretty high (for our current astronomy standards) resolution. I think it talked about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft).

I know this comment will sound a bit unrelated to the main topic but reading this made this thought pop up in my mind and I thought it would make sense to share it. This comment is, however, related to the sub topic of the quoted sentence:

> It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.

This is the same constraint for the, let's call it, "peace on Earth" problem, or just "peace".

If only more of us could realize this is what it takes to solve that problem... which itself is part of the puzzle, i.e. how to increase awareness about the need to solve this.

While there are a number of people and organizations trying to do this, I see that there seems to be more possible fronts that could be used to tackle this and accelerating the reach for stability and sustainability of the state of peace.

One example of a possible front (and I honestly don't know if those already exist) is: through marketing it would be possible to influence people enough to be interested in the outcome of "peace on Earth" and pay some money for that, in a way that it doesn't feel like a donation, and more like an investment or maybe acquiring a service that would be hopefully realized in the coming years (hence the importance of the marketing capacity of that entity, as this mindset needs to be set in the consumers in order to make them buy the good).

Of course, the reporting to the consumers on the use of the invested money toward that effort has to be as transparent and honest as possible, as those approaches are arguably required for a sustainable state of peace. And hopefully it would make enough sense for an entity to operate in the way of the outcome it is seeking. Even though we are moving from a state of no-peace, which is hopefully unsustainable. In other words the effort could be be defined as "safely and confidently accelerating the maximum point of unsustainability of the no-peace state such that it inevitably transitions to a sustainable state of peace".

That's then possibly a private endeavor (not that it could not be a public one as well, but you need to raise enough money to pay for the possibly expensive marketing and then pay all of its employees), because there is now an identifiable market willing to pay some amount in exchange for obtaining the "product" of peace, which in other words just mean the modulation of humanity and its mindset in order for it to operate in such a way that it is always aligned to its own common good, or maximum known state of well-being, sustainably.

We already know that groups and individuals are not great at doing that, on average. So if an individual is not always able to operate towards its own good, or maybe some are but don't have access to the resources that would allow them to do so, how could then a group of individuals be able to do so? Unlikely.

And yes, exploring the universe and finding more about its mysteries and teaching humanity about them is a valid and great approach and a subset of all the possible approaches.

It is a subset because in order for an individual to be interested in knowing more about the mysteries of the universe, or consciousness and other topics, they have to have this mindset, well, set in the mind.

Therefore there are many more fronts that could be, and to many extents currently are, covered. So all I'm arguing here is we are not doing enough to reach the tipping point before possible big catastrophes happen, therefore we should do a lot more than what we're currently doing. There are many entity/company/organization models to explore that could benefit us in a spectrum of possibilities ranging from private to public.

So true, I was also recently thinking I should read more science/engineering news because that's actually positive stuff happening.