by Amy Stewart
Once constructed, the three telescopes will have synergistic strengths, says the E-ELT’s Roberto Gilmozzi. The E-ELT will specialize in zooming in to provide high-resolution images of small regions of the sky; the GMT will excel at wide-field astronomy. And the TMT will be located in a different hemisphere, observing a different sky.
Gilmozzi, like most other astronomers interviewed for this story, thinks that had there been two telescopes instead of three, both might be nearing completion by now, at a cost hundreds of millions of dollars less. “If you don’t consider the problem of finding the money, it’s wonderful to have more than one,” he says. “Scientifically speaking, I could use 100 telescopes if I could afford to build them.”
Unfortunately, building telescopes is just the first step. Neither the GMT nor the TMT currently has enough money to sustain operations once it is constructed. Both hope the federal government will eventually step in to assist, but Van Citters says it is not clear how much money the government will be able to contribute. The telescopes are each expected to cost tens of millions of dollars a year to operate. “That’s enough to give people nightmares,” McCray says.
Even so, the problem of too many telescopes has a silver lining: the world could one day have three giant eyes gazing at the cosmos. This would be a big win for science, McCray says. “If this situation is a tragedy, it’s a tragedy with a small t.”
Contributors’ Notes
Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of the prose chapbooks Ologies (2015) and #Lovesong (2016). Her essays and journalism have been published widely online and in print. She teaches, writes, and hikes in Phoenix, Arizona.
Bryan Christy, a lawyer and former CPA, is the founder of the Special Investigations Unit at National Geographic. He is the author of The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers. In 2014 he was named the National Geographic Society’s Explorer of the Year.
Helene Cooper is the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, where she shared a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her work covering the Ebola crisis in West Africa. From 2008 to 2012 she covered the White House, and prior to that she was the Times’s diplomatic correspondent. She joined the newspaper in 2004 as the assistant editorial page editor, a position she held for two years before she ran out of opinions and returned to news. She has reported from 64 countries, from Pakistan to the Congo. Born in Monrovia, Liberia, Cooper is the author of The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography in 2009.
Gretel Ehrlich is the author of 15 books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including The Solace of Open Spaces, Heart Mountain, This Cold Heaven, and Facing the Wave, longlisted for the National Book Award. Her books have won many awards, including the first Henry David Thoreau Prize for nature writing and the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Geographic Expeditions Council grants for travel in the Arctic, a Whiting Award, and National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Her poetry was featured on PBS NewsHour. She lives with her partner, Neal Conan, on a farm in the highlands of Hawaii and a ranch in Wyoming.
Rose Eveleth is a journalist who covers how humans tangle with science and technology. She’s the host and producer of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future, and has covered everything from fake tumbleweed farms to sexist prosthetics.
Amanda Gefter is an award-winning science writer specializing in fundamental physics and the philosopy of science, and the author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (2014). Her articles have been featured in Nautilus, Scientific American, Quanta, Nature, NOVA Next, BBC Earth, The Atlantic, Technology Review, and New Scientist. She was a 2012–2013 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Rose George is an author and journalist based in Yorkshire, England. She has written three books, on refugees, sanitation, and shipping, and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman, Scientific American, and many other publications. She is working on a book about blood. When she’s not doing that, she can usually be found running up and down hills.
Gabrielle Glaser is an award-winning journalist whose work on mental health and medical and social trends has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Health, and many other publications. She is the author of three books, most recently Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—and How They Can Regain Control, a New York Times bestseller. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Stanford University.
Antonia Juhasz is an energy analyst, author, and freelance investigative journalist specializing in oil. Her writing appears regularly in numerous publications, including Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Nation, Ms., The Advocate, CNN.com, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a contributing author to six books and the author of three: Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill (2011), The Tyranny of Oil (2008), and The Bush Agenda (2006). Her investigations have taken her a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and to the rainforests of the Ecuadorean Amazon, from the deserts of Afghanistan to the fracking fields of North Dakota, and to the tip of the Alaskan Arctic. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public policy from Georgetown and Brown Universities, respectively. She was a fellow of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alexandra Kleeman was raised in Colorado and has been published in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New Yorker, and the Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She is the author of the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015) and Intimations (2016), a short story collection. She lives in Staten Island and is the 2016 recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize.
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Sixth Extinction, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Her three-part series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Journalism Award and a National Academies Communication Award. Those articles became the basis for Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and has received a Heinz Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Kea Krause has written for The Believer, The Toast, Vice, Narratively, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught creative writing. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now resides in Queens, New York.
Robert Kunzig is the senior environment editor for National Geographic. His article on cities was the last in the magazine’s yearlong series on global population trends. A science journalist for more than 30 years, including 14 at Discover, Kunzig has written two books, Fixing Climate (with Wallace Broecker) and Mapping the Deep, about oceanography, which won the Aventis Prize for General Science Book, the Royal Society science book prize, in 2001. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, Karen Fitzpatrick.
Amy Leach’s work has been published in A Public Space, Tin House, Orion, The Los Angeles Review, and many other places. She has been recognized with a Whiting Award, selections in The Best American Essays, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She plays bluegrass, teaches English, and lives in Montana. Things That Are is her first book.
Apoorva Mandavilli is founding editor and editor in chief of Spectrum. She is also an adjunct professor in New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, and cocreator of Culture Dish, an organization that aims to enhance diversity in science writing. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, Nature, and Popular S
cience, among others.
Charles C. Mann’s most recent book, 1491, won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck Award for best book of the year. Mann is at work on a new project, a book about the future that makes no predictions.
Emma Marris is a writer based in Klamath Falls, Oregon, not far from the territory of the wolf called OR7. She writes about people, nature, food, culture, and science.
Sarah Maslin Nir has been a staff reporter for the New York Times since August 2011. She currently covers Brooklyn for the paper’s metro section. Prior to that, she covered Manhattan and Queens and worked as a rewrite reporter for late-night breaking news.
Maddie Oatman writes and edits stories about food, culture, and the environment for Mother Jones. She also cohosts the magazine’s food and agriculture podcast, Bite. Her work has appeared in Grist, the Huffington Post, Outside, and The Rumpus, and she was a 2013 Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism. A Colorado native now based in San Francisco, she makes time for backcountry skiing and exploring the outdoors with friends.
Stephen Ornes writes about mathematics, physics, space, and cancer research from his home in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and three children. “The Whole Universe Catalog,” which appears here, was a story three years in the making. His first book, published in 2008, was a young-adult biography of mathematician Sophie Germain, and he contributed to The Science Writers’ Handbook, published in 2013. In addition to Scientific American, his work has appeared in New Scientist, Discover, Science News for Students, Physics World, and Cancer Today. He teaches a class in science communication at Vanderbilt University.
Rinku Patel is writing a book about immune dysfunction and holistic medicine.
Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, was a physician and the author of many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations. His book Awakenings has inspired a number of dramatic adaptations, including a play by Harold Pinter, an Oscar-nominated film, and a documentary by Bill Morrison with music by Philip Glass. Dr. Sacks was a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a visiting professor at Warwick University in the United Kingdom.
Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Gaurav Raj Telhan is a physician and writer. He studied literature and medicine at the University of Virginia, where he was a Crispell Scholar. He was chief resident at NYPH/Columbia-Cornell University Medical Center and trained at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is a recipient of the Smith-Shanubi Scholarship at the New York State Writers Institute. Dr. Telhan practices interventional spine medicine in an academic medical center. He writes about the intersection of literature, philosophy, and medicine.
Katie Worth is a journalist who writes about science and politics and their myriad intersections. She has covered the reason why the seemingly settled science of DNA forensics may be anything but, the role of the Whats-App messaging platform in Brazil’s response to Zika, and the psychology of the fight over climate change. Her stories have been published in Scientific American, National Geographic News, Vice, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate. She is now a digital reporting fellow at Frontline, a PBS investigative-documentary outlet based at WGBH in Boston. Her reporting for “Telescope Wars” took place while she lived in Chile, home to many of the world’s largest telescopes.
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2015
SELECTED BY TIM FOLGER
JAKE ABRAHAMSON
To the Sea and Back. Sierra, January/February.
JOEL ACHENBACH
The Age of Disbelief. National Geographic, March.
CAROLINE ALEXANDER
The Invisible War on the Brain. National Geographic, February.
GUSTAVE AXELSON
Soul Mates. Living Bird, Autumn.
MICHAEL BALTER
Flight School. Audubon, January/February.
BELLE BOGGS
Baby Fever. Orion, November/December.
JAMES BOYCE
Rethinking Extinction. Harper’s Magazine, November.
MIKE BROWN
Why I Still Love Pluto. Popular Science, July.
JOHN COLAPINTO
Lighting the Brain. The New Yorker, May 18.
KRISTA CONGER
The Butterfly Effect. Stanford Medicine, Summer.
GARETH COOK
The Singular Mind of Terry Tao. The New York Times, July 24.
TIMOTHY FERRISS
First Glimpse. National Geographic, January.
CHARLES FISHMAN
5,200 Days in Space. The Atlantic, January/February.
DOUGLAS FOX
Life at Hell’s Gate. Scientific American, July.
IAN FRAZIER
Earle Power. Outside, November.
DAVID FREEDMAN
Birth of a Rocket. Scientific American, June.
BRIAN GREENE
Why He Matters. Scientific American, September.
ERIKA CHECK HAYDEN
Bloodline. Wired, June.
BERND HEINRICH
Chickadees in Winter. Natural History, March.
WALTER ISAACSON
How Einstein Reinvented Reality. Scientific American, September.
WES JACKSON
The Great Awakening. Catamaran Literary Reader, Spring.
ROWAN JACOBSEN
The Perfect Beast. Outside, January.
OLIVIA JUDSON
Luminous Life. National Geographic, March.
RUSS JUSKALIAN
Climate and the Khan. Discover, July/August.
PAUL KALANITHI
Before I Go. Stanford Medicine, Spring.
SAM KEAN
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Giving. The Atlantic, May.
PAUL KVINTA
Overroo’d!. Outside, December.
WINONA LADUKE
The Thunderbirds Versus the Black Snake. Earth Island Journal, Autumn.
MICHAEL LEMONICK
The Archaeology of Stars. Discover, December.
LINDA MARSA
The People’s Scientist. Discover, November.
MAC MCCLELLAND
Slip Sliding Away. Audubon, March/April.
TRISTAN MCCONNELL
The End for Elephants?. Earth Island Journal, Summer.
BILL MCKIBBEN
Power to the People. The New Yorker, June 29.
KENT MEYERS
The Quietest Place in the Universe. Harper’s Magazine, May.
STEVE MIRSKY
Great Feets. Scientific American, November.
VIRGINIA MORELL
Feeding Frenzy. National Geographic, July.
GEORGE MUSSER
Is the Cosmos Random?. Scientific American, September.
NICK NEELY
Discovering Anna. The Southern Review, Winter.
MICHELLE NIJHUIS
Harnessing the Mekong. National Geographic, May.
MICHAEL POLLAN
The Trip Treatment. The New Yorker, February 9.
COREY POWELL
Europa or Bust. Popular Science, September.
JOHN RICHARDSON
Ballad of the Sad Climatologists. Esquire, August.
MICHELLE ROBERTSON
Recovery Season. Orion, September/October.
OLIVER SACKS
A General Feeling of Disorder. The New York Review of Books, April 2.
CARL SAFINA
Big Love. Orion, May/June.
MICHAEL SCHULSON
In Evangelical Country, an Apocalypse of Rising Seas. Insideclimatenews.org, December 8.
JAMIE SHREEVE
Mystery Man. National Geographic, September.
HAMPTON SIDES
High Science. National Geographic, June.
TOM SIEGFRIED
The Amateur Who Helped Einstein See the Light. Science News, October 1.
LAUREN SLATER
Bloodlines. The Sun, March.
JASON SMITH
Guest of the Great White. Catamar
an Literary Reader, Summer.
GARY STIX
Lifting the Curse of Alzheimer’s. Scientific American, May.
ABE STREEP
Coal. Guns. Freedom. The California Sunday Magazine, October 13.
NANDHINI SUNDARESAN
Catch and Release. Harvard Review 46.
LEATH TONINO
In Pursuit of Bird Poop. Tricycle.com, July 28.
BIJAL TRIVEDI
Broken Cables. Discover, September.
ERICK VANCE
An Ocean Apart. VQR, Spring.
W. D. WETHERELL
Outage. Appalachia, Summer/Fall.
DEBRA WHITE PLUME
Of Water, Starlight, and Raspberries. Earth Island Journal, Autumn.
ELLIOTT WOODS
Wolflandia. Outside, February.
TIM ZIMMERMANN
The Piscivore’s Dilemma. Outside, June.
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About the Editors
AMY STEWART, guest editor, is the award-winning author of seven books, including her acclaimed Kopp Sisters novels and the bestsellers The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. She and her husband live in Eureka, California, where they own a bookstore called Eureka Books.