Every culture has its creation story. The Babylonians tell the story of how the god Marduk shot an arrow down the throat of his great grandmother Tiamat, splitting her body in two, one half becoming the heavens and the other half the earth. The Judeo-Christian story tells of how God spoke the world into existence in six days and rested on the seventh.
And the native Hawai’ians have their own story, told from one generation to the next, of Wakeia, the Sky Father, and Papahānaumoku (Papa, for short), the Earth Mother, whose union gave birth to the Hawaiian islands, with its highest summit Mauna Kea as its piko, or navel. The Hawaiian Islands and its summit Mauna Kea, in particular, are a kupuna, the ancestor of the Hawaiian people.
Yet, science tells an altogether different story — a 40-million-year-old story of lava seeping out of the Hawaiian “hot spot” along the ocean floor, cooling into land by the surrounding waters, and forming, as the pacific plate crept northwest above this spot, into the Hawaiian islands.
The first humans reached the shore of the Hawaiian Islands 1500 years ago, a mere speck on this 40-million-year-old timeline. They brought with them their stories, culture and a commitment to live in harmony with the land.
Yet today, the people of Hawaii are clashing over the question of whose land is it anyway, as construction on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), projected to become one of the largest telescopes in the world, was set to begin this past month. Instead, construction vehicles were met by protesters, striking an empathic chord in the ever-crescendoing refrain of disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples.
Just this past month we’ve seen protests by the Māori in New Zealand over the industrialization of sacred land , the Djab Wurrung in Australia and the indigenous people of Brazil.
In Hawaii, native Hawaiians clashed with scientists, non-natives, bystanders and each other over the issue of sacredness, spirituality, economy, science and malama, the Hawaiian word for preservation and protection of land.
Sacred vs Spiritual
Because of its role as the progenitor of the Hawaiian peoples, many native Hawaiians see Mauna Kea as sacred, and the thought of bringing any industry onto sacred ground is not only distasteful but demonstrates historically endemic disregard.
Some still ascend its peak to perform the sacred rituals of their ancestors. To them, the upper regions are known as wao akua, “place of the gods.” “Even with the conversion of many of our people to Christianity and to modern forms of government and social interaction, there's always been at least a small group of people who went to the mountain and considered to the place sacred,” said Dr. Jonathan Osorio, Dean of the University of Hawaii’s Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge.
Other Hawaiians see Mauna Kea as more spiritual than sacred. One of the participants of the Hui Ho’olohe, the “Listening Group” whose findings were published in Envision Mauna Kea report, recalls ascending the summit with his son. We “went to the summit, right before [the sun] cracked the horizon. Just then we heard a conch shell. Someone was doing a protocol and chanting the sun up that morning. There were a bunch of others there who also decided to see the sunrise that morning. That was the whole thing, standing there next to the observatories, listening to the conch. I get chicken skin even now.”
Why Now?
The Thirty Meter Telescope is not the first such project to break ground on Mauna Kea. Rather, over the course of 50 years, thirteen telescopes have preceded it, ever since Hawaii and its university foresaw the economic advantages of the astronomy economy.
Astronomers have gravitated to Mauna Kea because of its height — approximately 14000 feet above sea level — and its location. The Hawaiian Islands offer low light pollution, low humidity and clear skies.
Significant telescopes have been built in other locations, such as the Canary Islands and Chile, both front runners for the upcoming TMT, but Mauna Kea came out on top. The Canary Islands are not high enough, offering an elevation of only 8000 feet. And Chile is already slated for an even larger telescope. To see the entire sky, building a telescope on Hawaii in the northern hemisphere trumps building two adjacent telescopes in the southern hemisphere.
“There's zero question in anybody's mind that Mauna Kea is the best site for a telescope in the northern hemisphere, and maybe on earth actually,” says TMT board member and UC Santa Cruz astronomer Dr. Mike Bolte.
When we look up at the stars with the naked eye, we see only what our five-millimeter irises can take in. When we build telescopes with larger lenses, we can take in more light and see fainter things. The larger the lens, the more we can see.
Galileo’s two-inch telescope could see things ten times sharper than the naked eye. He could see, for example, that Venus went through phases just like our moon, a crucial piece of evidence that led him to reject an Earth-centric universe in favor of a heliocentric one.
A telescope with a 10-meter diameter, such as the Hubble space telescope, can see objects 200 times sharper than Galileo’s telescope. And the TMT, the Thirty Meter Telescope, with a lens three times the size of Hubble, will be able to see objects three times sharper. This will enable us to “pick out a planet orbiting its star, for example, and do direct imaging of exoplanets [planets outside our solar system]. You can see the details of a galaxy at the very beginning of time much, much better with a larger telescope,” explains Bolte. In other words, the TMT is being built to look out at the beginning of space-time, at the Big Bang itself.
The Beginning of Space-Time
When we look at something far away, we see the object as it looked when light left it. For example, the sun is eight light-minutes away, so we see the sun as it looked eight minutes ago. An object two billion light years away, looks as it did two billion years ago. And an object that is 13 billion light years away, looks as it did 13 billion years ago, minutes after the big bang. As such, the TMT will be able to look back in time to answer our questions as to how the Universe, how our solar system, and ultimately, how we came into existence.
“We decided that 30 meters [has] the sensitivity, the light-gathering ability, and the sharpness of images, to be able to look all the way through space-time back 13 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies that formed, and then track that evolution all the way to the present time,” explained Bolte.
Seeking Common Ground
Yet, the project has been mired in controversy ever since its inception. To some native Hawaiians, the building of any telescope atop the sacred summit of Mauna Kea is anathema. In addition, many yearn for a return to sovereignty over the land, to malama, its care and stewardship.
Further, the Thirty Meter Telescope is being built on the backs of a history of native disenfranchisement, that is not against scientific advancement per se, but against any industrial complex that replaces natural resources with man-made run off and waste. “It's that they're building large buildings, and they either feel on one hand anger for people's sense of sacredness. On the other hand, it really illustrates the lack of control over building and construction in Hawaii, and environmentally it has created serious harm on the mountain,” says Osorio.
The TMT project has tried to meet its critics half-way. As a result of ten years of community conversations, it has made significant compromises. The TMT will be the last area on Mauna Kea on which any telescope will ever be built, 25% of the current telescopes will be decommissioned and 40 square kilometers of the 45 the university has leased will be returned to state protection. In addition, the telescope will be built on the side of Mauna Kea, indiscernible from its summit, and will create STEM jobs for Hawaiians and provide STEM curriculum for school children. Yet, to some, these are small drops in a bucket that has been drained of trust years before.
Not all natives feel this way, however. A poll conducted by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser asked 800 randomly selected registered voters across the state if they support or oppose the construction of the TMT telescope on Mauna Kea. They found that 77% of all respondents, and 72% of natives, supported its construction. To some natives such as Chad Kālepa Baybayan, the Navigator in Residence at the Imiloa Astronomy Center, the TMT is the natural next step forward in a long-standing symbiosis between the Hawaiian islands and astronomy that began when the first inhabitants used the night sky to reach its shores.
Construction on the TMT has been stalled by protests as early as 2014, and since last month’s protests, Hawaiian Governor David Ige has allowed an additional two-year extension to its start date. Whether both sides of the issue can use this two-year extension to reach common ground is doubtful, as each side digs its heels deeper into issues that go far beyond any one project.
A Modern-Day Tower of Babel
Every culture has its stories, some sacred, some profane. One such story in the Judeo-Christian canon tells of how the people of Babel built a massive tower, the Tower of Babel, “with its top in the heavens” to get closer to God.
God, angered by their presumptuousness, confounds the people with different languages and scatters them over the face of the earth.
To some, Mauna Kea is sacred. In the Hawaiian creation story, it is literally the umbilical cord between heaven and earth.
To others, the creation story can only be seen through the lens of a telescope aimed 13 billion light years ago.
To each, there seems to be something otherworldly atop Mauna Kea, where the heavens and earth touch.
“In that moment, when you look at the clearest sky in the world, is when you can feel …how vast the universe is... All of time and space, all of the galaxies, worlds, stars, elements, came together and somehow created consciousness so that I (with the universe in my atoms) could look back at the universe and see that we all came from the same Big Bang,” a university student recollected about his visit to Mauna Kea.
Each side, fervent in its truth, looks to Mauna Kea to connect to that liminal moment — to connect to their origins, to something greater than themselves.
First though, they must connect with each other, listen to each other’s stories and acknowledge their truths. Even if the outcome is not agreeable to every stakeholder — how can it be? — the process can be.
Until then, the language of each side is confounded. Perhaps that’s the consequence of attempting to build a “top in the heavens.”
