Native Hawaiians have legit land use grievances but those have nothing to do with the Thirty Meter Telescope planned and approved twice over ten years to be built atop Mauna Kea.  Astronomers globally need to stand up for this observatory or humanity will lose big.

Z, a quantity known as the partition function in statistical thermodynamics and the generating functional in quantum field theory tell us that we are exactly right about black hole thermodynamics.  Dr Craig Callender, Professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego, is all wrong about black holes.    Any theory which unifies Quantum Field Theory (QFT) with General Relativity (GR), by any means, will allow us to write such a generating functional.  When the low energy limits are taken for a large number of particles, we recover statistical thermodynamics.

A critical examination of the three main claims made by anti TMT protestors.  Here are brief rebuttals to their sacredness and sovereignty claims and lastly a scientific reason why building anywhere else on Earth is no substitute. There is no basis in law or ethics for this opposition.  It is instead more a fashionable cause, and a bandwagon to jump on.   “Kapu TMT” is their banner.

No, the Amazon does not produce 20% of the Earths oxygen.  The real value is more like 5% to 6%.  This is NOT to minimize how bad it is to have out of control wildfires.  This is to keep unscientific non-facts from being perpetuated.  I was made to write this due to a statement seen on CNN. 

First let me explain from pure physics why it is impossible for an area like the amazon to be responsible for 20% of the Earths Oxygen production.   Oxygen is released for Carbon dioxide by photosynthesis in plants, all plants, from majestic trees to slimy algae living in the ocean.    In a very abbreviated way this is what happens.

As a person of native American descent and quite a bit of native culture I know a thing or two about that world view.  Granted my family is well assimilated and mixed in as many who are descendants of some of the first Native Americans to make contact with the white man.  This gives me a fine-tuned sense of when someone is using nativness for nonsense. This is not to say that Native Hawaiians, Native Americans, or other indigenous people never have a point. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protest was one where they did, and where real practical environmental damage is a legitimate concern.   UPDATE (Science Facing Ignorance.) 

At best we can speculate about GJ 357d. The case of GJ 357d we have a scientific paper which is about a planet that is in the habitable zone of its star, is at least six point one times the mass of the Earth, based on what we see, and we do not even know its radius (Luque, et al. 2019).  Yet the news media writes and reports on it as if we knew for certain it is Earth like.   (A brief word on Jessica Yaniv follows.)