Anyone whose brain had been left intact by talks earlier in the week would have had it thoroughly scrambled by the numbers in Chris Hancock’s presentation on the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) of five thousand radio telescopes currently being planned. Some of the numbers were amazingly small: one potential site in North-West Australia is the size of the Netherlands and has a current population of 110. At the other extreme, the network to this location will eventually have to carry traffic over 6 Petabits per second!
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