Such a cool idea: a 1 km diameter exoplanet telescope lens built from self-assembling subunits could image other worlds with incredible detail.
With the recent SpaceX Starship orbital flight tests, it is time to commit to building the largest physically possible space telescope. Such a telescope would peer deeper into the universe than any before it, answering fundamental questions: are we alone? What do Earth-like exoplanets around other stars look like? How did we get here? What weird stuff awaits discovery? Where is the limit on human ambition to know what is in our universe? The Monster Scope answers these questions. Monster, because of its enormous scale, grotesque in its ambition. Monster, from the Latin root meaning a revealed thing. And monster, because through it we may be able to study not just the rocks and land masses but possibly lifeforms, both monstrous and marvelous, on distant planets.
When we look up into the night sky, we see thousands of stars. Most of them, visible to our weak and poorly-evolved eyes, are either exceptionally close or exceptionally bright. Along with the starlight that passes each moment through our corneas onto our retinas, its brother and sister photons splash uselessly onto the skin of our face, the ground around our feet, and the rest of the entire planet.
A telescope gathers this wasted light and corrals it into exquisitely sensitive instruments, extracting more of the ambient information that otherwise flows unseen and unstudied around us. The larger the telescope, the smaller and fainter the things it can see. Our pupils are but a few millimeters across, while the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), one thousand times larger, can see objects millions of times fainter. For telescopes, a simple rule applies: the bigger, the better!
