The Decidedly Short Blog Post

I just saw this on Wikipedia:

Because of the complexity and cost of building a telescope of this unprecedented size, ESO has elected to focus on the less ambitious 42 meter diameter European Extremely Large Telescope instead.

This was on the entry for the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

Three things occur to me about this naming system.

  1. The South African Large Telescope is 10m across. The Large Hadron Collider is 5 miles across. What size will the Overwhelmingly Large Hadron Collider be?
  2. At some point, scientists will run out of easily ranked adverbs. This could halt all scientific process.
  3. At that point I hope that someone like Brian Cox, recently quoted as saying "anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat", is on hand to introduce profanity. Science could be saved by names like "The Seriously Fucking Huge Telescope".