The Hawaiian island of Mauna Kea is currently home to 13 large telescopes, and an organization recently announced plans to build a Thirty Meter Telescope on the island over the next eight to ten years. While the TMT will likely create around 140 jobs for the natives of Mauna Kea, the quiet island’s residents have been launching a cyber attack against the telescope’s creation, claiming that it is being promoted with dirty money and that it will damage their ecosystems and culture.

Hawaii’s distance from light and air pollution has made it an optimal location for telescopes in recent years. A number of telescopes have already been created and met with little resistance from residents, but a group known as Operation Green Rights has been cyber protesting the creation of the Thirty Meter Telescope ever since it was first announced. The group posted their protests on the TMT’s official website so many times that the site crashed for two hours.

Large telescopes such as the TMT are likely to employ around 140 people, but Operation Green Rights believes that isn’t enough of a reason to risk destroying native peoples’ rights or ruining the cultural significance of Mauna Kea island. While the TMT organization has countered that remark by pointing out that the telescope will be placed far away from anything of cultural significance and won’t be near anything that is endangered, the people of Mauna Kea have continued creating poems, dances and visuals pertaining to their protest.

Hawaii Gov. David Ige recently arranged a halt in construction of the TMT to further discuss the issue, but decided last Friday that any further delays would be up to the TMT Obervatory Corp., since they have the legal right to build the $1.4 billion project. However, the nonprofit has not yet revealed when construction will resume.

“There are conversations happening among various stakeholders so we’re playing it by ear to see those conversations play out and what happens,” TMT spokeswoman Sandra Dawson told PBN.