the lack of interest in funding Arecibo at a level to even do maintenance to prevent this from happening suggests we won't bother within that millennium you are allowing.
Would normal maintenance have prevented this? My understanding from the initial reports is that they were unable to identify any flaw or anomaly in the steel cable that snapped that would have indicated the problem ahead of time, and that it simply wasn't designed to tolerate a failure of that nature. Sounds like a freak accident to me.
