Thousands of the world’s leading astronomers are in Hawaii for their triennial International Astronomical Union conference, a perfect kismet-like opportunity to learn firsthand why their noble and important profession has been tarnished during the protracted controversy over California’s Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) — yet another example of astronomers pitted against native people over a mountaintop.

If they’re wise, they’ll take advantage of the opportunity and meet with the Mauna Kea “protectors.”

As an early astronomy guide for the Mauna Kea observatories, I’ve long admired the analytical prowess of the astronomers on the mountain whose trailblazing research has led to so many important discoveries.

But I’ve also grown dismayed by their apparent inability to grasp why so many islanders, now in the thousands and of all ethnicities, want no more telescopes on the summit.

Nor do they seem to recognize that, at its heart, this decades-long conflict has always been about land use — about development on a sacred and environ-mentally sensitive mountain — and has little to do with science itself.

Ample evidence docu-menting these concerns — testimony at hearings, reports in the media, records from multiple court cases — date all the way back to the 1970s, and yet astronomers speak as if the recent outcry over TMT astonishes them.

Perhaps it does, but not because the evidence isn’t out there.

It’s because they’ve willfully ignored it.

“People have the need not to know,” my graduate school adviser (a physicist) had warned us in class, an irrational state of mind that shields people from inconvenient truths.

I’ve often heard astronomers say, “If the local community just understood what we do, and how important it is, they wouldn’t be against us.”

Indeed, astronomers often act as if they’re innocent victims in a battle “between science and religion,” an emotional construct employed to avoid seeing themselves as the latest in a long line of outsiders who’ve exploited Hawaii’s resources — including plantation owners, generals and hoteliers.

Yes, Mauna Kea is the last clear-sky mountaintop in the northern hemisphere where cutting-edge astronomy can be done (the others spoiled by light and air pollution), and the Californians’ TMT, like their twin Kecks, is a powerful tool that will illuminate the nature of the universe and perhaps identify other worlds where life exists.

Previous exploiters of Hawaii made similar claims of precedence — the best place to grow sugarcane, the finest harbor for staging military vessels, the most beautiful place on Earth for resorts.

Overriding local interests and concerns in those cases resulted in newcom-ers taking over lands that once belonged to Hawaiians, disenfranchising local people with new power arrangements controlled by outsiders and replacing island values with those belonging to the colonizers.

Later this month, the state’s Supreme Court will hear the Hawaiians’ appeal of the TMT’s permit, a challenge to the unseemly, politicized process through which the permit was obtained.

Meanwhile tensions rise, arrests increase, and the governor’s threat to call in the National Guard to break the protest movement looms — all in the name of astronomy and TMT.

It’s time for the world’s astronomers to burst their self-imposed bubble of delusion, dispassionately study the public record, and in so doing restore their own noble reputation.

Perhaps, after doing that homework, they’ll even ask their California colleagues to seriously consider the compromise TMT opponents have long requested — to take their important telescope to Chile.

Tom Peek, a former Mauna Kea observatory guide who lives within eyeshot of Mauna Kea, is the author of the award-winning Hawaii novel, “Daughters of Fire.”