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What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get There?
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jun 08, 2008 06:58 PM
from the good-place-for-wedding-chapels dept.
from the good-place-for-wedding-chapels dept.
MarkWhittington writes "For the first time in over thirty five years, the Moon has become the next frontier. The United States has committed to returning human astronauts to the Moon by the end of the next decade. China has hinted that it intends to do this also. A variety of countries, including the United States and China, but also India, Europe, and Japan, have either sent robotic probes into lunar orbit or are on the verge of doing so." Contribute your favorite moon ideas below; I'd like to see it used as the set to film The Moon is a Harsh Mistress .
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Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry Grommit... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
They mostly come at night...mostly (Score:5, Funny)
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The Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why. (Score:5, Funny)
"You know you can't mess
Re:Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why. (Score:5, Funny)
We shall blow up the moon ourselves, if necessary. Nobody can deny us our right of self-defense against the moon. If the French happen to think the idea of blowing up the moon is silly, then we'll rename food products just to spite them ("terrestrial fries"). Anyway, the French don't have the right to oppose our ideas because they're only French and they don't even run the planet anymore, much less the solar system.
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TFA is vacuous (Score:5, Insightful)
YAWN
Re:TFA is vacuous (Score:5, Funny)
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We came, we saw, we left. (Score:5, Insightful)
On second thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Build a Huge Telescope (Score:5, Insightful)
Also radio telescopes! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Also radio telescopes! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Build a Huge Telescope (Score:5, Interesting)
Most importantly, I'm reminded of Amara's law: we're going to overestimate its usefulness in the short term, and underestimate it for the long term.
*The lack of an atmosphere will make it so that heat doesn't dissipate in that direction very quickly, but I'm thinking that the dark side of the moon itself would be a kickass heat sink.
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Re:Build a Huge Telescope (Score:5, Interesting)
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Build Orbtiting Solar Power Stations (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, this kind of thing would need serious investment, but you could use such a network to reder most earth based power generation obsolete, and you'd get a nice global death ray system thrown in for free.
Ignore it. There's nothing there we care about. (Score:5, Interesting)
The moon is a canard. As is living on Mars.
I predict that within 500 years humanity will have spread throughout the solar system. But we won't live on a single planet or planetoid. Nor will we "teraform" any planets or moons in our solar system. We will instead *build* our habitats and live within them in orbit around various planets and moons which have materials we happen to need.
I could imagine a large rotating space station in orbit around Titan, dropping a nanotube straw to the methane atmosphere and/or oceans for energy. Or we might live in orbit around Earth, Venus, or Mercury in order to extract abundant sunlight for energy conversion.
Once we get off of Earth's gravity well, why in God's name would we build another society within another gravity well? Space is where we should live. And in space, we should build habitats suitable to our evolutionary history. And once we can do that, the notion that we waste our time looking for "habitable planets" becomes a canard. Our only interest is to look for stars and planets with enough energy to support our biological needs.
obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obvious (Score:5, Funny)
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Rape it (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the rainforests, but the moon is essentially a rock.
1. No Starbucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's made of cheese. (Score:5, Funny)
Come on you can do a better job than that:
1. Mine the cheese
2.
3. Profit!
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Re:going to the moon (Score:5, Insightful)
For some values of "short".
Reminds me of Seward's folly. Buy Alaska? What a total waste of money. Can't possibly justify such a waste while there is still one "Poor person" left anywhere in the world.
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