What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get There?

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 .

Obvious

Strip-mine it

Don't worry Grommit...

We've got crackers!!!

They mostly come at night...mostly

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

The Obvious

Kill each other for the land

Re:The Obvious

Install a giant frickin' laser on it.

Re:The Obvious

It is the high ground.

Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why.

America can, should, must, and will blow up the moon. The time is now. Children are our future.

"You know you can't mess ... with American pride."

Re:Hey, Mr. Monkey, don't be asking why.

There are unconfirmed reports of Al Qaeda on the moon. Furthermore, we have it from very reliable sources that Saddam has been working to establish lunar colonies in order to mine the tritium there for use in hydrogen bombs. We must not wait until there is a mushroom cloud over Earth.

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.

TFA is vacuous

Call me critical but I think if you don't actually have anything new to say on a topic then you shouldn't write about it. And people shouldn't post the link to Slashdot.. did you even read it first?

YAWN

Re:TFA is vacuous

+1 For using "vacuous" in a sentence +1 For ending your post in "YAWN" without being a troll.

We came, we saw, we left.

It looked better in the brochure.

On second thought ...

Let's not go to the moon. It is a silly place.

Build a Huge Telescope

What else? [slashdot.org]

Also radio telescopes!

The far side of the moon could be the perfect place to build an array of radio telescopes. With the whole mass of the moon between the telescopes and the Earth, it would be well shielded from all the RF interference that our modern civilization sprays in all directions.

Re:Also radio telescopes!

The moon does rotate, but it does so at such a speed, that the same side always faces the earth.

Re:Build a Huge Telescope

There are a lot of uses for a low gravity, low temperature* (half the time, anyway), high sunlight satellite. Power generation would be easy if we could solve the transportation issue. Retirement village for those who are extremely wealthy, taking a lot of pressure off of their joints. Tourism, of course. Data processing centers for those applications where scientists wait months before being able to use the computing power anyway. Eventually, assuming that colonization ended up being practical, it could be used as a refueling station/rest stop for space craft, giving them a place to land which doesn't require as much power to take off from.

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.

Re:Build a Huge Telescope

i just watched the documentary "For all Mankind" which was a brief history in video of the Apollo program. At one point during a moonwalk, a mission control dude remarked that the temperature of the light on the moon's surface was around 135 degrees fahrenheit, whereas the shade of the lunar module was -150 degrees. Seems like an easy way to solve the heat problem. Just errect a simple shade, and viola, heat be gone. Kind of blew me away, though, that two extreme temperatures exist side by side.

Build Orbtiting Solar Power Stations

The raw materials are mostly there (silica, aluminium) and the energy requirements to get smething to geostationary orbit around the earth are about 3% of a launch from earth. Sure, there's not enough volatiles to launch economicly using conventional rockets, but not having an atmosphere means most of your launch velocity can come from a linear acelerator.

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.

OK, if a He3 reactor comes online - fine, let's mine the moon. But we sure as hell can't live there, it has 1/6th the gravity of earth. Human beings are not adapted to 1/6G, we are adapted to 1G. If there is material on the moon worth mining, then people won't do it - machines will. We can make machines that would work in 1/6G far easier than we could adapt ourselves to live in 1/6G.

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

The first pioneers will be whalers, but eventually it will be a theme park with hookers and blackjack.

Re:obvious

Forget the theme park.

Rape it

This is a serious suggestion, not a troll. There is no life on the moon, nothing much worth preserving (aside from the odd monolith) so it would hardly be much of a "loss". Might as well extract as much benefit as we can from it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the rainforests, but the moon is essentially a rock.

1. No Starbucks.

2. Inspect the stuff we left there 40 years ago so we know what specs to build to for the next 40 years.

Re:It's made of cheese.

Carve it up and eat it.

Come on you can do a better job than that:

1. Mine the cheese
2. ...
3. Profit!

Re:going to the moon

> there is absolutely no other valid purpose besides that, for the short term

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.