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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.
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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[+] The Case for Lunar Property Rights 387 comments
longacre writes "Who owns the moon? In a thought provoking piece, Instapundit blogger/law professor Glenn Reynolds gives us a brief history of earthlings' discourse on lunar property rights, a topic which has stagnated since the 1979 Moon Treaty. Is it possible to claim good title on land that is not under the dominion of a nation? He goes on to plead his case for the creation of lunar real estate legislation. From the article: 'Property rights attract private capital and, with government space programs stagnating, a lunar land rush may be just what we need to get things going again.'"
[+] New Method Discovered For Making Telescopes On the Moon 135 comments
NASA scientists have discovered a way to craft very large mirrors using carbon nanotubes, some epoxy, a little bit of aluminum, and large quantities of lunar dust. They say the technique will allow the construction of massive telescopes on the moon without the expense and risk of transporting the mirrors from Earth. Douglas Rabin of the Goddard Space Flight Center is quoted saying, "Our method could be scaled-up on the moon, using the ubiquitous lunar dust, to create giant telescope mirrors up to 50 meters in diameter." While this breakthrough was relatively cheap, NASA is currently offering up to $10 million for other good lunar research projects.
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  • Obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:00PM (#23703209)
    Strip-mine it
  • The Obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:00PM (#23703211)
    Kill each other for the land
  • by BorgCopyeditor (590345) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:03PM (#23703229)
    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."
    • by cartman (18204) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:11PM (#23703309)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuantumG (50515) * <qg@biodome.org> on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:05PM (#23703251) Homepage Journal
    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
  • It looked better in the brochure.
  • by phantomcircuit (938963) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:06PM (#23703259) Homepage
    What else? [slashdot.org]
    • by Zobeid (314469) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:18PM (#23703375)
      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.
    • by moderatorrater (1095745) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:32PM (#23703487)
      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.
        • by WankersRevenge (452399) on Sunday June 08 2008, @09:55PM (#23704037) Homepage
          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.
  • by szyzyg (7313) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:11PM (#23703307)
    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.

  • 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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Ender (156273) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:23PM (#23703423) Homepage
    The first pioneers will be whalers, but eventually it will be a theme park with hookers and blackjack.
  • Rape it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AmiMoJo (196126) <mojo@wor[ ].net ['ld3' in gap]> on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:32PM (#23703503) Homepage
    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. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jpellino (202698) on Sunday June 08 2008, @09:40PM (#23703915)
    2. Inspect the stuff we left there 40 years ago so we know what specs to build to for the next 40 years.

    • by icebike (68054) on Sunday June 08 2008, @07:17PM (#23703365)
      > 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.