Silicon Valley Heavyweights Fire Up Plan For an Open Lunar Settlement (bloomberg.com) 197
pacopico writes: Aerospace technology has gotten better. The price of rocket launches has come down. So much so that a group of space friends in Silicon Valley now think it's possible to create their own settlement on the moon for less than $3 billion. They've formed a non-profit called the Open Lunar Foundation that looks to begin launching probes to the lunar surface and then to start work on a habitat. The idea is to build a settlement in the spirit of open-source technology where data and hardware designs can be shared and where policies around the settlement are shaped by people all over the world rather than a particular nation state or billionaire. So far the team is small and working off a few million dollars, but there's an all-star cast of advisors, including former astronauts, NASA heads and aerospace execs.
"While this could all sound farfetched..." (Score:4, Informative)
More like super far fetched. I don't expect this in my lifetime.
How much long term research have they done into living in a 15% earth gravity for long periods of time?
Answer: None
They've done plenty of research into zero g and there are some significant health issues...
https://www.space.com/23017-we... [space.com]
No one is going to be living on the moon for long periods of time any time soon.
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You have your bed in a centrifuge ... easy.
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I'd expect pregnancy to be particular dangerous for the fetus. And child-proofing a lunar base sounds like quite an adventure. It could be much like growing up in prison, for such an infant, or perhaps like the Inouit who live in a very harsh environment that can kill an infant in moments, at least during the winter. As I understand it, the Inouit don't _like_ living in a polar environment, they just know how to survive there.
Re:"While this could all sound farfetched..." (Score:5, Insightful)
More like super far fetched. I don't expect this in my lifetime.
Why would anyone plant an orchard if they will not live to see it mature? If you think about that for even a second you will realize that many people take on "farfetched" endeavors because they realize that they enjoyed the life they have because people before them took on similarly farfetched endeavors. The only way to pay back for these efforts in the slightest is to leave something for the next generation so that they can also gain. Everyone needs to find a purpose or they will live a miserable life.
How much long term research have they done into living in a 15% earth gravity for long periods of time?
Answer: None
You are absolutely right, we have very little idea on how well people could survive on the moon. This could quite possibly be a failure of epic proportions. Consider this a science experiment, where even a failure is something we can learn from. It's quite possible that the people funding this realize that they may not live long enough to go to the moon themselves. They do it anyway because they want to plant the seeds for future generations to enjoy the fruit.
We won't know the health effects of long term exposure to a low gravity environment until we try. What we do know from prior experience that this is certainly survivable in the short term, so this isn't a death sentence on going, and if there is a problem then it's a relatively short trip back to Earth.
No one is going to be living on the moon for long periods of time any time soon.
No one is ever going to be living on the moon if everyone believes this to be too farfetched to bother. Nearly everything we have today is the result of some "farfetched" scheme. Doing farfetched schemes is just what we do.
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Why would anyone plant an orchard if they will not live to see it mature?
There are several species of tree that only produce good yields of nuts after a hundred years of growth.
Starting up such an operation is still done.
Even when such a farm isnt producing, its value is still maturing. The startup can sell said nut farm, for a profit, even after only a few years.
These facts prove that you dont understand economics. You couldnt even fathom the very very very basics of asset valuation.
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These facts prove that you dont understand economics. You couldnt even fathom the very very very basics of asset valuation.
I understand the economics just fine of asset valuation. Maybe you should click this link on why I asked that question -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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If you're worried about gravity, you could simulate higher gravity to a certain extent, with specialized, weighted suits, boots, gloves and hats. That should be enough to stop your muscles and bones from decomposing.
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I don't know how old you are, but I'd be very surprised if there aren't more or less permanent moon bases in twenty years. Probably much less. Access to the moon will soon be quite a bit cheaper than access to LEO was ten years ago, and the means will be in private hands.
Actual colonies are a very different matter, but that will happen shortly after if someone comes up with an economic reason for it to do so.
Station Before Settlement (Score:3)
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Unlike a station in orbit the moon does have some gravity (I know, the station does too, bite me) so there are other options for preventing degradation. Maybe weighted clothes, for example, that keep the muscles working similar to a 1G environment.
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It's cheaper to make a 1 g base on the moon than it is to put one in orbit.
1 g that you could actually live in is fairly difficult to attain on a rotating station. You need some hefty construction and materials that have very good tensile strength. It's easier to build a rotating station on a surface, where everything doesn't have to hang off the centre pivot exclusively, and the moon/planet itself provides a good portion of the force.
Re: Station Before Settlement (Score:2)
If we try to build the equivalent 1-G simulated environment on surface, we need a very wide train / tram travelling along a canted track. Passengers would always be dealing with two separate vectors of force
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"The larger the station, the lower the forces."
Unfortunately no. The larger the station, the lower the required rotation rate. But the acceleration at the rim is, by definition, 1 g. Since you have to have to suspend that rim from the hub, the bigger the radius the longer (and heavier) the supporting structure you need. F = ma, so the force goes up with radius.
It's easy to spin a very small disk of metal or ceramic at hundreds of thousands of g's. You can buy a centrifuge off Amazon that's a foot across an
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PS: forgot to attach this link. The author is the guy O'Neill cylinders are named after.
https://space.nss.org/the-colo... [nss.org]
I think this is rather exciting. (Score:4, Insightful)
Face it, people: something like Moon colonies were always sooner or later going to become a reality, and I for one am rather excited that I may live to see it happen. I'm sure I'm far from alone in this sentiment, too.
Still Current? (Score:3, Informative)
i prefer closed (Score:2)
If it's open, how do they keep the air in?
Did you mean open source? Because open on its own doesn't mean anything specific.
Running costs (Score:2)
it's possible to create their own settlement on the moon for less than $3 billion
And how much a year to keep it operating and supplied?
Who would be expected to pay for keeping it going and what would they get in return?
Wrong Website (Score:3)
They forgot some zeros (Score:2)
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More like 3T not 3B and maybe even 3Q. You can't build a road for 3B anymore.
Maybe not.
Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices. Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants.
“That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”
From Is SpaceX Changing the Rocket Equation? [airspacemag.com] by Air & Space Magazine.
You can't build a road for $3 billion anymore, but you can definitely build space hardware for $3 billion. SpaceX has already done so. These people hope to replicate that.
Re:Concentrate on the earth (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not a good faith argument, because there are an endless supply of "what about" complaints.
Why is the OP even complaining about this on Slashdot? They should sell their computer and use the money to help starving orphans! Surely that's more important that posting whataboutisms on the internet!
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We should pay for your dreams instead of rebuilding a place...
Nobody asked you to pay for anything. Nobody asked you to do anything. Nobody asked you to even care. Some people you don't even know decided to spend some of their money doing something they want to do. You were not invited and no one cares what you think.
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How about you getting a clue?
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How much co2 is released in a rocket launch?
Depends upon the fuel, in the case of Saturn 5 rocket 9,240,000 kWh worth of carbon is burned just to launch the first stage which is 53% of the mass of the kerosene in the first stage tank. So a butt tonne of carbon is burned with a heavy lift rocket that uses kerosene and oxygen. The burn of a rocket engine is much more efficient at producing thrust than a modern jet engine but a jet engine that runs on aviation fuel can be more efficient at producing lower thrust over much longer periods of time.
Anyway
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Not enough to notice [Re:Concentrate on the earth] (Score:3)
How much co2 is released in a rocket launch?
Depends upon the fuel, in the case of Saturn 5 rocket 9,240,000 kWh worth of carbon is burned just to launch the first stage which is 53% of the mass of the kerosene in the first stage tank. So a butt tonne of carbon is burned with a heavy lift rocket that uses kerosene and oxygen.
I don't know how much a "butt tonne" is, but global emissions of energy-related carbon dioxide is 32.5 billion metric tons per year. That's billion with a "b". The fully-fueled Saturn V weighed 2.8 thousand tonnes, so the answer to the "how much CO2 is released in a rocket launch" is "even thousands of rocket launches wouldn't add enough CO2 in the atmosphere to detect, compared to what we're putting from burning fossil fuels".
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How much co2 is released in a rocket launch?
I assume just enough to get the rocket to its intended destination.
Re:Concentrate on the earth (Score:5, Insightful)
How about they use that money to help solve some of the problems on earth.
Maybe because they see the lack of a moon colony a problem that needs to be solved.
We gained many things from going to the moon the first time. By getting people interested in a moon colony could get people primed for solving problems that we don't really consider problems just yet.
By going to the moon in the 1960s we had people working on lightweight computers and had the government pay for it. From this we also got people to work on rockets that could be used for launching satellites, satellites we now use for communications, navigation, and weather forecasting. We gained from research into new materials and manufacturing technology. We gained in research on what the human body could withstand in matters of G-forces, CO2 exposure, heat, radiation, and so on that is used to build vehicles for transportation on Earth.
By going again, with the intention to stay, we can expand on that data we gathered 50 years ago. We can create more new materials. We can experiment with other manufacturing techniques. Then this newfound knowledge can be applied to more mundane issues on Earth.
You might see this as just some rich people burning cash they don't know what else to do with. I see this as an opportunity to expand our knowledge of the universe. From this we can find solutions to problems on Earth that we might not have considered if we didn't effectively create this problem to solve.
Here's a problem that this endeavor can solve here on Earth and has immediate results. It is getting people all over the world talking to each other, creating international lines of communication and friendships. With this cooperation we can get people talking about what you might consider an imaginary problem so that when a real problem arises then there will be an existing network of business relationships, international trade, and a level of trust, that would not have existed otherwise. This will very likely shrink future big and unsolvable problems into something that is small and trivial. The kind of future problems that we cannot yet see coming.
Or, as put by a sibling post...
How about they spend their money as they choose, you spend your own money as you choose, and you quit your fucking whining?
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Earth observing satellites for weather forecasting alone have saved way more people and property than a few billion dollars. And who would have thought cold war grandstanding would have led to that?
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NASA **made money** off of the Apollo program. Robert O'Neil's classes figured out (to everyone's surprise) that *just* the taxes on *just* the improvements in *just* the telecom/infotech industries would have paid for the entire program through the two cancelled Apollo launches by the mid-'80s.
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How about they use that money to help solve some of the problems on earth.
How about building some affordable housing in Silicon Valley . . . ?
"Charity begins in the home."
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How about they use that money to help solve some of the problems on earth.
How about building some affordable housing in Silicon Valley . . . ?
"Charity begins in the home."
And how would that work? You build a house and give it to someone for $100k in Silicon Valley. You know darn well that the first thing most people would do is turn around and sell that house for $1mill and keep the profit. All you've done is screwed yourself out of money.
Unless you can suddenly make more land appear in Silicon Valley so that the scarcity is gone.
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indirectly it might (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly by inquiring and researching how to make the best moon colony, they might actually find out stuff which may also have application on earth. So by searching in one subject (e.g. moon colony or whatever) you may actually help indirectly another.
Finally, I think people mostly care about their direct entourage, the further away the less they care. I don't think this is a controversial observation either - everybody does it otherwise they would be wracked in sadness and pain and unable to act because a flash flood killed 100 persons in somalia. No, the more remote, the less emotion, the more the people are just then "numbers". As such it should come as no surprise if somebody wealthy which is not really affected by all "earth problems" is concentrating of something of more interest. And it would be hypocrite for any of us to criticize it... Otherwise I would ask what those critic are *effectively right now* doing for the lack of toilet in a shanty town in Mumbai. Chance is that for 99.99% of those critic the answer will be silence.
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Firstly, this is a fallacy to think that all problem on earth must be solved before looking at other places (moon, mars...). This is the same fallacies which lead people to question why india is having a space program when they still don't have toilet for everybody. We as a specie can look at more than one problem at a time. Do you suddenly stop thinking at one problem at home when another come ? No you think about both and depending on the situation may even split resources.
There is also such thing as diminishing returns. Take constructing a house. 10 men can build a house faster than one man... but the difference between 1 man to 10 men in construction time is a lot faster than the difference it would take 11 men versus 20 men. Eventually the extra men just get in the way, or end up waiting on each other. The more men you add to a project the amount of return you get back slowly decreases.
Happens with programming too, or anything else. Sure, 2 programmers can write somet
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What about not to spend any money on entertainment?
People could do a lot of things at the same time. We need to relax, we need to work in near problems and we need to have hope in a better and greater future.
Space is one of the things that help us in believe that this kind of future is possible, if we work on it.
Spend most of our resources in the future would be a bad idea, but the spending is even lower than on entertainment industry.
So... No... that is not a valid excuse.
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Americans spend almost half a billion dollars a year on halloween costumes for their pets.
If someone wants to complain about waste, space research/exploration/settlement is pretty far down the list.
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"How about they use that money to help solve some of the problems on earth"
How to create low gravity on earth, you mean?
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"Priorities" is an argument used when talking about public funds. But this is private after-tax income. These guys could be spending it on hookers and blow; instead, they want to be lunar hobbyists. Good for them, especially because shaming them with that "priorities" argument won't work.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Any lunar base is definitely going to need hookers. Probably blow too.
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The hippies have you covered: https://panaceachronicles.com/... [panaceachronicles.com]
That's mostly not about hydroponics, but apparently that works too. They say you get better blow from coca grown at high altitude (low air pressure), so sounds like an ideal crop for the moon.
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They can't use the money to help solve problems on Earth because they don't have the money. Much like the Mars One scam, this is a way to separate money from idiots
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How about they use that money to help solve some of the problems on earth.
The big problems here on earth aren't due to lack of money, they're from decadent/corrupt governments presiding over people who've been herded into a "consumer" mentality in the name of profit.
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How about they use that money to help solve some of the problems on earth.
If humanity always spent all funding on correcting current problems, we'd never have advanced to where we are.
Why spend money on cables connecting computers when there are so many poor people without food?
Why spend money on a modern road network that can carry cars, when there are unskilled laborers who need to be trained to work?
It's all a balancing act. We need to balance our current projects whilst investing in the future and expanding our abilities. If thinking on the scale of humanity is too broad, t
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They are some of the problems on Earth. Sending them to the moon is a partial solution, and doing it on their money is just icing on the cake.
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So yeah, this strikes me as just another, even more expensive libertarian eugenics paradise corporate state project from the minds of people who grew up on particular fiction and made tons of money from being 'superior' in the last expans
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Necessity is the mother of invention. Living on the moon will be really hard. As the moon has nothing useful towards helping us survive. Every breath, every drop of water and ounce of food, heating, cooling, blocking radiation will need to provided at an optimal level. Some of the problems we are facing on earth, are problems with unequal distribution, where we do not really know what everyone really needs. A moon colony while drastic, may be a good exercise to really figure out what is needed.
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How about you stop telling people how to spend their own money?
Re: Concentrate on the earth (Score:2)
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Neil deGrasse Tyson routinely says: by the time you can solve the problem out there, you could have easily solved the problem down here
There are some problems that really are better solved "out there" on the moon, such as mining for rare metals and delivering rocket propellant to orbit. There's a high probability of finding impact craters made by asteroids rich in platinum, gold, etc. that could yield more than enough profit to make the venture worth the expense.
Re:Concentrate on the earth (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure. Now point me to a technology, discovery, or pioneering effort that didn't first make things much much worse. We're very good at making things much better right after making them much worse.
For those who are very unhappy with their life as it is, for those who want power over others, and for those who feel the need for a public legacy in a history book, it's very easy to make a name for yourself by pushing for the good that follows the bad.
On the other hand, for those of us with already happy lives, without the need to show off, and without the desire to be in a history book, who choose to spend our time enjoying friends and family and food and fun, life is already fantastic. I've no reason to push through bad times just to get to the good -- I already have the good.
I like to point out that today, given my average-size family home, safe neighbourhood, televisions and music and kitchen appliances and cleansers and heating and air conditioning and sports car, my life is already better than every king and emperor who ever lived more than fifty years ago. Think about that. My house is better than a castle, I get better service than a slave-owner, I have more entertainment than the queen of england just a few decades ago.
You want me to want more. I already don't have enough time to enjoy all of my now-free hobbies -- there are simply too many to fill a 168 hours every week of the year.
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Re:Concentrate on the earth (Score:4, Interesting)
Vaccines, antibiotics, germ theory, public sanitation, unleaded gasoline, laparoscopic surgery, effective birth control, public education....
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Thalidomide? Opiods? Exorcisms, Toxic ground-water, overdoses, corporate slavery, teaching to the lowest common denominator, ending of the family business.
Laparoscopic surgery doesn't apply -- that's the upgrade from surgery. Some goes for unleaded gasoline and effective birth control.
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"Now point me to a technology, discovery, or pioneering effort that didn't first make things much much worse."
Sanitation
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With lead pipes
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I presume this is a Roman reference, right? Lead pipes aren't usually a big source of lead in water, unless your water is shitty like Flint's is now. The big source of lead in Romans was the use of lead as an artificial sweetener [gizmodo.com]. And of course, in cosmetics.
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Now point me to a technology, discovery, or pioneering effort that didn't first make things much much worse.
The wheel for a start. Most of what NASA has discovered hasn't made anything worse. Or are you going to tell me that the viking lander somehow caused war or strife somewhere.
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Well, aside from myriad exceptions, of which NASA may contribute many, would it count if the viking lander contaminated the soil and killed some kind of life? If a thousand years from now we discover life only to realize that we brought it there and wasted all of that funding? Or if it's forgotten, and ten-thousand years from now the lander is discovered by future humans, who conclude that aliens visited, and an entire religion spawns from it?
Exceptions are obviously, by definition, excepted from the gene
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Heh, love it! Really shouldn't have been modded down.
I'm always amazed at the moving definition of "prison".
It used to be a jail cell in a castle.
Then it became a large building with a yard and a cafeteria and a gen-pop.
Then it became "house arrest" with all the amenities of your own home.
Then it became house arrest but also you can go to work.
Nowadays, if you live your whole life in the same neighbourhood.
Or without ever leaving your city.
Or without ever vacationing out of your state.
Or you've never left
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Mining for "rare materials"? The energy cost of bringing the mining materials from Earth to the moon, and of launching the materials from Luna to Earth, are so outrageously large there is simply no sense to it for minining. There is some interesting science to learn there. But far more profitable resources include solar power, from orbit, where it can be collected and rebroadcast to Earth by solar mirrors. Crystal manufacture, and computer macrochip growth in zero gee, are potentially _much_ easier than Te
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Speaking of old stories, I think that one of the most promising business plans for these people would be to create a service that collects all of the world's nuclear waste and then buries it in a dump on the far side of the Moon.
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If you've already hoisted the nuclear waste into orbit, why not just point it at the sun, give it a nudge and let gravity draw it in to be incinerated? Seems wasteful and dirty to leave it on the moon.
Or, build fast breeder reactors that will burn through the vast majority of the radioactive material leaving very little that needs to be disposed of.
Re:Concentrate on the earth (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've already hoisted the nuclear waste into orbit, why not just point it at the sun, give it a nudge and let gravity draw it in to be incinerated?
Sure, it only takes a "nudge" of 30 kilometers per second.
One of us has no fucking idea how gravity works. Its you.
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Stick a solar sail on it and nudge it into the outer solar system or nudge it towards the Moon, then use the moons gravity to slingshot it towards the sun.
Less of a nudge to send it sunward or outward then to send it to the moon, into orbit and down to be interred on the surface of the moon.
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Why "nudge it into orbit and lower it gently to the surface"? It's not like a crash landing is going to mess up the ecosystem on the Moon. Pick a crater with sufficiently high walls to contain the splash and target it all there.
Re:Concentrate on the earth (Score:5, Informative)
As he said, you don't have any idea how orbital mechanics work.
In order to crash something into the sun you'd have to lower your perihelion close enough to the sun that its atmosphere would bring you down. That's quite close to the dead stop delta V, more than 20 km/s. If you've got *lots* of time, you can play a trick and bring that down by first heading out of the solar system, then tweaking your orbit at a distance. You can also use gravity assists so your rocket doesn't have to supply all of the 20 km/s.
The sun is the hardest place in the solar system to reach.
https://space.stackexchange.co... [stackexchange.com]
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Mining for "rare materials"? The energy cost of bringing the mining materials from Earth to the moon, and of launching the materials from Luna to Earth, are so outrageously large there is simply no sense to it for minining.
The resources mined would nearly all be used off-Earth, either in the settlement or used in orbital construction of niche products, stations/satellites, and ships, the materials launched from rail guns on the lunar surface. This would massively decrease the need to launch everything used there from Earth, greatly reducing costs.
Once established, the only things going to Earth would be finished products like exotic materials, exotic computer chips, medical-specialty materials, etc that can only be manufactu
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"and of launching the materials from Luna to Earth, are so outrageously large there is simply no sense to it for minining."
That's exactly why nobody wants to do that.
Why do you think that?
OTOH, if somebody DID want to do it, it's 6 times less expensive than the other way round, the gravity well is not as deep.
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The point of lunar mining is not to bring materials back to earth but to supply the raw materials to build cities and spacecraft construction facilities and actual spacecraft. The moon is not a means to the end of serving Earthlings. The moon and its resources are for loonies.
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It doesn't take much energy to launch stuff from the moon to earth. If you really wanted to, you could harvest energy from the process.
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The prime customers for a Lunar colony have been known since the 1970s, operations in Earth orbit. Asteroidal materials are the long-term better bet, but one must walk before running (except for my niece, who started out running, then walking, and only later learned to crawl.) Solar Power Satellites will need massive amounts of raw materials, or manufactured materials if it turns out that making them on the Moon is more efficient (gravity does make plumbing work better, after all).
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There are some problems that really are better solved "out there" on the moon, such as mining for rare metals and delivering rocket propellant to orbit.
We don't really know any more about what the Moon might be useful for than the people of 1800 knew what might be found in California. But if nothing else, it will be a good nearby place to test the mining tech we will be using on the asteroids, and to find out what it will take to live there.
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Mining asteroids, with basically no gravity, is going to be quite different the mining on the Moon. Example, picks, shovels and dynamite work on the Moon but not asteroids.
Mining asteroids is going to be quite the engineering challenge. It'll likely happen, but not trivially.
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Given 3 billion dollars, well, I'm reminded of what Neil deGrasse Tyson routinely says: by the time you can solve the problem out there, you could have easily solved the problem down here.
And what if the problem is getting rid of n**ers? I'm not saying this because I am one of the racists, I am saying it because I'm pretty sure that many of the rich people are. I bet that some of these rich assholes just fantasize about creating a world without us and letting us die with earth.
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I'm pretty sure these rich assholes, as you put it, are so rich that they really couldn't care less about your skin colour. I'm pretty sure they simply ignore 98% of other humans as non-playing-characters. And that's fine. Some are simply addicted to earning money off of regular folk like points on a pinball table, others just score the number of humans under their control, and some look for challenges like this one thinking that they will finally feel fulfilled.
You've no doubt heard that most successful
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"I'm pretty sure these rich assholes, as you put it, are so rich that they really couldn't care less about your skin colour."
They have their islands to rape the kids.
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reductio ad absurdum
Indeed, such an absurd, the rich have never tried to close themselves from the rest of the world before. Surely, they have never built fenced neighborhoods surrounded by guards.
Re:Concentrate on the earth (Score:4, Insightful)
Neil deGrasse Tyson routinely says: by the time you can solve the problem out there, you could have easily solved the problem down here.
Let me speak of my experience in Antarctica: even well planned missions fail or at least have issues with totally unexpected problems that are solvable only by people on the field. You have problems there that you didn't even know you could have.
Economics and charity and billionaires (Score:5, Interesting)
How about they use that money to help solve some of the problems on earth.
Mod parent up please, a lot.
Mod parent down as numerically clueless.
First, the two aren't mutually exclusive. It is possible to both work on solving problems on Earth, and also invest some money in developing space.
Second, the world economy is approximately one hundred trillion dollars. Three billion dollars represents a leverage of about 0.003% of the world economy. You're not going to change a lot with that. It corresponds roughly to giving everybody in the world 40 cents. You know what? Forty cents per person is not going to solve the worlds problems.
Third, billionaires are investing money in trying to solve the worlds problems. Google it. https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
Fourth, most of the worlds problems are political in origin. "Solving the worlds problems" would mean solving political problems. I, actually, don't really want billionaires spending billions trying to influence politics. If you do, I suppose you like the Koch Brothers, who have poured billions into influence the American politics. (They funded the rise of the "tea party", for example.) Turns out-- I don't.
Given how well most people, (and likely everyone on slashdot) live on earth, I certainly wouldn't want to go labour on the moon. Which means that it'd need to pay pretty damn well to employ someone on the moon. That usually means hiring poor people. That equates to the usual slave-labour of yore -- think rowing wooden battleships across the ocean.
Wait, what? You said working in space would "pay pretty damn well", and then you said it would be "slave labor". These are opposites: the definition of slave labor is that it doesn't pay at all. Which?
Given 3 billion dollars, well, I'm reminded of what Neil deGrasse Tyson routinely says: by the time you can solve the problem out there, you could have easily solved the problem down here. He often says it about terraforming another planet instead of fixing this one.
Well, as I pointed out, 3 billion dollars will neither terraform any planets nor solve problems here on earth.
However, on terraforming, I would say that messing with the climate of another planet would be vastly superior to messing with the climate of this one. I don't really believe in terraforming (or, not as a near-term proposition, anyway), but if we did it, it would tremendously improve our understanding of how to engineer climates to get what we want, rather than unanticipated side effects. If we're going to change climate, sure, let's start out learning about those unanticipated side effects on other planets
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"That equates to the usual slave-labour of yore "
Screw that, I'd go tomorrow even if they didn't pay me and it were a one-way trip and there are millions like me.
Damn, I haven't been here so long I've forgotten the Quote tags.
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You are younger than 28, don't have a family, don't have a stable bank account, and don't have a passion. That's my guess. Or you're over 60, no longer have a family, and never acquired hobbies. In either case, you're bored. You look at travelling to the moon as "more", because you're not giving up an entire wonderful life to do it.
For the rest of us, there's far too much joy here that would be instantly erased by going there. Chasing "more happy" doesn't make sense.
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Has anyone told them they don't sell any soy lattes on the moon?
You honestly think they're going to build a colony on the moon without putting in a star bucks?
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