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Whoa there Bubba!

I said, "Of course it would literally have to hop as wings are useless on the moon. Low gravity may make the concept practical and gas could be 'waste' from the He3 extraction."

You might also run a fusion reactor on the moon using some of the He3 you've mined and use the heat to vaporize and accelerate other byproducts of mining such as metals.

Links. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html, http://exosci.com/news/129.html (He3 found with concentrations of TiO2), I like the Populrar Science RAIL GUN approach to getting the stuff back to Earth. Another nice thing about proximity of TiO2 and He3 is O2 is handy for miners of the made of meat variety. Perhaps some OPossums or Coons with human like brains (search /. or google for the articles on chimera).

Gotta think outside the bathtub

1) Consider the possibility of driving similar sails not with solar light but with high-powered Earth-based or orbital lasers.

2) This sail is quite small; just large enough to test the theory. Interplanetary solar sails would require MUCH larger surfaces, and, as you say, much better/lighter materials.

3) All ratios of mass vs. light pressure aside, a solar sail is impractical for interstellar travel because the pressure imparted by the solar wind ceases at the heliopause (by definition, the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space), where solar particles form a shock wave as our solar system moves through interstellar dust. Pioneer 10 and both Voyager 1 and 2 are believed to be approaching the heliopause.

Actually, apparently not on that doppler method only being able to detect gigantic planets.

Here is an article from a UK paper (I first found it referenced by exosci.com) on the preliminary results from one such doppler study that have found two potential earth like planets. The system is a double red star system named CM Draconis. It even comes complete with a large Jovian sized gas giant in the system to draw asteroids and meteors away from the terrestrial sized planets with. Gotta wonder about what effect the two red stars would have on any possible development of life though. They do also note that this study was pushing the instruments to their very limits in the article as well.

Results are very preliminary still it seems.

Celera mapped the genetic structure of the fruit fly recently. They claim that they will have the sequenced genes of their human subject assembled in three to four weeks in an article at CNN