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The Economic Development of the Moon
MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Smith, the author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, recently published a polemic in the British newspaper The Guardian, entitled Plundering the Moon, that argued against the economic development of the Moon. Apparently the idea of mining Helium 3, an isotope found on the Moon but not on the Earth (at least in nature) disturbs Mr. Smith from an environmentalist standpoint. An examination of the issue makes one wonder why."
If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?
Sigs cause cancer.
...so we wouldn't bother preserving that, right? It must be ugly, right?
Same with Craters of the Moon National Monument, eh? Not worth preserving, because it's short on biology and therefore ugly.
Oh, people found these two places beautiful enough to save them? He's right, I guess the rest of us do have a different idea of beauty.
I think neglecting the potential for cheese mining is the real crime here.
As I think of it. I think most people think of clean air and water and an ecosystem as an environment. Not a bunch of dead dust in a vacuum.
It seems that many in the "environmental" movement just want nothing to change from its "natural" state, even where there is no nature.
If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?
Given our current level of technology, if I looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, I would be filled with a sense of wonder about the ingenuity of aliens, and with forbidding and dread that the Earth would be next.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The only environmental significance I can think of that the moon has is that its gravity may help to stabilize the Earth's axis (and therefore, its climate). (This was discussed in Asimov's "Left Hand of the Electron"). For the foreseeable future, the moon will be capable of performing that role.
If we mine the moon, then we'll become dependent on its resources. When it finally explodes (as moons are notorious for doing), our glorious space empire will fall.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
In the movie the main character is having an interesting journey through time until he hit a 'bump' at August 26th 2037, where he finds a Moon mining operation has disrupted the lunar orbit. As a result, the Moon is breaking apart and showering Earth with massive chunks of rock. His presence outside of a shelter leads to an attempt by two military personnel to arrest him, but after they draw his attention to the shattered Moon and give him a brief explanation behind its present state, there is a scuffle and he escapes. He makes it into the time machine just as the city is being destroyed, but is knocked out and fails to witness the destruction of human civilization. But that was just a movie (and a book) of course.
Are we to avoid mining the moon because it will harm the native lifeforms? Oh yeah, there aren't any.
Do we need to invent the word "rock-hugger"?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Last time there was a story about moon mining, they had some stats on the density of the isotope they're looking for and it would take so much more energy to just mine it let alone go there and get it and bring it back, that you might as well just strap the rocket engine to a turbine instead of bringing the stuff back to a nuclear plant. It wouldn't even be remotely efficient if we had a city on the moon to run just that off rare isotopes because the density of it in the soil is so ridiculously low.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Well, it's not just that the moon is "low on observable life", it's that it has NO life, and no atmosphere. Besides, have you been to the Grand Canyon? There is much life! There is no "environmental equivalence" between the Earth and the moon. It's not an aesthetic question.
Besides, mining the moon for every gram of He3 would not change your view of it one iota.
If you let the helium out, it will stop floating up in the sky. Guess where it will fall.
Screw volcanoes; some people say the dinosaurs died because they had no space program. Maybe they died because they did have one, and made the same type of arrogant mistake.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Everywhere humans go you get shopping malls and brainless people beating each other to death. Most thinking people want us to extinct ourselves peacefully here on earth before we screw up another place.
Where in the world did you get the idea that there is little
visible life in the Grand Canyon?
http://digital-desert.com/grand-canyon/wildlife.html
The moon is a great big dead rock. Moving the pieces of that
rock around won't affect anything in the slightest. Sure, we'll
probably preserve the Apollo sites, and maybe a few particularly
picturesque spots, but the rest of it is a future mining site.
He doesn't even give a reason why the environmental movement might want to stop mining the Moon. Maybe he thinks environmentalism is about "pretty Nature, don't hurt her", rather than survival and legacy, but he doesn't even say so.
The only argument his protest makes about mining the Moon is in favor: mining the He-3 would reduce the need to damage the Earth producing energy here.
There might be an argument for science preserving the layout of the Lunar surface for study (eg, the record of impact angles and composition which accumulate billions of years of astrophysical history), but there are technical solutions to that problem, and he doesn't even mention them (except some handwaving about lacking "science" in our goals).
That is the kind of taking "environmentalism's" name in vain that gives legitimate environmentalism a bad name.
--
make install -not war
This is a very harmful idea. A certain amount of environmentalism makes sense; disrupting ecosystems can have harmful repercussions, as can running out of non-renewable resources, etc.
But this idea of preserving the lunar environment seems to me to be based on the idea that objects are better left untouched by humanity. That things should be left untouched, even when it is detrimental to humanity, and no worse than neutral to our ecosystem. This is the type of nonsense that, in the extreme, calls for humanity to let itself go extinct, so as to stop our plundering of the Earth.
Nothing in nature is a value, without something living that gives it that worth.
Lets mine the far side of the moon, where it won't be seen by those on earth.
Seriously - if it was an argument about contributing to space junk (which can be a hazard to life and limb), or an argument about leaving nascent life (like, say, on Europa or Titan) alone to develop, play... I can grok those arguments.
But the ones presented? ...it's the friggin' Moon! There ain't jack shit for life or biomass there! The only non-commercial value it currently has offhand are the Apollo landing sites (for historical value), and that's it!
IMHO, tear that bastard up if it generates commerce, gives us extra space to live, acts as an astronomical platform, and more importantly, if it takes humankind that much closer to becoming a space-faring race. It's not like we'll reduce its mass enough to really worry about instability (at least not within the next billion years or so), and it's (IMHO) free and open for the taking - belonging (nor should it ever belong) to no earth-bound nation.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The mass of He-3 on the moon is a ridiculously tiny fraction of the mass of the moon itself. Even if we got all the He-3, it would in no way affect the tides.
I guess he is worried that the moon will have another crater or two. Actually it may be nice if he and all his followers and sympathisers would go to the moon and leave us here on earth alone.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I am an very environmentally-conscious person: walking, biking or transit, no car. Vegan. Local, preferably organic produce. Buy used goods where-ever possible, make do or repair rather than buying. I give that as background, so that it's clear I'm not a typical consumer that thinks my personal desires outweigh impact to the environment.
That that said, I must ask: what environment? The moon is a lifeless, barren hunk of rock. All that has ever occurred in its history, is being pummeled by countless meteors to create a scarred and pulverized surface. There is no environment to protect, only dust and rocks. And as pristine and spartan beauty that may be, there's simply no one to admire it.
Right now, the universe appears devoid of life, except on our tiny blue rock, and it's always in danger of being snuffed out by one stray asteroid. Getting humanity up into space is the best thing we can do, for us, and for the Earth. Where we go, we will bring life with us. We will create new environments on any planets we settle. We are the seed by which Earth's life can spread throughout the galaxy.
Seeing lights glittering back at us from human settlements during a new moon shouldn't be viewed as a desecration of something worth saving, but the growth of new life where there was none before.
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi
In order to get to the point that we could make an entire solar system a boondoggle, we'll have to get out of ours first. That means tapping energy and resources available in the solar system, whether the process is pretty or not.
It's all getting destroyed by the sun in a few billion years, anyway.
It's Chinese this time and when they say they are gonna do it they will make it before everybody else. I mean it scares me. In a decade, China's economy will be bigger than United States, that is for sure. and they can dedicate little portion of their economy but it will still be billions of dollars that most other first world nations can't afford: because we have other things in priority such as taking care of poverty and improving welfare. Their govnt decide what is priority. not the way that is decided here. As soon as someone discovers great economic benefit from exploiting moon every rats will get on the cheese party. think about the disputes that we are already having. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
so now we gotta jump on space race, gotta have middle east in control as well as maintain bases in over 130 nations and gotta homeland security wow. the future seems real damn exciting.
My point is that America must not get behind. it's catch the flag game. If they get there they win. We have enough problem in the earth already.
Why not. I'm a clean enough energy source.
Quack, quack.
Just look at all the beautiful He3. Isn't it beautiful? Aren't you glad your daddy stopped them from plundering the Moon of all of it so that we can almost enjoy this unspoiled view of it through the completely polluted atmosphere of Earth because we never got that clean energy source from up there?
Yeah, right! There are some real clowns in the world, and the guy against this qualifies as two of them when weighted in the average of clown foolishness.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Gee, that's a nice sentiment, but history says that the moon belongs to whoever can get the most weapons up there first.
There is an element in the environmentalist movement that basically hates humanity and human progress. A deep-seated loathing rests within those individuals.
Not the entire movement by any means, but there is an element.
Economic development of the Moon would be a glorious thing. Turning that barren lump of rock into an engine of progress, a spring board for the colonization of other planets and perhaps other solar systems one far off day.
Azural - instrumentals
we'd rather have far bigger cars, houses and more bling
the moon is just too far for the likes of us greedy lazy losers
The rebuttal is based on the fallacy that without life environmental protection has no merit. If an environment is devoid of life it is still an environment. The land itself is worthy of protection. It's something Australia's aborigines have been pointing out for years, that their land has intrinsic value. Most of the rest of Australia has taken the moon mining viewpoint and desecrated the land in the name of development.
From a purely selfish human point of view there might also come a day when people want to visit that untouched environment.
This quest for Helium 3 and water on the moon sounds like a quest for WMD. They're not going to find anything. The real value of the moon is space for humans to live on. We're out of space on Earth.
I couldn't care less if we blasted it into a ring structure for easy collection. Goodness, it's a ROCK! ...Imagine the fireworks of that blast, amazing if we pulled it off. Ridiculously short sighted of we kill ourselves in the process.
Send some libertarians up there. ;-)
http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Harsh-Mistress-Robert-Heinlein/dp/0340837942
In the equatorial crust, He3 is about 1 part per 100 million. As best I recall, De/He3 fusion is about 5 million times as energetic - per weight - as coal. But on earth, we mine coal if it is 1 part in 20.
Where in the Guardian article does Smith claim that mining the moon is bad? He just points out that it is the likeliest cause for renewed interest in moon missions and goes over a couple of the good and bad consequences. There's no argument in there either for or against. At least from reading the article I've decided moon mining is a pretty good idea.
Even the last sentence, which is jumped on by the AC article only describes a possible environmentalist reaction.
We already have a source of clean limitless power: solar. But anyone can generate it! On the other hand, the distribution of energy harvested from the moon would be a tightly controlled affair. Very lucrative.
It amuses me when people throw around the idea of mining Helium 3 from the moon. You might as well write a diatribe on the evils of using kittens as hydrocarbon fuel: nobody is seriously proposing that either.
According to wikipedia, the concentration of He-3 in lunar soil is estimated at 1ppm. 1ppm is an order of magnitude below an economically viable grade for mining gold or platinum on earth. For the sake of argument, lets assume that strip mining the moon would cost at least one hundred times more than strip mining an equivalent tonnage on earth - He3 now needs to be worth 1000 times more than gold to make the operation viable.
Since the mechanism of He3 deposition in lunar soil is by solar wind, it's highly unlikely that you'll find areas of increased concentration. Pick a spot on the moon, land there, and start mining several tons per day. Nevermind that the largest thing we've ever sent to the moon was a package of a lander barely big enough for three people and a dune buggy, and that it took a significant fraction of a nation's GDP to accomplish that.
You need to send up earth moving equipment, a Helium / Lunar Soil separator (not yet invented), an isotope separation plant, and a means to return the product to earth for use. Did I mention that we don't actually have the fusion technology to make use of it?
I don't know what's worse: that this guy took the time to write about the evils of lunar mining, or that if, against all odds, we made it a viable enterprise, people like him would fret over the altered aesthetics of a tiny patch of a completely lifeless rock.
At this point, we can't build any kind of practical fusion reactor, much less one that uses Helium-3 (which probably will be harder because the ignition temperature is quite a bit higher). And it won't be completely clean or efficient anyway because some of the intermediate reactions will still produce neutrons.
So we can't even know if this makes any sense from any economic or engineering standpoint because we don't yet know how a practical fusion reactor would work. But we also need to know how to make much more cost-efficient space launch systems before it is even feasible to mine lunar regolith for trace elements.
So, if we can make efficient launch systems, and if we can design fusion reactors that use Helium-3, it MIGHT be economically feasible to extract Helium-3 from the moon and use it to power those reactors. I'd point out that those two "ifs" aren't small ones, either. So the "environmental debate" is a thought experiment about a thought experiment about a thought experiment. It seems to me that there are much more pressing environmental problems than this, if you even allow that mining the moon is an environmental problem.
I'd also add that mining is typically a pretty low-profit margin business (yes, the absolute profits might be quite large, but the margins are quite low, especially when averaged over time). You need to lose money like an army of Web 2.0 startups for decades before you start making any money (that's even true of things like petroleum and natural gas that are riding high right now). I'd also add that you don't just go digging holes at random looking for gold or molybdenum or helium-3. On earth there are geologic processes that concentrate interesting stuff. I suspect that the moon hasn't had many of those geologic processes, or even very many good geologic processes at all for creating or concentrating useful stuff -- and that means that mining on the moon is even less likely to be economically feasible.
I don't think environmentalism is the important issue here. I'm more interested in what impact the economic development of the moon will have on international relations.
Whose moon is it? Of course we have treaties, but when a company starts mining up there, you can bet the profits aren't going to be distributed very widely. Besides the ethical implications of this, how are other states going to react to an American or Chinese company mining a resource that used to be considered off-limits and belonging to all, until it was convenient for that to no longer be the case? Is this just a case of first come, first serve capitalism? There are more things at stake here than just environmentalism.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
We can just buy barren landscape offsets. For each acre of moon desolation that we disturb, we can torch one acre of Amazon rainforest.
Mr. Smith is an enemy of mankind. If he wants to freeze in the dark, he can do so to his heart's content.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How about this as a compromise: We'll only mine/develop/harvest/rape the side of the moon that faces AWAY from Earth. That way he doesn't have to see it change from Earth. And since Luna has no atmosphere (and not enough gravity to ever hold one), there's no worry about pollution smogging up the near side, or (in general) effects generated on the far side from propagating to the near side.
Just kidding! I don't have any problem with developing the moon; this guy's wrong. Not that being careful custodians of our environment is a bad thing, but his "logic" is illogical.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
We must protect our lifeless, uninhabitable and toxic environments from our waste and pollution, lest they become er... lifeless, toxic and uh.. uninabitable... oh never mind.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Just because one (or a few) environmentalist has a (to us) wacky view, doesn't mean he represents the whole of environmentalists. The only reason you'd imply this is if you had an agenda, and the author of the linked article clearly does.
I don't think environmentalism is the important issue here. I'm more interested in what impact the economic development of the moon will have on international relations.
Now, that's a more reasonable concern. I think it's a problem that needs solved, but it's not an insolvable problem. I would imagine that by the time we can really begin raping the moon's resources in appreciable quantities, there will be some political guidelines in place.
While not without it's technical challenges, You have a much hirer efficiency with He 3. A little over twis as much energy in a practical environment.
It also has nearly no waste byproducts from the fuel itself. The waste would be from maintenance. Considering the new nuclear designs that are in production, there won't be much waste from maintenance as well.
It's a good fuel.
We need a goal to do from the moon. Getting to the moon, creating these power plants and then...?
There are lots that can be done, but without having that planned it would just stagnate.
Actually the Japanese have on the drawing board self-contained nuclear power plants. You could send up the pieces and fuel, assemble it on the moon and that would be good for about 10-20 years.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I generally agree. The primary "concentrating" process that occurs on the moon is not geologic, but a result of the Sun shining on it. The He-3 arrives from the Sun as part of the Solar wind, and ends up trapped in small concentrations in the regolith. Very small.
So, the "mining" process involves scraping regolith off the surface, then processing that to extract the He-3 and a few other exceedingly-difficult-to-extract things, such as water for your manned lunar outposts. Energy for all this processing typically comes from Solar collectors.
But the evil anti-environmentalist in me favors placing large coal-fired power plants on the moon to provide the power for extracting He-3, with the coal being launched into space in large numbers of heavy-lift launches of conventional rockets fueled by any number of exceedingly nasty propellants.
I'm sure it all balances out in the end. Or ends. One of the two.
A lot of us are anxious to see some major commercial application of space (see the recent discussion on space-based solar power, too), but I'm afraid helium-3 mining on the moon is not a feasible one.
First of all, Helium-3 already exists in smaller amounts on earth. It makes up about 0.00138% of the helium on the earth, as opposed to 0.00138% of helium on the moon. More importantly, it can also be synthesized by deuterium fusion or by tritium decay, although current production is only a few kilograms per year. However, one of the first generation fusion fuels is deuterium, so it's very likely that first generation technology could eventually be used to make fuel for second generation fusion plants.
Second, obviously, we have not achieved practical hydrogen fusion yet, much less helium fusion, which is harder. The current ITER timeline estimates the first commercial hydrogen fusion plants will come online around 2040-2050. Helium fusion, if we decide it's worth the effort to develop, will come later.
Third, you have to move a lot of dirt to get a useful amount of He-3. Estimates are the US alone would need at least 15-20 tons per year for our current electrical generation. At the quoted 0.01 ppm on the moon, that means you need to process 2 billion tons (approx 670 million cubic meters) of regolith every year. In comparison, the giant Three Gorges Dam in China required excavating only 134 million cubic meters of material over a period of 10 years, using thousands of workers and who knows how many tons of heavy equipment.
Additionally, processing the regolith for the helium requires first boiling out all of the gasses by heating the excavated dirt several hundred degrees, then separating the minute fraction of He-3 from all the "waste" gasses. It will be very energy intensive. By my very rough math, every cubic meter of moon you excavate requires on order of 100 kW-hours of heat, so a year's worth of digging would take 47 billion kW-hours. This is about 4% of our current electrical usage, which hints at the scale of the power production facilities that would have to be built on the moon to facilitate this mining...over 5,000 MW of capacity not counting digging and gas segregation energy needs.
In the end, the native population will get large enough to separate very nicely from whatever nation put (most of) them there.
After all, history has some rather handy parallels: The United States' founding stands out as a rather large and violent example... but there are lots of less-violent ones too (Australia, Canada...) and some which sort of split on their own when the colonizing nation became too weak to hold on to it (such as most of South America).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Now you're making me feel like junk food. :(
Quack, quack.
I would argue that there is value in the romantic qualities of the moon, as well as a natural lead into astronomy.
That said: if we find a way to do it practically, mine that sucker.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why has the parent post been modded funny? It represents the first post in this entire thread that actually makes a valid point as to why one might wish to protect a lifeless environment.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
The moon is responsible for the Earth's tides. The sloshing back and forth of the oceans not only keeps a variety of tidal pool environments operational, it is responsible for introducing a significant quantity of oxygen and minerals into the water. This helps keep the fish and plankton alive.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
We could, for example, implement a Moon use tax, and all people on Earth would be getting an equal share from use of each square mile of Moon's surface, payable by Moon mining companies to the governments and then distributed as people of each country want. That tax would be small, compared to the costs involved in Moon mining and sales of resulting goods.
The aptly-named Frontier Thesis of the 19th century basically said that we were running out of the frontier in America. To Europeans settling the new continent, a few hundred years prior, North America seemed like unpopulated virgin lands. The wilderness! In the first European wave, various ships went up and down the coast plotting resources for later "exploitation" (using the word in the modern sense). It only recently occurred to scholars to admit that the American landscape wasn't wild at all. What juicy coastal lands they had settled had been entirely managed by the Native Americans through "swidden" agriculture. It's just that the new landscape was completely bizarre to the Europeans. To solve the frontier crisis, we (the Americans) went and acquired more lands through imperialism.
Here I end my narrative and name the 800 lb gorilla: capitalism. I am not suggesting that we will make a mistake of ignoring the moon's wildlife, or anything like that - but we shouldn't be arrogant to know what we are dealing with (and I am not even talking about the moon). The driving forces of going to the moon in these two articles is mislabeled as "progress" - but it really is capitalism. Or is it? The problem is - private industry at this point does not have the start-up capital to be able to go to the moon, let alone develop it. Sure, going to the moon is cool and all but why would we, in our current system, allocate so much of government money for the development? Keep in mind that the government's budget in this case is paid by us, the citizens.
So - once again, why bother? Are we running out of the moon-ness on Earth? Is this a socialist plot to have many finance the lunar adventures of the few? If we are so progressive and inclined to embrace socialism on the moon, why not embrace it down here first and prevent our own human beings from starvation and other forms of suffering?
Gee, think of all those poor moon-animal species that we'd be disrupting the habitats of, huh? I swear, half of the environmental movement is just made up of saboteurs who act like idiots to try to discredit the other half by association.
Oops...yes, that should have been 0.035% of the helium on the moon is He-3 and 0.000138% of helium on earth is He-3. Not only did I copy the same number down twice, I misplaced a decimal point.
As I understand it, the difference is because most of the He-3 on the earth is primordial...from the earth's formation. He-3 from the sun also strikes the earth, but is quickly lost again from the upper atmosphere. On the moon, there is primordial He-3 plus new stuff from the sun that gets trapped in the rock since there is effectively no atmosphere to slow it down before encountering the surface.
The dilution of He-3 on earth is also increased due to radioactive decay producing alpha particles (He-4).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
And you're right; it has no geologic processes. But it has some selenologic processes...;-)
rj
I doubt that the ridiculous cost of space travel will ever fall enough to make it worthwhile, but in case that happens, the lunar environmentalists will be there to file EPA complaints against anyone trying to make the moon economically productive.
I disagree with the first statement, I believe space travel will fall in price. But I agree about "lunar environmentalists".
If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?
I'd love to have a powerful enough telescope for this, and would also love to see buildings and civilization when I look through the 'scope.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I would be more amazed at the resolving power of my telescope if I could see a tiny robot mining on the moon.
So would I. With a telescope powerful enough to see a robot on the moon some amazing photos could be taken.
FalconShould there be a Law?
As an example, the phrase "Space Tourism" always makes me wince, considering that we have no infrastructure to gather energy from space yet and we're running low on non-renewable energy on a global scale. I'd hate to see that sort of attitude govern how we handle using the Moon's resources.
What about renewable energy sources? Richard Branson of Virgin, Atlantic and Galactic, is backing research into using ethanol which is renewable as a fuel source for his jets.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If we are to ever have colonies on the moon they will become nations, its how its happened with all sorts of countries that had far reaching empires.
I don't get it.
The "Helium 3 on the moon" people have it backwards. As someone else pointed out, you have to mine a lot of dirt to get any useful amount of the stuff. On the other hand, deuterium is available at moderate prices. Heavy water costs about $300/Kg. If we ever get fusion to work as a power source (a big if, after half a century of failure), deuterium fusion will work first.
There's some grumbling about deuterium fusion producing radioactive waste products, but it's nowhere near as messy as fission. You get some tritium (which is a useful material; among other things, it decays into ... Helium-3!) and the reactor components may become radioactive, but the isotopes are relatively short-lived; decades, not millennia, of decay time are required. The concrete and steel has already cooled off for many older decommissioned reactors.
Helium-3 fusion is potentially cleaner, though. If we ever get fusion to work, it's the fuel of choice for getting off the earth with fusion power, because you could dump the reaction products into the atmosphere without causing fallout.
So forget about mining the moon to power Earth. Dumb idea. Think about mining helium on Earth to power launch vehicles.
Ya, I gotta say that as much as I support the environment here on earth, I can't think of a single reason why we shouldn't mine the moon....
Actually mining the moon would be better for the environment on earth. Instead of creating strip mines and polluting rivers on earth, mine the moon where there is no life.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Obviously Mr. Smith saw what happened in "I Robot", and doesn't want anything to do with it.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
We've notice you studying the moon with a certain high powered telescope.
This telescope has enabled you to see things that you are not authorized to observe, and thus it puts you in violation of certain top secret Homeland Security directives. This incurs certain... penalties, which we may have to discuss with you later.
Now, on the other hand, Mr. Anderson, we're willing to wipe your slate clean... if you tell us who sent you this telescope...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Yes, but what about the safety of those on the moon? When we build our moonbase there, and start mining the moon for nuclear fuel and dumping our nuclear waste there, a simple accident could cause a tremendous explosion. This explosion could knock the moon from orbit, sending the moonbase and its inhabitants into the far reaches of space.
They would then have to spend the rest of their days hoping to bump into an earth-like planet. It's just a fate too boring to contemplate.
your .sig caused me to wet myself...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
ISS was just destroyed creating a cataclysmic chain reaction... nobody is leaving here alive.
Seems kinda dumb to be doing anything too close to home, simply too many variables leading to a likelihood of significant 'when' rather then 'if'.
No reason for taking H3 unless it's an excuse to begin mining for other minerals. At 1/6th the weight, it'd take no time taking apart the moon with a large scale operation (think open pit mining at 6-100 times the scale seen on earth).
(if the military is using microwaves to power vehicles within an area-a city could do the same at fractions of the cost grabbing for low hanging fruit heh... little solid state motors/chargers from IBM mounted to each wheel hub, with the incentive of free power within city limits. China could develop this easily given their economic situation-commie and turn around and see the tech to the states).
If raping The Moon means we have to rape The Earth less then I say we should go for it.
No sig today...
Earth first,
we'll stripmine the other planets later!
Of course there is no logical way you can claim mining the Moon is environmentally unsound. But he's not using "environmental" in that way. He is talking about the kind of "environmental" where you are against human beings and against technology, period. The advent of an economical way to exploit the Moon would be a huge boon to humans and to technological advancement. So if humans and tech = bad, and mining the Moon benefits humans and tech, then mining the Moon = bad.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Earth goes rouge from good old sol due to a common gravitational point shared by the moon. LOL... Starts to happen fairly quickly (less then 2% of total lunar mass).
There are plenty of reasons why the American Revolutionary War was successful, not the least of which was a successful ploy by the early founders of the American Republic taking advantage of a unique political situation between France and Britain where those two countries were nearly evenly matched economically and militarily, and both were seeking territory in North America for expansion of their empires. That is something which Australia and Canada didn't have to face when they had their own independence movements....and the British Government has the previous experience of dealing with America to know that if they didn't try to deal peacefully with those colonies, that similar revolutionary movements could easily happen with significant negative consequences to the British Isles in the long run.
I do hope that if colonies are established on other worlds in the solar system, that the model of sustainable independence that Canada and Australia currently enjoy can be duplicated, rather than going through a much more painful duplication of American independence or what happened in South America and their struggle for independence from Spain.
...is that this resource it high above this gravity well, ready to be exploited for use on the moon and has a tool to get to the planets. To throw it back down to the Earth when we have soooo many alternatives is insane. We have wind, geothermal, solar and other sources - why not save the H3 to move on out to the planets and beyond?
And of course, it *is* high time we learn to control our reprodution. To continue free-birthing will only lead to nightmares of pain.
-What a beautiful night, everything is so perfect, the food, the stars, the moo...what the fuck? (the moon displaying a scrolling marquee: If You See Something, Say Something Call 1-888-NYC SAFE | New York Lottery: "Hey, you never know" Today's winning numbers are...)
The United States' founding stands out as a rather large and violent example...
A more recent, and much more violent, example is China. Both mainland China and Taiwan were much more violent than what happened in all of the Americas. Up until the Chinese revolution there was no united China as there is today. Instead there were different independent nations. For instance Tibet, Tibet was an independent nation that had a defense agreement with the Chinese. As for Taiwan, when the Chinese Nationalist invaded the island of Formosa some 2 million Chinese subjugated 20 million Formosans. Formosans had their own Holocaust, 28 February 1947 wherein many thousands were massacred by Chiang's Kuomintang, KMT.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The reason the USA is in the "oil" trouble it has now is do to idiotic environmental laws. No new refineries since the 70's, can't drill for oil in our own back yard, etc... The line from an old bumper sticker comes to mind. "Freeze to death in the dark you environmentalist bastards!"
Just fucking die
Stay the fuck off the moon, shit stains.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard before your massive wall of text. But not really.
Gamertag: WyleType
When British prisons were getting over-crowded, prisoners were transported. Until America politely indicated they wanted no further convicts in the late eighteenth century, they were sent there. But having lost these colonies, Great Britain continued to pile up with prisoners no-one knew what to do with. So they decided to develop new colonies in an unknown land: Australia. The convicts made the land hospitable to future settlers, and guaranteed assistance to early ones. Today, Australia is an advanced western nation with many natural resources to offer the rest of the world.
American prisons are currently over-crowded with victims of the War on Drugs. Although it would be far simpler to simply decriminalise marijuana and offer rehabilitation and diversionary/work programs to users of harmful drugs, it doesn't seem like that is going to happen any time soon. My suggestion is therefore the colonisation and economic development of the Moon.
Criminals sentenced to a term of, say, six or more years for non-violent crimes will have the option of or be compelled to take transport to the moon. Initial transportees will work on performing limited terraforming so that people can do most of the work without needing to wear spacesuits all the time. Researchers and scientists, prison guards, medical and religious personel and other enterprising people will go up as free settlers and the earliest reasonable opportunity. Eventually, the Moon base will be as self-sufficient as any human society and may choose to form a nation independent of the United States.
The advantages are manifold: People who shouldn't really be in prison are taken out of the system and set to work, giving us something back. They're not free of course, because they can't (legally) return to Earth, but it's better than nothing. The technology to develop space travel and colonisation techniques will be necessarily developed at a faster rate that we are currently inclined to. Because we're obviously not really at a point where this is an easy task to perform, it will be expensive: This means other expensive excursions (such as the war in Iraq) will no longer be financially viable and America can get back to doing stuff that matters. The economic development will arrest this current decline America is undergoing and ensure it remains one of the Earth's—and indeed the world's—superpowers for a long time to come. And of course, we get all of the resources the moon has to offer. And of course, it needn't be one-sided: A nation like China or a bloc like the EU might choose to engage America in a second space race and construct other moon bases for their own use.
(Don't you love the sort of thing you read on the Internet?)
Look out!
dedicate little portion of their economy but it will still be billions of dollars that most other first world nations can't afford: because we have other things in priority such as taking care of poverty and improving welfare.
Ah, China is dealing with poverty and improving general welfare of the Chinese. The economic booms in China is making a lot of Chinese's lives better. Unfortunately what hasn't happened yet is an opening of Chinese politics.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Of people fucking around with -anything- on the moon. You want mess around with stuff in space? Hit up an asteroid, or go to Mars, but don't fuck with the moon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are people in power who, literally, would rather let food rot in a warehouse while there people starve then feed their people.
That's the problem, why so many go hungry, because of politics. A good example of this I like to use is Zimbabwe in Africa. It used to be that the country was the breadbasket of Africa. Zimbabwian farmers grew enough food to feed the population and still had plenty of produce left to export. Food was the country's main foreign exchange earner. However once Robert Mugabe came to power as Zimbabwe's president he forced all of the white farmers off their farms and gave them to his cronies and supporters. None of these people knew how to farm so the farms went to waste. Now Zimbabwe is a basket case and has to have aid in feeding the population by importing food.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The "Green" faction wanted more terraforming while the "Red" faction wanted to preserve Mars as it was. "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars". An excellent trilogy.
I really don't think many environmentalists will care about the moon. To me environmentalism is just the proper maintenance of our one and only life support system. Where are we going to go if we screw this planet up? Certainly not to the moon.
India and China are another issue, but both countries are quickly becoming industrialized as well, and going through many of the transition issues that affected North America and Europe in the 19th Century.... and surprisingly dealing with the issues in a much shorter period of time as well. Assuming that the prevailing attitude toward children hits these two countries, I would expect at least those two countries, who represent over 2 billion people, will also be eventually experiencing a population decline or even collapse of their own making. So where is this huge growth of population going to be coming from? Polynesia?
Yea, China's population growth is slowing down. I read in a study by 2050 it's expected there will be more seniors in China than there are young in China. Part of this is because of the one child policy however as in India people are having less children because their economic and educational situations are improving. In India because people have better opportunities for education and employment more men and women are holding off on getting married. As for where population growth is still going strong it's mostly in Africa and the Middle East. The economic possibilities aren't as good in these places, and in the Middle East women don't enjoy the same rights as men. Because of AIDS the African population growth rate is slowing down but even then the population is still expected to grow to over 1 billion people by 2020.
most of Texas *IS* inhabitable, with generally plenty of fresh water (lately even too much of that) and plenty of empty space for cities to grow and expand
Now this is wrong. There is not enough fresh water in Texas. With the current population of Texas the Edwards Aquifer, which provides a lot of the water in Texas, is being pumped faster than the water can be replenished. The Oglala Aquifer, the largest in Texas running from Wyoming and South Dakota to Texas, is also seeing water levels dropping. And some of what's left is being poisoned.
Also aquifers all over the world are being drained faster than they can be refilled.
Should there be a Law?
"Corn is a horrible source for ethanol..."
Regarding fuel, YES. But, damn, I do like my corn likker[sic]!
Okay, my natural smartass need has been satisfied...sorry!
I like your style. I would have went with '+1 informative', but that doesn't seem enough here.
You make some valid points (with reference links) that are relevant to the discussion. Bonus Points! (sadly, this seems the exception lately-
The two things that caused me to reply are:
There was also a political/cultural aspect to the 1934 law aimed against immigrants from our southern border. The movie (various titles, but I saw it labeled as 'Reefer Madness') http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028346/ "Tell Your Children' helped get this law passed to a small degree.
The whole "Oh NO!-We're gonna be exposed to sin and corruption and fall into Hell" mindset of the masses keeps us from utilizing hemp as a resource. Back then, and still today.
Okay, here's a better link:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6696582420128930236(it's now in the public domain-Yay!) Pay particular attention to th scrolling text that 'announces the movie'. They admit to 'blowing it out of proportion' to get the public's attention to this new menace being brought across the border by Mexicans, and the cool aspects of the use of this new terror was being espoused by the popular jazz musicians of the day! The Horror! The Shame! The Idiocy!
Maybe I played too much CyberPunk back when, but it seems to be turning to a corporate-run world more and more. Hhmmmmm....Solo or Runner?....
The general public doesn't realise that hemp (as grown for rope-making, fiber, etc.) has no significant THC content. It may be related to marijuana(so are hops), but it it not the same thing. The US gov't. has managed/subsidised many hemp fields just for rope(IIRC it started during WW2), and as a teenager I found one and sampled the crop. UGHH!...not worth the effort- I doubt a human could smoke enough of this stuff to feel even a mild buzz, much less get high!
Hell, it's said that George Washington grew hemp! I would not be surprised if he did. Back in his day easy to work fiber for rope-making was surely marketable. I imagine his smoking habits were more into tobacco than his hemp.
Bach to the point, hemp would be a good addition to the biofuel solution. Easy to grow, prolific, and high yield if cultivated.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I find it odd that AC finally concludes that Mr Smith suffers from technophobia rather than fear of even mightier capitalists. Given that he writes for the Guardian it would be an obvious choice.
Once a company has a foothold on the moon it would have the potential to grow much faster and further than anyone could on earth.
What might limit its growth initially is the fact that the customers would still be on earth. However, once there is a sufficiently large population of customers in space, earths importance would wane I guess.
There you would have social issues which could easily dwarf any perceived social problems we have nowadays with globalization.
Any entrepeneur would have potential access to weapons of mass destruction (i.e. throwing rocks) and they would be politically safer too (no fallout).
Ultimately things probably wouldn't get that far since companies still need a societies cooperation to work at all, what will certainly happen is that the amount of energy one person can control, will increase and the ability to do so will be less evenly distributed than nowadays.
All that will let the earth become a world among many and its resources will be limited compared what is possible in space.
After all I think the future is bright. I imagine that the world could become united in the process, much as bickering old Europe has become in the twentieth century.
Let me finally remind you of president Reagan wishing for an alien invasion
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KhUmCthFK0k
Our best bet to get there is to be those aliens.
Je me souviens.
As much as I like the idea, there are very serious obstacles to the concept of He3 fusion, besides the obvious issue of finding He3. Remember that the advantage of the D+He3->p+He4 reaction is that it does not produce neutrons. Well, even this isn't absolutely true because Tritium is also produced in the process and interacts with D to produce neutrons.
1) At first aneutronic fusion looks good, because the vessel doesn't have to withstand the dreadful 14MeV neutrons of "standard" D+T fusion reactions (which is a very serious issue for a potential future reactor). On the other hand, neutrons have the advantage that they penetrate the metals, so that the energy gets actually deposited in the volume of the metal surrounding the plasma. In D+He3 fusion, the wall surface has to be able to handle all the energy and as of today, there are no materials able to withstand such a thermal load, not by a long shot.
2) The cross section of the D+He3 reaction peaks at fuel temperatures much higher than the D+T reaction. This means that the ions will have to be much hotter (about 100keV, IIRC). Heating the fuel at these temperatures wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the plasma is going to radiate like crazy, through bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation essentially. Calculations indicate that it's actually gonna immediately radiate all of its energy, a phenomenon known as thermal collapse.
There are other objections as well, but quite frankly, these two are nasty enough to keep looking at D+T for the moment, even though it's less clean and comes with problems of its own.
"Reefer Madness" was a bunch of lies made to induce fear in people. For instance it makes marijuana smokers as being driven to violence, however there is no scientific data to support this. Actually what science evidence there is show it has the opposite affect, it calms people so they only want to relax. That's why the Soviet Union made it illegal, they couldn't afford people who only wanted to hang out.
(it's now in the public domain-Yay!)
Another movie, also in the public domain, on hemp is the movie "Hemp For Victory" which the US government made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the WWII war effort. The current president Bush's dad, former president Bush Sr may have had his life saved by hemp. Bush Sr was in a plane that was shot down in the Pacific by the Japanese and he bailed out, the cords from the parachute he used may of had been made from hemp. Hemp was used for ropes as well as cords. Something surprised me when I looked at the Archives page, it has "Reefer Madness" as the fourth, last, movie listed. I've got the link bookmarked, bookmarked it several years ago at least, and never saw "Reefer Madness" listed before. Maybe because it's now in the public domain.
They admit to 'blowing it out of proportion' to get the public's attention to this new menace being brought across the border by Mexicans,
I can see it now, Thomas Jefferson would of been rolling in his grave when the movie came out. TJ was a farmer who grew hemp on his farm, as many other of the USA's Founding Fathers did. Oh, I see you mention George Washington, yeap he grew it. TJ once wrote that there should be a law requiring farmers to grow hemp, but as he knew such a law would deny farmers their rights he never proposed such a law.
Bach to the point, hemp would be a good addition to the biofuel solution. Easy to grow, prolific, and high yield if cultivated.
Yeap, it is and would be good for that.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Couple of things come to mind from my superconductivity research work:
- Helium 4 is harvested from natural gas, mostly in the US (80% of world's annual production) and Algeria. It is quite expensive, so most people who work lots of it use recovery lines.
- Helium 3 is several times more expensive than Helium 4, since it is a very rare gas and must be obtained via neutron bombardment of a low-atomic-weight target (usually Lithium).
- A major application of both gases are as cooling agents. With liquid helium 4 you can reach temperatures as low as 4.2 K (with low pressure even smaller temperatures). Superconducting magnets are usually cooled with liquid helium and the quest for high(er) temperature superconductors is motivated by the possible replacement of the coolant (liquid nitrogen, 77 K).
- With a helium 3 cryostat (low pressure helium 3) you get about 300 mK.
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_3
reason defies logic
Isn't it wonderful what the Guardian finds to worry about?
They could be worrying about literacy in the UK. I think a third of school leavers can't read now. But of course, the Guardian is the house organ of the Teachers Union, so we won't write about that.
Or they could be worrying about hospital infections. in which we lead the world. In Maidstone, nurses first told patients to shit in their beds with no bedpans, then left them lying in it. Amazingly enough, this produced an outbreak of disease. I say an outbreak. It went on for several years, but the Guardian didn't notice. No, it thinks the health service is the envy of the world and if all the cleaners worked for Unison, everything would be fine.
Or it could worry about democracy. We elected a government which has a huge majority in the Parliament on a tiny minority of the votes cast. Where was the Guardian then?
Or it could worry about civil rights. We have had the most sustained attack on civil liberties since the time of Charles I in recent years. The Guardian will tell you to vote for the party that's been managing it.
Now the Guardian, with its head firmly bent over and upwards, is worried about saving the environment of the Moon!
It gives new and deeper meaning to the phrase "out of touch".
It's fair to point out the apparent (miraculous discoveries notwithstanding) lack of life on the moon, but there is an excellent reason not to disturb the moon's environment with mining until we've had some time to go there and do the basic science, much like doing archaeological preservation on Earth - if we want to learn more about the conditions of the solar system and the universe at large, the best bet early on is doing tons of science to examine the history of the moon in detail. If care isn't taken in development of the moon, history suggests, we will have cause to regret it once we do start thinking in terms of that scientific cause.
Check out Gonnick's Cartoon Guide to Physics. I actually used it as an alternative textbook when I taught high-school physics. It was better than the county-issued one because (a) it had no errors in it, and (b) it was highly accessible. (It also covered almost all of the physics I was required to teach for the entire year.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Does anyone else find themselves wondering if the original poster understands the meaning of the word "polemic", which means "a strong verbal attack"? The article seems to me like a thoughtful discussion of the changing motivations behind the latest round of the space race, with a throwaway comment at the end wondering if environmentalists will contain about mining on the moon. Where's the "strong attack"?
the guys that really drank the most and imbibed the most are now all Republicans
...and by the way, when was the last time anyone saw a responsible Republican? There certainly haven't been any in office within my lifetime.
Living proof that marijuana causes brain damage!
Will cost a small percentage of the Iraq war.
http://nlspropulsion.net/
"perhaps I should of finished "
It's "have", not "of".
Only with the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and maybe Argentina. Every other colony, it was the people that were there, reclaiming independence. OK, technically, that list should include Liberia, Rhodesia, and South Africa, too, since they were started as nations by colonists, before the pre-origin natives retook power.
And maybe, there is a quibble about certain Greek colonies, or Carthage wrt Phoenicia, where the colony eventually surpasses its parent, but in those cases, the migrants lost their original citizenship before they actually founded the new colonies.
Anyway, I think that enough people in charge will be able to read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress to avoid that. It might turn out like the last part of Asimov's The Gods Themselves, at worst.
I forgot to set it from "HTML Formatted" to "Plain Old Text" but then again it seems even more appropriately nutty that way.
He was correct about the tidal forces being caused by the moon. The rotation of the earth has more to do with weather than the tides. http://www.princeton.edu/~pccm/outreach/scsp/water_on_earth/tides/science/causes.htm
As with all other territory, the Moon will belong to whoever can get there and defend their right to hold onto it.
The growth differential between the US and China is 6-7%. There is general agreement that China this differential will shrink not grow. The Chinese economy is currently 1/6 the size of the US: $2G vs. $13G. Where do you get your math?
I just watched a US astronaut conduct the most amazing repair mission ever attempted on our 1000000lb space station. China has launched 2 short space missions since 2003 and won't launch a 3rd until 2008. I don't think we need to worry. China is as far from a manned mission to the moon as the US is from a manned mission to Mars.
an ill wind that blows no good
How much energy do you have to put in to get energy back out. Compare solar and oil. Solar you have to put a load of energy in to refine the silicon, grow crystals then manufacture the cells. The energy you get back out may ultimately be more than you put in, but it's a long slow process. Oil, you drill a hole and suck. What it means is that a much smaller percentage of the economy needs to be involved with an oil economy than is required under a solar economy.
With oil, the return is something like 100:1, reducing as the oil gets scarcer and you have to use lower quality supplies. With solar, it starts out negative and only gradually becomes positive.
http://www.environmenthamilton.org/reports/oilEra_spec040918.htm
The EROEI numbers are questionable, the nuclear industry for instance, claim approx 95:1.
The EROEI numbers indicate the proportion of the economy and society which has to be involved in energy production. If the proportion is 1:1 then 100% of the economy has to be involved in finding and exploiting energy sources.
Deleted
The idea of peoples of one nation, or even a nations sponsored activity, going to a "new world" and reaping benefits from the resources available there is not new. It has happened every time mankind has expanded somewhere new. Why should Mozambique, for example, have any input on whether Britain, the US, or China go mine the asteroids or Luna?
.... yup people would need new jobs. Would coal miners be willing to switch from mining coal to working in a factory? I'd say a good portion of them would.
"you can bet the profits aren't going to be distributed very widely."
You can bet they will be. Just not in the form of "here you did nothing to make this happen, have some money", which is what you seem to be talking about. The "profits" of the US (for example) going to Luna, mining some He3 and achieving fusion reactors that have an energy cost on par with today's energy, or even slightly more, are tremendous and are far more than mere dollars, assuming there would be much profit there.
Americans would have "clean" fusion energy. Which would mean (in theory) that we'd have far fewer regulations against an energy source that we can expand without "damage to the ecosphere". If American coal plants were cut in half, or eliminated, by being replaced with He3 fueled fusion reactors, then by simple and accurate deduction, the world benefits through reduced pollution.
It is even plausible that such a move may bring more manufacturing into the US. There would be a shift from coal mining and use to
At first, I'd expect these new factories to be more Lunar equipment factories. Increase and solidify the infrastructure, providing a gradual shift. With this increased capacity would come the ability to export the technology and He3. With that would be a continued decrease on dirty, or believed dirty, terrestrial power plants.
A cheap an abundant energy source (such as theoretically He3) could aid in solving the looming water shortage by powering desalination plants along the coasts.
Historically speaking, it would be a bad idea for countries not playing a part in it, to have any say whatsoever. It builds a false consensus that is then used as an appeal to the mob. It becomes "bad" because people who have neither the capacity nor the desire to go mine/occupy the moon say it is. Of course those who actually do benefit will do so. That is why those who can not often gather together to prevent those who can.
It would be like kids fresh out of junior high school banding together to prevent college graduates with physics from taking jobs as scientists. They can't have those jobs, but know that the graduates can, so they create an appearance of right that people should not be physicists.
Of course, their minds will change when it becomes possible for them. In the meantime, if successful, they would have missed out on advances and improvements made by those whom they prevented from taking those jobs.
Additionally, the US (or China) obtaining a source of energy that would be abundant and cheap enough to replace most of their oil consumption should in theory improve international relations by making the presence of oil a non-issue. If oil is driving US foreign policy as many claim, then the elimination of it as a critical resource should drastically alter said foreign policy. If it is not the driver of US foreign policy, and said policy does not change, then perhaps we will get closer to the actual reasons instead of assumed reasons. I'm not saying which is which, I'm not in the State Department and so not "know". However, the prospect for an improvement (international relations change ALL the time) due to elimination of oil dependence would be very high.
Finally, such an achievement (He3 fusion), would likely increase the energy available to mankind. Virtually every analysis of historical trends shows that as energy use increases, quality of life increases, and secondary damage decreases. The use of energy can not increase without an increase in the availability of energy. Think of the lives that could be saved in cold snaps from having more energy for heating, or the decrease fo heat related deaths due to air conditioning.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
In fact, if someone really wanted to get the jump on a He3 economy, they could start shipping a couple of tons of it back down to Earth as freebies for whoever was experimenting with reactors. Eventually someone's going to crack the method, and their testing will go a lot faster if they have a lot of test fuel. All of a sudden, the world has a pretty frickin' powerful energy source that's relatively clean, and whoever's got the moon-mining operation going is the sole provider.
Of course, this will inevitably lead to a lunar invasion by some nutjob national leader or coalition. But it's pretty damn hard to invade a planetoid that's now covered with self-replicating sensor stations, anti-invasion gear, and info-hardened against reprogramming and viral injections.
Betcha absolutely no-one thinks of forming a coalition to, y'know, just not use He3 fuel. Especially if the lunar forces start landing freebie samples randomly all over the planet.
Might make a good book. I can imagine a scene where the status of the not-so-secret invading forces is continually updated in real time via a multilanguage Eat-At-Joe's scrolling sign across the entire visible face of the moon.
Conservation is important, but it is not enough on its own. Our requirement for energy keeps increasing despite conservation. We need better, cleaner ways of making the energy we require.
And why does energy demands increase? Because people buy more and more inefficient energy vampires, me too. My stereo, dvd player, and TV constantly draw energy even when turned off. Therefore I plugged them all into a power strip with it's own power switch, I can then turn them all off at the same tyme. That is conservation, though it would be more conservative not having them admittedly. Another step of conservation people can do as I have is to replace most of their incandescent light bulbs with efficient compact florescent lights. The CFLs I replaced the incandescent lights with only use 1/4 of the power the incandescent bulbs did. And I only have lights on I need, when I leave one room and don't plan on returning I turn the lights off in that room.
As for cleaner energy, theres plenty that can be developed. In the US Rocky Mountains there's enough potential wind power to supply the lower 48 states with electricity. Other states also have good wind potential. Several years ago while they had rolling blackouts in California, there was a wind farm that sat idle in CA. Why? Because the power cabled needed to deliver the electricity to users wasn't there. Also California is a good state for solar power, as is AZ, MN, TX, and FL.
You don't understand the nuclear waste issue. It's far too complex to explain fully here. Needless to say, there are useful things that can be done with it that hysterical "environmentalists" have made politically impossible.
You're the one who doesn't understand, or refuses to accept it, there is no need for any new nuclear power plants. And the ones currently running can be closed. I'm glad environmentalists have done what they can to make nuclear power plants hard, they aren't needed!!!
FalconShould there be a Law?
this is a disingenuous cop-out and you know it.
What's a cop-out is saying nuclear power is needed when it isn't.
finally, everything that makes our society modern comes from mining, either ore or pretrochemicals
despite the demand of 6 billion people for all these mined goods the planet is still here and beautiful, and many more people are worried about logging than mining.
I went up the tread to see where I said the above in bold yet I don't see it. Is it something you're making up I said?
So in closing, if you are so opposed to mining as the bane of the planet, then you need to send everything you own which includes plastic or metal to the recycling plant and go live with the amish, or cut it with the hypocrisy.
Who's being hypocritical, someone stating facts or someone making things up? Plastics coming from mines? You are either ignorant or making things up. Though plastics are now made from petrochemicals this hasn't always being true. Prior to the mid 1930s, when DuPont was granted a patent on making plastic from petro, nylon then rayon later, plastics were made from plants such as trees. The cellulose in trees gave the name Cellophane, a plastic. Cellophane is what was used to wrap stuff like sandwiches, the saran wrap of yesteryear. Kodak the camera company had a process whereby they used plant cellulose to make the plastic for film. Hemp was also a source of cellulose, as well as other things. Henry Ford designed and built a vehicle on his Iron Mountain Estate in the '30s that used hemp in the construction and was made into fuel for the vehicle. In the end I am not opposed to mining but seeing as how there is no need for nuclear power plants there's no need to mine uranium!
FalconShould there be a Law?