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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."
GPP was not a retard, examine yourself before calling others names pls.
Sigs cause cancer.
I risk going off-topic here, but people whom most would describe as 'rock huggers' exist already. They wish to prevent rock climbers from climbing on certain rock faces.
Rock climbers use 'chalk' that prevents hands from being sweaty, but it has the unfortunate side effect of putting white patches wherever there are handholds on the rock face. Also, one method of climbing a rock wall involves having metal pitons drilled into the rock. Some groups lobby to have rock climbers stop climbing in areas, or disallow them from placing pitons.
So I guess the argument in this case with the moon isn't about lifeforms, it is more about aesthetics; similar to the 'rock huggers' I have described. But I don't see how mass mining of the moon would have a visual effect on the moon's appearance for a very very long time.
Actually, wrong. In the long run, entropy is your friend. This is because the maximum amount of entropy any given volume of space can contain is determined by the size of said area (to be exact, it is determined by the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole filling said volume). As long as entropy is less than this amount, it keeps growing, driving all kinds of interesting systems - such as yourself - as it goes.
If the universe was static, entropy would eventually reach its maximum, leading to heat death of the universe and the cessation of all interesting events. But the universe is not static, it is expanding. Consequently, the maximum amount of entropy the universe as a whole can contain is also increasing. If the expansion goes on forever, so does the growth of entropy and all that it drives.
In other words, in an expanding universe there will always be useful energy sources, by the virtue of it expanding.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
While Sheepweevil makes essentially the same point, you could make the argument that restricting industry on the moon is good from the perspective of preserving natural monuments. There are a lot of sites right here on Earth that have no direct economic value, but that, it could be argued, have their own intrinsic, non-economic value. That notion of intrinsic value tends to sit very poorly with those who define all external value as economic, but conservation and preservation on purely economic measures has always been dicey. (i.e., if you tried to make an argument for restricting whaling based on the grounds that if you killed all of them, there wouldn't be a whaling industry any more, the moment someone comes along with a paper demonstrating that a higher return on investment can be achieved by killing all the whales now and sinking part of the profits into something else, you're hosed. An argument for saving whales has to assign them intrinsic value separate from their economic use.)
Of course, if I take off the devil's advocate hat, I might make the more prosaic point that there are a whole frikkin' lot of technological issues that have to be solved to get to the point where having this argument even makes sense. It's easy to pile onto Andrew Smith, the author of the anti-plundering column, but I'm not giving any kudos to Mark Whittington, the guy who wrote the response and managed to get Slashdot to put this on the front page. Smith's column is actually very short and doesn't really talk about "saving the moon's environment." Whittington is by and large using this as an excuse to trot out hoary old libertarian-crank* nonsense about how environmentalists are all anti-technology luddites who won't be happy unless we return to the Dark Ages.
*Before the libertarians leap on this, I do distinguish between "libertarian" and "libertarian-crank." Drawing the distinction is beyond the scope of this footnote.
Ethanol is a horrid fuel, especially when made from corn
Corn is a horrible source for ethanol, I oppose corn for ethnaol. A better is sugarcane, but even better for making ethanol is Switchgrass. Ah, perhaps I should of finished your post before replying as I see you say sugar cane and switchgrass are better.
I don't know if Branson is concentrating on ethanol or biofuels in general. Unlike ethanol biodiesel can be made from more sources. When Rudolph Diesel designed his engine he designed it to run on vegetable oil, when he showed the engine during the World Expo in Paris he used peanut oil but he also demonstrated running it with hemp oil. And biodiesel can be made from used cooking oil, instead of used oil being a waste biodiesel could be made from it. Wllie Nelson started, invested in, a plant making biodiesel and formed Willie Nelson Biodiesel. In the 1930s Henry Ford designed and build a vehicle on his Iron Mountain Estate using a hemp, aka marijuana, based fuel.
Actually this was part of the reason hemp was made illegal via the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Prior to the passage of the act scientific research showed hemp was an excellent industrial plant. Besides fuel hemp was good for making plastics and paper. MIT published a study showing an acre of hemp could produce more fiber for paper than an acre of forest. The use of hemp for fuel interfered with Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Using hemp for paper meant William Hearst's, a big California newspaper publisher who owned thousands of acres of forest, would see a loss in clear cutting forest for paper pulp. Then in the mid '30s Du Pont received a patent on making plastics from petroleum, so again hemp was seen as another threat. Andrew Mellon, a major funder of Du Pont, had his nephew-in-law Harry J Anslinger appointed as the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics where they were able to push to have hemp made illegal.
FalconShould there be a Law?