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What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get There?
MarkWhittington writes "For the first time in over thirty five years, the Moon has become the next frontier. The United States has committed to returning human astronauts to the Moon by the end of the next decade. China has hinted that it intends to do this also. A variety of countries, including the United States and China, but also India, Europe, and Japan, have either sent robotic probes into lunar orbit or are on the verge of doing so." Contribute your favorite moon ideas below; I'd like to see it used as the set to film The Moon is a Harsh Mistress .
Strip-mine it
Kill each other for the land
Carve it up and eat it.
The Chinese can eat with sticks.
death ray?
Bring crackers and wine? FP. =P
America can, should, must, and will blow up the moon. The time is now. Children are our future.
... with American pride."
"You know you can't mess
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Frickin laser beam?
Call me critical but I think if you don't actually have anything new to say on a topic then you shouldn't write about it. And people shouldn't post the link to Slashdot.. did you even read it first?
YAWN
How we know is more important than what we know.
It looked better in the brochure.
What else?
will serve the same purpose in the near future that it has in the past: a nationalist chest thumping exercise
1. it demonstrates to other nations technological prowess. don't mess with us, we have the tech to go to the moon
2. it demonstrates to citizens how wonderful the usa/ china/ india is. they forget their earthly concerns
there is absolutely no other valid purpose besides that, for the short term
as for the long term, i won't pretend to know there might not be a more long term purpose, if you don't pretend to know of a specious long term purpose
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We've got crackers!!!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Claim my land of course!!!
http://www.moonshop.com/
We'd finally get real Nymphos from outer space
The raw materials are mostly there (silica, aluminium) and the energy requirements to get smething to geostationary orbit around the earth are about 3% of a launch from earth. Sure, there's not enough volatiles to launch economicly using conventional rockets, but not having an atmosphere means most of your launch velocity can come from a linear acelerator.
Of course, this kind of thing would need serious investment, but you could use such a network to reder most earth based power generation obsolete, and you'd get a nice global death ray system thrown in for free.
What do the presidential candidates say about it? I'm tired of ten year plans when at best a president's going to get eight years in the hot seat.
Do either McCain or Obama have policies about space exploration in general and the moon commitment in particular?
I am a leaf on the wind
Same thing we do every night, Pinky - pillage. Duh.
This!
That is, after we fight off the Nazis that inhabit it [http://www.ironsky.net/site/]
mining just thing of what we can find there.
for a travel brochure enticing eco-tourists to the Arizona desert.
Or was that Roswell, NM? I can't keep these straight.
It's ... OK, never mind.
Seriously, at this point there is no purpose to going to the moon for the US. We don't have the tech (or the budget) to set up a self-sufficient base, much less a colony. The transport costs for supplies are too expensive. Personnel would have to be rotated off--at additional cost of money, resource, and risk to their safety.
What we need to do is develop and send some form of unmanned, containerized, modular base, that can autonomously set itself up and start producing power, oxygen, and water. Once that is in place, we have a considerable step towards a self-sufficient base, and even a first "baby-step" towards a colony.
If we're not planning on having people live there eventually, then what's the damn point?
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Mining, Manufacturing and Settlements. And I'll volunteer to be a settler.
OK, if a He3 reactor comes online - fine, let's mine the moon. But we sure as hell can't live there, it has 1/6th the gravity of earth. Human beings are not adapted to 1/6G, we are adapted to 1G. If there is material on the moon worth mining, then people won't do it - machines will. We can make machines that would work in 1/6G far easier than we could adapt ourselves to live in 1/6G.
The moon is a canard. As is living on Mars.
I predict that within 500 years humanity will have spread throughout the solar system. But we won't live on a single planet or planetoid. Nor will we "teraform" any planets or moons in our solar system. We will instead *build* our habitats and live within them in orbit around various planets and moons which have materials we happen to need.
I could imagine a large rotating space station in orbit around Titan, dropping a nanotube straw to the methane atmosphere and/or oceans for energy. Or we might live in orbit around Earth, Venus, or Mercury in order to extract abundant sunlight for energy conversion.
Once we get off of Earth's gravity well, why in God's name would we build another society within another gravity well? Space is where we should live. And in space, we should build habitats suitable to our evolutionary history. And once we can do that, the notion that we waste our time looking for "habitable planets" becomes a canard. Our only interest is to look for stars and planets with enough energy to support our biological needs.
. . . animals on the moon. Russia, China, and the EU could probably get a person on the moon in a decade or so but let's see them get a rhino or crocodile up there in a special space suit. Eventually they might counter with China sending a panda, Russia sending a Siberian tiger, and the EU will going classy with a fancy horse or something but then we bust out the space shark.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
The far side of the moon could be the perfect place to build an array of radio telescopes. With the whole mass of the moon between the telescopes and the Earth, it would be well shielded from all the RF interference that our modern civilization sprays in all directions.
Matt Groening already decided this for us; why are we even debating this?
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
1) mining helium 3 currently there are no viable fusion reactors to use any of it though
2) space telescopes
3) forget the moon, visit an asteroid instead- the moon requires that rockets carry much more fuel for laeaving the moon than an asteroid, also the moon is deficient in volatiles in comparison to many asteroids/comets
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Simpsons^W Mr. Show did it first.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I want us to set up a large colony, or as large as we can at the current time. Get a biosphere or two setup. I'm sure I read that there are machines that can convert moon rock into a variety of materials, not the least is oxygen and concrete. Large habitats chock full of people would suit me fine. Moon City One sounds pretty cool to me. I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime, but I hope I'm wrong.
The first pioneers will be whalers, but eventually it will be a theme park with hookers and blackjack.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Lob lumps of moon-crete at the unwitting earthlings below. Muah-hah-hah-haaah!
We should commit to actually developing a colony, rather than these expensive tech demonstrations. Treat it like the south pole stations. Send 50 people and a shitload of supplies and raw materials, and Good Luck.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
[X] Blow it up.
We should forget about the lawyers and bureaucrats they are nothing but a waists of Oxygen.
back-up genetic material and other important data in case something happens to the original
This is a serious suggestion, not a troll. There is no life on the moon, nothing much worth preserving (aside from the odd monolith) so it would hardly be much of a "loss". Might as well extract as much benefit as we can from it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the rainforests, but the moon is essentially a rock.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We need to return to the moon so that those savvy people with the foresight to purchase land can finally lay claim to it.
Let's not go to the moon. It is a silly place.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Why is there any question of this?
We should go there so we can build 108" flat screen TVs.
...we'll learn stuff that will turn out to be useful in really unlikely, impossible-to-predict ways.
Pretty much the same answer as with any pure science initiative, really. Remember: economics may come and go, but knowledge is the only investment that will pay dividends for eternity.
Put some people up there and figure out how to keep them alive and well, with less and less assistance from us down here.
There are two great issue with being an intelligent life-form. 1) Humans are constantly terrified that some greater intelligence will harm them (god and aliens in that order). 2) Continuation of #1, we don't have any slightly lesser intelligences which we ourselves can lord over. I think #2 might help explain our problem with #1.
So, the answer is simple. We plant the moon with primitive life, which we have specially modified to encourage mutation. We then carefully craft that life until it begins to form intelligence, at which point we leave well enough alone, but still monitor them. The moment they begin to ask the big questions, like is there any other life in space, we show up and lord over them how much more advanced we are. That's pretty much my plan.
It is the perfect set, don't let it go to waste.
so the moon can never appear as a crescent again. HAHA Muslims.
Hey, we're only a couple of decades late, but store all of our nuclear waste on the moon, then it can blow up and leave orbit, just like on tv!!! LOL.
Should products and services be provided under threat of violence? This include products and services provided by NASA.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Once we get there we should hurl large rocks at people.
What do you think we should do?
I would love to install a giant kinetic energy weapon up there and be done with nukes.
We just had the item about building the lenses on site, now it's even more obvious than it already was. Use the moon for the next generation deep space telescopes; its the perfect platform from them, and simper to manage than free flying telescopes.
Wait a few months.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Big burned in sign:
"Eat at Joe's"
Cover thousands of square Km with solar collectors, and laser the power back to Earth (at about 10KW:m^2) to a floating collector at sea, then over to my undersea grotto lair. Leave my logo carved out in the collector surface in bare moondust, so my power corp is advertised globally every night (well, about half the nights).
--
make install -not war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
Poster suggested Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a movie - not a bad idea - but The Menace From Earth has a great cavern where people fly with wings in the low gravity!!! The plot's a teenage romance story so Hollywood would probably need to dumb it down. (but would that be 'Lunawood'?)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
You know in case we blew the earth... redundancy is good.
Mathieu Pagé
The always clever Stanislaw Lem wrote a book called "Peace On Earth" in which world peace is achieved... by moving the war to the moon.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
One thing we could use the moon for is PRISONS. Put
the sick evil bastards there. One good reason for
that is you can STOP taking away MY freedoms because
of them. Thank you...
PARTY HARD!
The Moon is American, goddammit!
expandfairuse.org
Set up a moonbase... call it Alpha, let the atomic piles blow up on it launching the moon out of orbit, and go on a galaxy spanning adventure...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
http://lawactually.blogspot.com/2008/03/google-moon.html
Steal it from the natives.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Why do want to go to the moon? Because the Chinese are going?
... but it's otherwise an utterly worthless dick-swinging contest.
Let's see... why did we want to go last time? Oh, because the Russians were going. Aha.
Putting a man on the moon may be inspiring and make for great geopolitical drama, and it's fun to touch the moon rock at the Air and Space Museum
It's extremely expensive to get there, and the fact that we still have no idea what to do with it (as evidenced by this very article!!) suggests it ain't worth it. Until there's some compelling economic or scientific reason for a moon visit, I believe it's simply a boondoggle for the things-we-can-do-by-wasting-enough-fossil-fuel industry.
My bicyles
really... as a matter of fact it's all dark.
I think we should get Pink Floyd up there for a concert before its too late.
If there's any R&D forbidden on Earth you could do it on the Moon. Hopefully you could fund the R&D with money made from mining the moon's abundant supplies of ... eh ... what's there a lot of on the moon that's worth lots of money per kilogram?
Maybe there's oil on the moon... left over from the moon dinosaurs... the moonosaurs?
[signature]
Turn it into a permanent satellite (as in technological)...I'd like to see China shoot down the moon. Too bad you wouldn't always have line of sight...but it's a good "back up." I'm sure we can advance satellite technologies as to cut down on the latency.
you don't think anyone else would have a problem with that?
or say china claims the moon. no one else has a problem with that?
it's one thing to turf war on earth, it is another thing entirely to turf war on a heavenly object all humanity has gazed at since eternity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The article linked about private property on the moon shows that we are likely to fail our test of if we have actually learned anything from our history or not. How (and in some ways if) we explore space will determine our future. I think this is the question of our age and I'm making an IMAX film about this very question with a section detailing what will happen to the moon if current plans are carried out. http://wwww.outsideinthemovie.com/
Hey, when you've been everywhere in the world, why not go off the world?
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Grow weed on the moon. Hydroponic setup with solar panels and some grow lights and we're good to go. Transportation might be a bit expensive....but the low gravity will cause the plant to grow differently, and hence the moon weed, that will get you outta this world.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
"A variety of countries, including . . . Europe" Europe isn't yet one country. . . last time I checked, or is the EU THAT powerful already?
"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." -Asimov
What Shall We Do With the Moon Once We Get There?
... break it.
What we always do with a new toy
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Find a way to turn moon rock into an air tight cement. So we can bring something up there that we could start building dwellings there. Bring plants and trees and a way to make a fish habitat.
Can we burrow under the ground there?
Someone invent a forcefield so that we can keep oxygen in a predetermined area.
2. Inspect the stuff we left there 40 years ago so we know what specs to build to for the next 40 years.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
CHA
This will give us a means of getting things to the moon. We can just keep a shuttle and park it at the elevator to travel back and forth.
Imagine being able to siphon water out of the ocean. Have it collect into a giant ice ball and crash that ice ball into the moon. There you have a source of oxygen AND water...
What if in the center of these ice balls you had a heating device that was solar powered. The heat was distributed JUST enough to keep the center of the ice ball liquid. Thus allowing you to have FISH inside of it. Algae and seaweed inside of it.
I didn't know whales could live on the moon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The real question is: Can US actually afford it this time?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Check out history... it seems like whenever something new is discovered (no, we didn't just discover the moon) it is fought over. While I don't know the specifics of the makeup of the moon's surface, if there is even one natural resource there worth actually going for, the United States will undoubtedly lay claim to it, and attempt to defend that idea, probably with a footprint and an empty shell of a lunar module.
Which brings us back to blowing up the moon, as stated above.
Something witty.
prison?
Want to learn about living in space and develop technologies for it - goto the Moon first! It's taken us this long to decide to go back?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I'd like to see it used as the set to film The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Yeah, because Starship Troopers worked out so well...
I just don't want to live in Colorado when the rocks start falling! (for the uninitiated, a Moon is a Harsh Mistress' reference).
TANSTAAFL!
and use it to get Smith's parents to Mars.
GROK????
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
There's really only one good thing that we should do with the moon:
CHA
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
set up a huge array of mirrors that turns the lit side of the moon into a display surface
Reminds me of Seward's folly. Buy Alaska? What a total waste of money.
Are you trying to imply that there is something worthwhile in Alaska?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
OBVIOUSLY we should open a Starbucks and McDonalds
We should hold the next Olympics there. Politically non-controversial and the likelihood of setting a lot of new world records.
CHA
It better come damn close to being Moonbase Alpha or I'm gonna be seriously pissed off!
Its great to see so many ideas of how the moon could be used for scientific purposes, but the depressing reality is that, when the moon's surface is divvied out, the same thing will happen to it that has happened to all prospective territories. It will be sold to the highest bidder to do with what he or she pleases, which most likely consists of mining the hell out of it, selling it to the not-quite-as-rich-but-still-pretty-damn-wealthy for their entertainment, and generally not using it to its fullest potential. And yes, I understand that there are roadblocks that prevent the moon from being sold, but, looking at the sorry state of certian governments that would stake claim to it, for how much longer will that be the case?
Maybe he's a common purpose / EU minion furthering the federal superstate by such slips.
Though bearing in mind the completely undemocratic way the EU is being built, especially the Lisbon treaty (2005 constitution by another name), perhaps he's just preparing himself or is a time traveller.
The only real reason for lunar operations is industry. Judging what is on the Moon from a few measly soil samples and surface imaging is a joke. We really don't know much of anything about what might be there. We do know that a lot of stuff has impacted on it though. Prospecting will be an early high priority task.
Once people start staying there more than a few days there is going to be a significant degradation in the local vacuum and the moon will start to acquire a tenuous atmosphere. Humans are a contaminant wherever we go. The extraction of lunar O2 will be first and foremost and that is mining plain and simple. Tons of lunar material will have to be processed on a monthly basis leading into the thousands of tons per year. We will create tailiings from this process and they will have to be dealt with. If water is found the same thing will happen there.
You can forget about lunar surface habitats. Unless you are fond of mutation. Living will be a lot like being on a submarine for a long time. The establishment of habitation space that does not require the delivery of hardware from earth will be a prime task. You can expect lots of digging, detonations and surface fracture and pulverization activities. These are all dirty, ugly things best done by people without PhD's. Scientists will be seen as a nuisance for quite a while.
Preparation of a large landing pad area will be also be a high priority as will the manufacture of local roads to suppress dust . The manufacture of many large cisterns for water and waste storage will be a big task too. Water paranoia will be the guiding principle on the moon. It will not be wasted. A complete system for the synthesis, liquifaction and storage of LO2 and LH2 also has to be installed using the decent stages of lunar landers for starts. The synthesis of real soils for lunar agnriculture will also be critical. In short, all the boring stuff that few people even thing about are the top priorities on the moon- not searching for He3.
If we want to do this it will take hundreds of people on the surface at any time and they will have to be there for at least 1 year stints to make it economically digestible. The transport is what eats you alive here. You must compel a moon-centric thought process as soon as is practical. If everyone is looking to earth to bring every damn thing the colony will fail. You must be able to repair and replace everything. Most aerospace technology is not amenable to this at present. There will be an evolution of hardware that works on the moon. High performance stuff that is finicky or prone to failure will be ditched. It is this engine of innovation that will be one of the most valuable things we "discover" on the moon.
As for the far side of the moon being radio quiet- not for long. The L2 point is a valuable location and it needs a telecom relay satellite to talk to it. One of the first things we will put up will be a telecom network in orbit and/or at L1/L2. Exploration of the far side will be a far higher priority than a radio telescope. That means comm, machines with electronics and hence noise. Not that they won't declare some small area to be "radio quiet" .
If we discover industrial scale sources of water on the moon its value as a base will be incredible. It is a bio-safe location for people to work. By that I mean they can live and work without the fear of being irradiated to death. What an astronaut will put up with for a few days is utterly different to what a welder should have to put up with over a two year tour of duty. We need the best welders, mechanics,seamstresses, cooks, farmers, doctors, dentists etc etc to make this work. If it is perceived that working on the moon is a death sentence it will be hard to find good help. Working in high orbit like L2 and L2, while necessary, will be minimized. Those are just the equivalent of runways anyway- not much industry that cannot be automated there.
If we go to the moon with some sort of tou
I think this is what we should do on the Moon over the next 100-200 yrs.
1st Communication Outpost
2nd Small Science Colony
3rd jump Off for further space exploration
4th Mining and/or Waste Disposal
5th General Colonization
try reading comprehension next time
pro tip: it has something to do with claiming alaska, as an allegory to the moon
thanks!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Once we get there, the first thing we have to do is kick out the natives!
What the hey. Why break a successful pattern?
Seriously, did /. need this much time for somebody to state the obvious?
Of course, this was supposed to have begun 9 years ago, and gone into its second phase about 7 years ago. But hey, better late than never....
We can experiment there with all kinds of genetic experiments not allowed here in many countries. Like shark-human hybrids. The croco-women experiment was successful, I married an earlier prototype.
Advertisement space...
Spelunking on the moon would be a good sport I suppose.
With the lack of atmosphere, the amount of solar energy that's available per square meter is incredible. Photovoltaics are one obvious option. Heat engines that would harvest the huge amounts of potential energy to be found in the vast temperature differentials available between lit and unlit lunar surfaces would be another.
With so much cheap energy available, the obvious next thing to do is to start refining things, e.g. extracting vast amounts of oxygen from all of that silica and hurl it into orbit via a rail gun. Other raw materials and purified minerals to follow. Lots of O2 and refined materials in orbit = a good start towards constructing orbital factories. Additional ores to come both from the moon and the asteroids; hydrocarbons to come from Titan.
Okay, so now we've got a factory system set up with effectively unlimited amounts of energy, oxygen, hydrogen, and refined ores of any sort imaginable available to us at the top of Earth's gravity well. Maybe we might get serious about building a space elevator at that point.
What should we build next after that?
Whatever anyone damn well pleases.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
They could save massively on the weight issues for sending astronauts into space, if they would start using jockeys. I couldn't help noticing how tiny those guys are while watching the Belmont Stakes yesterday. I'm thinking they would eat a lot less, require less water and oxygen. The would all help to get the launch costs down.
http://stu.wccnet.org/~bwells/gdt200/cabum1.html
Really, its a great group of people. Will someone please think of the children?
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
Obama wants to slow the space program down to spend it on welfare.
Education, actually.
It's one thing to be critical of decreasing space program funding to pay for math & science education, it's another thing to imply that the funding will be diverted to handouts.
Tweet, tweet.
Didn't Heinlein suggest advertising? Let's go for it. Set up an array of frickin' lasers and prisms to display the Coca Cola logo. Or the Pepsi logo...
That's no moon, it's a ...
Oh, wait, it is a moon after all.
1. you apologize for shouting "straw man" when you didn't even try to read the comments
2. you wish to amuse me by repeating my own concerns about possessing the moon, but as if they occured to you originally, and in contradiction to something i said
you're a strange little wormy kid
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Without an atmosphere, you'll be totally dependent on soil extraction for materials. It's unrealistic that you'd be bringing anything in really large quantities from the earth. That said, lunar soil is pretty much devoid of Carbon and Nitrogen. Both are necessary for sustaining human and plant life. That's a pretty huge impediment to a sustainable human presence on the moon.
There's plenty of metal and oxygen, and plenty of sunlight, so it might be a better plan to send up a fleet of teleoperated machines to prep the place for a future human presence. Might take a couple of decades to do, but we probably need that time to figure out the other issues.
Been there, done that. It's a big airless rock. Unless we get some way of lifting stuff to orbit at a price comparable to, say, China to US air freight, forget it. Chemical rockets are about as good as they will ever get, which is not very. Maybe with nuclear rockets or something new, but redoing Apollo is pointless. (Also, the current NASA would botch it.)
We have trouble keeping the ISS supplied and staffed, and can't find any really good reason for having built it in the first place.
What should NASA do? Damned if I know. Or care all that much for now. AFAIC the real concern is for a private group to choose some location well away from the various government-run bases and just bloody well start shooting itty bitty robots up there ASAP. As I've said about Mars, the rational thing to do is to start processing minerals, digging tunnels that are deep enough to be radiation resistant, establishing power generation capacity, and maybe even starting a few teeny separate greenhouse enclosures in which the beginnings of working ecosystems can get going. In the next few years. Not to mention building the kinds of expertise one only gets through real world implementation.
To wait to do this with human-optimized vehicles or even simply to wait to do this until the billions of dollars in funding needed for a full mission can be rounded up and the milions of man-hours in research and development needed to make a moonbase human-capable is as boneheaded as, say, using only Microsoft products "because that's the established approach".
We already know that dust is going to make every job bloody difficult. We already know that our attempts at equipment that reliably works in vacuum and under those temperature changes haven't gone all that well. We have a lot of learning to do. And it will all go a lot better if the first humans get there to find as much mass and equipment already waiting and running as possible. So let's start with the least demanding tasks and get more ambitious as we go.
So I say:
A.) Put a couple of relays in Moon orbit. This massively cuts power and complexity demands down for the devices we later send moonside. If they can take pictures of the moon as they orbit, that's jim dandy too.
B.) Have at least two teams launch at least two different approaches to digger robots. These robots will, hopefully, if nothing else, build the first enclosures in which other robots can do things like wait out the worst radiation storms.
C.) Send more robots to survey the local area for mineral resources. Each package also includes some amount of additional power generation capacity. Ideally some mix is used of solar, temperature differential-based systems, and other approaches.
D.) And only then send robots to start doing things like making rocket fuel from moon mass.
Maybe I'm wrong about the ideal order. But I'm pretty damn sure that I'm right about my basic point. We should be launching payloads as soon as we possibly can. Barring some other group stealing what we send, we lose far more than we gain by waiting. /. classic become true.
Oh, and if we do it right, the group that does so may even get to have that
E.) PROFIT!!!!
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
This moom race has been denied by virtually all involved as a 'peace loving exercise'. Don't believe it! It is a resource race like none other in the history of the world and the losers will be inevitably and inexorably dominated by the first party there that fortifies the place. With active laser weapons, a defense established 'piece lovint colonist' like the Chinese could see you coming from a long ways off and well perforate you before you ever get near. The prize is energy. Fusion energy! In virtually unlimited supply. Earth based laser beams would have a problem with the atmosphere that lunar lasers would not have to contend with. As for transport. Once there the winner, and I will assume that the Chinese will do this first as they have the single minded determination to succeed and they are immune from economic saboteurs, will simply set up his laser equipment and announce that they 'won' and that they now 'own' the moon. They will further announce that all orbiting satellites will either deorbit or be shot down unless ownership of these is forthwith transferred to China. This they will back up with their nuclear missiles that the world will horrifyingly discover the Chinese possessed of in great numbers. Then will come a worldwide education program in Mandarin and Cantonese following a worldwide roundup and execution of all 'troublemakers' like this writer. As for expense of launch. No problem. You see, fusion power makes an excellent rocket. You could even feed it with a fission reactor for some energy needs. Use it as a main booster and you could easily have single stage to orbit or interplanetary flight capability. Space would instantly open up as reliable and cheap. And all the few that remain alive detractors that ensured the defeat and domination of the losers in the world will have to sing praises from their slave chains to the dominant darwinian winner, the Chinese. They are the most fit, and Darwinian determinism mandates the survival of the fittest. All other arguments are irrelevant to the only one, victory, as with over a billion and a half mouths to feed, and more little emperors being born every month, they will give short shrift to 'environment, noook proliferation, 'air pollution', or whatever specious arguments that their agents and third country traitors and fellow travelers foster among loser nation's populaces to render them helpless or at least into inaction.
We must find the crystal skulls to save humanity!
If it were that simple to create such a temperature differential on a line, couldn't you make one hell of an awesome Stirling engine up there?
Guess it is time to start investing in umbrella stock.
Can you imagine how much Pepsi would pay to turn the moon into it's logo?
Hilarious post, but I think there are some valid things we can do there. Massive telescopes on the dark side of the moon come to mind. They could be much larger thanHubble and there is no atmosphere to block their view like there is on earth.
www.ianhoar.com My blog about geeking out.
Vacuum is very useful in a variety of manufacturing processes. Gravity is also useful as you don't need expensive zero gravity toilets, etc. I remember reading that titanium is one of many elements available on the moon. With lots of solar energy and raw materials, I would think a moon base/colony could become self self sufficient.
In the longer term be able to provide materials to nearby space for orbital constriction easier then launching the materials from earth. The choice of material may change, but the cost could be much lower.
Going to the moon only makes sense if you look at it as a long term investment where the break even/profit is many years away. The benefits may end up being measured more from increased human knowledge then from direct financial profit.
One of the major problems large companies have with investing in R&D is the investment is always a long term process that may take years before showing a result and even longer before showing a profit.
The longer the payback time frame and/or more expensive the research, the harder it is for a business to justify the research. Look at the internet. The basic start was back in the 70's as Arpanet. Until the mid 90's most people had never heard of the internet. Now not only has almost everyone heard of the internet, almost everyone has some type of internet access. Communications satellites were science fiction until the 60's when the first one was launched.
Hokay So!, I think that Hawai and us Californians need to work on breaking away from USA and go live on the moon,... Alaska can come too.
ZEE END!
I vote that we get rich by enslaving the inhabitants and drilling for oil.
Advice: on VPS providers
If it were up to me, every kid with an IQ over 120 would get a free copy of that book, among others, on their twelfth birthday.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The only use the moon could ever have is for our entertainment. Something along the lines of a combination DisneyLand and Los Vegas would probably be something people would pay to go see. If we build garish buildings and name the drinks "sex on the moon" people will find it all horribly interesting and go into debt just so that could say they had sex on the moon even if it was only a drink.
Can't stop the signal!
is now a country! Rejoice!
Could it be that the US wants to get there before China so they can't be proved as "fakes" for never being on the moon before? what if the whole luna landing was fake and there is no flag or any evidence that the landing happened.. it would make the US look a little silly ;)
Am I the only one that considers the military benefits of having a barren, uninhabited, never-populated, no-worries land? I mean, think of the testing applications that could be done where we never have to worry about the effects on other people?
I spend much of my time working on things like low cost ways to build food-producing planters out of post-consumer waste. I spent about half an hour yesterday helping a couple of homeless kids find food and a place to sleep since their expected ride just had a heroin overdose. I think that I'm pretty safe in saying that I'm middlin' concerned about the problems of the truly poor. And afaic, getting humans on the moon is an excellent idea. If nothing else, as a very effective way to encourage more kids to go into the sciences.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Choice are, written in 80KM high dark basalt outline letters...
1) "Wally World" if we need an outside sponsor
2) "George W are smart guy" if we need government funding.
Vote please!
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Make it into the new Alcatraz, and then make a movie of how someone escapes.
I call digs on the Moon-ing toga party concept. Min. girl to guy ratio 5:1.
"A variety of countries, including the United States and China, but also India, Europe, and Japan, have either sent robotic probes into lunar orbit or are on the verge of doing so."
Europe is not a country.
Europe is not a country! (There was another post , but it is hidden deep-deep )
http://revj.sourceforge.net
pick up some rocks, turn round and come home? There's nothing else there (except the dreams of a lot of sad fanbois who cant distinguish between star trek and reality.) We will never "colonise" the moon, only a half-wit could think it either desirable or possible to do so. -1 flamebait in 5, 4, ..
The moon in general would be a good place for some big-frikkin-huge telescopes.
I know some of these have been mentioned already but here are a few tings that come to my mind.
1: Lunar space elevator/slingshot to launch payloads at high velocity.
2: Giant telescopes. No atmosphere, low gravity, and no jarring lunch into space makes huge telescopes easier.
3: Radio spectrum analysis on the far side of the moon would block spectrum pollution from earth.
4: Resources. Titanium, Helium-3, and others.
5: Laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory (LIGO on the moon). Since there is less seismic activity on the moon the detection of gravity waves would be easier.
6: Asteroid/comet detection. An array of observation stations could scan the sky to track and catalog potentially dangerous space objects.
7: Earth defense from asteroid strikes. A laser array (or a mass impactor) could slightly deflect a asteroid on a collision path with earth.
8: A base of operations for manned interplanetary missions since it is easier to launch a craft from its reduced gravity field.
9: Earth observatory. It would be a stable, long term point from which scientists could monitor many aspects of earth.
10: Fun. Who wouldn't love a rock climbing wall, swimming pool, or pedal powered flying machine on the moon.
11: Profit. I'm sure there would be a monetary incentive, either in the resources or tourist like activity, for people to go to the moon.
12: (Insert next hundred ideas here...)
Indeed there is no shortage of ideas or reasons to go, the article seems more focused on the potential problems of land management/rights/claims. i.e. Who gets to make the rules for the moon.
It's only a waste if you think that all space exploration is a waste, since the moon with it's low gravity is a great place to launch from, build spaceships on, do experiments in low gravity... it wouldn't really be a waste would it. Besides, who wouldn't want to do some moon-walking in his lifetime :D
I agree, but now that NASA is talking about a permanent presence on the moon, it implies that they will need some sort of local computing capacity to support their astronauts and possibly their robots, death rays and other machines, all of which they will want to control remotely due to the harsh environment. It's not very comfortable living inside of a space suit for a long time with a tube stuck in, well, you know where, so I expect them to work mostly in their specially constructed habitats.
But even if server farms are a bad idea, some NASA contractors who have their hand in the lobbyist equivalent of the cookie jar may demand them "just because."
Since none of this is happening until 2040, maybe 2080 (maybe, like *never* because we don't have the money...), just send up one self-replicating server or a self-replicating machine ecosystem and let that spread on the moon's surface on its own. Everything could be built from moon materials using solar energy if it's designed right. Of course it won't be designed right but that gives the astronauts something to do besides get there before somebody else.
You don't need an atmosphere to radiate heat. Heat is just infrared and given enough time it'll happily bounce into the blackness of space. (If the moon couldn't radiate heat it would be a nasty molten mistress by now.) You just need a large enough heatsink, and there are lots of metals on the moon for that purpose as well as for being able to say "bite my shiny metal ass." Of course, you would want to place your heatsinks outside of direct sunlight, not to mention the server room itself. By 2040 one would hope that some really low wattage computers would be available, easing that problem. What TFA seems to be worried about is how several potentially competing moon communities would share the vast empty "real estate" on the lunar surface without conflict. Perhaps then each side should build the death ray enhancement first and only then worry about the server farm.
There are shady pockets in some craters that never receive sunlight. Or, at worst, you just have some rovers push moondirt to form a levee to provide shade. It's not like the wind will knock it down.
Of course, once the entire moon is covered in server farms peoples' jaws will drop at the video streaming capacity and the entire NSA will want to relocate there. Rather than build that many space suits, instead a lot of orbiting satellites with routers will be used to bring the capacity to earth, and these too will have to be built on the moon and launched from the moon. And the neat thing about all of it (possibly the *only* neat thing about server farms on the moon) will be that having all of that crap up there won't add to global warming here.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
You've got it all wrong - Moon is occupied for quite some time by Nazis.
I guess that even if Saddam or Al Qaeda did reach it say 10 years ago they would encounter properly protected bases of Nazis and would be blown up before landing.
But you still managed to reach a valid conclusion, at least in regards to blowing things up: we have to blow-up the Moon because last time I checked, Nazis are still "bad" (the only exception are their uniforms, which are chic/sexi/cool/whatever that's why people still like watching movies about WWII ... which will include this Good Nazi Tom Cruise as reporded in IIRC The Daily Show).
hany
Look, get past all the W. rhetoric. Living on the moon just became relatively cheap. For us to live there is going to sending loads O2, or providing lots of power to mine it. We are currently looking at solar power, but that really is not going to provide enough. In particular, solar will not do the job away from the poles. It would require beaming it combined with storage. That is until recently. Japan has found lots of uranium there. Not earth level, but it appears to be more than we could ship easily. Japan also has a nuclear reactor designed for the moon (the toshiba 4S). That will open up the moon to be relatively cheap.
But more important than that, is that from that uranium, we can breed plutonium that we can use to power ships as well a sats elsewhere and perhaps a base on mars. In addition, with that kind of power, we can build a rail launcher on the moon. Even more important than the He3, is the simple fact that it opens up the solar system for us. That uranium being there will do that for us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The reason is that they are easy to hide. A mass driver can be seen launching. Somebody would KNOW where and when and simply move their sats a few inches. Anything that would hit earth would have to be BIG and that means a REALLY big rail. But a laser is not seen shooting until AFTER it hits the target. Nothing can get out of the way. That means it can not be defended against easily esp. if it has staying power AND power. In fact, it is almost certain when a mass driver pointed at earth appears, than you can safely assume that powerful lasers are already there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In fact, at the poles, there are crater EDGES that have near constant sun, but the craters themselves, get zero. And for a solar collector, just run it up on a tower. That would enable 100% collecting.
I had not thought about it before, but I wonder if that is not a better idea than PV?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We are moving towards an electric battlefield. It will use rail guns as well as lasers. The reason is that carrying bullets is expensive and difficult. But lasers and rails guns are a lot easier EXCEPT for power. All of our new systems will provide LOADS of power just for these. The naval DDX and the F-22 are geared just for these. The M1A1 is being studied for a mobile rail gun. Well, the DOD is now studying to solve that issue via SPS. It will also mean that a team on the ground can START with power right from the gitgo. In addition, it will mean logistics is no longer expensive and hard.
Finally, the DOD likes to think in terms of multi uses for their items (for example, they now have relatively little cargo aircraft; airlines were given money to guarantee that DOD would have access to cargo flights). As such, they are thinking that SPS will be used by FEMA to provide power in disaster areas. Imagine the difference if china could have gotten power into the earthquake area RIGHT after. How many lives could have been saved? I would guess quite a few. We have the same issue with hurricanes, wild fires, tornadoes, and of course earthquakes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The poles on the moon may ALSO have water, hence O2.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
lets blow it up
Want hols in the ground to hide in? Ok, done
WAnt private enterprise to send differing robots to the moon? Ok, soon to come
Want companies that provide servies such as launch, communications, and perhaps even power?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Blew Moon
oO0Oo
or whether it can be used in practical fusion facilities or not, we know that there's silicon there. A highly automated mining and metal refining facility designed to ship semiconductor-grade silicon (the crystallization is better done in microgravity) to Earth orbit might be a good way to provide the solar cells for a SPS (space power satellite) array to solve Earth's power needs and after or concurrent than that, it can be used to feed orbital wafer fabs. I've heard one can grow defect-free semiconductor crystals the size of basketballs in microgravity for cheaper CPUs with higher profit margins. That's a for instance.
There are lots of things one can do if one has zero-gravity, for practical purposes, free energy, and transportation.
Once upon a time, the American West was looked at as an unprofitable, useless wasteland.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'll do Britons did with Australia. I will send all the prisoners who have senetences of 10+ years, from all countries around the world. They would get an all paid single ticket to the moon in ships with places just-about-enough-to-avoid-human-rights-whinning.
They would have to work there on mining whatever other people has posted here, and of course, on conserving and promoting their self-sufficient world (as nothing would be given from the earth unless they are worse than African starving people).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Iceland has enormous amounts of energy going spare and a population of under half a million.
Iceland has just completed a large hydroelectric scheme, the idea being to use it to smelt aluminum, no - use the electricity to extract hydrogen from the sea.
Put the hydrogen into the biggest balloon that is practical. Use the lifting power of hydrogen to lift a big bag of oxygen plus a rocket engine, to the edge of space.
Use the rocket fuel you have lifted to the edge of space, to take a significant quantity of hydrogen to the moon.
Around forty percent of moon rock is oxygen. Combine the hydrogen and oxygen to release energy, use the energy to melt the large amounts of silica laying around. Viola you have glass.
With the glass, create the biggest dome practical. Apart from the tons of helium three lying around, there is also ordinary helium lying around, use helium and oxygen to inflate the glass dome (this will give you breathable air.(albeit you will speak with a high voice but never mind) )
Use the waste water left over from combining the oxygen and hydrogen to brew beer. Then strap on a pair of wings and fly drunkenly around, singing the moon is a balloon.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
The question of what to do with the Moon is a specific version of the question of what to do with space in general.
Most ideas about tourism and mining are bullshit. The huge transport costs make them utterly unfeasible for the foreseeable future.
So what does space have? The answers in the name; "space". The huge cost of getting there also allows one to escape the clutches of governments, corporations and institutions that might want to impose themselves on you. Moon man is free man, simply because bothering him is just too damn expensive to be worth the trouble.
Earth society has become static. People who hold political, cultural, and economic power have become very adept at holding on to it. The 'end of history' has been imposed by force by those who are served quite nicely by the present order. Thus, if you want to really change society in any big way you must escape the reach of existing society. The only place this is possible is in space.
And, to add weight to my argument, there is of course precedent. The same applied to the Americas centuries ago, and people fled there to escape the confines of an existing and largely static society.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The funny thing with the former moon langings is that every single piece of evidence had some curious issue that made it look fake. But of course, it wasn't.
What shall we do wite Moon wh\en we get it
More like what willt hey do!
Litigate it!! divide it !!
It will become the property of the richest man who who can afford the highest priced corrupt lawyers and judges who already see riches as righteous ! Slime balls not all but most.
I.m sorry but the courts have become governed By an ideology by a corrupt people of a specific religion who only see , money and cash is King even over family the people and constitution .
Here: Orbiting Mirror Ribbon
At the risk of causing lunar warming and reducing the moon's biodiversity, I think we should get a long hose and pump our CO2 there.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
It sounds obvious that there will be some kind of holy war on the moon in our lifetimes.
The Lunar Track Database has a list of Four Wheel Drive tracks on the moon. I can't wait, pristine wilderness, exciting tracks and views that are out of this world, it's just the cost of getting my truck to the moon from holding me back.
- mining
- production
- astronomy
- housing for astronauts
- launch pads
- research
I've been speaking about orbital bombardment. A mass driver on the moon isn't too effective against satellites, that's true, but you could easily destroy underground bunkers with it (given you know their location and use the right projectiles). Oh, and I don't think that you could see the laser even after launched, unless you use special vision helps, but I doubt that concealment would be an advantage of a laser over a mass driver, since I think that by around 2024 (when the NASA's moon base should be completed according to their plans), most governments would try to monitor what the US government (shame on me for being US-centric, I know that other nations want to build a moon base too) is doing up there.
For the laser, I don't know, but maybe an advanced version of THEL might help. It is pretty effective at destroying rockets (though extremely expensive, due to the hazardous, rare chemicals being used), so with some tweaks, it might be able to destroy satellites as well, but I think that it would be pretty hard to get it working in space.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
Once we get there, we shall say: "Hey, i've been to this place before. Now it's time to go back and look a Earth's war, hunger and nature."
- Bruno Cassol
That's no moon. It's a space station!
I think you should go to the moon just to drive on the little car...
Either that or a big picture of Burt Reynolds.
it's a continent.
NT
...would you eat it?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
This time we need to go to the dark side of the moon.
The problem is, if you do that, will your consciousness be transferred to your "VM image" or will you die but have a "backup" of yourself preserved? It would be impossible for others to know, in any case, and you wouldn't really know either because you'd be dead.
The real question is, is your consciousness tied to your physical brain or the data it contains (in the form of links between neurons)? And if it is tied to your physical brain, why?
IMO it's actually a silly question, if someone takes a backup of your brain, it's just a backup of your brain. Your original consciousness would remain with your physical brain. You would be dead but a perfect copy of you would live on. Not much use to you.
Apart from this there are the technological issues of turning links between neurons to 1s and 0s and back again, the brain/computer interface and the insane amount of storage that would be required...ripping a brain would certainly be a lossy data conversion. Brain/data transfers are the most far-out sci-fi concept there is IMO.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"... A variety of countries, including the United States and China, but also India, Europe, and Japan, have either sent robotic probes into lunar orbit or are on the verge of doing so." And since when is Europe a country?
Mine it for cheese. If we start bringing our cheese down from the moon, we won't need as many dairy cows which will cut down on global warming.
Europe is a country now?
Why go to the moon? I can think of at least one decent reason:
The moon could act as a secondary backup should the earth be hit with a global catastrophe. While primarily this would require storing humans, it should also keep as large a repository of earthly flora and fauna as possible. Maybe similar to the cave in Norway? Admittedly though, the sort of global catastrophe that could wipe out life on earth has a high probability of affecting the moon (asteriod hit etc). However, it could be useful in case of epidemic, nuclear war, or some environmental disaster such as global warming.
Ultimately though, while the question is "what shall we do once we get there", the first question to consider is "how will we get there". To go to the moon right now, the only technology that is viable and available is chemical rocketry - this is just too cumbersome and expensive to carry the sort of payload required. My vote goes for investment in the practicalities of a space elevator into orbit - this at least has good potential to allow for more or less limitless transfers with minimal expenditure.
Build giant frickin' laser beams to threaten the rest of the planet with .. :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
How about selling it to the martians .. :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
send robots up there to carve a flag into the visible surface?
I think the moon *may provide a fantastic environment for rather bizarre and potentially dangerous physics research projects. Maybe the moon would be a great place to conduct more extended matter/anti-matter research along with various other potentially hazardous physics research surrounding faster than light travel. And perhaps the lower gravity enviornment could have other benefits for a multitude of other applications - perhaps even general manufacturing of gigantic space vessels - which would be easier to launch from the moon than the surface of earth. I say we just make an army of robots to go do all the actual work while we sit back here controlling it all from a beach. It also is a great place to put a whole bunch of Tim Horton's stores. Mmmmm.. Ice Caps!
the far side, keeps the radio garbage from earth in check.. but gets the same amount of light.. But the idea is pretty awesome.
- Set up outposts
- Convert natives to Christianity
- Introduce fortified alcohol
- Rape and pillage
- Spread disease
- Profit!
I mean, it's worked in the past... granted it's been a few years, but it's a pretty solid plan.Still not dead.
Do a remake of "Nude on the Moon"
IMDB
I hear they are going to go extinct. We should grow them on the moon with special Panama Disease free soil. While we're at it, let's grow all sorts of rare and exotic victims of humanity's cornucopia. This might make bananas as expensive as saffron per unit mass, because of the mass of water in the banana. The water would need to be shipped to the moon, otherwise the residents might get some ideas and talk to a certain computer... ...Until some adventurers spirit it away with a pantheistic solipsistic device.
People look for things to drive them. Some are driven by the good life, some are driven to succeed, some are driven by pride in their country. It can be good for a country to do such things. As for the alternative methods of chest thumping, I'll take a lunar escapade over violence, death and war any day.
Note, please, that I'm suggesting a first step of sending relays to be put in moon orbit. What more do we possibly need to know to do that? Note also my suggested second step, which involves not only sticking with the least complex task, it's explicitly designed to let us test different approaches, give us a reserve of useful mechanical parts there for later when the robots fail, and reduce the stress on any later machinery we send. I don't know about you, cobber, but in my world, one of the best ways to keep equipment running in a hostile environment is to do everything you can to minimize the exposure of that equipment to that environment. Another is to build a nearby reserve of spare parts. This approach provides both.
If you haven't already done so, let me suggest that you watch Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. This will give you more of an idea of what I am talking about.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Awesome sig!
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
I don't know about you, but I'm more than a bit afraid of self-replicating machines. But then again we're so far away from actually making those that realistically, we can safely assume that anything we make will die off in, at most, a few generations. Creating things like electronics from raw ore is hard!. Not to mention all the kinds of raw materials needed for components, or simply to run the reactions to make those components.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Drive around - Jerry Seinfeld
The moon is visible to every person with sight on earth, throw some incredibly pricey coca-cola ads on that baby and put the money toward more space funding.
What better place to host all your pr0n.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
It makes a lot of sense to launch an interlanatery manned mission from the moon. I say build the next generation space station on the moon!
this could also help the crisis of the rising oceans
lets pack up some water and move some people over to the moon.
http://www.ironsky.net/site/
Go to the moon to fight Nazis of course!
Sorry Indie, Commies are the poor mans Nazis when it comes to evil villains!
the nazis went to the moon. In 2018, they are coming back.
That's fiction man, just like the other one that came out in 1969.
the moon dance
Fire missiles at it
We should colonize it. It would be nice to have some sort of back up of humanity... just incase those pesky asteroids or much more likely governments mess things up :)
CHA!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Are you referring to this?
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=679
Sell the moon to the porn industry and have them make a theme park on the moon.
How about cleaning up after ourselves? How much junque have we left there? We haven't done enough damage to our planet?
We should probably chat with whatever up there has been shadowing our spacecraft too. I get the feeling it's important.
Besides - if we don't get back to the moon, the terrorists win!
The moon is the perfect prison. Eliminate the death penalty and send lifers to the moon. Of course, we'd have to eat the cost of getting the convicts there, but then we'd have a perfect labor force for mining the moon.
Of course, then all of RAH's darkest fantasies could then come true...;^D
But even if you don't believe that, you could opt for a gradual upgrade. Gradually replace your neurons with artificial ones - and assuming the artificial ones behaved in the exact manner as the original - you wouldn't have to worry about disconnections of consciousness. Apart from this there are the technological issues of turning links between neurons to 1s and 0s and back again, the brain/computer interface and the insane amount of storage that would be required...ripping a brain would certainly be a lossy data conversion. Brain/data transfers are the most far-out sci-fi concept there is IMO. You're talking about space habitats in the 26th century, and computer memory is the most far-out sci-fi concept you can think of? No-one has seen a working space habitat, but we've certainly seen storage devices large enough to be capable of housing human consciousness. There's one in your skull right now.
Compared to things like FTL travel, teleportation, time travel, and all the other "superscience" that appears in sci-fi, we at least have an idea of where to begin with reverse-engineering the human brain. Biological science is an established field, and whilst it'll take us a long time to fully document how the human mind works, 500 years seems plenty of time.
Anything you do on the moon or any other environment away from "civilization" requires some form of energy. Small, portable, renewable, clean energy generation is a key component to any successful mission. Kennedy set the country on an ambitious goal to the moon within a decade. We should set the same ambitious goal to clean renewable energy generation.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=679 No, I was referring to this
I would've thought that
We need to send MacGyver.
Deport all the Australians to the moon.