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Unambiguous Evidence of Water On the Moon
Nethemas the Great writes "Information has leaked ahead of the scheduled NASA press conference tomorrow that we have found unambiguous evidence for water on the moon. From the article, 'Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.'"
I'll be thirsty after the long ride.
The water these missions have found is present in very small quantities. Extracting it would require a lot of energy. The hope with polar water is that there might be masses of the stuff in some craters so that you could at least get a kilo of water from 20 or so kilos of regolith. Water in those quantities would be of use to humans. But we haven't seen it yet.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Since Apollo expedition brought back petrified wood from the moon, water was abundant there many years ago.
I hope that the Indians are able to establish a lunar colony; they certainly have the expertise.
The casinos might take off, that's a business that will attract customers no matter where you build one. If they've gone and bought Rotary Rocket's intellectual property, the ATV is certainly the right shape too. But there are precious few bison up there...
And here I was looking forward to eating a nice curry on the moon. I had the wrong Indians all along.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Whalers on the moon!
There have been persistent reports in the Indian press over the last 3 days that Nasa's Moon Minerology Mapper on board India's Chandrayaan-1 had found water, and that the Thursday press conference would reveal it. Glad to have the embargo lifted early. http://www.examiner.com/x-21670-Houston-Space-News-Examiner~y2009m9d22-Did-Chandrayaan1-confirm-ice-on-the-Moon http://www.rttnews.com/Content/GeneralNews.aspx?Node=B1&Id=1074265
Clearly not common enough to assume that it was present in this particular location without direct evidence.
"India's first lunar mission has found evidence of large quantities of water on its surface, The Times newspaper reported on Thursday."
from http://www.hindustantimes.com/Is-there-water-on-moon-NASA-to-reveal/H1-Article1-457426.aspx
...and ultraviolet light from the sun which breaks the water molecule down into oxygen and hydrogen. Water is unstable on the surface where it gets exposed to light but it should be stable in shadow on the surface and under ground. The problem is that almost no places on the surface have remained shadowed for hundreds of millions of years (except possibly the polar craters) and shallow subsurface still get rotated to the surface by meteor impacts, while deep places are... deep and hard to reach.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I guess that explains where all our arctic and antarctic ice caps have disappeared to then.
And then we can have magic flying hamburgers that zoom into your mouth when you give them the secret whistle!
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-- All your booze are belong to us.
Jump off a building. Seriously. Your atoms are not accelerated quite simultaneously and equally due to the slight incline of the gravitational plane, but the difference is almost negligible (ignoring air resistance), and so you don't feel any acceleration (fall into a small black hole and the differences become important and you become spaghetti). You won't be injured until you hit the ground and the atoms in your feet are the only ones being accelerated, with the others being brought to stationary by the electromagnetic force propagating through your body. The same effect can be achieved in mass drivers with ferromagnetic projectiles in a vacuum.
The grandparent is an idiot who has read too much science fiction, but his ideas are theoretically sound. The practical problems are huge, however, not 'just around the corner'.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The scan works by looking for the OH bond, as I recall, which resonates on a particular frequency. I may be talking nonsense now, because it's a few years since I looked at this tech, but it basically works on the same principle as your microwave oven. That emits microwaves that cause the OH bonds to resonate, exciting the molecules and generating heat. This works by causing the OH bonds to resonate (in exactly the same way) and then picking up the IR that they emit as they return to their non-excited state. All that it can conclusively say is that there are molecules containing OH bonds present, but the simplest molecule containing this bond is water and so it's very probable that they've found water. Even if they haven't, they've found something that can be turned into water relatively easily, given sufficient power (e.g. a lunar solar array).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
He's modded funny, but he's right (well, maybe not he part about "immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles" even though we are indeed immersed in an immense ocean of energetic particles; that is, after all, what matter and energy are).
We live in primitive times. The 1800s are considered by us to be primitive, but to a man getting off of a train and sending a telegraph to someone hundreds of miles away, it was amazingly high tech, almost magic. To someone watching Star Trek in the 1960s, their cellphones, flat screen computers, self-opening doors, space shuttles, sick bay monitors, etc were all impossible fantasy. But we have them now, as well as microwave ovens, VCRs, DVDs, CDs, the internet, PCs, tasers, LASIK, heart stents, viagra, and much more that people in the sixties never dreamed of.
Yesterday's science fiction is today's ho-hum mormalcy. Today's science fiction is tomorrow's reality (although never exactly as the science fiction writers envision it).
Sometime after we're all dead our descendants will have vehicles that can move at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring damages due to inertial effects. Floating cities, unlimited clean energy, earth to mars in hours, New York to Beijing in minutes... That's the future of energy and travel.
There, fixed that for you.
Free Martian Whores!
Considering the incredibly harsh environment of every other body in the solar system, I'd say that transportation is one of the least of our problems in trying to colonize them. We haven't even colonized the vast majority of *this* planet, and just about any spot on it is way more hospitable than anywhere on Mars.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
no.
Rocket propulsion blows.
Jet propulsion is the one that sucks, of course it also blows.
And I guarantee you that their teenagers will probably all still rebel, they'll still groggily and grumpily get up for work in the morning, and they'll still grow old wishing that they hadn't fritted their youth away.
We're more or less still living like we lived 5,000 years ago, from a macro perspective. Somehow I don't see that changing any time soon (unless, of course, we all die).
The ______ Agenda
There's plenty of solar power on the Moon's surface, and plenty of materials for construction in its crust. The first stage would be launching a small amount of automated fabrication machinery, run by a small crew, to build a solar power plant.
That plant could supply the energy to power the larger construction of a nuclear plant. Again, using local materials, and a larger crew supported by the larger infrastructure built by the solar power. The nuclear power available would be much larger than even the solar power.
Along the way, the power, infrastructure and crew would be capable of doing a lot more than building the next phase. Lunar science, other industrial engineering, telescopy, and launching other missions to farther out.
A solar base should take America no more than 5-8 years to build, if funded intelligently (ie, at the levels at which we love to fund wars for oil, but with a larger and more guaranteed return on investment). A nuclear base should take no more than 10 years to build, with probably 2-3 of those years performed during the 5-8 years building the solar plant. So the nuke plant could be operating somewhere 12-16 years or so from commencement. Since the US is right now deciding the entire roadmap for offplanet development, the clock should start in a year or two. Twenty years until we have sufficient power to explore, industrialize and colonize the nearby solar neighborhood is quite short, especially with lots of material benefits to show sooner along the way.
As for other countries, that's their problem. Many nuclear capable countries already launch nuke plants in satellites. That's a much more dangerous operation than building one on the Far Side of the Moon. And as usual, the US project will create the science and engineering, as well as working proof of concept, for other countries to do it themselves. We always give away some of the most valuable products of our investments in space, because it makes the world better in which Americans can live (as well as others who take advantage of it).
The US is going to put more and more nukes in space, even if it's just the CIA and Pentagon getting the monopoly. The more we do it for more peaceful and constructive purposes, the safer we'll be in every way. We could spend the next couple decades doing it. Or arguing why we shouldn't - and watching China, India, Russia, Japan and other global competitors doing it instead - and probably not as well. We can be Spain in this new age of exploration/colonization/industrialization, or we can be Britain. I'd like my grandchildren to keep speaking English.
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make install -not war