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Crowdfund a Moon Monolith Mission?
Jamie found a somewhat amusing little essay on putting together a crowd-sourced mission to
put a monolith on the moon. The author estimates it would cost half a billion dollars, which is a sum he thinks could be raised. Although personally, I think a half a billion dollars could be put to better use, it's a fun thought exercise.
Let's raise the stakes. I propose raising half a trillion dollars to develop a time machine and put a monolith in Olduvai Gorge three million years in the past to influence Astralopithecus Afarensis evolution. Our very existence might depend on it.
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Why not crowd-fund a completely open-source (thus nothing magical) tablet computer?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Etch everyone's name on it who contributes, and you just might do it. It helps that you wouldn't have to actually pay unless the entire sum was raised. I'd kick in a hundy.
So I only need to find 5 million geeks-like-me worldwide who think this is a cool enough idea to donate 100 bucks
Good luck with that.
Better than spending trillions on proxy wars. Probably would stimulate the economy better than the bailouts did. Would probably be more successful than NASA will be in the next 20 years.
Get cracking, apes, the universe will last billions of years but you won't! Act now!!!!!!!!!
Wasn't that an episode of "The Tick" when Chairface etched his name on the moon?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Although personally, I think a half a billion dollars could be put to better use
You can play that game forever though. Did you east breakfast this morning? That food could have been put to better use, as could the water from your shower, or the resources it took to make the shoes you put on your feet.
In fact I can think of no better use for a tiny drop in the total sum of money floating around the planet, than a mass exercise in artistic expression. It's kind of the ultimate way of saying, here we are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I liked the artist's rendition of the black monolith front view. That made me laugh out loud at work. It would appear that the paper's name, Ironic Sans is quite appropriate.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I especially like the artist's rendition of what the Monolith would look like! :-)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I would much rather feed the hungry than fund this extravagance.
Surely somebody can get geeks excited in something more useful than putting a non functioning block of stone on the moon.
There's plenty of non-functioning human created hardware sitting on the moon already. Put your hundred dollars to better use, help people here, help planet Earth, whatever good cause you believe in. Some of them even give you credit, if your goal is getting your ego stroked / your name for immortality etc.
Plenty of IT related good causes down here.
Or at least match your moon-donation with an earth-donation.
Why, is there a bank left that needs a bailout? Do you get a bank bailout for just half a billion anyway?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They'd do less harm there and the skeletons of over 500 humans would make a bigger impression on future races or any aliens that found them. I think it'd be easier to raise money for that proposal as well.
I mean why? Chairface Chippendale is just going to obliterate it with his laser, so why bother?
Monstar L
Then get out there, raise it, and put it to that "better use".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Really... I think putting something that is essentially just an art exhibit onto the moon before we have any sort of real plan to get anybody back there, particularly since it doesn't even offer to create any sort of impetus for getting us back onto the moon anyways, may be one of the most spectacular ways to waste money that doesn't actually involve throwing perfectly good cash into a fireplace.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
somebody should get the author in touch with the current "staff" behind ThePirateBay.
I'm sure they'd love to contribute something to the project if the monolith could be used in a distributed link technology. even something dumb like just a solar powered signal repeater would be awesome.
Well played joke. He wanted to land the monolith by parachute, and give a small sticker as the only reward for donating 100 bucks... Think about these things,
Well trolled sir, well trolled.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Some people loosely connected to the Lunar X Prize want to place a Christian cross on the moon.
http://crossonthemoon.com/
Religious Zeal-sourcing?
Donate 500M to my cause and I'll send a solar powered excavator to dig holes and trenches to construct an earth visible smiley face instead of those stupid craters- dude moonolith? you gotta think bigger.
Start a charity that provides one free space flight for children with rare and fatal diseases. Everyone wins. The kids get an obscenely expensive, cool experience and commercial space travel gets an unprecedented shot in the arm with private funds.
That is essentially what places like Kiva and the like are trying to do. They take crowd funding, and give it to pre established infrastructure to try to help people with their goals.
Off the top of my head, some of the design issues that I can think of for doing something like this are (in no particular order):
Deployment: Having a large, long, skinny rectangle (probably hollow to save mass) bolted to a launch vehicle is a bad idea. Rockets shake the ever living shit out of their payloads and that monolith is going to be one big wiggling moment arm unless the basic internal frame is super rigid. That said, it seems like making the monolith some form of deployable, maybe a telescoping rectangle, might be the best bet.
Landing: Landing on the moon is going to require some form of controlled descent, unless you just want to recreate the LCROSS mission. That said, a whole lander system (small rocket powered) is probably going to be needed to land, place the monolith, and let it otherwise deploy. Putting rockets on the monolith itself would probably be a bit difficult as tanks and thermal control issues tend to distort the nice, necessary rectangle geometry of the object. Also, stabilizing a tall object like that with rockets on the base is similar to an inverted pendulum control problem. It can be done, but it is tricky and requires a powerful control system, which requires power, which might necessitate something like solar panels. In other words, the basic geometrical nature of this particular payload would be very constraining if you wanted to turn the monolith itself into a vehicle.
Thermal control: If the monolith has any sort of electronics or equipment inside of it, they are going to cook. The vehicle will likely see sun on it's way to the moon. If the monolith itself is exposed to view, then you will have a nice, large area, black surface absorbing solar radiation. That sucker is going to get hot. Basically this would be similar to pointing a typical spacecraft's radiator straight at the sun, which is a big no-no in spacecraft design, unless you like melting things.
Cosmetics: This isn't really a mission killer, but if you truly want a big black monolith on the moon, it probably won't be particularly black by the time it gets their. Between atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere and direct exposure to solar radiation, whatever surface coating you put on the ol' girl is going to get beat up. So it will more than likely end up a, "mostly black but very scuffed," color. Not a big deal, but something to consider.
Of course, all of these problems are solvable. Maybe the whole monolith could be stored in a box. It could erect itself by deploying some lightweight rods in a rectangular geometry and pulling a black skin between them, unless of course the outer material has to be one solid piece. Covering or storing the monolith during transit in such a fashion would help regulate the thermal issues. The most expensive part of the project, like all space projects, will be buying a launch vehicle. Lander development would also be expensive, but perhaps the project could purchase existing hardware from someone like Armadillo or White Space, once their platforms get tested.
Either way, fun project, but it will definitely be expensive and not simple by any means.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
The article needs a minor correction, the diagram is labelled as showing the front of a monolith but it is clearly a rear view.
Sell the back of the monolite per square inch as advertising space or for private investors to put their name on. Maybe in a million years it will be rediscovered by some descendant of the mouse who then have achieved human like intelligence.
Why does the moon need two?
Let's see if we can land a golf ball on the moon for $1 million and perfect our technique before we go wasting half-billion dollar boosters that might explode on launch.
Well, lots of people seem to enjoy masturbating. But I am sure you don't. You spend every penny towards bettering the world and helping your fellow man, right?
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
That way we can get immortality and live long enough to visit the monolith they place there.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Those precious seconds could be used earning money to lift people out of poverty! You god damned hypocrite!
I take it that essentially every moment of your time is devoted to preventing people from dying, since the $1.66 that this would represent if you spread the expense over every person in ths U.S. (neglecting the other 6.6 billion people in the world) is less than a half hour of a net minimum wage.
While we're at it, let's get rid of those pesky cultural arts, since that's virtually all "masturbation" as well.
If we just describe Apollo 11 as "sent Neil Armstrong to the moon for an afternoon giggle," that would of course sound like a waste of all of those resources. Instead, America collectively spent those resources by choice.
If a bunch of geeks want to pony up $100 to "put a monolith on the moon," sure, you can also look at that as a waste, but as an opportunity to maintain that trajectory of wonder, of daring, and of progress. Or we can sit back and watch the dreamers in other countries do the same... with possibly far less noble and gregarious intentions. A hundred bucks of discretionary spending for those who dare to dream doesn't seem out of line for me. I've got plenty of other geek toys and half-done projects around the house that cost me more than that.
We (and I mean America and mankind as a whole) earned a lot of new technologies and had a lot of new dreams due to those efforts of the 60s and 70s, and the fields of science and engineering were forever advanced by the project. We reap them now, and we now stand on the shoulders of giants, choosing new challenges that will continue to propel mankind figuratively, if not literally.
[
Tell him it will be the cornerstone for his new house, he'll be all over it. He certainly has $500M to spare...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And anyone who spends their time reading slashdot instead of working the shelter downtown is... what?
Just confirms a theory I've held for some time about Kickstarter:
"The more retarded the Kickstarter project the more money it will ask for, and receive."
Some of us choose not to live in a welfare state. The mere thought of any non-government entity entering another gravity well is worthwhile.
would be a good analog for monoliths. The technology doesn't actually need to preserve them; just some blinky lights on the side will do to appease their families.
The thought of what a wonderful accomplishment this would be makes me weep.
Let's waste half a billion. Why not crowdfund for something meaningful and useful to the world? There are people dying and these jerks, anyone who supports this with effort or funding, are masturbating.
This sort of project would provide a fair number of jobs and is voluntarily financed, what's non-meaningful and useless about that? The government isn't confiscating the money from you so why are you complaining? Start your own crowd sourced project to halt death or whatever it is you think is more meaningful and useful.
Well, lots of people seem to enjoy masturbating. But I am sure you don't. You spend every penny towards bettering the world and helping your fellow man, right?
What do pennies have to do with... wait... it isn't free? I'm supposed to be paying a licensing fee or something to someone?
Well, that explains about half of the national debt... sorry guys.
...then I'd put $10 into that.
This just confirms a long held theory of mine:
"The more retarded the Kickstarter project, the more money it will ask for, and receive."
"For nine billion Euro we could have written 'Fuck off Germany' on the moon." -Frankie Boyle
"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." Douglas Adams
You're assuming that this has absolutely zero redeeming benefits to society. In reality, such a project could go a long ways towards lowering the cost to LEO and beyond which of course has the potential to benifit everyone.
In Soviet Russia monolith creates you.
Well the kitten isn't going to bury itself ya know
Unless the dollar bills are packed in a box and sent to the Moon, they aren't "wasted". They will end up as paychecks for employees and used to pay for materials, which will put the money in people's pockets, creating jobs for people who can then give to charity. The real waste is to NOT spend half a billion dollars that you have. That doesn't help ANYONE.
A Friend of mine made a suggestions very similar to this about a decade ago -
He noted that the production and marketing cost of a major hollywood movie is about the same as to launch a high tech satellite (I never verified his numbers, just took it on faith... yeah.)
The idea was to use movie-style financing to send a slew of home-grown autonomous robots to the moon, their only purpose: to explore the moon, fight off the other robots in low gravity (natural slo-mo), and send video of it all back to Earth.
The resulting video footage wold be edited and distributed just like a motion picture, but, in theory, the novelty of it all would be self-advertising through word of mouth (this was well before the term "viral marketing" had been coined.)
Ten years later....
A half billion dollars is less than $2 per person in the USA, or about $60 for every iPad sold by Apple (so far). Certainly do-able as a crowd-funded operation. We should definitely do something like this. Here's why- In the 1960's, the Apollo program's main objective was to show the Soviets just how bad-ass the US really is. This could be a way for the citizenry of the world to say the same thing to our governments...
Well, if you get rid of cultural arts, you take care of the monolith by default, since it is a cultural arts project.
As a skeptic, what this really means to me is: this guy is looking for a way to fund his retirement.
Half a billion? That's 500 million. Sure, it might cost that much to perform the actual operation, but consider: management and administration costs. Surely there will be a significant portion of that set aside, particularly for the fund management. Say, as a non-profit, it's a 'relatively modest' $175k/year for such a position (if he's fitting in with current gov't standards, at least), and surely that sum would be allocated to him to manage it.
Let's say the project lasts 5 years; he just netted 2/3 or so of a million in income. At that point, the project has gone bankrupt due to lack of interest.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJdrlWR-yFM They need to do this again but get it into space and onto a lunar trajectory. A controlled landing would not be necessary.
[NT]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm9_gpGF3Xw
Put it on one of Jupiter or Saturn's moons at least if you want to hope for any chance of survival beyond Earth's life.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Absolutely right!
Even an extraterrestrial publicity stunt like this, if privately funded, would be worthwhile... more so if they include a low lunar orbit satellite with a webcam to stream continuous video to Ustream or some similar service. Anything which helps to make the point that we do not have to limit ourselves to a single world is worthwhile.
You are not spending all of your money in a way that all the rest of us think that you should be spending your money. So we are now going to berate you for spending your money.
Have a nice day and make sure that you do not forget to Fuck Off.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Let's waste half a billion. Why not crowdfund for something meaningful and useful to the world? There are people dying and these jerks, anyone who supports this with effort or funding, are masturbating.
Yeah, look at all the good that money raised for Haiti did!
Oh wait, no it didn't - plenty was wasted, and they are arguably worse off than before. Hmmm...
I'm not saying DON'T give to good causes - but thinking that this money is somehow better spent elsewhere for a more worthwhile cause doesn't hold water in my mind.
..if you want something to compare it to.
I'm in.
The economical logic is simple. $500,000,000 is only ~0.007 (less than 0.1%) of the first "bailout" tranche that US taxpayers committed to maintain a purely-parasitical banking system. If we can spend 1000x this amount to pay bonuses to the banking class, can't we spend 1/1000 to help ALL of mankind?
This project that would at the very least INSPIRE and EDUCATE humanity...not to mention the technology spinoffs and trickledown benefits.
But personally...I would donate 100 times more money if the mission goal was to write a short MESSAGE on the moon that is beneficial to humanity. Something like "LEARN" or "LOVE" (or maybe, just to get past our biggest immediate hurdle, "BANKS = EVIL").
I'm not sure of the best technology for this. One possibility is a payload of several hundred small projectiles that burst with a carbon-black payload, each creating a large dot in an overall dot-matrix printout. Another possibility is to send a number of robots (Mars rovers, simplified) that could "draw" the message by chemically or mechanically "blacking" the lunar soil as they move.
Smarter minds can figure out the details. But the goal would be a message that advances humanity, and is visible to anyone with an average pair of binoculars at full moon.
Let's do it.
Helping the Google Lunar XPrize teams (there are twenty currently) would be a far more interesting, fun, and productive way to spend some millions. Slashdotters could help support Google's important Lunar competition.
And how exactly is this anything close to the same thing as "throwing cash into a fireplace"
It does nothing useful for almost anyone (well... a small number of people would get a very expensive heating system) and all it does is produce pollution.
the reason money exists, is to purchase time/work from somebody. $500M would potentially allow hundreds of people to earn a living for a time, stimulate an economy that globally is stagnating, and would produce results that people would for hundreds of years be able to say "we accomplished that" or "we helped fund that".
Those people will not starve without this project.If anything, this project would take away their valuable time and resources.
Also, idi... I mean author of the "article" pulled all of the numbers from his as... I mean thin air.
You want a project you could say "we accomplished that" about? Get your buddies and go plant some trees.
it's "saving money" that ends up hurting the current system, not spending it.
Actually... no. It's spending the money you don't have on things you don't need that is hurting the system. You know... like a war or two.. or putting a fucking rock onto another rock. In space.
Which is about as artistic as making a photocopy of Mona Lisa. Or taking a snapshot of it with your phone.
On the other hand, NOT spending that money would NOT waste human, technological, monetary and other resources that WILL be needed elsewhere - as people with the knowhow to pull something like that are not actually sitting around on their asses or flipping burgers at the local grill.
Nor would most of the material and resources be recyclable in any way - even if you have plans for a "put a rock into space" industry.
And the FACT that this will never be done (definitely not in the way it was proposed to be done) proves beyond doubt that there are more important things to spend/waste/save money on.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Couldn't we just pull another "Capricorn One" and pocket the other $450,000,000?
8==8 Bones 8==8
With telemetry back to Earth. Seriously... NASA could do that with their eyes closed.
Lunar Cam 2011. That's MY crowd source mission.
I'm all for funding a project to put something on the mood. But make it something constructive, not some stupid, pointless tribute to a novel and movie. I like the movie and novels, but not so much that I was to see untold millions wasted on this nonsense.
How about spending a few thousand bucks and having one erected somewhere on Earth?
This funding method might work better than advertising: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/30/nasa-scientist-publishes-colonizing-red-planet-guide/ I'm ordering this book in couple of moths by the way
Placing a monolith, or any relatively small-sized object on the moon is a waste of time: it is bound to be obliterated, or at least buried, by an asteroid strike long before the Earth-Moon system is destroyed by an aging sun. Something that would last much further into the future would be a large-scale excavation of some kind, like the Nazca Lines. It could be something as simple as a straight line, or consist of more complex shapes, perhaps conveying information about our civilization. The bigger it would be, the better: preferably on a scale of thousands to hundreds of thousands of meters. That way, large parts would remain recognizable as obviously artificial for as long as possible. If the excavation robots used for the project were self-replicating, it would be possible to do it for relatively little money as well.
Well the kitten isn't going to bury itself ya know
I don't think he needs burying yet.
the food people eat is essential to their survival. Art is not,
Art is not essential to survival; it is essential to existence. That's why it's not a waste of money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey, if he can pull this off, then anything is possible. Even honest politicians!
Ironic, coming from a username pronounced "man goo" ;-)
Cost In Todays Dollars Of 1960's moon program: $170,000,000,000
# of Saturn V rockets in Moon program: 15
Maximum Payload of Saturn V rocket: 272,000
(170,000,000,000 / 15) / 272,000 = $41666 per lunar pound
1.62oz golf ball = $4218 to get a golf ball on the moon using 1960's technology.
unless they use globalmojo [globalmojo.com] which gives non profits money when you surf {add-on or firefox mod}
1. Use existing survey data to find spots on the moon where peaks are likely to contain good, solid rock.
2. Launch laser into LEO.
3. Carve monolith using precision control of the laser.
4. ???
5. Profit!
I don't think we can do this now. We'd probably learn a lot building the control systems to target and move the laser. Some of the results of that research might really be profitable.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I got my $100 right here!
Yeah, it's only the minimum wage equivalent of 13,000 man years. That's almost nothing.
Why not just build some completely useless pyramids instead? All the benefits of the monolith, but you can actually visit the finished product.
Like analogs to the Martian rovers? I watched a documentary a while back where there were was still information to be gleaned from surface rocks the Apollo astronauts never had a chance to collect.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The monolith was pretty fraking huge, are there any rockets currently in production that could lift a payload that size to escape velocity?
If there arn't (which I think is likely given the Saturn V factories were long ago converted to service the STS and nothing else ever got a lander the size of the LEM to the surface let alone a 27ft+ tall statue) and without the ability to buy a rocket from someone else this project would have to bare the full cost of development and capital overhead to produce a rocket from basically nothing. That would probably be several orders of magnitude more expensive than the half a billion dollars estimated by the author.
Ironic, coming from a username pronounced "man goo" ;-)
Be afraid, be very afraid of who you make fun of...
That estimate seems very low. We probably couldn't restart the Shuttle programme for half a billion, and as it stands there are no rockets ready to lift anything to the moon.
IANARS but my out-of-the-blue unqualified know-nothing-about-it guesstimate would be around 4 billion dollars. Maybe that's too low too.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Am I the only one who thinks this would be a bad idea?
It's kind of like tattooing the moon.
Once it's up there if we ever decide we don't like it, it would cost twice as much to get rid of.
I liked the movie well enough. But I think this kind of turns the moon into a giant movie reference.
That might be cool or funny now but what about a thousand years from now. What are our descendants going to think?
I think that in all likelihood, if we did this, it would spend 100 years being funny and the moon's existence as a hollow joke about a species that couldn't band together to accomplish anything that matters.
That's just my two cents though, sorry to be such a downer.
People on Slashdot often exhibit a depressing lack of spirit when stories like this come up. Yes putting a monolith on the moon is pointless, but so was sending the Voyagers (or should that be 'V_ger') into space with a gold record and a picture of a naked man and woman on them (and don't tell me they'll be spotted by aliens in eons or something - a monolith on the moon is just as likely to be discovered by the next Neil Armstrong monkey astronaut). Big budget movies cost an insane amount of money and are mostly crap. I go and see them, but given the choice, I'd give my £15.00 ticket price to something like this - a lot more affecting, entertaining, and satisfying than Avatar or something. We (/. community) should support stuff like this! Rubbishing people's artistic ideas because they're not immediately practical or whatever is so easy, and lazy, and sometimes I reckon is down to sort of creative jealousy or something. Lift your nose from the keyboard, think of all the shit in the world, then think of the universe. Different scales - both important.
It's easy to argue that an aggregate total of something should be appropriated by someone "in charge" for some worthy cause. I'd love 13,000 man years to be dedicated to solving major problems. More power to those involved.
It's ridiculous to argue that all individual effort not directed to a worthy cause should be confiscated for redirection to a worthy cause. You may as well scrap any semblance of free will in our society. After all, the time spent calculating that total didn't contribute an iota to preventing people from dying, now did it? You bad, non-cause supporting person you. Heck, if you've ever slept in without needing to recover from an illness, we may as well declare that a crime against humanity -- just think of the aggregate loss in worthy-cause productivity.
Look up the definition of hypocrisy. If you can't say that you've never engaged in an equally or even more frivolous activity, your criticism and the GGPs complaint fall pretty squarely within its bounds.
...could provide a fair number of jobs...
You've been listening to the announcements of politicians too much!
"Creating jobs" is often a synonym for "wasting money".
Jobs that do not produce anything useful are 100% pure waste. Does this produce anything useful? No. Hence, those jobs are wasting the time of people that could otherwise be gainfully employed.
At best, this could be construed as a publicly funded inefficient grant to the aerospace industry, but even then, a more productive use of that money would be to donate it directly to NASA earmarked for scientific exploration or something.
For example, it would be much more useful and interesting overall to fund a probe to go to Europa. The mission would generate new and interesting scientific results and NASA would have to develop new technologies like cryobots. Those have practical applications on Earth such as mineral exploration under ice sheets. There's a reasonable chance that life could be discovered, which would be the most amazing scientific discovery ever made by man. Worth a couple of billion? Probably. Sending a slab of metal to the moon? No.
Or maybe this is all just a plan along these lines:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/01/04/132622672/could-it-be-spooky-experiments-that-see-the-future
\for those a bit dense: we place the monolith after the fact to make it appear for a real-life "2001 a space odyssey" mission due to "leaks" in the space time continuum.
Stupid skintubes...
Of course we don't spend all of our time on "worthy" causes, and obviously leisure, arts, recreation, sports and other non-productive activities have their place. OTOH, I have to agree that spending $500 million of a monolith to the Moon seems excessive. And yes, if we managed to bring so many people together on one cause, let's make it a bit more worthwhile than a Monolith. :)
Or are we engaged in "compensating"
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
"Creating jobs" is often a synonym for "wasting money".
Jobs that do not produce anything useful are 100% pure waste. Does this produce anything useful?
Yes, it provides satisfaction to the people who contribute. You miss the point that entertainment is a perfectly valid economic product. A concert, once finished, production no "thing" but the musicians provided a service and the audience was entertained. A concert (or play, or poetry recital) is 100% legit private sector economic activity, not wasting money. This project would fall in along the same lines.
http://oscomak.net/ could go far for half a billion US dollars (my site).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
How would you spend it then? About the only thing I can think of where $500 million might have an impact would be a mass sterilization program. It would cut down on the dying and people like you wouldn't reproduce.
WIN! WIN!
There will always be people dying, that's what we do, no way to stop that, but putting something on the Moon now that is an excellent idea. Especially if it was done by just regular people.
That is what we call inspiring. Maybe once they do that then solving hard problems, like say cancer, might not seem so difficult.
Dude, I've been homeless. I'm actually a bit worried that I might be again within the span of a few months. And having been there, I'm giving serious consideration to suicide if that becomes a certainty. And even I think you need to lighten up. The solutions to world hunger, saving the sick and dying, etc, just aren't there. And throwing money at that particular problem isn't going to do anything. Throwing money at not having a monolith on the moon however, might solve that problem. When I had money I used much of it to just buy food for various homeless people around town, or if I had more to at least try to provide what I could to get them back on their feet. Sometimes it went well, sometimes not, and most of the time I have no idea what the end effect was. But even when I was doing that, I'd have chipped in a bit to this kind of thing. People who live and breathe charity, who let it dominate them, tend to become hollow shells of a person. Keeping yourself going is itself a charity as well, and maintaining a sense of humor is important to everyone.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I've worked with enough charities that I eventually decided that I don't give money to them without a huge amount of research beforehand. Between those that are outright corrupt, and those that are ruined by internal politics, it can be hard to find anything real. I vastly prefer just giving it directly to the homeless without a middle man.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Now my monitor smells like coffee...
It's ridiculous to argue that all individual effort not directed to a worthy cause should be confiscated for redirection to a worthy cause.
Agreed. Good thing we're talking about a collective effort.
I think you're far overestimating the work power of 13,000 minimum wage "man years". McDonalds corp owns (err, employs) 166,358 workers in the United States (extrapolated from their published numbers). You can rest assured, the 13,000 "man years" are easily covered by folks happily making your BigMac and Fries. Would you like an ice-cold McShake or McApple McPi with that? (Pi intentionally spelled as such, to keep up with your side of the argument, which incidentally is the number of apple-like flavored slices included, and the number of grams of known carcinogens in a McDonalds apple pie)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You forget the "fun" factor. Imagine what archeologists will be saying in a few thousand years about some oversized monument to some imaginary beings in the sky.
Too bad we won't be around to hear it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.