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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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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
Yeah, but you only have to buy this monolith once. The hungry will just be hungry again tomorrow... Unless you stop feeding them, then it eventually solves itself.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
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.
Because imitating a market leader is always doomed to fail (by the time you come out, they will have innovated again, and you will be behind). However, this reminds me of the Pandora Handheld, which is a handheld computer/video game console with an extraordinary set of hardware features that has an open, Linux-based OS and was crowdfunded via pre-orders. Unfortunately, they've failed to avoid getting jerked around by their suppliers, so they have yet to completely ship all of the units in their first batch. They shipped about 1k units last May, but the joystick nubs were unreliable, which caused them to spend 6 months waiting for that supplier to make nubs that can last long enough in stress tests. They're finally getting back into mass production now, and I think they'd get through the first batch in the next two months if nothing else goes wrong. Anyway, this is the sort of open hardware that I'd like to see further development of, it does everything, has almost every possible feature (e.g. a full size USB port) and could be considered pocket sized by some standards. Re: the first reply, I think OpenMoko failed because the hardware had next to no features. I would have bought one if it had an 800x480 screen and some buttons, for example.
Some people loosely connected to the Lunar X Prize want to place a Christian cross on the moon.
http://crossonthemoon.com/
Religious Zeal-sourcing?
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?
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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...
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.
Let me make a few comments here...
1. I'm neither under paid as an IT worker.
2. A student (in our out of debt)
I do have extra money to spend, but I wouldn't waste it on this.
I don't consider myself a guru, just a mediocre linux/windows sysadmin, and a passable LAMP programmer.
Oh, and I don't know if it helps or hurts that my UID is only 4 digits. For reference for all you 7digit peeps, I'm 34, and I'm guessing I got this UID somewhere around '98 or 99.
Here's some news from that era
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?threshold=0&op=stories&sort=1&start=105690
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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.
With telemetry back to Earth. Seriously... NASA could do that with their eyes closed.
Lunar Cam 2011. That's MY crowd source mission.