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Scottish Academic: Mining the Moon For Helium 3 Is Evil
MarkWhittington writes "Tony Milligan is a teaching fellow of philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and is apparently concerned about helium 3 mining on the moon. In a recent paper he suggested that it should not be allowed for a number of reasons which include environmental objections, his belief that the moon is a cultural artifact, and that too much access to energy would be bad for the human race."
This is probably the most publicity that Milligan will ever have in his life.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Seriously - does this guy have any clue as to how frickin' BIG the Moon is? You could carve a hole in it the size of New York City and it would barely be noticeable. You could carve out the entire dark side of the Moon and no one would ever see it (and misnomer aside, it gets just as much sunlight, thus He3, etc...)
The environmental angle? Maybe if it all got brought back here, okay... having not RTFA, I hope he isn't worried about the Moon's "environment", namely because it really doesn't have one of note.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Too much access to large amounts of cheap energy would mean that we don't continue to buy it from current sources. We can't have that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Given a long enough time frame, the human race will either inevitably fizzle out on our single planet, or move on to be an interstellar civilization for at least some period of time. If the second possibility is to happen, utilizing the moon will most certainly be a stepping stone there. Whether it's covering the surface in solar panels, mining it for helium 3, or something entirely different like simply using it as a staging area for longer range launches, we can't say, but it's virtually guaranteed that humans will be all over the moon in some capacity if they are to expand beyond our planet/solar system. On another note, the moon is a boring bland rock compared to Earth. I bet the moon is incredibly desperate for us to do something interesting on its surface... "please, let something, anything happen aside from getting smacked with another space rock and getting a 15 millionth identical crater!"
teaching fellow of philosophy
sounds like the sort of individual who's opinion I certainly give a fuck about
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
too much access to energy would be bad for the human race.
Ah, so the classic "we should all live in the dark and grow our own food" argument. Beautiful. Give King Ludd my warmest regards.
Free hint, Tony - Yes, many of the energy booms of human history have come along with a variety of ills. But they have also come along with the single greatest periods of progress as well, both social and technological. The industrial revolution caused a good bit of pollution, but basically made human slavery a net loss, economically. And fusion, as a nice perk, pollutes less than fission (which we already do), which in turn pollutes less than dinofuels (which we also already do because the hippies would rather let birds - and us - die that build more fission plants).
So in summary - Go fuck yourself, Tony. Live in the dark if you want. I like computers, and air conditioning, and cars, and concrete, and aluminum cans, and cheap plastic bottles.
The elements in our bodies come from exploding stars.
The earth coalesced from a swirling ball of gas and dust. Which had various quantities of these elements. Then yadda yadda, lifeorms started popping up. Of which man was one of the later variants.
Man needs this fishbowl of earth to survive in the universe, just like goldfish need a fishbowl to survive in our living room. Imagine if the goldfish could get to the refrigerator.
We're just trying to get to the refrigerator. Or maybe even go outside.
The earth is not the center of the universe. It's a smallish planet in the solar system. It's part of the universe. Just like man. Eventually the sun will red giant. If we don't go outside - leave the womb - we're finished. A fruit that died on the vine. Seems like we should be working on that problem now.
The Moon: A Ridiculous Liberal Myth
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
No wars of intervention to get at resources "owned" by another nation.
But there is the old fashioned war for control of a resource. We have nice friendly agreements about scientific study and no territorial claims at the moment, however at the moment we can barely get there and there is nothing we can economically exploit. If we get to the point where there is something very valuable to exploit and one or a small number of nations can control access to it then things may change with respect to no territorial claims and free access.
... there is so much surface area, that it is cheaper to mine than to wage war.
Wars/battles are sometimes fought to deny resources to someone else.
We are burning all oil here, probably getting out of that not renovable resource in this century or next. And that, in just 200 years of a civilization that been around for 10000 years, from a species that exist since 1 millon years ago, and will be out for anyone/anything here in the next billon years. And is it not just an energy source, it have a lot of derivatives that will be hard/expensive/impossible in practice to get from other sources. Compared to that, the limited amount of He3 that we could bring from the moon, and in a not very fast rate, won't count a lot.
Regarding the energy surplus, getting the same amount of energy from the sun (i.e. collectors in the desert, or satellites that somewhat beam down the energy) would have a similar effect.
The real problem is the civilization or the current culture, not using the moon as energy source or not. The current agenda is to use everything as if would be no tomorrow (thing that will happen if we keep acting like that). If you don't fix it, the moon won't matter anyway.
Actually the plan isn't that far off. Theory wise we have pretty much everything we'd need to do economical Moon-to-Earth He3 transport today. And academics routinely look at least a few decades out when considering implications of other people's tech
* Helium 3 is not a geological resource, it's believed to be deposited fairly uniformly on Moon's surface by the solar wind, so mining is a matter of gathering the upper layers of lunar dust and processing it to extract helium. Not without it's challenges since we would be doing it on the moon, but in principle nothing terribly complicated.
*While getting from the Earth to the moon is challenging, the return trip is much easier. In essence once you're off the moon it's downhill all the way. Escape velocity is roughly 4.7x slower at 2.4km/s instead of 11.2km/s, which translates to about 22x less energy required. That's a *much* smaller, cheaper rocket, or even a rail gun or the like since there's negligible atmosphere to slow it down on the ascent. Aim it so that it leaves the moon on a collision course with the Earth's upper atmosphere and aerobraking allows for cheap and easy deceleration. Combined with reusable
At present the biggest problem is that nobody yet knows how to practically generate electricity from He3-based fusion, or any fusion really. Even nasty neutron-rich deutrium fusion is still mostly theoretical, and He3 fusion has a 4x higher Coulomb barrier, which radically raises the difficulty. The only current tech I can think of that has a shot at reaching those energies is the Polywell, and that is claimed to be likely able able to do hydrogen-boron fusion relatively easily, which is a reaction much easier to efficiently extract energy from, as well as using abundant Earth-based resources.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.