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How To Avoid a Scramble For the Moon and Its Resources
MarkWhittington writes "With the Chang'e 3 and its rover Jade Rabbit safely ensconced on the lunar surface, the question arises: is it time to start dividing up the moon and its resources? It may well be an issue by the middle of the current century. With China expressing interest in exploiting lunar resources and a number of private companies, such Moon Express, working for the same goal, a mechanism for who gets what is something that needs looking into. Moon Daily quotes a Russian official as suggesting that it can all be done in a civilized manner, through international agreements. On the other hand, law professor and purveyor of Instapundit Glenn Reynolds suggests that China might spark a moon race by having a private company claim at least parts of the moon. 'International cooperation will certainly rule supreme while there are no economic interests, while it is not clear where commercial profits lie. Scientists can't help communicating with each other and sharing ideas.'"
Property rights might come into play some day, when the moon is crowded or scarce materials are identified in limited places, but until then, good luck writing things down on paper on Earth and expecting anybody to care about that. Property on The Moon will belong to whoever gets there and defends their claim.
If any Earth Nation expects to shoot down transit flights to or from the moon to enforce their paper claim, the ramifications will be far more severe than if they simply did nothing. Perhaps the politicians will mumble and gurgle about it, but then do nothing, as is their typical pattern.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He who gets there, and stays there, first with the most wins the rights.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Other than being a place to wave your flag, and maybe--and I mean maybe--a handy place to build a telescope and a base for scientific research, is it really economically viable to haul back minerals and other materials by the ton?
Won't someone think of the native people?
Mooninites are people too! They're from the moon.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The UN isn't the best group all the time, but they are the largest international and best organized and most accepted international organization to do this. The moon is one of the best sources for Helium 3 IIRC.
I am me, I am the anomaly in the machine.
You're so jaded you just come off as ignorant. Bridges standing, roads open, clean water, electricity: those are all *major* problems that China and India actively struggle with. We don't.
It's not like the Moon has native wildlife that we might disrupt. It's an airless lifeless rock right now. Why would we want to bother trying to preserve it in that state?
What's there left to discuss? If you want who is moon's owner, just check whose flag is planted on it.
Somebody already did.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There's already a framework for establishing claims and exercising rights on those claims, and for resolving disputes over those claims.
Enforcement will always be the problem - since currently, and in the future, there's really no way to enforce the rules eleventy million miles away, it's going to come down to either put up or shut up, as it should.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm no scientist here, but the moon's mass I believe would be critical to it's stability in orbit. As we take mass away, and bring it to Earth, I would speculate the moon may eventually lose the momentum keeping it from crashing back into Earth. Granted we all may be long dead by then, but it's worth a thought.
yeah, things are so bad that when we first went to the moon most of the people were still poor and only a tiny minority could even dream of going to college
I am thoroughly convinced that this statement is about to be proven wrong... to borrow a phrase from a particular US President, while speaking about almost identical subject matter, "by the end of the decade". I do not mean the US reference to make make any implications as to which nation(s) might accomplish the task, however.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Some badguy once said that the way to win a battle was "He who gets there fustest with the mostest". That typically works pretty well for most human endeavors. We should want a scramble to get to the moon. Human innovation, powered by greed, has typically been the best catalyst for moving forward. I fail to see why this would be any different.
The UN would undoubtedly screw it up, as would any other controlling agency. So for the time being, leave it uncontrolled. It causes no harm and may do good.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
It's not like the Moon has native wildlife that we might disrupt. It's an airless lifeless rock right now. Why would we want to bother trying to preserve it in that state?
Um, because humans have a tendency to royally fuck up every environmental factor we can get our grubby little meathooks on, and the Moon plays a vital role in the tidal flow of our oceans?
If we mine a shitload of material out of the moon, won't that affect it's gravitational effect on the planet?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Good idea. Why not the Moon after the UN did such a great job divvying up Palestine and managing any subsequent conflicts over the land/resources there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Right. We're so backwards we can't even land the most complex lander ever devised on Mars. Or put satellites in orbit and Jupiter and Saturn.
And keep a manned spacecraft up and running for years. Or pay for the Hubble (several times).
Awful. Awful. Awful.
Yeah China - they manage to take mostly Russian technology and do something that both the US and the USSR did 40 years ago.
The Chinese are to be congratulated - no matter where the tech came from, it's a significant accomplishment. And FSM knows we need some competition here (it's the American way, right?). But quit the angst.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
a rough idea would be
1 land a Bot Crew to setup Moon Base Alpha (something big enough for say 24 folks)
2 when the bots have everything tested start sending people
3 the first group then builds MB Beta (big enough for 120 people)
4 after everything is tested and stable we start sending Managers
5 MB Gamma gets built
6 Congress critters get sent up (enough people should be there to "count")
Worry about which nation on Dah MudBall gets which moon rocks after we can have a conference ON THE MOON
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
No one can get to the Moon and no one has the resources to do so. Realistically this is something we'll have to figure out in a hundred years, not every time someone lands a rover on the moon.
We went from the Wright brothers flight to landing a couple dudes on the Moon in less than 60 years. Because we had a reason.
Never underestimate the drive and ability of human beings with a purpose.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Hyperbole much? "Never" is an extremely long time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What are the resources there?
Based on previous examples, what seems to work well for American's to really get it together tech wise is to have a president outline a grand, almost impossible plan then shoot them. Worked for Kennedy/Apollo and Reagan/Star Wars although obviously Ronnie got better.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Whoever gets the moon get's a very nice place to station lasers and missiles pointed at earth. It's of strategic military importance. The best place to have a star wars program is from a satellite. The moon is the biggest ass satellite of them all.
Because the website was hashed together relatively quickly, by staff with little personal stake in its success, and honestly there were plenty of efforts to ensure external data would remain unreachable by the website's calls.
A moon mission is very different altogether & would be managed differently. Stop whining & have some faith.
Bridges standing, roads open, clean water, electricity: those are all *major* problems that China and India actively struggle with. We don't.
Except for the bridges that have collapsed and the ones that are in critical need of maintenance; roads barely worth the name; constant water boil advisories across various parts of the country and - I take it you've never lived in the Northeast if you think we don't still laughably struggle with electricity.
Keep waving that flag though and ignoring our ailing infrastructure. We'll be number one in the race to the bottom at least, I guess.
The UN can't even manage things on earth.
Let the invisible hand sort things out. It is a whole lot more efficient, and less intrusive, than government.
He already owns the moon (according to him at least)
Dude, we have two active rovers on Mars - one that has been roving around for 10 years. In addition, two of the orbiters we sent there are still operational, with another en route. The ESA has had an orbiter for 10 years. Even India has an orbiter en route to Mars. Do you really think we don't have the capability to land a rover on the moon?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
We don't.
Yet.
also The moon unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.
We'd have to mine a hell of a lot to noticeably change the moon's gravity. And a slightly lighter moon might make up for the energy we're taking out of the system with tidal power.
I would like to see a company sell advertising on the moon. They could use a moon bulldozer to scrape a pattern in to the lunar mare to produce a coca cola ad.
It's not like the Moon has native wildlife that we might disrupt. It's an airless lifeless rock right now. Why would we want to bother trying to preserve it in that state?
Airless lifeless rocks have feeling too, you know.
First place the moon far away.
Next introduce a large gravity well around earth. Then make sure there is a vacuum on the moon and the only source of power is the sun.
That will avoid a scramble for a long time.
The problem is not technology to go to space, you americans already have this. The problem is will to do this again.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
without tears & innocence we will not get very far? handful of crown royal nazi psychos trashing our planet (causing the need to discover a new one) &/or populations sucks our spirits dry & deletes our genuine physical & spiritual allys all billions of us unchosens
...that's where all the good stuff is.
If we mine a shitload of material out of the moon, won't that affect it's gravitational effect on the planet?
I haven't seen a failure of perspective (or even expending a minute effort to think) of this magnitude in quite some time. You're a fucking retard.
Sometimes when i play monopoly, instead of developing my current properties i race to gobble up free spaces. I usually win.
that this guy the other day selling me the Moon was for real?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Yes, and when technology supports shipping quintillions of tons, we'll worry about that.
If we mine a shitload of material out of the moon, won't that affect it's gravitational effect on the planet?
Mass of moon: 7 x 10^22 kg
World annual steel production: 1 x 10^12 kg
World annual concrete production: 2 x 10^13 kg
Not an imminent problem to solve!
"Star Wars" worked?
Under the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, its name was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and its emphasis was shifted from national missile defense to theater missile defense; and its scope from global to more regional coverage. It was never truly developed or deployed, though certain aspects of SDI research and technologies paved the way for some anti-ballistic missile systems of today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
If you consider rescoping the project and completely ditching the satellites to still 'work', yeah, I guess.
Heh--I do really like that the satellite component had the acronym ERIS, though.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Yes lets appoint an unelected organization with a history of institutional corruption the rulers of the moon.. makes perfect sense.
I'd be more worried about what emptying the moon from so much material (has to be a lot to even be worth the effort, logic) would do to earth. We all know how much is influenced by the moons gravity - could seriously mess up some things
The shuttle cost $10k/lb to bring things 200 miles up to the ISS. SpaceX knocks that considerably. Now lets talk about going to the moon, being able to actually mine something, and bring it back. There is nothing that values in the $1M+/lb to go and get. It's not cost effective and will be much more than 50 years until it is and there is any sort of land grab because of it. Until then the Moon is huge, and the players so limited there will be no butting heads.
Except that that will shouldn't necessarily be focused on the Moon. Mars, Venus, and the outer planets all have a lot more to investigate about them. We put enormous multi-focusing telescopes in space to look at planets beyond our own system. It's not unreasonable to say the U.S. has ambitions with regard to space that outpace other nations.
First come first serve i say.
Everyone is so concerned with civility but in reality mankind is still an evolving species driven by the basics of survival. Its more important to put bodies in space than it is to waste time arguing over which bodies to put there.
Ah, but if Robotech has taught me anything it's that once you give the UN a space fleet, it can accomplish wonders... with the aid of reverse-engineered alien supertech that randomly crashes on an island near Japan.
And if Robotech has taught me two things, 75% of intelligent life in the universe is genetically compatible with humans already, and the last 25% is self-mutating towards that goal.
mooninites are dicks and their enormous bullets are easy to dodge so I think we're cool.
but srsly fucking lunar conservationism? wtf? what's next, a petition to preserve venus as it is? let's just stay out of europa and do wtf we want with the rest, mkay?
and I propose the following rule to it: whoever manages to get to the resources can use them as they see fit. I find it unlikely that they'll erase it out of existence any time soon.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No, we NEED to go back. We can't let China - a communist nation that hates freedom - beat us at this. In fact, we need to one up them and send a manned mission to Mars. To do that, we should pour tons of money into NASA and various scientific organizations. That'll show those dirty, rotten commies.
(Waits for the "blindly patriotic" crowd to start chanting for more money to NASA and science.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Its the only way to be sure.
http://www.tutorials128.blogspot.com/
no chance of just leaving it alone? arrogance abounds as abuse victims abuse everything
I'll leave it alone if you leave it alone.
But I'll prepare to pillage the lunar resources, just in case you make a move.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now that we're all democratic,it's OK for the old world to carve up the new world, and screw anyone who wants independence!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Treaty's work as well as you have guns to enforce them. That is the classic mistake of assuming somehow the rule of law enforces itself, ultimately it takes the rule of the gun to do so. The moon is potentially a very strategic position, the closest high ground that's capable of withstanding an attack while easy to launch kinetic weapons from.
No sir I dont like it.
It's not like the Moon has native wildlife that we might disrupt.
So no whalers on the moon?
The moon should be easier. They wouldn't have to worry about getting tickets for double parking. No cops. Drunk driving? No problemo?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Except that we do. U.S. infrastructure is crumbling, we have lobbyists working around the clock to deregulate environmental protection, and even keeping the power on is becoming more of an issue. Thank goodness we have plenty of money to dump into unneeded military tech projects, though.
It's not like the Moon has native wildlife that we might disrupt. It's an airless lifeless rock right now. Why would we want to bother trying to preserve it in that state?
Airless lifeless rocks have feeling too, you know. You insensitive clod!
FTFY
NASA was starved into irrelevance long ago. Both policitcal sides find reasons to starve it further. "Takes away from social programs" 'Increases the deficit"
We don't.
Yet.
Actually, you do. It just hasn't hit the headlines on Fox News yet.
What about Antarctica?
Never give away part of something you might want all of later.
That is all.
Who has worse roads?
Beijing or New York?
And i dont mean smog/polution, etc. I mean who's roads are in better condition?
To be more clear: Lack the will to go beyond of sending probes and start sending settlers. We have the moon where it is possible to mine taking advantage of low gravity, and a whole asteroid belt where it is easy to find literal giant metal balls just waiting to be processed.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Way to be a wet blanket... I'm in full support of protecting the environment but people really take the mindset to the most idiotic extremes. There's nothing to spoil up there, except maybe the view.
Personally, I'd love to look up at the moon and be able to see signs of human activity. It would be tangible evidence that humans are finally moving towards the stars. Although, considering that in orbit you can't see signs of human activity, I'm pretty sure the moon would look no different either.
More to the point, we have rovers on mars that draw penises. We own that place. The moon is so 50 years ago. Next stop Uranus.
One of every four Bridges in the US is broken: http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/08/07/one-of-every-four-u-s-bridges-is-broken/
The US government has a website specifically addressing problems with closed roads: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/trafficinfo/
Millions in the US drink dirty water http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/business/energy-environment/08water.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Energy poverty. Budget cuts in the US are causing people to freeze to death http://www.politicususa.com/2013/12/20/republican-budget-cuts-literally-causing-people-freeze-death-streets.html
Good idea. Why not the Moon after the UN did such a great job divvying up Palestine and managing any subsequent conflicts over the land/resources there.
OK, so the UN made one big mistake (fuelled by Great Britain's incompetence) in their history, but the organisation as a whole works pretty well. Just wish they could take over regulation of the Internet! They might get the moon bit sorted out first though.
If we mine a shitload of material out of the moon, won't that affect it's gravitational effect on the planet?
Any more than the current effect of the moon moving away from the earth?
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
All that matters is Boots on the Ground.
The international "can't get there" crowd, U.S. included, can only whine and posture in the U.N. as the Chinese strip mine whatever valuable resources they find there.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
What are the resources there?
1. Silicon
2. Oxygen
3. Aluminum
4. Iron
5. Magnesium
6. Water ice (in craters near the poles)
7. Helium 3
8. Titanium
9. Lots of trace minerals
10. Solar energy
Which we then generally find a cheap way to synthesize.
Wow. That escalated quickly.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Not an imminent problem to solve!
Thought that but wasn't sure, so figured it was worth asking.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm not ignorant. I'm just paying attention. It's like the character Hari Seldon's observations in Asimov's Foundation series. You start noticing problems with the little things -- a burned out light here or there; a pothole that never gets repaired; road signs that get knocked down and are not replaced; etc, etc. Individually, they don't amount to much, but they are indicative of poor planning, bad management, and indifference.
Proverbs 21:19
Why the HELL would you want to AVOID a scramble for Lunar resources? This is something to actively encourage, to get some permanent human settlements off this rock.
Every man/country for themselves, and may the best and fastest effort win.
Necron69
If we mine a shitload of material out of the moon, won't that affect it's gravitational effect on the planet?
IIRC, the force of gravitational attraction is proportional to the product of the masses. Given the magnitude of the masses of the Earth and the Moon, moving mass from one to the other in the amounts of which we are capable will result in a delta of the before and after products barely indistinguishable from zero.
The problem is not technology to go to space, you americans already have this. The problem is will to do this again.
No. The problem is a reason to do it again. We already have a sack of moon rocks. We don't need another. Until there is an economic reason to go back to the moon, the government should be spending our tax dollars on something that matters.
Who cares about the fucking moon, it's a huge fucking desolate wasteland. Save for boots on the ground there no one is going to claim all of it. By the time someone starts an industrial plant up there you'll have all other aspiring world power nations shitting their pants and pouring billions into competing projects so you'll be lucky if you claim a crater or two for yourself.
In the end it will be economical trade anyway. Someone will be sitting on surplus steel and someone will not bother to send a fucking smelting plant for 25 billion to the moon.
The Antarctic Treaty has worked pretty well so far. Something similar would work for the moon, although a Moon Treaty should have stronger controls on those pesky Japanese whalers doing "research".
The perennial argument against space exploration, especially by humans, is "There ain't nothin' up there." If a lunar resource scramble did develop, this would put an end to that line of reasoning for good. Of course, such an outcome would be immediately followed by "How arrogant of man to exploit the resources of the precious Environment..." Bite me, McKibben: the Moon has no ecosystem, and no natives for whatever equivalent of the British East India Company we set up to fear exploiting.
Nope. Our finest minds are working at Wall Street coming up with new ways to move money around. Talent usually go where the money is.
There's gold (and helium 3) in them thar hills.
Can we make concrete from the lunar dust?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The surface area of the moon is larger than all of Africa. I don't think there's a risk of a land shortage there any time in the near future. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
Then they should stop mooning us.
Hey!
You better get your hands off my land.
I already own a square kilometer of the moon and I've got a certificate to prove it.
Always communicating with each other and sharing their ideas. What's wrong with them!
"Scientists can't help communicating with each other and sharing ideas.'" Where the heck did that sentence even come from?
Call me crazy, but I think whoever has the resources to go to the moon and collect its resources... should get said resources.
I guess you were not around for the 2003 blackout that knocked out power to the entire NE of the U.S and part of Canada.
Sending settlers when you have only just barely established where there might be a supply of water could be construed by the more ethical to be jumping the gun.
We do have electric space motors - ion drives throw a small amount of matter out the back *very fast*. Rather that the usual rocket engine that ejects large amounts of matter at relatively slow speeds.
I must also warn that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress...
I'll keep this simple.
No. Not even close. If we shipped ten times more material than we have mined out of the earth in all of history, it would still be a negligible amount of the Moon's total mass.
That's No Moon . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I see what you did there... USA USA!
Which of those have value /on the moon/ ?
Silicon, oxygen, water are all quite plentiful down on earth. Even iron, aluminum and titanium are abundant. Magnesium isn't needed in massive amounts.
In fact, the Moon has mostly lightweight atoms, which generally are the less interesting ones. You're not going to find gold nuggets on the moon.
So, solar energy then? No, that's best harvested in much lower earth orbits. Geostationary would be a good spot. Until interplanetary flight takes off, the main resource would have to be He-3
It's actually a moment, but you keep believing that time is linear.
Please god let this be a joke.
ROFL
not possible m8...
Anyway the only way to make a claim without an international / ONU aggreament is to place an 18 years old there with a rifle there (special magnetic / electric rail gun naturally).
The goal of "Star Wars" was to destroy Communism by raising the cost of nuclear aggression to beyond what the Soviet economy could afford. It did exactly that.
I think future history books would benefit from a Great Lunar War.
Hurr durr.
If we mine a shitload of material out of the moon, won't that affect it's gravitational effect on the planet?
If we shoot a thousand rockets off of the Earth, won't that affect the gravitational effect on the moon ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I'm sure we can go back any time we want. NASA would have been foolish to destroy the original soundstage used for the Appolo missions. I bet they'll even get the shadows right this time.
What are the resources there?
1. Silicon
2nd most abundant element in Earth's crust
2. Oxygen
Most abundant element in Earth's crust
3. Aluminum
3rd most abundant element in Earth's crust
4. Iron
4th most abundant element in Earth's crust
5. Magnesium
In the top 10 of the most abundant elements in Earth's crust.
6. Water ice (in craters near the poles)
Oceans
7. Helium 3
10s of ppb only, and just on the surface (solar wind doesn't really penetrate).
Also, it's useless as an energy source compared to everything else:
If we are at a technological level capable of building a fusion plant for He3,
we can build one for hydrogen for much less. And thus, again, Oceans.
8. Titanium
In the top 10 of the most abundant elements in Earth's crust.
9. Lots of trace minerals
In traces very similar to those on Earth, given the common history.
10. Solar energy
Deserts.
So unless the idea is to produce stuff that goes further out and not back to Earth,
mining the Moon is just an insanely difficult way to get resources we have plenty
of down here.
Admittedly, building an actual production economy for space exploration would be
a great idea, and I'm all for it. Waiting for humanity to get the technical capability (to say
nothing of the will) to do so might still take a while though. We're far from being there.
uhmmm, a million dollars is not that much money, maybe ask for a little more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY
mfwright@batnet.com
It may be small as planetary bodies go, but is still really huge, its.surface area is similar to all of Asia. We are ridiculously far away from having a resource conflict on the moon. As far as environmental concerns - it already is an ugly ("sort of like a dirty beach") lifeless radioactive wasteland - what could we possibly do to make it worse?
If some country or agency really manages to use a substantial fraction of the 40 MILLION square kilometers of lunar surface, then as far as I'm concerned they can have it, I'm on their side.
In reality any attempt to regulate commercial or national exploitation of the moon is just a way for the countries that no longer have the will to explore space to discourage others from doing so.
It would definitely be interesting to look up on a clear, dark night (away from a city) and see the little dots of light barely visible against the shadowed portion of the moon. One small change, barely visible if you're not looking for it, but with a giant meaning.
they have a great vertical leap tho
And furthermore, an organization that gives resentful thugs from postage-stamp satrapies an inordinate amount of power.
tangent-ville: I doubt it'll be governments who wind up escalating or owning the thing, but corporations. Odds are very good that someone will pull a Heinlein and get it declared an entity separate and distinct from any single nation's control. The only trick is to get the big boys (US, China, Russia) to sign off on it, but since all three are somewhat easily controllable by corporations...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Does anyone remember your history lesson? Spain and Portugal claimed the entire western hemisphere would be split between themselves, which is basically why most countries on South America speak Spanish, except Brazil speaks Portugese. 500 years later, what's the status of that treaty? Not much.
We'll do the same except this time it will be US vs China, and 500 years from now US and China will be nobodies.
No... wait, yep, actually it IS the moon!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Sadly, AC is right... the friggin' thing is HUGE - it would take literal millennia upon millennia to mine even 1% of it away at current technology.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I WANT a scramble!
We WANT a scramble!
We want autonomous. colonies, and then small nation-states, on the moon.
Central planners, please jump into Christmas tree grinders in January as they swing by. Wildcat development has done nothing but bring freedom and development to humanity on unheard-of scale.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Yes, and when technology supports shipping quintillions of tons, we'll worry about that.
Quintillions of tons?!? We can do better than that. We'll just de-orbit it. Then it will all be on Earth and easy to get.
The will is there. Looking at the US between public and private institutions I see a lot of work being done here. However no one is at the point where we can set up a colony. The tech (and economics) just isn't there yet. Something that has been discovered over the decades is that doing anything in space is a lot harder and a lot more expensive then people hoped it would be.
Simply getting something to the moon is extremely difficult, if it is easy there would be all kinds of spacecraft going there (geez, I see zillions of PPT and occasional technology demonstrators). So whoever country builds up a usable infrastructure to utilize lunar resources, they can simply say piss off to everyone else.
Hmmm, this could create problems when have-nots will wage war with the haves. But at times reminds me when Ming Dynasty didn't think much of their massive navies and they were faced more with land based enemies than ocean based. But then couple hundred years later comes ocean going gun boats from Europe and dominate the region.
mfwright@batnet.com
Based on previous examples, what seems to work well for American's
Is obviously not the use of apostrophes. Where did all you semiliterate greengrocers come from??
NASA is next to useless nowadays - a massive bureaucracy that puts out only the smallest of missions in return for it's massive budget. Sure, the Mars rovers are impressive, but that is just exactly how many missions over how many years for how much money? Pournelle's iron law at work...
Far better would be to offer prizes to private industry. First company to send a lander to Mars that does X and Y: prize $100,000,000. First company that manages this on Venus: prize $500,000,000. First probe to "land" on an asteroid. First company to refine metal from an asteroid. First company to refine fuel on the moon. You get the idea...
Close fricking NASA. For $16 billion a year you can buy a lot of private innovation.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The issue is not one of reason, it is one of time horizon. Over the last few decades both public and private planning has become increasingly short term. Plans for things that will have big payoffs 20 or 30 years down the road are dismissed, while plans with smaller short term payoffs are glorified. Something like a moon colony is a long term economic investment, it would take time to get a return back on it (assuming the tech ever gets to the point that we would), but right now the US just isn't thinking that way.
Ya, lets us import iron ore from the moon. That will work.
...that's Loonies... you insensitive clod.
Yeah,.. when I was an undergrad working in a physics department, we had active recruiting from wall street firms and they tended to grab a lot of the best people. And now working in systems engineering we have trouble even getting grad students or staff for research, undergrads usually go strait into finance and staff are hard to keep since they can get twice or more salary doing modeling for investors.
Any large scale manufacturing, such as a five mile long O'Neill colony, will require considerable resources. Mining the moon and lifting it out the moon's gravity well is much easier than getting it from Earth. Even a small scale project, like building a lunar copy of Arecibo, isn't feasible without lunar mining and manufacturing.
USA! USA! USA!
It did work but not technically. The true purpose of SDI was to bankrupt the USSR to hasten its collapse. As a propaganda tool it worked perfectly. It also worked in the sense that it put a lot of contractors to work developing technology that would never work and they didn't have to account for it. So basically Ronnie gambled that they would go broke before we did. Of course, he put it all on the government credit card and a reckoning is coming soon but woohoo! The USSR is dead!
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Won't someone think of the native people?
Do you mean like this native "people"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PWnsamvE2k
This whole argument sounds like rationalization after the fact. "Oh, of course I knew the tech would never work...I was just planning to outspend them...yeah, that was the plan all along!"
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
It did work but not technically. The true purpose of SDI was to bankrupt the USSR to hasten its collapse. As a propaganda tool it worked perfectly. It also worked in the sense that it put a lot of contractors to work developing technology that would never work and they didn't have to account for it. So basically Ronnie gambled that they would go broke before we did. Of course, he put it all on the government credit card and a reckoning is coming soon but woohoo! The USSR is dead!
Ignoring the fact that Gorbachev was trying already to tone down the cold war and Reagan ignored him so his military-industrial buddies could get filthy rich at the public trough while Ronne waved his cowboy hat like Slim Pickens.
So you're saying you'll have a rover that will draw penises in Uranus?
As has this Chinese lunar lander.
Am I the only one who finds it kinda ... odd? I mean, whenever the US launch some satellite nobody gives a shit about we get to see at least a minute of stock footage (because, well, there is none, considering that the one half of the crap launched here today is for spying on us and the other half is for spying on the rest of the world), but here they send a craft back to the MOON and I get to hear from /. about it, days after it happens?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The folks killed by the I-35W bridge collapse beg to differ.
And before you object that anecdotes are not data, the ASCE thinks that America is barely passing overall.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, it's a stalemate. New York has the better roads, but Beijing has more parking spaces.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Did anyone else think at first that this was some kind of sex toy?
It's one thing to send a camera on wheels that sends back radio waves, and sending a mining operation that sends back mass. There's nothing on the Moon that isn't here already. What completely delusional Space Nutterish crap.
Another day, another crude propaganda attack on those designated 'enemies' by Team Obama and Team Blair.
China is going to own the Moon, dribble, dribble. Reds under the bed, dribble, dribble. Spend even more on the US military, and find even more reasons to use History's biggest war machine to murder ever more Humans, dribble, dribble.
Tell me, sheeple, does this propaganda play really work on your sheeple minds? I mean, every day the owners of Slashdot look for propaganda articles like this to promote, so clearly THEY think you are this stupid.
You know NASA is a front for America's military options in space. You know China and Russia are the only powers on Earth left to prevent the US from applying its nation-exterminating genocides in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to dozens of other target nations across our planet. You know the war mongers of the USA, fully supported by those like the owners of Slashdot, see the 'conquest' of China and Russia as their ultimate goals.
I would also like to think you are smart enough to know that 'going to the Moon' is simply practice for any nation preparing to confront the absolute evil of the US military use of space, and that Russia and the US long ago proved the uselessness of using the Moon for any practical purpose.
Part of any space program is winning the wide-eyed enthusiasm of young people, so they are inspired to become your future generations of participants in growing, future versions of the program. So you go to the Moon, or you go to Mars, and as a consequence the following decades bring more and better people to work on your military space projects. China is engaged in a race against time- the count-down to the moment the USA decides to launch an unthinkably massive pre-emptive attack against China in order to take control of the entire planet.
Behind the US war mongers who are DUMB enough to imagine a comprehensive victory for American butchers over the forces of Russia and China are monsters like Tony Blair. Blair simply wants the World War- to manoeuvre the US into a position where it willingly triggers a fully unleashed, nuclear and biological aggressive war against every powerful non-aligned nation on the Earth, almost certainly in the name of greater zionist Christian 'glory' (Blair knows the 'religious' play is likely to be the successful one in the USA).
So Slashdot will continue to bash Russia- continue to bash China- continue to bash any nation under attack from the USA, or listed to be attacked soon. Slashdot will continue to lionise the twin depravities of Saudi Arabia and Israel, the favourite allies of 90%+ of those that serve in Congress and the Senate.
So you say it would help if we threatened managers with imprisonment or worse if they can't get their shit together?
Sounds like a plan, we should try that some time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So unless the idea is to produce stuff that goes further out and not back to Earth,
mining the Moon is just an insanely difficult way to get resources we have plenty
of down here.
Duh. The whole point of mining on the moon is that it is IN SPACE. It is at the bottom of a shallow gravity well, with no atmosphere, so a simple mass driver (way more efficient that chemical rockets) can be used to launch materials into orbit. Other than maybe the Helium-3, no one is going to bring these materials back to earth.
Your parents shouldn't have let you consume all those lead paint chips.
Thank you. People love to point out that the US hasn't been to the moon in 40 years, like it's some huge failure. But there's no reason to go to the moon. There's nothing there.
The Sun loses 4 million tons of mass per second anyways already...
I had to look up what a water boil advisory is.
One big mistake? What about the extremely high-profile Oil-for-Food Programme? Widespread scandal, corruption, and kickbacks taking place. It kinda tells you something when most of the Wikipedia page has to be dedicated to documenting the abuses and investigations that took place. And if you read into it, you'll find that the connections reached as high as the son of the UN Secretary General at the time, who profited immensely from the business that was thrown his way as a result of the programme.
A scramble may lead to some rapid technological innovation. Sounds like a good thing.
That said, the moon is really really big and we struggle to put more then a few tons on it right now. Not too worried.
Which bring us to the mars colonization project http://www.mars-one.com/
I thought they would have tried the moon first. At least it's close enough that a rescue mission may be able to get to you in time depending on the issue.
Dangerously low food or water supply the original moon mission only took 3 days to get there, mars would be an 8 or 9 month trip.
While China and India are sending spacecraft there, our government can't even build a working website
"Truthiness" much? Do you have any idea how fucking many perfectly functional web sites the US Government has? Starting with NASA's? Ever register a copyright? copyright.gov. Want to see how many people live in your town? Census.gov. And guess what? Even the Obamacare site is working now.
How the hell did that completely inaccurate comment get modded up? Twice! I'm glad they were overruled by smarter moderators.
our finest minds are squandered on ways to get people to click links
Jeff Bezos is our finest mind? I think you'll find that the "finest minds" aren't greedsters, but scientists working at universities and yes, at NASA.
Free Martian Whores!
Actually, our near-term fusion reactors probably will use some helium-3--not as a main reactant, but as a plasma impurity which will allow a certain form of current generation using microwaves. But it's probably not worth mining from the moon.
"they manage to take mostly Russian technology " by that token , the US and russian took most from the first innovator : the nazi germany.
The problem is the enrgy needed to escape the gravity well. Until you solve that problem efficiently, you are pretty much screwed and it might take hundred of year, if ever, to get colony or industrial extraction on other planetoid or moon.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Because the competent try it first.
We really need a war over the moon's resources. Especially if said war produces a gun that plays techno music.
Regardless of "can't" or "won't"... there is no US rover on the moon. Like they say, the proof is in the pudding and it doesn't matter if one sprains an ankle or just doesn't bother to cross a finish line, a DNF is a DNF.
Seriously, so what if those things are here on Earth? It would make more sense stop shitting where we eat so to speak. Same reason we use all the brown people oil before we use our own. Use your own resources only when you must.
Sure, right now costs more in terms of money to get the stuff, but "because it's cheaper" is not a real reason to fuck up the planet.
[mod parent up, please]
Although it will be a while before we get mass drivers working on the moon, even in the meantime, it's still much cheaper to boost out of Luna's gravity well than Earth's. Anyone who doesn't think there's a "business model" up there hasn't been paying attention to the last few years of development.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Luckily, the guys at NASA are into that kind of thing....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So the worst that can happen is that the moon starts generating life on it's own?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
you forgot the two MOST valuable resources...
11 Moon Rocks.
12 Moon Dust.
Moon rocks go for more than 5000X their weight in gold. Moon dust is close to the same value.
So DeBeers will be there selling wonderful classy Moon rock engagement rings, because being expensive means you love her....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How To Avoid a Scramble For the Moon
That's a pipe dream, especially if there's a large asteroid in a direct collision course with the Earth (hint: we will be scrambling).
so is this how eq2 started? houhou
" It is at the bottom of a shallow gravity well,"
It is at the bottom of a Gravity well that is 1/3 as deep as the Earths gravity well but also still within the earths gravity well, which is also within the Sun's gravity well.
To orbit is easy from there, out of orbit still needs a lot of energy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
but srsly fucking lunar conservationism? wtf?
The moon has more impact on the earth than you might think.
I find it unlikely that they'll erase it out of existence any time soon.
I'll bet people thought the same about many resources on earth too. Now look at us.
Over the last few decades both public and private planning has become increasingly short term.
Human planning has always been short term. There is no reason to believe this is a "new" problem.
Something like a moon colony is a long term economic investment
The problem is that "long term investment" is often used as a codeword for "spending huge gobs of money on a boondoggle." A moon colony would cost over trillion dollars. To give investors a ten percent return, it would need to generate 17 trillion in income in 30 years. But the likely income would actually be much closer to this amount: $0.
You're missing the point. Yes hauling them back is useless. They would be used in space.
For what exactly? By who? And with what technology? All I'm seeing is a bunch of ill informed hand waving about the economics and technology involved. You're just assuming everything would make economic sense and that the technology will somehow be viable. Yes, getting out of a gravity well is expensive. However it is not the only economic issue in play here.
How do you propose the person doing it get an economic return if they return no product to Earth? Even if you somehow do manage to mine and process materials in space (which is a HUGE if) you still need to return *something* to Earth in order to make it economically attractive unless you are actually engaged in a colonization project with a completely independent economy.
Getting materials to orbit is incredibly expensive.
Sure, it is expensive to get materials out of a gravity well but it is not remotely clear that it would be any cheaper to process them in space especially since essentially 100% of the technology to mine and manufacture materials in space is, for all practical purposes, science fiction. While our scientists and engineers are pretty damn clever, this is a MUCH harder problem than most people realize. Seldom do people think about the supply chains that are required for all products. You have to have mining, refining, processing, transport, engineering, assembly, and quality controls for every single product and repeat it all for every material and every subcomponent in the item being made. You don't just have to send up a single device, you have to send up an entire supply chain to make space manufacturing technologically viable.
Get there first.
We went from the Wright brothers to landing men on the moon in less than 60 years. In the 45 years since we have gone from landing men on the moon to not being able to land men on the moon, and the US isn't even able to put men in orbit anymore.
"We could but we just don't want to" is a common excuse, generally used by those who can't do something.
First I see a picture of some homeless person. Ohh, so sorry. I wonder if I will one day wake up homeless. No, I will not. It doesn't happen over night. It is a long series of bad decisions for most. Bridges. Yes, when the US did the highway projects, we built thousands almost at once. Guess what? Materials degrade over time. Guess what else, broken is a loaded term. Guess what else what else? How often do most of us see a collapsed bridge. I have never seen one. I've seen a truck fire under one, and earth quaked bridges. They are checked and repaired immediately. I think your links are some bullshit scare crap. Seek medication please.
The United States made claim the moon in the same manner as early explorers, by planting the nation's flag. Unless China is looking for war with the US it wouldn't seem wise to steal US resources from the moon.
"we have rovers on mars that draw penises"
Link or it didn't happen.
There's also no Statue of Liberty in Philadelphia. What is your point?
By the way, there is a US rover on the moon. It has a steering wheel and was driven by human beings.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Because the Earth has liquid water, and enough complex organics to start the process of evolution.
That water, and possibly the complex organic molecules, came from space. The asteroids out there are not made of different stuff than the earth. The advantage of the earth is that it provides a life support system, we don't have to take one with us.
We went from the Wright brothers to landing men on the moon in less than 60 years. In the 45 years since we have gone from landing men on the moon to not being able to land men on the moon, and the US isn't even able to put men in orbit anymore.
"We could but we just don't want to" is a common excuse, generally used by those who can't do something.
I'd lay the blame on our social direction changing from "let's show the world how badass we are" to "how can we get our mitts on ALL the money?"
By "our social direction," I of course mean here in the USA.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No, I just answered his question factually. The reasons humans evolved on Earth are entirely unrelated to the reasons we might want to put humans in space. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
You are so mistaken. If anything evolution ***proves*** we need to go to space. We evolved into what we are, an intelligent species, a dominant species, because of the incredible evolutionary void created by a mass extinction created by a big 6 mile rock falling from the sky. Dinosaurs were not a failed evolutionary branch, they were wiped out by an external force.
It is at the bottom of a Gravity well that is 1/3 as deep as the Earths gravity well
No. At 1g (where g=earth's surface gravity), the moons gravity well is 288km deep and earth's is 5,478km. That is not 1/3 but 1/19th. Citation.
Is the moon profitable now? Meaning, can someone retrieve enough resources today to make the expensive trip there and back worth it? If not then no corporation is going to care now, they're not going to spend billions to buy land on the moon hoping it will be cheaper to get there and back in 20+ years. Therefore governments will need to divide up land on the moon now.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You're not really pushing a rational business case here. You would typically find a use for the uber expensive material before you spend a lot of money going after said expensive material.
Rational business cases involve risk and reward. High risk ventures can have a rational business case, they merely require a high potential reward.
Mining on the moon will be completely different than on earth. No oxygen = no gas engines, and no dinosaurs = no oil = no gasoline. Everything will be battery and solar or nuclear powered. And we haven't even covered what people will eat. Makes more sense just to send robots or rovers, might be slower than humans but easier to keep alive. Actually couldn't they do that now? Don't we have a rover on the moon now controlled from earth? Just need a rocket to land there, rover fills it up, rocket comes back to earth..... Profit!??
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Correct. The moon is 1/4th the size of the earth. Humans can't even begin to mine that much on earth let alone on the moon, and remember there's no oil on the moon so we won't be collecting oil or natural gas, only the most valuable and rare minerals will be mined. Compared to the size of the moon we will be mining practically nothing, and moon mining will be very slow going compared to mining on earth.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
If that is all the moon has then there is nothing to mine. Helium 3 is the only valuable thing on that list and even that is extremely rare on the moon so it would be extremely expensive to mine. Guess there is no need to mine the moon then.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Sorry, I can't tell whether you're talking about the UN still, or have drifted onto the related topics of the failings of pretty much any modern business or political entity...
You're still thinking too short term, which is why this sort of project belongs to the realm of government and not the private investor.
A successful off-planet colony may take quote some time to become self sufficient and start establishing profitable industry. 'A long time' could even mean several hundred years. But the end result could be similar to colonizing the new world in economic effect: new resources, new industries, new markets.
Establishing an off-world colony is really just an engineering problem at this point (especially if it's on a relatively tame place like Mars or the Moon). The positive economic impact of a successful colony (ie, permanent and self-sufficient) will be massive. We just need the will as a people to make plans that far into the future.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
More to the point, we have rovers on mars that draw penises. We own that place. The moon is so 50 years ago. Next stop Uranus.
I think that the TSA already beat NASA to it.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
"we have rovers on mars that draw penises"
Link or it didn't happen.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/mars-rover-penis-draws-nasa_n_3148422.html
unfortunately it did.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You're massively overestimating the relative depth of the gravity wells (and the convenient lack of atmosphere). For a visual comparison:
To get to the moon from the Earth.
To get to the Earth from the moon.
One word, nobody shall undertake commercial mining operations on the moon, anybody does, shall be killed by nuclear warheads.
Because if done wrong, we could get the moon moving more rapidly away from the earth or the other way around. Impacting masses on moon and earth also play a role, but at the moment the moon gets 5cm more distant per year.
We are in the need of Spacepeace.
Space transportation costs aren't as bad as you think, or at least they shouldn't be. Its our implementation that is horrible, we are using defense contractors, government bureaucracy and expendable spacecraft. Using even 70s tech and proper economies of scale costs could probably be brought down 100 fold. For reference the stated space shuttle cost almost 700 million per launch, but only about 2 Million of which was for fuel (Solid (~1.8 Mill), LH2, LOX (200K)). A reusable craft, even multistage, using liquid fuel would probably only cost $400k per launch in fuel. Seeing as how a 747 costs around $154k per flight its not that unreasonable even adjusting for less capacity vs more cost. Spaceflight will never be as cheap as air travel, unless some massive tech advance occurs. But its also not the "rocket science" that we are told it is to justify the massive waste.
You're still thinking too short term
No, the problem is that you are not thinking. At a 10% rate of return, spending a trillion today is equivalent to spending 17 trillion thirty years from now, when our capabilities in robotics, materials science, and propulsion, will likely be much better than today. If the timeline is measured in "centuries", then investing now makes no sense. It makes far more sense to wait until we have a clue how the "massive positive economic impact" will actually happen.
we went from landing man on the moon to essential hitchiking with the russians in less time
never underestimate political bean counter ability to fuck up a good thing
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The textbooks you read in school are the same that are taoght in India and China..their secondary school has equal calculus (may be more)...by the time their students post-graduate, more than half of Americans have dropped out anyway. The time has already shifted. It is only the said infrastructure such as clean water, electricity., roads bridges etc..that people from brilliant talent from likes of India and China keeps flowing into America. And this taleny in return keeps your rovers landing on Mars...Saturn ..wherever now and in future.
So try this - give them a place no where to go but stay in their respective countries. I say America got most 20 years before being technologically ghosted.
I give America only 5 years in case they stop maintaining their infrastructure today.
Cheers!
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
So... you don't think Russians are human beings?
That's kinda weird, yo.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A scramble for moon real estate and mining rights would be the best news in half a century on the space front. I suggest you divvy up much like other Homestead type plans and land / mining claims in the past on earth. If you can get to a plot and do something at all to add value to it then you can claim it as yours.
Most of the world has already signed on, including the US and China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
No government is able to lay claim to any celestial resources, such as the Moon or planets, as they belong to the human race as whole.
The UN isn't the best group all the time, but they are the largest international and best organized and most accepted international organization to do this.
The UN was designed to prevent WWIII. You want to know if the UN will be good at something? Does it prevent WWIII? If yes, then yes. If no, then no. Simple as that. Bad sci-fi movies will make you believe otherwise, but in the real world, that's how it is.
Only if it involves the Gundam
When it comes to advanced tech capabilities (plus possession of really big pair of balls) the NSA has shown the world they have pretty much powned the Internet. I doubt they waste much time developing web sites. And when other countries setup their own space initiatives they rely heavily and almost exclusively on technology and operational experience collected from the US or old USSR programs. And while there is nothing wrong with using information gained from someone else's efforts none of them pioneered the technology and processes needed to get to the Moon or anywhere else for that matter. The only other country that can honestly claim they innovated something new is the USSR although chances are good the KGB was able to get hold of any US research to help them keep up. The US is still at the forefront of developing space technology. The replacement of the shuttle program with the X-37 program offers a re-usable space that can provide quick turn around times, ground breaking orbital maneuvering capabilities, stealth, and vastly increased mission time. With the manned version of the X-37 being built the US will own earths orbital spaces. If China or any other country even comes close to claiming exclusive rights to the moon or any where else you would see the US space programs go full tilt with no concerns about the cost. Say what you want about the US but the general population loves a good "us versus them fight" which can provide ample political cover for increasing the government funding. After all it was the US vs. USSR cold war power struggle that made the US moon missions possible.
Well, no not "profit" yet. We'd have to discover something on the moon that's rare enough, and in enough demand on earth for there to be any profit in sending a giant rocket to the moon in order to bring back a fairly small amount of stuff. I haven't done the math, but at this point I doubt the economics come anywhere close to making sense.
Only way it will work there will still be space wars for it.
Exactly. MasterCard and visa don't think saving 5 billion annually in credit card fraud is worth switching to chip and pin.
When you need to to extract billions of dollars annually in raw material costs to make it profitable you need a good reason for businesses.
Maybe moon diamonds would work. But any of the base minerals won't cut it initially
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Yes, and when technology supports shipping quintillions of tons, we'll worry about that.
Quintillions of tons?!? We can do better than that. We'll just de-orbit it. Then it will all be on Earth and easy to get.
With what reaction mass are you going to use to perform such a de-orbiting procedure? Where is the energy source for such a hair-brained scheme? Don't you think such energy should be put to something more practical, like sending all of humanity to another hundred star systems?
You suffer from the same order of magnitude problem that the idiot above made with regards to thinking humanity could even make a dent in the Moon through mining activity. Actually, it was worse as at least mining stuff on the Moon is theoretically possible in large quantities.
Rail guns have already been built which have been able to achieve lunar escape velocity. Getting such a system to the Moon is just a matter of engineering and making it work in a lunar environment. While not one of the first things to be built on the Moon, if there was a business reason for getting a mass driver going it would be merely a matter of time and how much capital was available to get it built in the first place.
The real question is if it is easier to simply grab a near-Earth asteroid instead?
Probably more like the Moon Nazis
That has to be the dumbest comment I have ever read on Slashdot. You are an idiot.
Mine the moon for cheese!
Actually, you do. It just hasn't hit the headlines on Fox News yet.
Say what? Where did this even come from?
Instead of the sly comments, maybe you should look up our GDP/debt ratio, and pull your head out of the sand.
The goal of Reagan fans is to assert "see, that's exactly what we were counting on" well after the fact.
Fact: We spend more money on infrastructure TODAY than we were during the Eisenhower administration, when we were building the Interstate Highway System - and yes, this is adjusted for Inflation.
Fact: The Democratic Party is losing it's main sources of funding - Unions - and big surprise cooked up this whole Infrastructure story in order to ensure that more tax dollars go to the Teamsters, who return the bribes, er, favors, by donating large sums to the party, plus pushing their members to vote Democrat.
Fact: Whenever one or the other parties calls for spending money on something, claiming we must spend this money or we are all doomed, grandma's gonna starve, you're gonna die, whatever you can assume they are LYING and it's all about GREED, not our well being.
Fact: WTF does this have to do with Space Exploration, or the moon? Are the paid trolls so pervasive now that we can't talk about ANYTHING without all of the loons coming out of the closet?
Fact: A poll released this week from a reputable polling source indicated that some 70% of the people polled believed that the biggest threat to the survival of America was big government. It's the death of liberalism, get over it, big government is not the answer to your problems, can we please talk about coding, technology, space exploration, and something INTERESTING???
Murphy was an optimist
First it's not really a question of "if" but "when" such exploitation will occur. The US has had plenty of opportunity with 1st mover advantage to make claims and exploit the moon. They sat on their asses when it could have been financial cheap for them to do it. If other nations are ready to pick and do the job instead, I'm 100% OK with that. The US had its chance and it failed. Let someone else try.
I'm an American BTW
The correct comment would have been "The Obama Administration can't build a working website" not our government can't even build a working website.
Murphy was an optimist
It's almost a good question. The interesting question is: How large was the Earth before the moon was blasted free?
Nuke the Chinese
we still have NO FUCKING IDEA how to get fusion working, left alone getting He3 fusion working. I'm longing to see the solution, but my scientific estimate is it won't happen in my lifetime. also, from the scientific point of view, i would not worry about the radioactive waste from fusion that much. we're talking about a much lower amount of waste compared to fission, and it consists of mostly low half-life isotopes that are in most cases non-poisonous - whereas fission produces a lot of long half-life waste which is also often pretty poisonous apart from being radioactive.
and there is another thing - if we REALLY get He3 fusion to work, we can produce the stuff on-site - using a fission or spallation type neutron source to breed tritium from hydrogen which will then decay to He3 with a half-life of 12 years.
one thing with He3 fusion that makes me wonder if it really CAN work is how they want to extract energy from the process. doing deuterium or tritium fusion, this is trivial since most of the energy is carried away by the neutrons that He3 fusions wants to avoid - neutrons are charge-free, so they can leave the magnetic confinement. all products from He3 fusion are charged - so this won't work here. i've worked right next to Wendelstein 7-AS in garching for years, and most of the physicists there considered He3 fusion to be "neat - if it works". if ever, it will always be the second type of fusion reactor we get running, because if we can't make it with hydrogen first, we will never get it to work.
Interesting article in the UK's Guardian newspaper "Who outer space really is the final frontier for capitalism" http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/20/outer-space-final-frontier-capitalism-mine-moon
Bottom line: capiatlism is too bloody timid to take on such a risky venture and the only force that could or would is a well-funded socialist state
"Houston - the Locust has landed"
The UN should auction 15 year full property right leases, and give the money to developing countries.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
This whole thread is pointless.
Everything about space beyond high (GEOsychronous) orbit is 100% done for national pride.
When there's profit coming out of it it's from the tech developed to support said activity. Plastics, the micro processor revolution, many essential techs used in commercial aircraft came directly or indirectly from the Apollo project.
Even with the cheapest launch costs expected for the next 36 months (SpaceX Falcon Heavy) it would cost one billion dollars just to send humans back to the moon for a (useless) week long trip.
Establishing a moon colony just focused on mining would cost 50-100 billion USD.
The earth has no shortage of cheap plentiful energy, if we'd just stopped being freaky about nuclear power.
One square meter of dirty contains enough thorium (2 square centimeters) to produce as much electricity as 30000 square meters of Oil could produce.
If the same governments interested in spending those tens of billions in mining the moon would spend just 10% of that in LFTR Thorium reactors (or some other modern Thorium nuclear option) we would have enough energy (assuming current continuous exponential growth for it) for another 10000 yrs at the very least.
Without the carbon problems, or the pollution associated with massive scale space launches that would be needed to establish large moon mining infrastructure.
Nuclear fusion is a pipe dream. The reason govts keep investing on it is pretty much the same reason we want to go to Mars. It's awesome PR. We've been 20-30 yrs away from Fusion becoming viable since research on this intensified in the 1980s.
If you plot a chart with the moving target you'll see we're more likely 100 yrs away from viable fusion instead.
I guess it's back to http://www.discovery.org/ for some real nastiness.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Won't someone please think of the moon whales!!!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
..are we erasing earth out of existence? no.
worst thing is that luna gets freed from earth orbit and goes somewhere else and that's only after we have literally taken a large chunk of planetary(or moon) scale out of it(and tides would be less severe).
nobody fucking lives on the moon. there's no moon worms to preserve. there's no plantation to die from toxic fumes.
you got any idea what kind of scale scifi proportions the scale would have to be to make a dent on how big it looks on the sky?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You're a fucking retard.
And I'm certain your parents are very, very proud of the mature, well-rounded individual that you became as a result of your upbringing.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
0. Massive Lunar Vacuum
How the fuck could you possibly move the moon out of orbit?
No, the problem is that you're thinking too short term.
The desire to get a predictable monetary return on investment is why private industry has largely backed out of basic research. This is why the government largely fills that role. Desiring the government to act like a business in every way will only lead to a complete abandonment of basic research by our society. Without it, we'll only see incremental increases in technology (mostly those that lead to shinier gadgets) and your premise (that colonization will be cheaper in the future) doesn't necessarily follow.
It's possible that a sustainable colony on another planet could do for the economy what the New World settlement did several hundred years ago. Investing all of our money today in derivatives, smartphones, and housing bubbles will certainly make a few people richer today but it won't keep expanding our economy forever.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Your mistake is thinking on the issue solely in monetary terms. And as another commenter said, thinking in terms of short-term monetary gain and wanting return guarantees. Basic research do not have guarantees of return.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Luckily, the guys at NASA are into that kind of thing....
No, the guys (and gals) at NASA were into that kind of thing. No longer. NASA, sadly, can't even put someone into LEO, much less land them on the moon and return them safely to earth.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Bob Park, PhD. in physics and former head of the American Physical Society, famously wrote that it's so expensive to go to LEO and return that if LEO was full of 24-carat gold chunks, you'd lose money trying to retrieve it.
What are you going to bring back from the moon and turn a profit with it?
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.