The raw materials are mostly there (silica, aluminium) The important term here is 'raw'. All you need to do is build a mine, an ore processing facility, and a smelter, and you've got... big thick slabs of aluminium. Which you now have to change into useful forms, so you now need heavy industrial plant.
Have you any idea what that sort of industrial infrastructure looks like? (Let me guess, no, you've never seen heavy industry in your life.) How are you going to ship that lot to the moon and assemble it in situ? Guess what, it can't be done.
Living on the moon would be easy if... we could only solve the gravity well problem. Oh and the "no infrastructure in place", lethal rain of micrometeorites, gamma ray bursts and CMEs and hard UV from the lack of an atmosphere, errr..... and all the rest. Well guess what, we can't. They're called "laws of physics" for a reason.
assuming that colonization ended up being practical, Assuming I shit solid gold bars, I'm going to buy me a Porsche!
Retirement village for those who are extremely wealthy, taking a lot of pressure off of their joints. Stop! You're killing me.
The far side of the moon could be the perfect place to build an array of radio telescopes. You're right, it could be, if only it wasn't vastly harder to live and work there than it would be to do so at the bottom of the sea, and it costs tens of billions of dollars[that the US doesn't have, by the way, so this is all purely academic now for the next three decades] to get there.
I wish the "yeah but if everyone had your attitude we'd still be living in the trees!" brigade would go away an meditate on powers of ten.
This is actually the most serious and practical proposal I've seen in these comments. Bravo. I recommend you sketch up a reference mission design. You'll be wasting a lot less time and brain cycles than the Dan Dare fantastist fruitloops elsewhere in these comments.
pick up some rocks, turn round and come home? There's nothing else there (except the dreams of a lot of sad fanbois who cant distinguish between star trek and reality.) We will never "colonise" the moon, only a half-wit could think it either desirable or possible to do so.
-1 flamebait in 5, 4,..
Er, no, this is a drop in revenue to to customers leaving. When a DB company signs a customer up, it's recurring revenue; they expect to be able to count on so many dollars per user (or customer) in services, consulting and the rest. Those incomes streams are drying up as customers switch.
It looks like nearly everyone hear is jumping to the conclusion that TFA is saying "...and this is a BAD THING!" which clearly, it's not. Putting proprietary companies out of business (as everyone's pointing out) is *obviously* a good thing. Enough with the knee jerk "OOoh, they're attacking us! they're attacking us!!" mentality. Guess what, THEY'RE NOT!
I'm well aware of the potential bad uses of Palladium / "Trusted" Computing etc. The bit that's making me metaphorically point and laugh is this:
....with the goal of giving them total information control and selling that total information control to governments and corporations. Carl Sagan had a couple of useful sayings about this, firstly "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof", and secondly "...but they laughed at Bozo the Clown, too."
And you're just an utterly selfish self-satisfied dick sitting on a huge heap of corpses of those who died to bring you your lifestyle. And you'll be first up against the wall come the revolution.
they are willing to spend vast amounts of their time, effort, and money, in order to achieve something so truly inane. Who the fuck are you to say that thinking killing sentient living creatures is wrong, is "inane"?
What resources, rocks? I've got news for you, spacecraft thrusters don't run on rock. And as you say, a huge iraq-war scale investment would be required to set up that infrastructure anyway. Believe me, people cleverer than you and I have thought about this, which is why the official NASA Mars mission template/ design study is a straight-to-Mars design and has been for thirty years or more.
Well, if you're serious, we'll have to get in touch offline... I'm thinking a $100 stake (which won't buy you a beer in 2035, so it's just a bit of fun really.) I'm happy to do it on a virtual handshake I guess.
Except that the Virgin/Scaled Composites thing is just a Mach 2 rollercoaster straight up to 100km, then plummet back to earth; whereas the Russian have a real space program, you know, that actually puts things in orbit. That's much, much harder to do.
Slashdot Mirror
How is free education not a hand-out?
Here's an example: let's build a roof across North America!! Why? *Seward's Folly!*
Get it?
It's just a model.
This is actually the most serious and practical proposal I've seen in these comments. Bravo. I recommend you sketch up a reference mission design. You'll be wasting a lot less time and brain cycles than the Dan Dare fantastist fruitloops elsewhere in these comments.
pick up some rocks, turn round and come home? There's nothing else there (except the dreams of a lot of sad fanbois who cant distinguish between star trek and reality.) We will never "colonise" the moon, only a half-wit could think it either desirable or possible to do so. -1 flamebait in 5, 4, ..
Er, no, this is a drop in revenue to to customers leaving. When a DB company signs a customer up, it's recurring revenue; they expect to be able to count on so many dollars per user (or customer) in services, consulting and the rest. Those incomes streams are drying up as customers switch.
Company revenues are not normally considered to be a lottery...
sheeesh.
a $60,000,000,000 hole in public company's bottom lines is definitely a something, not a nothing.
gratis or libre?
....with the goal of giving them total information control and selling that total information control to governments and corporations. Carl Sagan had a couple of useful sayings about this, firstly "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof", and secondly "...but they laughed at Bozo the Clown, too."And you're just an utterly selfish self-satisfied dick sitting on a huge heap of corpses of those who died to bring you your lifestyle. And you'll be first up against the wall come the revolution.
Bugger, Slashdot ate my other link about how meat-eating is killing the world.
sure, you can mail me at i - m - i - p - a - k , without the hyphens and spaces obviously, at google's mail service.
what? it isn't. why? *baffled*
What resources, rocks? I've got news for you, spacecraft thrusters don't run on rock. And as you say, a huge iraq-war scale investment would be required to set up that infrastructure anyway. Believe me, people cleverer than you and I have thought about this, which is why the official NASA Mars mission template/ design study is a straight-to-Mars design and has been for thirty years or more.
Well, if you're serious, we'll have to get in touch offline... I'm thinking a $100 stake (which won't buy you a beer in 2035, so it's just a bit of fun really.) I'm happy to do it on a virtual handshake I guess.
Except that the Virgin/Scaled Composites thing is just a Mach 2 rollercoaster straight up to 100km, then plummet back to earth; whereas the Russian have a real space program, you know, that actually puts things in orbit. That's much, much harder to do.