See the post immediately above yours. It only works if you don't factor in inflation.
The "economists" claim is not directly cited, only indirectly referenced (no source given in the indirect reference), and the economists in question are implied by the indirect source to be "environmentalists" who have "tended to deny the significance of the Ehrlich-Simon bet".
Note, of course, that the emphasis is on mineral resources - not biological. Biological resources don't follow a "the harder it is to extract, the exponentially more is available" curve. Rather, they're just the opposite - the more you extract, the less the total for you to extract in the future; the less you extract, the faster new resources become available.
"We're now forty years after the first oil shock... How come peak oil isn't listed?"
Your post contains its own answer.
People have been screaming "peak oil" since the late 1800s. Meanwhile, oil resource estimates just keep rising.
It's a naive perception of how the world works that envisions that mineral resources are like some cup with some fixed, limited quantity of a resource, and once you take it all it's gone. The reality is that for every resource, there's unthinkably, mind-bogglingly vast quantities available in total. The ease of extraction generally follows an exponential curve: the easiest stuff is incredibly rare, the next easiest an order of magnitude more common, the next easiest yet another another order of magnitude, and so forth. The amount you can produce depends on your technology and your current price point. Any hike in your price point or increase in your technology consequently puts exponentially more resource onto the market. Likewise, any hike in price leads to significant increase tech research to develop new types of resources, as the potential payoff becomes massive. The exponential scaling factor of difficulty of extraction versus availability strongly discourages supply peaks.
Now, the sort of resource availability curves aren't completely smooth - some order of magnitude transitions can be easier to achieve than others. Likewise, resource markets are always going to be inherently vulnerable to long-term price swings because you have such a long lead time between the start of new projects and the reaching of full production, and even longer time periods before the start of work on new technology and it becoming commercially viable. But regardless of the swings, the long-term picture is never one of scarcity. Making the scarcity bet is not a good idea.
Now, minerals can and do peak - but rarely from supply peaks. Rather, demand peaks are far more common. The stone age didn't end because people ran out of stones.
Straw man. First off, any commercial drones are going to have to be able to prove that they can cope with whatever conditions they're permitted to fly in (and not fly in conditions they're not approved for), as well as to gracefully handle failures. And secondly, even a piano won't crash though the roof of a house - let alone a couple dozen kilo (tops) drone. Roofs are not as weak as you seem to think they are - unless your house is condemned or something. And third, if the wind is strong enough to blow a drone into your house, it's also going to be throwing all sorts of other debris into your house as well; at least the drone would be actively *trying* to resist and/or gain altitude to safety (with a powertrain that can do 50+ mph). When was the last time you saw a tree branch or piece or other debris do that?
Lastly, while an out of control drone may not be able to go through the roof of your house, let me assure you, an out of control delivery truck absolutely can go through your walls.
Yep, treating them like an other vehicle sounds like a reasonable approach, as does banning storing of recorded images without extenuating expressly-permitted/licensed circumstances.
The barrier for getting to fly delivery missions should be compared to delivery vehicles: if the per-package rate of collateral damage can be shown to be similar to or less than that of delivering by truck, and likewise with emissions, then it should not have a bunch of legal barriers put in front of it. Drone manufacturers should have a straightforward process to demonstrate their safety to gain approval (demonstrating acceptable results in realistic failure scenarios), and statistical data on drones in real-world usage should be collected to handle the adjustment of the safety standards that future drones have to meet.
Even if in the beginning they can't quite meet the safety levels of ground vehicles, that doesn't mean they should be totally banned - just not allowed to go widespread until they can (pilot programs only). Unless there's a sizeable hazard to the public, one generally allows a little leeway with new technologies. One can just imagine where aviation would be today if the earliest planes had to meet the safety standards of ground-based vehicles, for example.
1. Actually, it's often pretty easy to spot satellites. Visibly. There's 100-ish that are brighter than mag 4 (the limit for unaided vision in perfectly dark skies is 6, about 100-fold dimmer). If the position and angle are right the ISS can be mag -5.9 - an order of magnitude higher than the peak brightness of Venus, and readily visible during the day if you know where to look. Most commonly it's -2 to -4, so roughly between the average brightness of Jupiter and the average brightness of Venus. Iridium flares can get on rare occasions up to a staggering -9.5, though they usually max out at around -8.
2.Whether you're talking about radio or visible is irrelevant. What's relevant is that you're changing the angle of the "sight", from the horizontal to the vertical.
if there must be a line of sight between the operator of some monitoring equipment and the equipment itself, it's much harder for that equipment to be used to invade a person's privacy.
Really? So if I run a spy satellite and it's currently above the horizon where I am then it's "much harder for that equipment to be used to invade a person's privacy"? Really?
There's a world of difference between "I can see what you're doing" versus "I can see something that can see what you're doing."
Come to think of it, even a green pen laser kept aimed at the operator at all times would provide naked-eye visibility to a couple dozen miles out, barring obstructions or inclement weather.
Amazon employees have become frequently sighted in the Space Needle holding remote controls. Waves of reportings across town have been made of drones carrying lightweight parabolic solar reflectors that can be seen by the unaided eye dozens of miles away....
"Potential loss of offsite power" was listed as one of the two reasons for taking it down; the inability of the grid to accept power is only one. I would presume based on this that offsite power is part of their scenario for dealing with emergencies wherein the plant can no longer supply power for cooling its reactor, and hence the risk of loss of offsite power means an unacceptable meltdown risk should a disaster occur at the plant in the coming days.
To put it another way... the first stage has a dry mass of 18 tonnes but carries 385 tonnes of fuel, a 95 tonne second stage, and payload up to 13 tonnes. Hence for a given amount of propellant, the return leg of the journey right before flame out gets up to 27.4 times more delta-V. It makes it very easy to reverse your momentum. And of course, you don't need to reverse all your delta-V - for example, that spent achieving altitude or lost to air resistance. In fact, that spent achieving altitude actually helps you get back.
The question of whether there "clearly is not" depends entirely on the capability of the rocket versus its payload and target orbit, and thus how much propellant remains relative to what kind of trajectory it's on. This is a case where the rocket equation actually helps you - free of its upper stage and the majority of its fuel, delta-V changes are far less expensive.
There are two scenarios in question. The first is where there is sufficient fuel to return. In such a case, it simply returns straight to the (new) pad. The second scenario, where there's insufficient fuel, still involves a barge. Once on the barge, the rocket isn't overhauled, just simply inspected, partially refueled and then relaunched back to the main pad where it can undergo proper maintenance and prep for its next flight.
The goal is to eventually land upper stages as well. They are intended to complete an Earth orbit before reentering and landing at the launch site.
Of course, Kerbal makes things waaaay easier on you than real life, in so many ways;) The only advantage real life has is that MechJeb isn't considered cheating in RL;) But real life makes you put up with unreliable hardware, dangerous heating, heavy life support requirements, electricity generation is several orders of magnitude less, costs several orders of magnitude more, your delta V requirements are half an order of magnitude worse, and you have to play with Ferram installed.
Yeah, sort of, though IXV is much smaller (half the length and a fifth the weight). IXV is just a test vehicle, while X-38 was much closer to a realistic production spec.
That said, I like the general concept. You get maneuverability and you can stretch out your deceleration time (aka, lower peak heating), but don't have to take a big mass or complexity penalty to do so. And of course, a key for simplifying reentry is "no bigger or heavier than absolutely necessary". Even the X-38 would have fit in side the shuttle's cargo bay; IXV is the size of a passenger car.
Honestly, I can't think of a more compelling place outside of Earth that we have current, compelling evidence that there is life or lifelike processes ongoing than Titan.
A long mystery on Titan has been, where is the methane coming from? We can see it being converted into the atmosphere into a wide range of organic compounds, various compounds of CHON (the building blocks of life, one might add), and the whole atmosphere should be converted in about 50 million years - yet here's this multi-billion-year-old Mercury-radius moon that still has an atmosphere thicker than Earth's. Some have been detected at over 10000 daltons, so we're talking about big, complex molecules - as well as a lot of bulk simpler organics like ethane and acetylene. A common theory before Cassini-Huygens was that there would be a deep, global ethane / acetylene ocean, with all of Titan's current methane constantly bubbling up from deep within the planet. But this turned out not to be true. So what the heck is happening to all of it?
One theory that had been postulated was that life or lifelike processes on the surface in the hydrocarbon-"wet" sands and the seas are conducting their own cryogenic version of our gas cycle - that is, hydrogen plays the role of oxygen and methane the role of CO2, with various longer chain hydrocarbons, but especially ethylene and in particular acetylene, as the fuels. These are metastable on the surface of Titan. It's like if you set a bowl of sugar out, it's not just going to react with the oxygen in the air, even though that would put it into a lower energy state; you either have to heat it up significantly, expose it to an organic catalyst, or expose it to biological metabolic (catalytic) processes to react it with oxygen and extract the energy. Obviously, there are no widespread significant sources of great heat on Titan's surface. A cryogenic natural widespread acetylene catalyst would be very weird and a remarkable discovery in its own right. So if its breaking down, one would have to seriously consider biological processes as a possibility.
After the theory was proposed, the Cassini-Huygens mission confirmed the paucity of acetylene in the lower atmosphere compared to the upper atmosphere. And then a computer model of the data suggested that 1/3 tonne per second of hydrogen is diffusing from the upper atmosphere to the lower atmosphere, aka - it's being consumed at the surface and regenerated photolytically in the upper atmosphere. Now, this latter research is just a model - we don't know yet if it's accurate. But it's yet more evidence that there might be something unusual on the surface catalytically breaking down organic compounds with hydrogen.
We can also look at what we know about the chemistry that's going on. The longest chain compounds identified thusfar are PAHs - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Well, one of the major pre-"RNA World" hypotheses (that is, to say, how a RNA World abiogenesis scenario could come into being) is called PAH World. PAHs act as natural scaffoldings for RNA synthesis. Furthermore, laboratory recreations of Titan's atmosphere and the organic chemistry going on therein resulted in the synthesis of all five nucleotide bases as well as amino acids.
Would I bet my car on there being life currently on the surface of Titan? No. But there's some very interesting activity that warrants explanation, and it'd be pretty hard to rule out life or lifelike processes. Certainly more evidence than we're seeing anywhere else. It would have to be very different than life as we know it, no question, and we may be talking about something more like a "hypercycle". But if it's true that there's some sort of catalytic cycle going on on the surface, what could one point to as a more likely cause on a world awash in complex organic molecules than a process based on complex organic molecules? And if you have an environment were you're constantly producing a wide range of organic molecules and these molecules are performing an energy-extractive activity, well, that sure sounds like a perfect setup for abiogenesis.
But... there's a lot of big IFs, so time will tell.
Most of what I've read about heat loss on Titan pertains to hot air balloons, so I'll cover that first.
Thermal radiation is proportional to the temperature to the fourth power. So essentially zero. Convective / conductive losses are proportional to the gas density, surface area, and to the absolute difference in temperature. Buoyancy is relative to the relative gas densities, meaning for a given amount of buoyancy in Titan, you're dealing with only a small absolute temperature difference compared to what's needed on Earth for the same amount of buoyancy. The low gravity means you can float higher (in thinner gas) as well, and means that you can use a much smaller envelope at any given height. So convective and conductive losses are dramatically reduced.
All in all, heat loss for a balloon in Titan's atmosphere is extremely low.
Now, a submersible is more challenging, of course, as you're surrounded by a much denser fluid capable of drawing away heat much faster (aka, like the difference on Earth between standing in freezing air vs. swimming in freezing water). But thermal radiation is still essentially irrelevant. The question for conduction / convection becomes what sort of heat profile one plans to design their craft to have. It should be noted that most hydrocarbons have significantly lower specific heats than water, and thus would not be expected to draw heat away as quickly in an equivalent scenario. Also, there's a fairly good chance that these liquids may be rather viscous, so convection will probably be greatly reduced (it all depends on the exact mixtures and temperatures).
Not to mention that North Korea isn't anywhere close to a missile that could be aimed on a trajectory that could reach to Africa.
EMP would be very expensive, let's not downplay that. But it's hardly the end of the world. For power companies, it'll be as if a major storm took out hardware across a rather large area. For businesses and the public, it'll mean having to replace random non-surge-protected electronic devices (we're not talking "close enough to erase hard drives" or anything, the power grid is vulnerable to these high altitude pulses because the wires act like giant antennae)
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See the post immediately above yours. It only works if you don't factor in inflation.
The "economists" claim is not directly cited, only indirectly referenced (no source given in the indirect reference), and the economists in question are implied by the indirect source to be "environmentalists" who have "tended to deny the significance of the Ehrlich-Simon bet".
(for those who are curious, here's the long-term pricing on the minerals in the Simon-Erhlich wager, inflation-adjusted).
Keep getting your news from Russian media.
Note, of course, that the emphasis is on mineral resources - not biological. Biological resources don't follow a "the harder it is to extract, the exponentially more is available" curve. Rather, they're just the opposite - the more you extract, the less the total for you to extract in the future; the less you extract, the faster new resources become available.
"We're now forty years after the first oil shock ... How come peak oil isn't listed?"
Your post contains its own answer.
People have been screaming "peak oil" since the late 1800s. Meanwhile, oil resource estimates just keep rising.
It's a naive perception of how the world works that envisions that mineral resources are like some cup with some fixed, limited quantity of a resource, and once you take it all it's gone. The reality is that for every resource, there's unthinkably, mind-bogglingly vast quantities available in total. The ease of extraction generally follows an exponential curve: the easiest stuff is incredibly rare, the next easiest an order of magnitude more common, the next easiest yet another another order of magnitude, and so forth. The amount you can produce depends on your technology and your current price point. Any hike in your price point or increase in your technology consequently puts exponentially more resource onto the market. Likewise, any hike in price leads to significant increase tech research to develop new types of resources, as the potential payoff becomes massive. The exponential scaling factor of difficulty of extraction versus availability strongly discourages supply peaks.
Now, the sort of resource availability curves aren't completely smooth - some order of magnitude transitions can be easier to achieve than others. Likewise, resource markets are always going to be inherently vulnerable to long-term price swings because you have such a long lead time between the start of new projects and the reaching of full production, and even longer time periods before the start of work on new technology and it becoming commercially viable. But regardless of the swings, the long-term picture is never one of scarcity. Making the scarcity bet is not a good idea.
Now, minerals can and do peak - but rarely from supply peaks. Rather, demand peaks are far more common. The stone age didn't end because people ran out of stones.
Straw man. First off, any commercial drones are going to have to be able to prove that they can cope with whatever conditions they're permitted to fly in (and not fly in conditions they're not approved for), as well as to gracefully handle failures. And secondly, even a piano won't crash though the roof of a house - let alone a couple dozen kilo (tops) drone. Roofs are not as weak as you seem to think they are - unless your house is condemned or something. And third, if the wind is strong enough to blow a drone into your house, it's also going to be throwing all sorts of other debris into your house as well; at least the drone would be actively *trying* to resist and/or gain altitude to safety (with a powertrain that can do 50+ mph). When was the last time you saw a tree branch or piece or other debris do that?
Lastly, while an out of control drone may not be able to go through the roof of your house, let me assure you, an out of control delivery truck absolutely can go through your walls.
Yep, treating them like an other vehicle sounds like a reasonable approach, as does banning storing of recorded images without extenuating expressly-permitted/licensed circumstances.
The barrier for getting to fly delivery missions should be compared to delivery vehicles: if the per-package rate of collateral damage can be shown to be similar to or less than that of delivering by truck, and likewise with emissions, then it should not have a bunch of legal barriers put in front of it. Drone manufacturers should have a straightforward process to demonstrate their safety to gain approval (demonstrating acceptable results in realistic failure scenarios), and statistical data on drones in real-world usage should be collected to handle the adjustment of the safety standards that future drones have to meet.
Even if in the beginning they can't quite meet the safety levels of ground vehicles, that doesn't mean they should be totally banned - just not allowed to go widespread until they can (pilot programs only). Unless there's a sizeable hazard to the public, one generally allows a little leeway with new technologies. One can just imagine where aviation would be today if the earliest planes had to meet the safety standards of ground-based vehicles, for example.
1. Actually, it's often pretty easy to spot satellites. Visibly. There's 100-ish that are brighter than mag 4 (the limit for unaided vision in perfectly dark skies is 6, about 100-fold dimmer). If the position and angle are right the ISS can be mag -5.9 - an order of magnitude higher than the peak brightness of Venus, and readily visible during the day if you know where to look. Most commonly it's -2 to -4, so roughly between the average brightness of Jupiter and the average brightness of Venus. Iridium flares can get on rare occasions up to a staggering -9.5, though they usually max out at around -8.
2.Whether you're talking about radio or visible is irrelevant. What's relevant is that you're changing the angle of the "sight", from the horizontal to the vertical.
Really? So if I run a spy satellite and it's currently above the horizon where I am then it's "much harder for that equipment to be used to invade a person's privacy"? Really?
There's a world of difference between "I can see what you're doing" versus "I can see something that can see what you're doing."
Because traffic and diesel fumes and road noise from surface delivery are a-okay in your book?
Come to think of it, even a green pen laser kept aimed at the operator at all times would provide naked-eye visibility to a couple dozen miles out, barring obstructions or inclement weather.
Amazon employees have become frequently sighted in the Space Needle holding remote controls. Waves of reportings across town have been made of drones carrying lightweight parabolic solar reflectors that can be seen by the unaided eye dozens of miles away....
"Potential loss of offsite power" was listed as one of the two reasons for taking it down; the inability of the grid to accept power is only one. I would presume based on this that offsite power is part of their scenario for dealing with emergencies wherein the plant can no longer supply power for cooling its reactor, and hence the risk of loss of offsite power means an unacceptable meltdown risk should a disaster occur at the plant in the coming days.
"Score:2, Troll"
Whoever did that, my hat goes of to you ;)
Daystar bad! The Daystar, it burns us. Best stay indoors and guard our precious.
The Man is also trying to stop you from removing the brakes on your car. Removing the brakes on your car is a personal decision, dammit!
To put it another way... the first stage has a dry mass of 18 tonnes but carries 385 tonnes of fuel, a 95 tonne second stage, and payload up to 13 tonnes. Hence for a given amount of propellant, the return leg of the journey right before flame out gets up to 27.4 times more delta-V. It makes it very easy to reverse your momentum. And of course, you don't need to reverse all your delta-V - for example, that spent achieving altitude or lost to air resistance. In fact, that spent achieving altitude actually helps you get back.
The question of whether there "clearly is not" depends entirely on the capability of the rocket versus its payload and target orbit, and thus how much propellant remains relative to what kind of trajectory it's on. This is a case where the rocket equation actually helps you - free of its upper stage and the majority of its fuel, delta-V changes are far less expensive.
There are two scenarios in question. The first is where there is sufficient fuel to return. In such a case, it simply returns straight to the (new) pad. The second scenario, where there's insufficient fuel, still involves a barge. Once on the barge, the rocket isn't overhauled, just simply inspected, partially refueled and then relaunched back to the main pad where it can undergo proper maintenance and prep for its next flight.
The goal is to eventually land upper stages as well. They are intended to complete an Earth orbit before reentering and landing at the launch site.
One step at a time...
Of course, Kerbal makes things waaaay easier on you than real life, in so many ways ;) The only advantage real life has is that MechJeb isn't considered cheating in RL ;) But real life makes you put up with unreliable hardware, dangerous heating, heavy life support requirements, electricity generation is several orders of magnitude less, costs several orders of magnitude more, your delta V requirements are half an order of magnitude worse, and you have to play with Ferram installed.
Yeah, sort of, though IXV is much smaller (half the length and a fifth the weight). IXV is just a test vehicle, while X-38 was much closer to a realistic production spec.
That said, I like the general concept. You get maneuverability and you can stretch out your deceleration time (aka, lower peak heating), but don't have to take a big mass or complexity penalty to do so. And of course, a key for simplifying reentry is "no bigger or heavier than absolutely necessary". Even the X-38 would have fit in side the shuttle's cargo bay; IXV is the size of a passenger car.
Honestly, I can't think of a more compelling place outside of Earth that we have current, compelling evidence that there is life or lifelike processes ongoing than Titan.
A long mystery on Titan has been, where is the methane coming from? We can see it being converted into the atmosphere into a wide range of organic compounds, various compounds of CHON (the building blocks of life, one might add), and the whole atmosphere should be converted in about 50 million years - yet here's this multi-billion-year-old Mercury-radius moon that still has an atmosphere thicker than Earth's. Some have been detected at over 10000 daltons, so we're talking about big, complex molecules - as well as a lot of bulk simpler organics like ethane and acetylene. A common theory before Cassini-Huygens was that there would be a deep, global ethane / acetylene ocean, with all of Titan's current methane constantly bubbling up from deep within the planet. But this turned out not to be true. So what the heck is happening to all of it?
One theory that had been postulated was that life or lifelike processes on the surface in the hydrocarbon-"wet" sands and the seas are conducting their own cryogenic version of our gas cycle - that is, hydrogen plays the role of oxygen and methane the role of CO2, with various longer chain hydrocarbons, but especially ethylene and in particular acetylene, as the fuels. These are metastable on the surface of Titan. It's like if you set a bowl of sugar out, it's not just going to react with the oxygen in the air, even though that would put it into a lower energy state; you either have to heat it up significantly, expose it to an organic catalyst, or expose it to biological metabolic (catalytic) processes to react it with oxygen and extract the energy. Obviously, there are no widespread significant sources of great heat on Titan's surface. A cryogenic natural widespread acetylene catalyst would be very weird and a remarkable discovery in its own right. So if its breaking down, one would have to seriously consider biological processes as a possibility.
After the theory was proposed, the Cassini-Huygens mission confirmed the paucity of acetylene in the lower atmosphere compared to the upper atmosphere. And then a computer model of the data suggested that 1/3 tonne per second of hydrogen is diffusing from the upper atmosphere to the lower atmosphere, aka - it's being consumed at the surface and regenerated photolytically in the upper atmosphere. Now, this latter research is just a model - we don't know yet if it's accurate. But it's yet more evidence that there might be something unusual on the surface catalytically breaking down organic compounds with hydrogen.
We can also look at what we know about the chemistry that's going on. The longest chain compounds identified thusfar are PAHs - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Well, one of the major pre-"RNA World" hypotheses (that is, to say, how a RNA World abiogenesis scenario could come into being) is called PAH World. PAHs act as natural scaffoldings for RNA synthesis. Furthermore, laboratory recreations of Titan's atmosphere and the organic chemistry going on therein resulted in the synthesis of all five nucleotide bases as well as amino acids.
Would I bet my car on there being life currently on the surface of Titan? No. But there's some very interesting activity that warrants explanation, and it'd be pretty hard to rule out life or lifelike processes. Certainly more evidence than we're seeing anywhere else. It would have to be very different than life as we know it, no question, and we may be talking about something more like a "hypercycle". But if it's true that there's some sort of catalytic cycle going on on the surface, what could one point to as a more likely cause on a world awash in complex organic molecules than a process based on complex organic molecules? And if you have an environment were you're constantly producing a wide range of organic molecules and these molecules are performing an energy-extractive activity, well, that sure sounds like a perfect setup for abiogenesis.
But... there's a lot of big IFs, so time will tell.
Most of what I've read about heat loss on Titan pertains to hot air balloons, so I'll cover that first.
Thermal radiation is proportional to the temperature to the fourth power. So essentially zero. Convective / conductive losses are proportional to the gas density, surface area, and to the absolute difference in temperature. Buoyancy is relative to the relative gas densities, meaning for a given amount of buoyancy in Titan, you're dealing with only a small absolute temperature difference compared to what's needed on Earth for the same amount of buoyancy. The low gravity means you can float higher (in thinner gas) as well, and means that you can use a much smaller envelope at any given height. So convective and conductive losses are dramatically reduced.
All in all, heat loss for a balloon in Titan's atmosphere is extremely low.
Now, a submersible is more challenging, of course, as you're surrounded by a much denser fluid capable of drawing away heat much faster (aka, like the difference on Earth between standing in freezing air vs. swimming in freezing water). But thermal radiation is still essentially irrelevant. The question for conduction / convection becomes what sort of heat profile one plans to design their craft to have. It should be noted that most hydrocarbons have significantly lower specific heats than water, and thus would not be expected to draw heat away as quickly in an equivalent scenario. Also, there's a fairly good chance that these liquids may be rather viscous, so convection will probably be greatly reduced (it all depends on the exact mixtures and temperatures).
Not to mention that North Korea isn't anywhere close to a missile that could be aimed on a trajectory that could reach to Africa.
EMP would be very expensive, let's not downplay that. But it's hardly the end of the world. For power companies, it'll be as if a major storm took out hardware across a rather large area. For businesses and the public, it'll mean having to replace random non-surge-protected electronic devices (we're not talking "close enough to erase hard drives" or anything, the power grid is vulnerable to these high altitude pulses because the wires act like giant antennae)
I assume you mean "far side", not "dark side". The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, not the sun.