quote:I feel space exploration is great, as is our amazing progress in science and technology, but erecting a facility on the moon is quite simply mad. It is playing with fire. Consider the incredible dependence of life on earth on the moon. The moon is responsible for the stability of this amazing planet. Suppose there is some accident on this facility or perhaps a mistake during construction that results in damaging the fragile satellite. That could destroy the stability of our planet. As if the American governemt isn't doing enough to contribute to our potential doom with their militarism, nuclear weapons and horrible record on climate, now they want to mess around with the moon. What is wrong with these people?
Note, I didn't edit this at all, whoever wrote this is apparently quite capable of composing intelligble English sentances.
posted
I myself, am an EARTH FIRST person. WE WILL STRIP MINE OTHER PLANETS LATER....
When you look at practicality of colonizing space, you will see that going to asteroids are a lot cheeper and easier than going to any planet and moon. You are not dealing with the expense of powering into and out of a gravitational well. What we need to do is attach space stations to asteroids and mine them for raw materials. Getting the equipment onto the planet and assembled would be a lot more expensive than assembling things in space and just relocating them to another point in space.
Something to keep in mind. We never had a climate-record problem until the environmentalists appeared. Now we have one. Cooincidence? I wonder if they might be the cause of our climate record...
posted
Actually, going to the asteroids is more expensive because it involves a greater delta vee and all of that has to be accomplished using conventional thrust. With the moon, the total delta vee isn't very high and you can use assisted launch technologies like railguns and stuff to make the return trip very economical.
The asteroids make a lot of sense mainly because there's just so much raw material there, and it's all broken up into easily exploitable bits already. The hardest non-resource rocks tend to be about as hard as clods of dirt, and they have heavy elements like iridium and gold and pallidium and crap in high concentrations right near the surface.
But if you were bringing in lots of stuff from the asteroids, it would make a lot of sense to impact it against the moon as a way to kill their relative velocity, thus making the return trip a lot cheaper. You could try atmospheric braking, but that would be more difficult, involve more danger of losing the package, and be pretty polluting once you were importing serious quantities of anything.
As for Space:1999, that was supposed to be a bunch of Americans all having wacky adventures on the moon, right? While I don't recall them destroying the moon's pristine environment (rather the other way around, wasn't it?), I'm sure tha the show did little to reassure dem furinurs that Americans would make the best possible stewards of Earth's precious and oh-so-delicate satellite.
Anyway, while anti-American sentiment obviously does play a part in the quoted opinion, I was wondering if there was anything else too it. I mean, can anyone think of a way that we could possibly mess up the moon enough to have any impact on the Earth's environment? Note that I'm precluding any deliberate use of planetoid-destroying weapons, you can't mount a giant laser on the moon, rename it the "Death Star" and ask for a million dollars.
posted
Well, there was that jingoistic little incident with an American flag, and the grossly commercial sale of bits of the moon as though it didn't belong to everyone on Earth equally Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:As for Space:1999, that was supposed to be a bunch of Americans all having wacky adventures on the moon, right?
Not quite. The moon was knocked out of its orbit by a nuclear explosion (which is almost certainly the reason Spaceman brought it up) and by means of space warps ended up gallivanting around the galaxy.
Posts: 1517 | Registered: Jul 2003
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If you destroyed the moon (by blowing it up with nuclear weapons, sending it through a time vortex, or whatever) the change on it's gravitic effect on the Earth would have bad results as far as ocean tides and weather.
posted
Let's face it. The moon is our nearest celestial neighbor...we're gonna get there eventually (though I doubt in any great numbers during the next few decades). For one thing, the arguments about harvesting rare and/or valuable materials from the luner surface and subsurface are moot until we have a practical way of transporting said materials to and from Luna (not to mention to and from the surface of the earth). This will necessitate either advanced mass driver technology (the concept of which is not without its flaws, to put it mildly), or a working space elevator. Preferably more than one.
Moving materials from A to B is still too clumsy, too power-hungry, and too expensive to justify mining operations of any kind on Luna. Until we have a reliable and safe renewable energy source, coupled with an efficient sublight drive, the cost and effort of lugging ore from the moon to Earth (or to L-point refineries before shipment to the surface of Terra) would be astronomical, no pun intended.
On the other hand, the original excerpt (if it can be called that) smacks of paranoia to me. Not only that...anti-American paranoia (which is not really all that surprising, since detractors of the United States have pretty much covered everything else on this planet...it's only natural that they'll expand to cover the solar system and galaxy in general sooner or later).
To be honest with you, I'm more worried about incoming planet killers and the like than industriously conquering the moon. Until we've got a couple of large-scale, anti-asteroid Gauss guns pointing outward, I'll leave the Sea of Tranquility well enough alone.
Inkwell ----------------- "The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp." -Anonymous
[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited December 09, 2006).]
posted
The moon is apparently moving away from us, perhaps not fast enough. Maybe it's feeling skittish what with all these discussions of what to do with it.
Posts: 0 | Registered: Feb 2008
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posted
Ah, the American space program has been one of the great disappointments of my life. When I was a kid, they got to the moon, then talked up a bunch of things they were going to do---next to none of which actually happened in my lifetime so far, and with minimal chance of them happening in the rest of my lifetime.
What did we get? A bunch of automated probes going to the planets, instead of manned expeditions...an international space station that carries few men and does very little...and the shuttle, which (also) promised little, and eventually cut back on even that. {And whenever there was an accident, the space program just shut down for years at a time.
I'd like to see a base on the moon...but I have more hope for my literary career than I do for it actually happening.
posted
Actually the space program has a lot of great technical side-effects like new materials and such. It's also healped to push the robotics industry.
As for messing with the moon, I don't think that's very likely. It seems the only way we can really mess with a planet is by screwing its environment, and the moon has no life and no atmosphere so that won't work. I guess if we nuked it enough we might be able to kick some dust out and significantly decrease its mass thanks to its low gravity, maybe mess with tidal flows here on earth and rain moon dust down on everyone, which would probably burn up upon reentry.
posted
Okay, I already said no planetoid destroying weapons. Using nukes to blow up the moon definitely counts.
On the other hand, rail gun technology is actually reasonably mature, though many of the cutting edge applications remain classified. But with the low gravity and lack of atmosphere on the moon, it would be pretty easy to boost things back to Earth using what the U.S. Navy has in their bag of tricks.
Also, if you're going to mount large scale Gauss guns somewhere, why not put them on the moon? They can be dual purpose, launching large packets of whatnot back to Earth and launching small packets of whup@$$ at anything we don't like.
posted
Despite the presence of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain as leads, Space: 1999 was basically a UK production and presented a multi-national Moonbase (the first series featured an Australian, a Nigerian and, IIRC, an ethincally-Hungarian Romanian amongst the supporting cast).
The original quote that starts this thread can be easily dismissed as foolish by a careful consideration of the use of one word: "fragile".
posted
So if nuclear winter or asteroid strike was going to make the earth uninhabitable, would you prefer an underground bunker or a moon base?
Posts: 366 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
^^^ Well, if you're careful, they do stay alive for a bit after you've eviscerated them. Say...twenty, thirty seconds. But I'd guess a newly minted opossum hat might be a tad distressed if you hung him jauntily from your noggin. Just a tad.
(BTW, for those of you who don't know me, I do not eviscerate live animals...just attempts at modest humor.)
Inkwell ----------------- "The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp." -Anonymous
[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited December 16, 2006).]
posted
Yuck. A freshly eviscerated but still living animal does not make a suitable hat, the most important quality of a hat being that it sits on your head rather than clawing desperately in an attempt to escape. Since the usual suspect for a live article of apparel would be a cat or small dog (possibly a snake), putting them on your head in that state would be unwise, at best.
Cats make fine hats, as long as you have the right material on your shoulders and choose a reasonably docile cat with whom you have a good relationship. They do have a slight tendancy to cover your eyes with their paws, which can be a problem if you have a bad relationship. Small constrictors can also make a good hat, but virtually all of them would generally prefer to coil about your neck, and they aren't easily trained. I have yet to see a dog that I would willingly allow to sit on my head, and I'm not looking for one. But if you don't mind having your hair smell like a dog's nethers, go for it.
posted
You know, I hope, that responding to hoptoad's tangential (actually, out of the nth dimension is probably more correct) comments only encourges him?
Posts: 8826 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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posted
government's involvement was a boon and bust to the space program. The boon was there was a whole pile of money thrown into the problem so that solutions could be found fast, if funding alone could solve the problem. Basically, when money is no object, solutions will be found.
the bust to the space program was that government bureaucracy came with the money and everybody knows that bureaucracy of any kind acts like a brake, not an accellerator. After the inital burst of advances due to money, the addition of paperwork, meetings, oversight, layering of decision making, slowed the advancements down.
A private space program would not have had the start up money to buy one's way to success, but their lack of governement oversight, paperwork, decisions going through layers of decision makers, would allow a private space program to continue to advance.
A private space program would also look for a way to make money at it, commerciallizing space travel and visits to the planets and asteroids. Look at satilite communications at what commercializing space can do. Government, on the other hand, thinks only about government useage, and only after things get out of hand, do they even consider commercial useage, by then, the brakes are on in full and almost impossible to turn off.
The stories written in the 50s and 60s about space travel, were based on the initial burst of advancements that government money provided. It was logical progression.
Privatize and commericialize space and in thirty years, we will have space stations around pluto.
posted
quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Privatize and commericialize space and in thirty years, we will have space stations around pluto. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why?
That's the reason I think your statement is wrong.
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Tourists will pay to go on interesting trips. Right now, our space flights are like pre-world war 1 planes. In spite of war, people paying for a ride, developed airplanes. Most of us would love to spend one or two weeks on a space station. Others would love to circle another planet. Some people's health might be improved by living in low gravity. Many manufacturing processes would be easier in space. People would want to be near their work so they would live in space. There are minerals available in asteroids that would be great in manufacturing and the gravity boosts to get to them would be cheap. They would likely set up space stations, possibly attached to the asteroid to make mining easier. Just a slight bit of power would allow the loads to drop into earth orbit and back again. Raw materials would not need to be rushed once you have several hundred in route. With easy access to space that tourism would demand, getting space probes and space stations in space would also come easier and cheeper. Going to and from space would become almost like flying from California to Austrialia. Only a few will do it, but enough to make it well worth having regular routes. With scientists and space stations in space, they would want to explore more of space. they might not land on planets, but at least have space stations set up so they can study the planet in depth, over a long period of time. this line of reasoning places a space station around pluto. It would be fun to go there if the travel time was not too demanding, or if I had enough to play with over the journey, stay and back.....
posted
I think one problem with space flight as currently constituted is that it's not cheap. It's an expensive undertaking, easier to put down on paper than to build and launch.
If the price to put a man in space comes down into, say, the tens of millions, you may see some interested billionaires shake loose some starter money and then you'll see something going. It's not going to happen as long as the price tag is so expensive that only the government can buy it.
quote:In spite of war, people paying for a ride, developed airplanes.
I'd guess that fare-paying passengers formed a small part of the incentive for building airplanes.
[rummages...] Here, check this out:
quote:By 1939, a handful of aviation companies had struggled through the Twenties and Thirties nurtured by relatively small but profitable military contracts.... Within seven years, [Grumman's] annual billings stood at $1.9 million with sales of $1.7 million.... All but a tiny part of this incredible rise during the worst economic disaster in American history came from military work for the Navy, which Grumman decided to pursue from the beginning instead of commercial transport....
The Glenn L. Martin Company (which became Martin Marietta in 1961), also made it through otherwise rough times by building warplanes for the government.
I can't vouch for the source, but it all sounds pretty reasonable, and Patterson was apparently editor and publisher for Newsday, a Long Island, NY paper, until 1963.
quote:Most of us would love to spend one or two weeks on a space station.... Some people's health might be improved by living in low gravity. Many manufacturing processes would be easier in space. People would want to be near their work so they would live in space.
...don't require anything beyond Earth's orbit. Even things like mining the asteroids would only be reasonable if you couldn't mine, say, the moon first.
When you privatize something, you're playing off the businessperson's instinct for getting the most return off the lowest investment with an acceptable risk. That places serious limitations on what would be done first. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, investors won't do it. Even Christopher Columbus wasn't just trying to explore; he was trying to get a leg up in the spice trade.
posted
I think it would be funny if the space program were financed the way professional sports is. I mean, the sports and space programs were roughly similar in the USSR, so maybe the capitalist model could work. What if cities or regions had competing space programs? That could be an awesome spec world.
Posts: 366 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Going to and from space would become almost like flying from California to Austrialia.
Going from Earth to Pluto would be like walking from California to Australia after circumnavigating the earth 50 times. You really believe you'll get so many people willing to pay to spend years and years in a spacecraft for the pleasure of stepping on Pluto, that you can support a permanent base for the sole purpose of tourism within our lifetime? You're stoned.
posted
I've often thought of spacetravel as being more like locking some group in a motel room for the duration. You can't go outside (except in an emergency to make repairs), boring diet, canned entertainment. Not recommended for a clautrophobe. Yet, I'm dying to try it out for real. 18 months to Mars? I'd say yes in a flash and tough out the reality in the hopes of the charge at the end --walking on another world.
[This message has been edited by arriki (edited December 20, 2006).]
posted
I don't understand the appeal of space tourism (or any kind of tourism, really), so I can't comment on whether it would really be all that profitable. As for Pluto...that's fundamentally really expensive and basically pointless. Consider that getting to Pluto would cost a substantial fraction of the energy it would take to travel to Alpha Centauri, and you realize that it's expensive. Considering that, given the ability to travel to Alpha Centauri, you could actually live in its nice habitable range and there just might be a planet or two to colonize and you can see how utterly pointless a trip to Pluto would seem in comparison.
But I don't know, maybe everyone is really dying to visit Pluto.
There have, in the past, been a few annoying regulatory restrictions on attempts at private space travel. Those have already been substantially relaxed and most of the remaining ruiles aren't really so unreasonable. Light, commercial space craft are being developed privately, and have left the atmosphere though none have achieved true orbit. The possiblity of building an orbital elevator is being seriously considered by investors looking into the profit margins to be had by reducing the cost of access to space by several orders of magnitude. But in thirty years the rising generation will laugh at the idea that there was ever some golden age of technology when just about any disease could be cured with "antibiotics" and you could talk to people on the other side of the planet. I just hope that they don't laugh at the idea that the Earth is a planet....
Anyway, it could happen...except for the fact that it won't.
posted
Alpha Centauri doesn't really have any true habitable zones because of the eccentricity of the secondary's orbit. It produces wild temperature extremes.
Of course, I'm not letting that stop me from writing a novel with a habitable planet there.
posted
That's not true, B isn't close enough to significantly affect the habitable range of the A. Nor does A do much to B (I'd actually go for B, it seems nicer to me). And Proxima doesn't even effect its own habitable range (ha ha, look at my affect/effect joke). A and B never get closer than 11 AU, at which distance an object at a little over one AU (near the middle of the habitable range) would still have to be about ten AU from the other, meaning that the increase in total stellar radiation would be about 0.5-1.5% depending on which star's habitable range you were using, and assuming that the planet was between the stars, so that the further star was only ever warming the night side of the planet.
The gravitational interaction is sufficient to possibly prevent either star from having a Jupiter-like planet, but would not affect the possibility of forming terrestrial planets in the habitable range. I'd say that the dispersal of a far Jupiter mass makes near terrestrial planets even more likely, though they might be uncomfortably massive (doubling the mass of a terrestrial planet might increase the surface gravity by about 50-60%, if one assumes similar composition). Still, you could live in orbit and just have your plants and animals live on the planet. Maybe anyone who wanted their children to grow up as stereotyped fantasy dwarves with big muscles and short (hah) tempers.
posted
I don't agree that the gravitational interaction would have no effect on terrestrial planets. According to Stephen L Gillett, the closest approach of the two stars provides enough gravitional perturbation to the accretion disks to possibly prevent any planets from forming, leaving you with an asteroid belt in the habitable zone. (See World-building Stephen L. Gillett, p148)
He may not be right, but the book is a very good one, and his arguments sound. But as I said, It's not going to stop me from putting a planet there anyway.
posted
OK I'm guilty of reading the topic and jumping straight to the bottom to comment... what can I say I love to see my opinion in print.
I am no scientist, but I know that the moon is no tiny fragile satellite. It isn't some orbitting bombshell that is barely holding some kind of delicate balance that could initiate the destruction of all creation domino-style at any given instant.
That thing is 1/6 the size of the earth, if we built a few buildings there it wouldn't hurt anything. I mean what do they think we're planning a nuclear testing yard? Even then it's not likely to throw the moon out of orbit, not with all that mass.
But should we build a base there? I'm not aware of any advantages. There are no resources there. I say we wait for the klingons to make the first move, if they attack us then I guess we can build a military base there. In the meantime let's just use the money to cut taxes Adam Smith style.
posted
Actually, there are resources there, but the biggest one is that it would make launching interplanetary missions cheaper by a factor of a hundred. The moon is an ideal place to send and recieve for the rest of the solar system.
It's also a good staging point for low-gravity rather than null-gravity assembly/construction projects, like if we wanted to build a giant space mirror to control the climate (or fry Paris).
Gillet is saying that it's possible for the gravitational interaction to prevent accretion disks from forming according to a highly specific model of how accretion disks form. It's certainly true that the disks would be unlikely to form aligned on the galactic ecliptic rather than the local ecliptic of the two interacting stars, but that's not the same thing as saying that the accretion disk wouldn't form. If the disk didn't form at all you wouldn't have gotten either star to initiation mass/temperature.
Which is why I assume that the planets of both stars would orbit in the same plane where the stars were orbiting each other. That's pretty much a given. It would be very[i] surprising to find them in a totally different plane. That's not the same thing as them not forming at all, which is quite unlikely (though [i]possible, according to Gillett).
posted
And that's why we need a moonbase. Even if it means we continue "to contribute to our potential doom" by "damaging the fragile satellite."
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Consider how many times the moon has been hit by all sorts and sizes of massive objects. I doubt the system (earth-moon) is all that fragile that a hundred years of humans on it will cause it to fail.
Posts: 1580 | Registered: Dec 2005
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