Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
Unfit to sharpen Phil Farmer’s pencils! Unqualified to be Ursula LeGuinn’s personal douche bag! Helped transform Niven from primo grade SF to Tom Clancy with ray guns! Feh! I say, and again: Feh!
We have no use for helium-3 until controlled nuclear fusion is perfected. First things first.
True, mining on the moon will be tough, but there is no Antarctic Treaty forbidding its mining whereas the world has agreed on a hands off policy about exploiting Antarctica. There seems to be a growing desire to protect, preserve, conserve, etc. large areas of the Earth not already spoiled. There also seems to be a desire to repair or restore areas already damaged by human activity.
At any rate, humans don’t always go cheap and easy over ridiculously expensive and complicated. There is still plenty of land to go around here dirt-side, yet people still choose to pay previously unbelievable prices to live in places like Manhattan, or Tokyo, or Moscow or someplace where the money, jobs and/or cool people are. Why do we build taller and taller and more and more expensive skyscrapers rather than simply spreading out to undeveloped, but developable cheap areas?
You’re putting the carriage in front of the horse.
Developing fusion would, by all reports, be easier with helium-3 as the target. But, people don’t develop towards a particular target for which they have no reason to think that its reasonable. If there’s not even a hint of a suggestion that a regular source of He-3 will be available, people aren’t going to develop for it. Not to mention that developing something without reasonable quantities of material to test with is significantly harder than when you have plenty of it. It’s like telling someone that they have to develop a fully working automobile with a single thimble of gasoline to work with for testing. Once they’ve completed production, you’ll start figuring out how to get more gas.
Yes, you’ll corner the market on [sup]3[/sup]He. Then you just need to figure how to market it as a miraculous new teeth whitener. :rolleyes:
Stranger
You are profoundly mistaken in this assumption.
Stranger
Well so, is there anything worth getting in space, besides information?
Perhaps you might elaborate, for that half dozen or so dopers who never quite got around to picking up that degree in nuclear physics.
The Lawson criterion (a metric of the difficulty of achieving the conditions needed for fusion) for D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than D-T fusion (regarded as the most promising type of practical fusion for power generation). The advantage of D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He and [SUP]3[/SUP]He-[SUP]3[/SUP]He fusion is that less or none of the output is in the form of energetic neutrons instead of charged particles.
Sure. There are countless mineral resources in the asteroids (including Near Earth Asteroids, many of which are easier to reach than the Moon). But there is no especially persuasive reason to go to the Moon, and certainly not for [SUP]3[/SUP]He, which can be more readily produced on Earth via tritium decay than by collecting it by sifting regolith.
Stranger
Their failure rate vs manned is due to how far they are being sent. They are pushing the cutting edge. Moon missions hardly ever fail these days. Challenger and Columbia represent a pretty big failure rate for manned missions, I would say.
That’s also because they are so far away. They have to get their commands, then operate autonomously on those commands. Leaves lots of room for insurmountable problems to crop up. As I said, the moon is close enough for essentially real-time control.
Here, people are cheap, and sophisticated machines are expensive. Cost to orbit is so high, that a few hundred pounds of machine, for millions of dollars, can do what it takes a few 10s of tons of human, and human life support to do, for billions of dollars. That’s why my suggestion also includes R&D on cheaper methods to achieve orbit.
Very true, but at a cost an order of magnitude or two higher. I’m not at all against manned flight. I’m just against premature stunts that leave no capability for permanent presence. Also, the machines are getting immensely better with each mission. Look at how much better the current crop of computers are, vs when Spirit & Opportunity were actually built. I stand completely by my original suggestion. I’m not even the first to propose it. It’s been in articles in science magazines and stuff for years.
No, when you have $1T programs, you get lobbyists, and voters depend on you. To paraphrase Stalin, how many special-interest groups does NASA have?
Are there no other worthwhile mineral resources on the moon? And if not, why not? I thought the moon was basically composed of the debris from a collision between the Earth and an early planetesimal. So…wouldn’t it have similar materials to those on Earth? Or did all the heavier metals fall back to Earth (or were completely ejected out)? Also, the moon has obviously been impacted many times over it’s lifetime…wouldn’t there be valuable remnants from at least some of those impacts?
I guess what I’m asking here is, why wouldn’t there be anything worth while mining on the Moon? And is this one of those things that known with a high degree of certainty, or is it one of those things that is still unknown?
-XT
Near Earth Asteroids, sitting right there on the moon. Splattered a bit, but everything that was in them is right there.
Meh.
You know what is a real accomplishment? We are on the verge of eradicating Guinea Worm, a horrific parasitic worm, up to three feet long, that incubates in your body before eating it’s way out through your calves in an agonizing process that takes weeks. We’ve gone from 3.5 million cases in 1986 to less than 3,200 today. It will soon be the second disease, after smallpox, that scientists have managed to wipe off the face of this planet.
This cost us around $300 million and was pretty much wholly orchestrated by the Carter Center. Imagine what we could do with a little more money and some real political will.
This is something we should be insanely proud of, but instead it’s something 99% of people have never even heard of. This should be what brings our nation pride, not launching stuff into space.
During this same time that we were playing around on the moon, we were this close to eradicating malaria. But just couldn’t muster up the political will for it. In part because of our failure, malaria rates began to surge and now around 400,000 people a year contract it and more people die of it than AIDS. Malaria is one of the big reasons why Africa is so damned poor. The disease is destroying the strength of the young people who should be making Africa great. And this is a disease that is extremely preventable and remarkably easy to cure. A disease that is 99% curable with a week’s course of drugs that cost around $1.50 still kills more people than AIDS!
This is how much it’d cost to get rid of it. And yet, in general, scientists have resigned themselves to the fact that eradication is an impossible goal.
I say we take this on! Let’s get our best scientists, epidemiologists, diplomats and the greatest minds on earth to work together to eradicate malaria. We already have the technology and know that we can do it- all we are lacking is the will. Let’s leave a legacy that will save millions of lives, change the face of a continent, and make the Earth a better place to live for the rest of time. This would be a grander and more glorious undertaking than anything we could ever hope to accomplish in space this century.
[post=11789537]Previous post on this topic.[/post]
Stranger
This is going to be a big chance to fight ignorance here, so…
I thought that some of the big problems with malaria were that we (and the Europeans) successfully got them to stop using DDT, but with a really effective (and cheap) alternative, coupled with a lot of ‘success’ on the part of the anti-vax crowd making big inroads in Africa and scaring them off of vaccinations, and compounded with a lot of general disorder in logistics (i.e. the drugs are sent, but they sit rotting on a dock or are seized or sold by corrupt officials and/or whoever has the firepower to seize it). Granted, ‘Africa’ is a big place encompassing myriad countries, cultures and a truly vast area, but my understanding is these were the main issues in the hardest hit malaria areas. You seem to be indicating, however, that the failure is on the US’s part, and that it’s primarily a funding issue, not the list above. Assuming that’s the case, then my second question after the whole ignorance fighting part would be…why would it have to be the US to fixes this, if it’s merely a funding problem? And if it’s seemingly a CHEAP funding problem? I mean, Europe is right next door, and they have all that UHC, so, presumably they would be in a better position to fix this issue once and for all. They are closer, and from what I’m constantly hearing, they have superior medical care (and, I assume, better pharmaceutical companies), and a comparable economy size wise…so, why haven’t THEY fixed this yet?
I’m truly curious here, as I don’t know (I realize it’s a bit of a hijack, but I’d really be interested in hearing the answer).
-XT
That post doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the question asked.
Yes, I recall both the discussion and your post there. But that’s not really what I was asking for here. Whether it’s economical or not to mine is not the question…I’m asking if there is anything there worth mining.
-XT
This and the malaria issue are all well and good except they have nothing to do with NASA’s budget. A vote for NASA is not a vote against doing something in Africa. A dollar given to NASA is not a dollar snatched from an African disease program. Yet, that’s how it’s always presented, and it’s so easy for people to say “no” to NASA because they personally, can think of things they’d rather spend money on than silly space adventures.
Those of you campaigning for unmanned robot this and that should be careful how you argue against manned exploration or moon bases because once the “feed the poor!” crowd is done killing those projects it’s just as easy - in fact easier since they’re just robots - to kill silly space probe missions.
Hunger and disease will remain uncured, of course. AND no cool NASA projects.
We should be sending expeditions into space for the same reason Spain and Portugal sent expeditions out across the ocean: because we don’t know what’s out there until we look for it.