It’s some time since I read that series(and very good it was too,I thought) but believe you are essentially correct about the comets being used for that purpose. I also seem to remember he suggested nuclear explosions to help things along! The main idea being to first to heat the planet up by providing an atmosphere, any atmosphere then oxygenate it with various lichens etc.
V
I’d like us to return to the moon to create a large observatory on the dark side.
Since the dawn of time humans have been wanderers and explorers. I think it’s a great thing. I hope I get to see it in my lifetime.
No immediate material benefit, that would win the next election.
I can image some Queen or king thinking 400 yrs ago, why would we want to send anyone to the New World what possible benefit could it be? They would have to cross the stormy N Atlantic, live in log huts, deal with all sort of nastiness, why bother!
Short term thinking.
Quite the opposite. People were sent to “the New World” precisely for the short term benefit. Kings wanted silk, spices, gold; easily transportable things with a lot of resale value. They were not planning on shipping ALL the supplies to the destination for EVERYTHING for almost ALL time forseeable, with virtually NOTHING to shihp back of value, and expenses greater than the GDP of some countries.
Right, of course, we’ve only explored a very small area of the Moon for a very short period of time (as RAH puts it, “The Moon is roughly the size of Africa, and we’ve only had a few people mucking around on it in an area about the size of Capetown.”) so we really don’t know what’s up there. If someone were to find something exceedingly valuable on the Moon (of course, to do that, they’d have to be there, but you know what I mean) you’d see an interest in going back to the Moon.
The Chinese are talking about it, which might inspire us to get off our lazy butts and doing something again. India, however, is only planning on sending a robotic lander and not a manned mission.
A potential benefit of the X-Prize is that if someone finds a cheap way for us to get into orbit, it’ll make it cheaper to go back to the Moon since the major expense in going to the Moon is getting things off the Earth, and into space.
The Moon is worth using as a source of silicon for solar cells; manufacturing photovoltaics from material found in situ will provide a valuable resource; power.
In a hundred years I would expect the whole Moon to be covered in selfrepairing photovoltaics, and collecting enough energy to power mass drivers to put even more solar cells in orbit around the sun.
SF worldbuilding at
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Yeah, but what do we use the power for? If you “beam” it to Earth, then you fry any migrating birds and aircraft that happen to pass through the beam. Use the power for a colony? Okay, but why have a colony on the Moon to begin with? No point in making the solar panels on the Moon and shipping them to Earth as the expensive doing so would eat up any benefits gained from making them on the Moon. (Earth orbit would be better, anyway, since in zero gee the silicon crystals could be grown in a weightless environment.)
This is forgetting that there isn’t any reason to believe that the Moon varies in any significant way. No telescopic inspection has shown any variation worth noting, and there’s no changing environment to make a forest over there, or mineral deposits downstream, etc. I would be willing to bet that the mineral assays are going to be the same everywhere.
Of course, there might be something deep underground, but the cost would be sooo high. I don’t have any figures, but how could it be worth the cost? Don’t forget that there will still be a human toll. How many manned flights have been lost, 3 (U.S.)? What percentage is that, ~ 2% or more?
And you’d lose that bet. There’s lots variation in the Moon, but it’s not visible in telescopes. You have to get down on the ground and go mucking about to find it. Each of the 6 Apollo missions brought back rocks with unique characterstics. One of them even found orange soil on the Moon.
**
The US has lost 2 manned flights (the Apollo 1 crew was killed during a ground test), the Soviets have lost roughly the same number, IIRC. As for it being worth the cost, that depends upon a lot of factors. What’s the item worth? If we found (and I’m certain we won’t) something that rendered radioactive material unusable for nuclear weapons, but still useful as fuel, then I’d say it’d be worth the cost. If the knowledge gained from the exploration of the Moon improves life on Earth, it’d be worth the cost.
The biggest problem is that so much of the Moon is unknown territory (we know what it looks like, but we don’t know what all of it is) that it’s impossible to say for certain that there’s nothing of value on the Moon. And until someone can find a way to get the price (in dollars) of finding out, we’ll never know.
Columbus set sail because he thought he knew of a way to get to the Indies and thus could bypass the middle man. He was going for a known quantity. With the Moon, we’re going for an unknown, and that’s a tough sell.
[sacrasm]
Oooh, orange dirt!
[/sarcasm]
No offense Tucker, m’boy. “Unique characteristics” simply means it was a different type of rock. The various Hawaiian Islands’ volcanoes often produce considerably different kinds of lava and lava flows- but in the end, it’s still just lava, which is still just a kind of rock.
Yes, it’s entirely possible we’ll find something interesting, perhaps a big nickel-iron meteorite. But the fact of the matter is, the Moon simply didn’t have the geological upheval and metamorphic conditions the Earth had. We likely won’t, for example, find diamonds up there- the conditions simply didn’t exist. The Moon doesn’t have the same kind of crust, so it doesn’t have the same kind of differentiation we see down here.
As for unique elements and so forth, I have yet to hear of anyone plausibly suggesting elements beyond what we know or have made, even can exist, let alone exist naturally somewhere. Sure, under certain conditions some strange things can happen- like the theorized “metallic hydrogen” that’s supposedly deep in the heart of Jupiter. Or the sci-fi “Neutronium”, or neutrons compressed to near-solid in the heart of a Black Hole. In either case, removing the substance from it’s conditions negates its condition- the hydrogen reverts to gas, the neutronium reverts to free particles.
Even if we found a deposit of gold up there, if it costs $10 Billion to go get it, how much gold would you have to (safely) return to Earth just to break even? And here we have diminishing returns- if you flooded the market with ten billion dollars worth of gold, all of a sudden gold will be worth about two bucks a pound and you’ll have massive stockpiles you can’t sell to cover the spaceflight costs.
Even Uranium or Plutonium would be barely worth the cost to get it- we actually have a surplus of Plutonium right now, since nobody will allow it to be used in a power plant, and we’re taking some nukes out of the arsenal.
And if we DID find some mystery element that made it worthwhile, think of just how much equipment we’d need to get up there- the Apollo landers were the size of a large truck and a little heavier. That required a two-million-pound rocket to get it there.
A small bulldozer weighs three times as much as the lander. How many loaders and dozers would a full-fledged mining operation require? The Lunar equivalent to dump trucks? Ore crushers? How many people to operate everything? How much food and water and oxygen will we need to shoot up there to keep 'em going?
We’re talking a trillion-dollar operation, and to what end?
Doc, I’m not a selenologist, so I can’t give an exact account of the geology of the Moon, but while the Moon doesn’t have geological activity like the Earth (though it does have Moonquakes), one of the things that it does have that the Earth doesn’t have are meteor strikes. (Yeah, I know, we get 'em too, but the Moon is thought to have acted like a shield for the Earth) And the landing site for Apollo missions were picked so as to land near the ejecta from the various craters in order to get rock blown up from the lower parts of the Moon. That’s how we found the Genesis rock.
And you’re right about the diminishing return aspect, no argument there.
However, as far as the lander goes, they weighed considerably more than a truck. I think they carried something like 14,000 lbs of fuel (forget the exact number and don’t have time to look it up), but we wouldn’t need one of those to get items off the Moon. A railgun (solar powered) would work quite nicely to get things headed towards the Earth. Slap some small manuvering thrusters on the cargo hauler, along with some parachutes, and you could get it on the Earth fairly inexpensively (in comparison to a chem rocket) and with reasonable accuracy.
As to what end? Good question. To me, simply getting humans mucking around on the Moon is enough. Of course, that’s not enough for most people. Then again, lots of folks fund the arts simply because they like “pretty pictures.” We are dealing with an unknown here. A vast unknown. We don’t know what we’ll find if we go, nor do we know what other things we’ll learn simply from going.
To hop back to your example of finding uranium on the Moon. It’s certainly worthless for shipping it back to Earth. Too expensive and the enviromentalists go ballastic at the mere mention of the stuff. However, if we found it on the Moon, it would make going to Mars much easier, since we wouldn’t have to ship the stuff up from Earth, with all the risks and resultant headaches that entails. Of course, you’re left with the question: “Why go to Mars?”
Sooner or later, humans will expand outwards, simply because it’s in our nature to do so. The only thing holding us back right now is the cost.
Cite?
I was counting Apollo 1.
It sure is. There are billions, nay, probably trillians of dollars of investment capital at the ready around the world, and not one serious attempt at a consortium to mine the moon has been made. Considering how even some of the most lame ideas attract high-risk tolerant investors, this says volumes to me.
This is another one of those cases where I say, “I don’t know much about this, but the actions of the people who think about this all the time tell me that my initial guess must be right.”
So your example of what would make it worth it is by your own admission a pipe dream? As Doc Nickel has pointed out, what would make it worth it, anyway, diamond studded gold already in Moon mission collectible stamped coin form?
I know that’s sarcastic, but I really don’t know how you could be saying this.
Oh, and according to your own admission, with 249 manned flights between USSR/Russia and the U.S., (http://users.commkey.net/Braeunig/space/manned.htm) about 2.5% of the craft have killed their crews. This is a horrific human toll. How many thousands of days go by in a regular mine without anyone dying?
Hmmm. On preview, it seems that maybe you already agree with most of this.
Cardinal, it’s pretty obvious that you have to get down on the Moon to be able to tell what’s what. The scientists who picked the landing site for the Apollo mission (IIRC, it was 15) which found the Genesis rock knew that it was their best shot at finding old rocks on the Moon, what they didn’t know was how old the rocks would be. Read A Man on the Moon for a detailed discussion on the whole geological research aspect of the Apollo program. The only scientist to set foot on the Moon was Jack Schmidt, a geologist, on Apollo 17.
And actually, since the dotcom bomb, everyone’s having trouble finding investors. However, the various X-Prize teams have attracted lots of high powered investors. Once someone finds a cheap way to space, many of the investors will start looking at the Moon.
As for the space program exacting a horrific human toll, I disagree. Early aviators will killed by the dozens, and yet people still took to the air. Burt Rutan has said that we’re not killing enough astronauts, since we humans tend to only get serious about something when someone dies.
And I can’t come up with a valid argument as to why we should go back to the Moon now. My gut tells me we should, but that’s not going to convince anyone, I’ll readily admit. I wish I could come up with the convincing argument, because then I’d be screaming it from the rooftops to get us back there.
The solar system is round. Heading to the Moon is a shortcut to Iraq. Can we not sell this to the military?
It’s rumoured that Mars is a faster route for power grid cables across the US.
Now, I know this is being very picky, but this IS the SDMB.
My request for a cite was for the idea that we know that there’s lots of variations in the Moon’s makeup.
I went to the linked page, but, boy howdy, that’s a lot of text. What’s the point with the “Genesis rock”?
To accomplish a fantastic, legendary, hugely profitable goal that could be had no other way. YOU take a 2.5% chance of never getting off the ship alive just to mine some minerals that might be kind of expensive to dig out of the ground. I’m not going, especially with NASA’s credibility shot (again) in the safety department. I’m despairing of its ever being anything but a bloated government agency intent on justifying its own existence by dreaming up jobs for itself that sound good to Congress.
I seriously don’t know your point with that. We have plenty of geologists on earth to analyze rocks and look at video beamed back.
OK, I hate snarky people, even here, but you just contradicted yourself in succeeding sentences, with the second one pretty much proving my point. There are investors for projects with foreseeable payouts. In this case, there is a $10 million prize, plus the very real prospect of stealing NASA’s business for putting up satellites.
Wikipedia puts the world’s GDP in 1999 at $40.7 trillion. Mind you, this was one year’s output. I would not be surprised if there is a trillion dollars waiting to find the right investment opportunity.
I guess we really are on the same page. You can’t come up with a political or economic argument to go back to the moon yet, either.
Is this the requisite wacko interjection for a thread like this?
Nah. If it was really wacko I’d be telling you that they were already laying power cables to Mars, but in secret.
Closest Mars has been since, like, forever and power-cuts in the US and UK. You think this is a coincidence? And did you ever stop to think where Saddam is hiding, huh? You can see the dark side of the Moon from Mars! It all makes perfect sense.
If you were wacko, that is.
To be serious, we’re not going to go back to the moon until one or both of the following conditions arise:
A/ There’s pots of money to be made from it.
B/ There’s a military advantage to be had from it.
Neither are the case just now. (Unless you’re wacko.) It’s a pity, but A+B above are the uppermost values of the countries that have the resources to do it.
MOON
Been there, done that.
SPACE STATION
Next. Establish a way station.
MARS
Next after space station, the reason for the s.s.
The whole point of using the Moon as a power station is to provide power for habitats on the Moon and in the Earth - Moon volume;
there should be no need to ship fuel up off the Earth’s surface once the power economy isestablished up there.
Selling power to Earth may never be important.
This solar power could also be used for craft going to Mars,
and to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Near Earth Objects, the asteroid belt and the Jupiter Trojans.
of all these destinations the Moons of Jupiter and the Trojans are perhaps the most resource rich;
Mars turns out to be way down the list as far as I can figure.
But the Moon is the key to the solar system.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html