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These places surely cannot be scarce in the universal sense? Are they even scarce in our own solar system?
I think it actually might be the best spot because the far side of the moon is always positioned facing away from earth. Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that?
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The Age of Exploration has ended so long ago that we have all collectively forgotten how it works. Almost every square meter of land on Earth is covered by one group or another of People with Guns. The only ones that aren't are ones so deeply undesirable that nobody cares. But it actually works in a fairly intuitive manner. People who get to the Moon can do as they like there. Anyone who wants to stop them is invited…
Presumably those who get to own the Moon will have people here on Earth who they love or care about. Following the "this is just how it is" logic, what's stopping a barrel of gun from being pointed at those people?
Threaten the loonies too much, and they can throw big rocks at Earth.
They'd have plenty of brute mass up there.
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I think it actually might be the best spot because the far side of the moon is always positioned facing away from earth. Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that?
> Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that? I know Mercury shares this. Not super useful, except at the boundary.
Mercury definitely isn't tidally locked to the sun, and its sidereal day isn't a whole integer fraction of Earth's year.
I'm not 100% certain without doing some algebra, but don't think it's even possible for one planet to be tidally locked to any planet in a different orbit, be that Mercury to Earth or otherwise, owing to the distance not being constant while angular momentum has to be.
(If two planets share an orbit, there are an infinite number of trivial solutions).
While I understand their concerns, it seems a bit crazy to think you have any right to tell people what to do or not do on the moon.
I understand study of the early universe has potentially important ramifications in physics - but scanning exoplanets for evidence of life seems pointless to me. Say we found life within 10 LY of our solar system. What would we even do with this information?
10LY is close enough that given a sufficiently motivating factor, like strong evidence of life, we could build machines to study them in more detail. There are concepts for telescopes which are technically feasible with current or near future technology, albeit very expensive and long travel times, that could take much more detailed images of the planet, eg a solar gravitational lensing telescope. Hell, 10ly is close…
Not meaning to get downvoted here - I'm just genuinely curious what people think the real scientific value is here.
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Maybe the way there is no regulations, gonna look like dumping grounds everywhere except the developed areas
The cost to bring trash (or even nuclear waste) to the moon is completely prohibitive, so the only thing it will be a dumping ground for is trash generated on the moon. And for the foreseeable future it will be entirely appropriate to dump lunar trash where ever it is most convenient.
That might be a easier problem to solve on the moon. Considering its much much lower escape velocity. Once someone builds something like a mass-driver on the moon - they can just shoot the junk into an orbit that will eventually have it fall into the sun in a few hundred years.
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I think it actually might be the best spot because the far side of the moon is always positioned facing away from earth. Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that?
Always facing away from Earth, but not always facing away from the sun. Not my field, so I don't know how important interference from solar RF is. If you're building on this scale, why not put two on opposite sides of, say, Deimos? The delta-v between there and LEO is less than the delta-v between the lunar surface and LEO: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...
14917 ms-1 [Moon] v. 14520 ms-1 [Deimos], if I'm reading it right.
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> preserve the planet in its pristine state For those that have jumped straight to the comments this isn’t the flavor of TFA: > The moon hosts several sites of extraordinary scientific importance (SESIs) to astronomy. > Only within the last 20 years have astronomers discovered locations on the moon where conditions are ideal for the study of the early universe. The far side of the moon, for example, is one of the mos…
> > But because of the far side’s mountainous terrain, scientists say the installation of telescopes is possible at only three sites—and one in particular is rich in helium-3, which space mining companies have identified as a key element in quantum computers and fusion energy. A while ago, I saw a page that did the maths, and it worked out that the abundance of He3 was so low (at best 50 parts per billion), that even…
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These places surely cannot be scarce in the universal sense? Are they even scarce in our own solar system?
I think it actually might be the best spot because the far side of the moon is always positioned facing away from earth. Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that?
A telescope in that orbit would never see earthlight, like one on the moon.
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> preserve the planet in its pristine state For those that have jumped straight to the comments this isn’t the flavor of TFA: > The moon hosts several sites of extraordinary scientific importance (SESIs) to astronomy. > Only within the last 20 years have astronomers discovered locations on the moon where conditions are ideal for the study of the early universe. The far side of the moon, for example, is one of the mos…
These places surely cannot be scarce in the universal sense? Are they even scarce in our own solar system?
That doesn't really matter at the moment, because even if places like these are common, the only practical ones we can reach are on the moon.