121–130 of 150 posts
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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.
The cost to bring anything to the moon is completely prohibitive.
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"the installation of telescopes is possible at only three sites" The far side of the Moon is bigger than Russia. I have my doubts about such a categorical claim as "only three sites are suitable for telescopes". On Earth, we build observatories in mountainous terrain regularly.
The issue might be landing anywhere near it to construct the telescope. We are probably pretty far away from landing on the near side of the moon and then building roads or train tracks to the far side and creating a flat area.
If you're worried about communication, a relay satellite is way cheaper and easier than cables or roads.
There's no need to build roads or tracks from the near side to the far side.
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There's an orbit that's always dark to Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Earth A telescope in that orbit would never see earthlight, like one on the moon.
Communication with earth in that orbit would be a bit of a pain tho, right?
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Its a joke. It sounds like a normal libertarian argument, but on the moon. If you want a more serious answer though, we have multiple treaties and moratoriums on what is, and is not allowed in space and on the moon. They were agreed upon because we have mutual interests, and want to preserve humanities future of spaceflight and research. - https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int... - https://www.…
Treaties can be updated or even ignored if new economic or technological realities come into play.
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> Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that? I know Mercury shares this. Not super useful, except at the boundary.
I'm 90% sure you're mixing up two other things, about planets in the goldilocks zone of red dwarfs being tidally locked to their host star ? 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…
https://www.quora.com/Is-Mercury-tidally-locked-so-that-one-...
There is more info about what is and is not:
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Serious question: What is the difference between telling people what they can and can't do on the moon vs telling people what they can and can't do on vacant land here on earth? If I go out to some remote area in the United States and start building houses, I'll almost certainly get into legal trouble, especially if I don't have any permits and definitely if I don't own the land. Who gets to own the moon? Is it just…
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…
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>- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick I'm aware of how large the moon is. >- most of the Moon is made up of the same stuff as the Earth's crust (silica, alumina, etc) and has very little value, compared to the energy needed to get it off the Moon CURRENTLY has very little value. J…
> I'm aware of how large the moon is. Are you? Removing from the moon a cubic kilometre of solid rock per person would be a thing you'd notice in a side-by-side comparison, while being less than the optical illusion that makes it seem bigger when close to the horizon. 30 miles down is 2-3 times the Mohorovicic discontinuity between crust and mantle; 30 miles up you're above the ozone layer and the air is too thin to…
Again, I'm aware of how large the moon is.
>It stays right where it is: orbiting earth.
Huh? You just asked if I understood how large the moon was, and then came to the conclusion the only thing that would happen should the moon not be there is that it would stay where it is? It would completely change the tilt of the earth, tides, etc. Do you think the spreading cloud of moon dust would have the same gravitational pull as the moon in one piece?
>Electricity is a red herring; consider all power of all kinds combined. 500 years ago, let's assume that meant just human muscles even though windmills and watermills existed and animal muscle was also used, just to maximise the difference.
It's very much not a red herring, and you can't have it both ways. If you're basing it on "human power" then you're going to need to calculate today's human power as well because there are endless manual labor jobs that humans still persist at today.
>or 4016 years if I assume another 384.17 increase in the rate of human power consumption: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.543×10%5E6+average+Gr...
Except power hasn't increased linearly over time, which I assume you know and at this point are just arguing for the sake of argument.
In 1900 the total yearly power consumption of humanity was 12TW. In 2022 it was 178,899TW, an increase of 14,908x in 100 years. Assuming a 384.17 increase is a great way to make some very flawed assumptions look good. But it doesn't reflect reality.
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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…
I'm not so sure that it's been proven these distances are navigable on human timescales. I know solar sails have been theorized, but aren't we very far from seeing that kind of technology as a reality? Say we spend ~100 years going to a planet to collect data. What then? What do we do with that data? If the universe is teeming with intelligent life - it would have to be very VERY local in our galaxy to make any kind…
Say we find that single-celled life is very common, then, considering our lack of detection of multi-cellular life, we'd have reason to put more effort into understanding the conditions which led to the emergence of multicellular life on Earth, since by the only statistics we would have, that must be a significant filter on the development of life. By having data on the environment they evolved in, we could understand our own evolution (eg if that planet is much younger than Earth, it could serve as a picture of what early Earth might have been like, if it's similarly old, we could try to understand what went differently on Earth). We could also figure out if they might be based on similar chemistry etc, all of which would feed into our understanding of the origins of life on Earth.
Detecting intelligent life would have a different, more 'philosophical' effect, even if we couldn't interact with them. The galaxy is theoretically colonizable over millions of years. The technology to do so is probably only thousands of years away for us. But, since the galaxy has existed for billions of years, and has been hospitable to life for at least 4 billion years, it is unreasonable to assume that much of that intelligent life won't have been around for millions of years longer than ourselves. In which case, why aren't they already everywhere? It'd have to be some sort of nearly fundamental limitation all intelligent life runs into, in which case it'd also affect what we as a species can aspire to achieve. The more intelligent life we find, the more unsurmountable the limitation becomes.
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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...
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> “We need to preserve the far side for exciting science that includes measuring magnetic fields associated with potentially habitable exoplanets and uncovering the mysteries of the unexplored Dark Ages of the early universe—using low radio frequency observations” Does that sound completely crazy? Like... the fact that they want to study it before private companies destroy it for their own benefit? > Moving developme…
Once the market believes that gold or other precious metals will imminently be returned from space, the price will plummet, making many destructive mining operations unprofitable. As a tangent, have you seen that gold rush show on discovery? Taking acres of lush and beautiful Klondike Forest and bulldoze it barren so they can maybe get a few oz of gold. It's terrible.