To the moon! Again!

[steinguitar]

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0312030858.asp

When President Bush delivers a speech recognizing the centenary of heavier-than-air-powered flight December 17, it is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed space flight, with at its center a return to the moon, perhaps even establishment of a permanent presence there.

Whoa. Cool.

Whoah. Waste of money.

[thedancingbear]

A permanent presence on the moon isn't a waste of money, given the potential long-term benefits of it.

Energy generation. This could be done in any number of ways, one of my favorites being solar collection and then microwave transmission to Earth. Yes, it's scary and infeasible, but it's really cool.

Colonization. OK, this one is obvious.

Well, anyway, it's not a terrible idea.

CHEERS!
IS

[syphos]

wow, this jives entirely with the article I am wrote for this weeks paper for my school. I will post it when it is up thursday late-night/friday.

[army CPT]

to quoye bart simpson "cool maaannnn!!!"

out friggin standing...lets go back to the moon

hey will we see alice there?

[THE DING]

I'm running low on stilton (dark side)and bleiu...uh bleau...uh
yah..duh udder cheese...

Could be a serious kick in the collective hive mind not to mention the wallet if handled correctly. (Well that just blew that....repair we back to implements of drawing)

[army CPT]

maybe we could send stannard there as the first debate colonist ....oh wait a min he is already there :P

Allright ian, I'll go at it with you on this one, if only for Jason's amusement.

I feel that a colonization of the moon is in fact a tremendous waste of funds that should be better spnt on the satggering American problems with health care, joblessness, homelesness, social security and military reform.

The fact is we either
1. Don't have the money to do both
or
2. Are throwing good money after bad on a moon project that could be putting every spare red cent into taking asbestos out of every school in America.

The idea of incremental colonization has its own merits, i'll grant you, but why not just create a more prosperous society and then blow our massive annual surplus on researching mars, which might actuall be able to sustain life, inlike anyone's beliefs about the moon.

Beyond that, coloniztion would have very little practical impact for the first 500 years or so, as it's onluy natural resource that we know of is it's unique mineral deposits. So essentially advocating colonization of the moon is just one more frontier to find a substance moe valuable than diamonds- which I contend is a pretty big waste.

[army CPT]

o.k. i'll play with this...so we should never explore or search out new possibilities....we should just stay put and remove asbestos and help the needy... we can not learn anything through exploration and colonization...we can't use the moon as a viable resorce for our people medically or in any other way...lets just do nothing...well thank god our gov doesn't think like that or we would still live in caves.

1. New possibilities is fine. Lets go somewhere with actual potential, instead of where pretty much half of the world of sciece feels is a waste of time compared to Mars

2. Yeah. We should remove asbestos from the "needy", if by "needy" you mean "those who need to not live with fucking asbestos because our government doesn't give a shit about funding inner-city public schools when their voucher program aims to get them bused out to the suburbs".

3. we can learn plenty from exploration and colonization. lets do it elsewhere. Maybe Mars, or maybe the 45% of the deep sea that remains unmapped, or maybe we shouldn't commodify every resource on earth to the level that we level the rainforrest, killing thousands of unique species of pant, animal and fungus in the process. these are just as valuable to science and medicine as moon rocks.

4. Nobody has found any indication whatsoever to the effect of the moon being medically important that Ihave ever heard of, though my Popular Science subscription ran out a few months back. Also see my previous response that there are plenty of places on Earth to find these advances that if used would

A. Not endanger lives

B. Not substantially decimate the envornment as the staus quo of clear-cutting/grazing does and instead re-evaluate the need to preserve such places. same goes for deep-sea exploration, look at the high school policy cards this year...

C. Lead to more practical and urgently needed solutions in science in empirics are to mean anything. We may be killin g the next pennacillan [thats misspelled] for cancer in Argentina right now. I doubt the Moon has ever been described as such.

D. Won't smell like green cheese.

5. Let's not do nothing. did you even read my last post?

So thats a little somethin'-somethin' for ya'...

[army CPT]

o.k. bro...mull on this....i agree mars would be better...but the moon gives us the ability to learn how to do it....we could throw billions into mars but if there is a problem help is a year away at best...the moon...a few days...also on med...zero grav research and other space based projects could be completed at a "moon base".

moon colonization may stop deforstation and the like by letting us disperss pop off world if you will. we can stll remove asbestos and go to the moon. also maybe we find more resorces on the moon to replace earth based ones.
moon could be stepping stone to bigger and better things.

star trek....o come on that would be cool

safety...refer to earlier comment

alright i need to stop and go take some cold medicne cause this cold is kicking my ass.

"...I agree mars would be better...but the moon gives us the ability to learn how to do it...."

Or we could do the deep-sea work we did to prepare for the first moon trip instead of wastin gmoney on this trip and put it to better use.

"...if there is a problem help is a year away at best...the moon...a few days..."

Cool, lets not do either untill its safe and won't endanger lives. We have plenty of stuff on Earth to work out.

"...also on med...zero grav research and other space based projects could be completed at a 'moon base'."

Pop quiz hotshot: which yielded better medical benefits for humynkind: discovering a variation-fungus that killed harmful bacteria and stopped waves of plague, or testing how said fungus reacted to different light filtrations in zero G? I'm not denying both are useful, but how about we fix the problems here in the best way possible [like not destroying the places on Earth that are most likely to give us the biggest boons and do the zero G thing later, in stratospheric conditions [freefalls NASA used to recreate zero G], or on Mars.

"...we can stll remove asbestos and go to the moon..."

Look to my prior post-
1. No we can't [0 sum tradeoff]
or
2. Every cent we spend isn't being used to fix our other problems. Can you seriously not put $300 Billion to good use?

"...also maybe we find more resorces on the moon to replace earth based ones."

Still waiting for that Popular Science article that claims that to be likely in any way whatsoever. Also, see my point about the pointlessness of moon-rock diamonds.

"...moon could be stepping stone to bigger and better things."

So are deep-sea and forests, without all the dangerous and wasteful stuff.

Or so is Mars.

"star trek....o come on that would be cool"

There is nothing cool about Trek. See Crusher for President thread.

"safety...refer to earlier comment'

Likewise.

I'm going to my next final now...

[army CPT]

sea first then moon...agreed...that gives you time to remove that nasty asbestos...moon first then mars...yes..need to test what we learn at sea close to home before we go out to far.

can do both...go international and get help on funding.

star trek...forget crusher its all about sisko
zero g and earth based med...both serve great pourposes...
resorces...moon expo will tell...maybe we do mwybe we don't....but i am sure we can get something out of it..
o.k. off to the doc's i go

"sea first then moon...agreed..."

Cool, so I guess since the original point was about this admin wantingto go to the moon again now, thats a changed mind. Wow. A NB first!

"that gives you time to remove that nasty asbestos..."

This assumes that we're spending a bit less on deep-sea than NASA, which sounds reasonable... so OK yeah.

"moon first then mars...yes..need to test what we learn at sea close to home before we go out to far."

So I say lets not colonize the moon, lets do our test runs, then go for Mars. Still no real need for a colony on le Moon.

"can do both...go international and get help on funding."

Ooh! UN family outing!

"star trek...forget crusher its all about sisko"

STOP IT. STARTREK ISN'T COOL!

"zero g and earth based med...both serve great pourposes..."

Yeah but one is a better priority.

And, seriously. Trek blows.

[steinguitar]

1. I am all for funding space exploration... especially if it comes out of the general "Bomb Foreigners Fund" that our president has stashed away.

2. If we don't do it, the commies will.

3. The private sector should probably be allowed to do the legwork on this one. Just so we can have the Golden Arches tattoed on the moon.

Where will the golden arches fit with half of Chairface's name already up there?

[syphos]

Haha, My article came out today!

http://trail.ups.edu/article.php?story=200312041925327

I just realized that they made some post-editorial edits to the piece, but eh, I can't do anything about that now.

Go Michael!

Nice work my friend.