Going back to the moon

[giza]

Instead of reinventing the wheel and creating all new rocket engines, NASA is taking a closer look at older technology from its first trip to the moon and building upon ideas that worked back then. In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as "Apollo on steroids" in order to meet the deadline of flying the Ares rocket by 2014.

I for one am excited that we might return to the moon sometime in my lifetime. Let's hope we don't stop just at the moon this time, though. I think that colonization in space, on the moon, and on other planets is the single best thing we can do to ensure the long-term survival of our species.

Oh yeah, since the new rocket will be called Ares, I would like to propose that we call the capsule Kratos.

Comments

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Colonizing space is a very intersting topic. It raises good phylosophical and practical questions...
The name suggests there would be colonies... like, the US would colonize a territory and it'd be like the old American colonies, the New Spain, African countries, etc..
I doubt such a model would "scale" well though. Countries won't want to colonize a small region, they'll want entire planets and, with the space being virtually infinite (especially if they find a way to travel faster =P), other countries may not be all that willing to fight for chunks of land (planets), but instead colonizing their own. Once a planet was full (or impractical to continue to expand in), they could move on to the next one and so on... I know I'm getting ahead of myself technology here, but that's the wonderful thing about phylosophy, like when people in the 18th (or 19th?) century started to fantasize that one day computers would exist and so they started to write algorithms for them.

So what would happen?

It would be reasonable to assume land prices on earth would drop, at least initially (maybe after a while the status or convinience of living on earth would offset that, assuming that Earth was still the virtual center of the universe).
More interesting (or so I think) would be to speculate how land value would be assigned in the new regions. Would there be cheap planets and bad ones? Would it all be "equal" at first, and then naturally evolve into higher and lower cities/states/planets? Would it be more expensive to live in a planet where there is more (or less?) oxygen available? Or perhaps other commodities, like a gravity closer to 9.81 m/s^2? They say some body functions and fetus development may depend on gravity and therefore don't work as well in 0g; would more gravity be better than? Maybe the optimal gravity for humans will be found to be 10.23m/s^2 and planets with that gravity will be more expensive, kind of like how lower regions are more expensive in Lima than higher ones, due to the lack of pxygen in higer grounds...

But why do I say it wouldn't scale?

Well, have you seen a really old map of Mexico? It used to span from California to Honduras (or was it Panama?)... What happened, other than Americans stealing our northern regions ;P, was that everything was happening in Mexico city. The government was here, the comerce was centered here, everything!
So, of course, the further regions didn't get all the attention they needed, they felt neglected and eventually they became independant from us...

Likewise, with a government here, would the planets feel they get all the attention they deserve? Would a single president in, say, the US, be able to govern 50 states and a planet?

Most likely not... so we'd probably see a myriad of new "countries", probably several per planet.
Then... would we see planet-wide laws? Even here on earth? Would it be legal to murder people elsewhere? Would villains take refugee in these new planets?

Ah, the posibilities...

I'm not so sure it'd be that a good idea to live in space; the more space the human race is given, the more it will take... maybe we should stay here, but grow food in space?

I've rambled long enough, I'll stop now =P

[giza.livejournal.com]

> It would be reasonable to assume land prices on earth would drop

At last, I'd be able to afford a house in Philly!

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Heheh

[triggur.livejournal.com]

What a complete and utter f***ing waste of money.

[triggur.livejournal.com]

Because it wasn't fare to post that without explanation, here's the explanation. Please read the comments too.

Long story short: a sprint to the moon does not represent even the tiniest fraction of the technology necessary to go to space permanently, and is not, in fact, a stepping stone-- it's a step in the wrong direction entirely. Giant. Waste. Of. Money. For. The. Fuzzy. Warm. Feeling.

[ryvex.livejournal.com]

No, it's not. All we need is to get robots to the astroid belt! Hello mineral deposits! And Let's fling some comets at Venus, while we are at it. ^.^