NASA has recently announced that it wants to have a permanent moon base by 2024. Eventually they hope to "extend human presence to the moon to enable eventual settlement." The Mars Society thinks we should colonize Mars. Stephen Hawkins thinks we need to colonize other solar systems. Far be it from me to criticize, but what the hell is wrong with these people?Let's focus on NASA's moon "plan." Why on earth (no pun intended) would you ever want to live on the moon? Presumably only if the conditions on Earth were so unlivable that the moon was actually a better alternative. Now let's go over some of the basic living conditions of the moon in case you have forgotten:
- The moon has no real atmosphere, so there is no air to breathe. Kind of a problem.
- Another side effect of not having an atmosphere is that there is nothing to block the sun or retain heat during the night. Thus, the temperature on the moon varies between -387° F and 253° F. In other words, very similar to Minnesota. Fortunately, without an atmosphere there isn't much to transfer heat to, so it won't feel that cold.
- Yet another side effect of no atmosphere is that there is nothing to block the rays of the sun, so you are going to get bombarded by highly radioactive rays. When you're as white as I am, that is not a good thing.
- We're not done with the lack of atmosphere yet, as we haven't discussed the fact that the moon environment is also a vacuum. While this will apparently not make you explode รก la Total Recall, the various side effects should kill you within a couple of minutes.
- The moon has gravity that is only 1/6th of the Earth's. While this would allow me to actually dunk a basketball, I imagine the low gravity might cause a lot of problems.
- There is no food or water on the moon. I hope you like the idea of Tang mixed with recycled urine because that's what you're going to get. In fact, pretty much everything would have to be shipped in except maybe for rocks and despair.
- A day on the moon lasts about the same time as 30 days on Earth. Can a moon society survive if women had PMS every single day? I submit that the answer is no.
Now, can you think of anyway to make living conditions on earth worse than that? I can't. An irradiated post-apocalyptic wasteland (even one with Mel Gibson in it) provides a much better living situation than the moon does. Pretty much the only reason I can see for colonizing the moon would be if the earth was destroyed completely, but with no earth to orbit I think the moon might be in for a bad day as well.
Besides the fact that it simply makes no sense, of all people NASA should know how ridiculously expensive it is to put anything into outer space, much less keep it there intact. It costs $450 million just to launch the fucking space shuttle. Hey, I'm in favor of space probes and advanced satellites and Mars Rovers and all that but putting people into space is just a dumb idea.*
These other people are just as dumb. The Mars Society thinks it is our manifest destiny to colonize Mars. First of all, anyone who would actually use the term "manifest destiny" to describe something they want to do is clearly not someone you want in charge of any kind of national policy. Apparently the idea is that we establish some kind of Mars base and start to terraform the planet into something inhabitable by earthlings. Let me get this straight - we live on a planet that we can't even terraform out of a couple of degrees of global warming, and we are going to transform Mars into a habitable planet? And now Stephen Hawkins wants us to go to other solar systems and colonize those planets. How, pray tell, are we going to get there? Even if we traveled at the speed of light, it would take over four years or so to get to the nearest star. It's too bad that our current space vehicles only get up to about 17,500 mph in orbit. For the record, the speed of light is 670,616,639 mph. What do you think will happen first? That humans will perfect some kind of worm-hole-antimatter-doohickey that will allow us to safely travel close to the speed of light or that we will wipe ourselves of the planet by one of a variety of means already at our disposal?
In the meantime, I will be working on my time machine that will allow me to travel back to a time when people were not this stupid.
*And I don't want to hear any crap about Richard Branson. Suborbital space flight is not even close to moon colonization.
3 comments:
I've been saying for years that Tang mixed with urine should be more readily available. I'd move to the moon just for that!
Peter:
I'm a reader of Mindy's blog, but occassionaly I drift to other reader's blogs.
I have to disagree with you on this issue. "NASA has really lost it" for many reasons, but this is not one of them.
The biggest hurdles to both space exploration and satellite technology are the high costs of exiting the earth's orbit. A permanent moon station could make an inexpensive gateway between the earth and the moon (think a permanent cable for shuttles to climb) a possibility. It sounds outlandish, but it has been considered for some time - http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/nanotech_space_041222.html -.
Current shuttle launches are not only dangerous and limited to those that can afford the millions to do so (read: NASA), the bulk of the technology and cargo invovled is devoted to exiting the earth's stratosphere. A gateway would allow for more daring explorations and greater use of satellite technology by reducing the costs of accessing space and opening the field to larger number of players.
The ways in which "NASA has really lost it" include:
- focusing primarily on the use of "reusable shuttles" (read: Challenger and Discovery);
- manned (vs. robotic) space explorations (read: Hubble Telescope and Christa McAuliffe);
- and preventing others from competing in the same field (read: X Prize)
I feel like I've just outed myself as a total nerd -- but space is just so fucking cool.
There is nothing wrong with being a huge nerd. It's refreshing to see someone around here who gets excited about things besides Lindsay Lohan crotch shots.
I'm not sure what we are disagreeing on here, though. I wouldn't argue that space isn't cool or that advances in technology wouldn't make a variety of things cheaper. My main point was that the moon will never be more habitable than Earth and therefore creating a moon colony wouldn't serve much of a purpose other than being cool. Maybe there is something that can't be performed by robots, but I doubt it would outweight the benefits we could generate by spending the money somewhere else. Then again, Congress has to find someone to give ridiculously lucritive contracts to and they can't wait around hoping for another hurricane/war.
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