[ExI] Moon Bases Not Needed

[Dan Ust]

Certainly, considered as a potential safe haven and even for long-term space settlement, one need not accept the Manhattan Project approach in general or any of these specific proposals. In fact, the approach I advocate is piecemeal and more along the lines of growing capabilities in a decentralized fashion as opposed to the highly publicized approaches like Mars Direct.

(Needless to say, my approach does not rely on starting with self-sufficient settlements at all. To me, trying for them first is the best way to delay settlement... Like waiting until one has a perfected theory of mind before even making an attempt at cognitive science.)

Regards,

Dan

On Jul 30, 2011, at 12:28, john clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> Dan wrote:
> 
>  "one might like to have a safe haven in case whatever comes next is not anything like what folks here are planning or hoping for. For instance, imagine one of the horror scenarios plays out -- nanotech gone wild or Skynet or whatever "
> Yes but that's not what people mean when they say they want to go to Mars, they're talking about spending a hundred trillion dollars or so to get half a dozen people to Mars, have them fuck around Mars for a couple of months, and then spend another hundred trillion dollars to reverse that herculean task and bring them all back to Earth. The result would be similar to what happened with the Apollo moon program and we'd have the world's most expensive reality show. People would love the first episode but just like with Apollo they'd feel like they were watching a repeat and be bored stiff at the second and all future landings unless something went very badly wrong as in Apollo 13. We'll know its time to send people to Mars when we're prepared to do so with a one way ticket; and that won't happen until the technology allows us to establish a permanent and completely self  contained colony. We're not there yet. 
> 
> Kevin G Haskell <kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com> wrote
> "it would really only make sense if we needed to locate the same materials somewhere up there that are mostly located in China as "rare-earth" materials. "
> There is no reason to think that the Moon or Mars contains more rare-earths than the Earth, and the rare-earths are not really rare, most are more common than Copper or Lead and even the rarest is more common than Silver. The trouble is that all 17 rare-earths are in the same ore and the chemical properties of all 17 are very similar so its very difficult and expensive to separate them out; and the oar often has radioactive Thorium and Uranium in it which can make for an environmental mess it you're not careful. Also, although Gold is much rarer than any rare-earth in the Earth's crust, there are places where Gold is much more concentrated than average, rare-earth oar is not as well concentrated.  
> 
>  John K Clark
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