/sci/ - Science & Math

>utopia

Utopia isn’t profitable.

>utopia
>on the moon
You first.

>>4598219
> So whats stopping technocrats from funding an expedition to set up a utopia on the moon?
A) The moon is already a utopia. Population 0 solves all problems.
B) The moon has no resources to base an economy around, let alone a "utopian" one, whatever your personal utopia is.

>>4598219
We don't send enough pennies to nasa?

>>4598224
Come with me. We must band together /sci/

>>4598236
I'll stay where there's already oxygen, thanks.

>>4598240

Oxygen ninjas can’t get you if you’ve hit PEAK OIL.

>>4598240
There is tons of oxygen on the moon. It's composed primarily of silicates which means it is over 40% oxygen.

>>4598236
I thought the plan was to build a colony in Antarctica?

The main problem is lunar dust. We still don't know how to get rid of that shit.

>>4598306
Glass it with a blast of heat.

Alternatively, blast it with piss.

>>4598251

Inurdaes says "South Georgia"

>>4598251
I like the way you think. Tons of open land, penguins are a good source of protein.

>>4598311
Deargodwhy?!

>>4598526
Wha- what?

D:>

>>4598306
Static electricity. No joke. Running a charged "fine brush" over something covered in Lunar fines would attract the fines to the brush via electrical induciton.

Wait so there is actually oxygen on the moon?
Is the carbon dioxide?
If you had soil on the moon could you grow plants and make oxygen??? why can't we live on the moon?

>>4598579
no atmosphere dummy

>>4598585
I'm not your dummy, bozo.

>>4598586
I'm not your bozo, fool.

>>4598579
this is what happens when english class is considered more importent in schools then science

>>4598747
>important

>>4598752
yeah, that's the american spelling fagget

>>4598747
>then
I don't think it was all that important in your school.

>>4598747
the fail is strong in this one

>>4598579
>Wait so there is actually oxygen on the moon?
>Is the carbon dioxide?

On the moon these are bound up in rocks.

I don't think you can breathe rocks.

>If you had soil on the moon could you grow plants and make oxygen

No, they would die pretty much immediately due to the lack of an atmosphere, direct exposure to ionizing solar radiation, and extreme temperatures.

>why can't we live on the moon?

Same reason the plants can't.

It would be interesting to set up a kickstarter for a project to:
a. buy NASA
b. fund NASA
c. set up a permanent moonbase

Remember the "race to the moon"? Yeah, it wasn't actually a race to the moon. It was actually a race to steal trillions from the frightened populations of two sick little empires, namely the USA and USSR.

Any real civilization that understands capital development would have raced to the moon in order to use it for its real purpose: The factory floor for creating a space-faring civilization. The lunar regolith is a perfect pre-processed ore body (since it's so finely pulverized) for oxygen, aluminum, iron, silicon, calcium, etc. You can built a shitload of space-faring stuff with that, and you can build it all using constant power derived from solar panels (made from lunar silicon) mounted at the lunar poles.

But all that sensible development is far too gay for Humanity to actually perform. We're violent simians and we don't do anything that doesn't involve FUCKING SOMEBODY OVER FIRST. That's why space efforts exist in the first place; we only do them since it functions as a subsidy for aerospace companies. And that fucks over the taxpayers.

Damn it. Even if you build your colony on the Moon it can simply be destroyed becouse of shit falling from space (meteorite, for example). It' REALLY hard to establish ANY colony, even temporary.

>>4598916
>Damn it. Even if you build your colony on the Moon it can simply be destroyed becouse of shit falling from space (meteorite, for example). It' REALLY hard to establish ANY colony, even temporary.

That's true of any city on Earth.

>>4598926
you fucking retard

did you somehow forget about the existence of the atmosphere? or are you just trolling?

>>4598972
>you fucking retard

Stopped reading here. Lrn2persuasive argument

>>4598974
Atmosphere dude. It destroys most of the tiny space shit that heads towards earth.
The moon doesn't have one.

>>4598916
>>4598972
>>4598989
But what Luna has, is regolith. Lots and lots of regolith.

Regolith that can be heaped on your modules.
Regolith that can be consolidated and strengthened.
Also, the chances of anything big hitting a colony even in the long term is quite small. The Late Heavy Bombardment ended billions of years ago.
And even in the case something does hole a module, there's bound to be quickseal in every cabinet and bulkheads isolating every module.

And once colony starts to get established, it can expand underground for even more protection.

>>4599006
True dude, but the problem is the first step: colony establisment. I mean, it's not the problem of something big striking, it's the problem of little shit which constantly makes little holes. It's not that much of deal, but it actually destroys solar panels. Don't forget 'bout hermetization

>>4599024
Yes, that's where the heaping of regolith comes in.
It's now a pretty old concept.
At the early stages, you dig a wide trench in the regolith and put your modules in it and the pile the heaps of regolith over the modules.
In the later stages, you take regolith, consolidate it into brix and a shit them all over your everything.

Just half a meter of loose regolith will protect you from 99% of all the shit that's gonna hit you. A meter or more will protect you from 90% of the rest.

@OP
Oh great you want big governments greasy fingers controlling peoples lives on the moon too.

>>4599037
i dont think burying solar panels will work out too well for protection...

>>4599114
You're obviously going to shield the panels with something else than regolith.

While you're extracting oxygen from regolith, you're going to end up with a lot of other materials, one of them is silicon.
So you can make glass in bulk and recycle the glass shields when they become too opaque.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/731566998/966432572?token=227e6bef

It is almost ready for submission 0.o

>>4598230
>A) The moon is already a utopia. Population 0 solves all problems.
I fully agree with this. However it is notoriously lacking in ale and whores.

>>4599178
It is nice to see crowd funding being taken seriously for science projects. Problem is, the proposition is crap. We don't go to mars and do terraforming in 30 years. It's not feasible and not efficient. What you want is a permanent base for scientific research and productive capabilities to extract resources and manufacture habitats for long-term colonization. And ideally you'd start with something closer, like NEOs or the moon, no?

rock looking crabs that will burrow into the skin and start to eat you inside out.
this is what is stopping us.

>>4599202

Yeah... although I did say it would take 70 years in the desc.

It IS a joke though, albeit a *serious* joke. it would be easy to make the $500b target if we got all the pro footballers etc interested.

The problem is that the people with the money/poer are not (usually) well informed scientifically

>>4599275
You know, any business means making profit. If were to decide whether to invest in this project or not I would say "No" for sure. I mean it's a lots of money. And what will I gain? Maybe lots of resources (which we still can find on Earth). This kind of project is interesting for countries like Japan (by the way, it's pretty possible that we will face NippoMoon)

Itt libertardians who think that environmental regulations and taxation are such drains on their productivity that they'd be better off in in a place that doesn't have any air.

>>4599749
air is for fags

>>4599769
Real men breathe cum. Thick streams of cum going up their nose until their lungs are full of the slimy stuff.

>>4598893
We didn't have the technology to do that then, and we don't have it now. Even though regolith contains all the minerals, the steps involved with processing it as significant. Pulverizing is the simplest one - you then need to melt it, separate it, form it, and work it. You'd need hundreds of Apollo missions to transport enough people and equipment to the moon to make that possible - and how many trillions would that have cost?

Even once you do all that, there's still no point to doing it on the moon rather than on earth. Sure, gravity is lower, but that won't mean anything if there's nowhere worth going. Humanity won't be "space faring" until we have the technology and the economic strength to build massive ships that can sustain generations of humans.
Or FTL propulsion..but GLWT.

We aren't yet at the point where transitioning to a space-faring civilization is the matter of some guy saying "brb going to the moon". We need to build up our economy here on earth first; we need to produce more ideas and more stuff. By the time we really go into space, large portions of Africa will be industrialized.

>>4599799
That's true if we don't make big increases to NASA's and the ESA's budgets.

If we were to put 20% of the National Budget into colonizing the moon, we could do it within 20 years, easily.

BUT, it would never be able to pay for itself, simply because transporting the resources back would cost more than they were worth.

I think we'd be better off trying to colonize Mars. The more Earth-like gravity means Astronauts won't get as weak as fast, and we could set up a low-energy transfer ferry system to shuttle the resources back to Earth, and supplies to Mars.

>>4599820
>If we were to put 20% of the National Budget into colonizing the moon, we could do it within 20 years, easily.
Probably. But that means either a 19.5% increase in taxes, or 19.5% decrease in something else.

Spending all that money on NASA would be a very poor use of it. We would spend trillions to colonize the moon/mars and have nothing to show for except a crappy town that's really far away from everything.

There's very little value in going to Mars or the Moon right now. As I stated previously, we're better off focusing on economic and technological development, and when we're ready we'll travel to the heavenly bodies in style.

>>4599835
As much as I want to live on the Moon, I have to agree with you.

I think the practice in long-distance spaceflight would be helpful though, because we ARE at risk of an asteroid or comet impact, and without long-distance missions with big ships, there isn't a lot we can do about it.

>>4599847
On the contrary, we've sent probes to asteroids many times, of course sending humans is a whole new challenge. For the purposes of preventing an impact, a probe may or may not be enough.
NASA expressed interest in sending some humans to one. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/23/nasa-mission-astronaut-asteroid_n_907820.html

>>4599799

The first part of your response isn't even worth responding to. Industrial processes are bootstrapped all the fucking time, and yet you make it seem like it's an impossibly expensive production to do it on the moon, where you're walking over the ore body all the time, and walking under your power source all the time.

> We need to build up our economy here on earth first; we need to produce more ideas and more stuff. By the time we really go into space, large portions of Africa will be industrialized.

Build up our economy? Do you not read the news? The world economy is crashing, from the largest financial bubble ever created, much fostered by the worldwide banking system. Canada's housing bubble is still growing, and China's property bubble can't even be fully evaluated yet, for obvious reasons. And we've reached peak world production of petroleum, so it's all downhill from here for Humanity's Maximum Fuel. So economic growth can't keep going.

Nobody's going to industrialize Africa, moron. Africa is an ag-heavy, warlord-ruled, Nigger-infested shithole, and it's only purpose in life was to hold Humanity's veldt animals while the First World raped it for minerals. That's it. There's no particular rule of law in Africa since there are so many Niggers; they are the least of Humankind and never form gainful civilizations. For instance, they are tearing down South Africa as we speak, bringing that White experiment back to the natural state of Africa, which is being heavy with agriculture, ruled by warlords, and infested with Niggers.

Africa is a zoo. Put a fence around it.

>>4599863
despite being a zoo the large animals (humans aside) are nonetheless on a fast road towards extinction.

so basically it cant even be a zoo without the redguards fucking it up.

just glass it lol

but seriously it needs to be colonized properly. i think china is up to the task. white colonialism is considered "racist" probably because of all those human rights violations the last time we tried (oops. but they were still loads better off with british rule
anyways. bring back colonialism)