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Post by publius on Dec 7, 2007 4:46:06 GMT
What is the most important thing you could be doing right now? Are you doing it? If not, what are you doing instead? and why?
Now, feel free to define the terms as you see fit. "Right now" doesn't have to mean "as you read this". It could be "today", "in this phase of your life", "in your current incarnation in this aeon of the Cosmic Cycle". You choose. Same with what constitutes doing a thing, or what the criteria of importance are. I'm after your individual judgement.
Personally, this past summer I came to the conclusion that the most important thing I could be doing with my abilities and within my limitations was to work to send human beings to the Moon, to stay, within the next few years. And that's precisely what I'm doing. It would be easier if I could find some coadjutors, but I haven't been at it long nor had much public exposure. Risking everything on a single gamble which much of the world thinks mad demands a particular cast of mind, but it also brings a certain iron comfort.
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KBF
Drowsy
Posts: 18
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Post by KBF on Dec 7, 2007 8:21:44 GMT
The most important thing.... Wow. You really are living to your highest. That's great! But uh, people already can go to the moon. I'm assuming you mean help, or get a localized space program where you live (I have no idea where Luna City is).
I have no idea... The most important thing I could do with myself right now.... The only thing that's coming to me is learning to dance before a big party I'm going to in 2 weeks.
But thanks alot, I haven't had something like this to really think about since I was 6 or 7.
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Post by GtF on Dec 7, 2007 12:57:43 GMT
The most important thing I should probably be doing with my life is getting a good degree, finding a stable well paying job and falling in love with someone I could spend the rest of my life with. Then take out a mortgage for a new home, raise a family, continue to earn a wage to support my loved ones until eventually I retire and grow old comfortably with the knowledge that I lived a perfectly acceptable normal existance.
Thankfully, instead I'm earning a reletively worthless degree in media production, generally wasting time writing bad screenplays, drawing silly pictures and making bad short films about weird things like toasters with souls. And eventually I will break into the chaotic and highly unstable film industry. Eventually. Whether you like it or not.
I could go into the details as to why, but this isn't really the place.
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Post by publius on Dec 7, 2007 16:59:21 GMT
The most important thing.... Wow. You really are living to your highest. That's great! But uh, people already can go to the moon. I'm assuming you mean help, or get a localized space program where you live (I have no idea where Luna City is). Well, of course, nobody has been to the Moon in 35 years. (You can look it up : Apollo 17, December 1972.) In all that time, not a single human being has gone farther than about 400 miles from the Earth.
If one suposes, as I do, that the future of the human race must be played out on a stage rather larger than this one planet if the word "future" is to mean much of anything at all, it follows that a succession of three-man encampments in two-hundred-mile orbits, and twelve decades-old sets of footprints on one other celestial body, are not sufficient. Men and women must go and make their homes in the heavens, live and work and raise their families, form permanent communities.
Such is the purpose of Luna City, to be the first extraterrestrial home of mankind. When it is founded (my preferred location is the walled plain of Plato, at 55 degrees North, 10 degrees West — you can see it with a pair of binoculars as a dark spot in the bright band of the Alps separating the Sea of Rains from the Sea of Cold), it will change everything. "Space" will no longer be a nebulous out there, but a part of the "world" as people ordinarily understand it. That is the prospect which drives me.
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Post by sapphire on Dec 7, 2007 19:41:05 GMT
My single and not inconsiderable talent is for failing. I even flunked suicide. So I guess if there is anything important to be done, I ought to keep well away from it.
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wireman
Sleep Deprived
^ Kurau from Phantom Memory Kurau ^
Posts: 8
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Post by wireman on Dec 9, 2007 4:34:28 GMT
What about the energy problems? Sure we have the technology to build a settlement on the moon and get people and supplies there, but not efficiently, and there are no solid proposals that I've heard of for an efficient way to do it. The moon's only natural resources are mineral in nature (as far as we know) which means that a large ammount of food, water, and even air will have to be shipped to the moon on a regular basis. The water and air can at least be recycled at high efficiency (although not perfectly) with some advances in current technology, but the food is another problem. Even if you were going to grow your own plants on the moon to eat, you'd need to ship massive ammounts of fertilizer to the moon to accomplish that. Think about the smallest self-sustaining unit possible with current technologies and you're talking about a very large collection of animals, plants, and natural resources such as soil and air. Wihtout the earth's vast natural reserves that work to balance out local ecosystem changes, whatever you construct would be a much more fragile and unstable ecosystem. Now consider that you're going to need to build a structure to contain all of this. That structure will have to be immense (or partitioned into smaller structures) and even using geodesic domes, you're going to have a lot of pressure to work against. Of course, this will all need power. But what sort of fuels are available on the moon? None that we know of. Nuclear power is the most likely candidate, but even nuclear reactors have a lot of material throughput. And all of that material will have to be shipped from the earth at immense cost, or recycled on the moon. Fundamentally, the cost will be immense, and the colony won't be contributing economically for a while, assuming even that available enough Moon resources exist for it to be profitable. I've made the above arguments for three reasons: 1. Although I realize you've probably thought about this quite a bit, do you have a list of problems that includes those above? If not, you should get to work on making such a list. 2. Although I find your assumption that humans will eventually leave the Earth and spread to "the stars" a less-than-solid one, it's not a terrible one. However, eventually means a lot more than "within the next 50 or 100 years". At the current rate of technology (and rate of rate of technology, not to be too Kurtzweilian) the likelyhood of discovering efficiencies that make this a much more economical venture seems high within the next century. Rushing the colonization of the moon will do several things: - Make that colonization more expensive.
- Make that colonization less productive.
- Force the colonists to live with lower-quality accomodations than would otherwise be available: upgrading something once it's working is a lot more difficult than getting it working (politically and economically).
- If it fails, delay the ultimate colonization of the moon (due to political forces).
Of course, none of these things is for sure, but they seem likely to me. 3. The immense cost of such a mission to colonize the moon is such that it will necessarily detract from Earth-focused efforts like improving the global standard of living and overcomming diseases. Every dollar you spend on moon colonization is a dollar not spent in some other way. Although this is of course true of any spending, which means that the argument should be taken with a grain of salt, at spending magnitudes like those involved with colonizing the moon, we're talking serious international effects (potentially) and so you should seriously consider the marginal costs of such a venture. That said, I'm not focused on dissuading you from your goal. These objections are the ones that I can think of immediately to joining an effort such as yours, and I hope that you have answers to at least some of them. I'm not trying to say that your project is doomed or should not be undertaken, just make sure that you've thought this through. I'd love to hear your answers... here would be great, or if people here aren't interested (in what I think will be an increasingly interesting but perhaps somewhat argumentative thread) you can email me at pmawhorter@gmail.com. -Peter Mawhorter
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Post by publius on Dec 10, 2007 17:27:48 GMT
I'm taking take the second way out, thanks. This thread isn't supposed to be about me. I posted my own answer to the question to allow others to see what I meant.
I've sent you an extraordinarily long e-mail, so look out, as it may wind up in the spam folder. For the benefit of others reading, I will remark that I and others have thought this out very carefully, and all of these objections do in fact have answers. In fact, a few of them vanish almost entirely. (Remember, Singapore isn't self-sufficient in food.)
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Post by Haxar on Dec 11, 2007 11:25:20 GMT
making bad short films about weird things like toasters with souls. And eventually I will break into the chaotic and highly unstable film industry. Eventually. Whether you like it or not. Ah but I do like it, I do! Do histories most famous philosophers represented by our toasty friends. What would Plato say to Karl Marx if he suddenly had a crumpet pop out of his head? Hmm well, I'm no longer sure what I should do at all since everyone who claims to know what I should do doesn't seem that trustworthy. My mother thinks I need a better job, she hates hers. One of my friends says having children ('passing on your genes' as he put it) is the purpose of life, he and his girlfriend had an abortion a few years back. So what I should be doing AND what I am doing is trying to figure out what I should be doing. Cyclical logic, it's the way forward.
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