StarDust:
China to Launch Lunar Space Probe Before Year's End
...
Still don't know the composition of the Moon after 50 years?

Chris L Peterson:
Do you know the story of the blind men and the elephant? The Moon is a
big place.

Still. The Moon is made of rocks, dust, perhaps a bit of ice, and a
trace of man-made detritus. Who cares?

If Google serves me, the ocean basins comprise about 360 million sq km.
or about 71 percent of the Earth's surface. The Moon's surface
comprises about 38 million sq km. We know considerably more about the
Moon's geography than we do the seabed. Not to mention the 1.35 billion
cubic km of seawater that lies above the seabed. We have no idea what
lives in that water. What we have done to date is comparable to
trawling the ocean with a whale-sized net and concluding that it's all
whales. Prochlorococcus: most abundant photosynthetic organism, but not
isolated until 1988 because it is too small to be seen with
conventional optical microscopy ‹E.O. Wilson. Prefer dry land? Wilson
calls bacteria the dark matter of life; they are there, but we haven't
found them. There are 6000 named species, but all of those and
countless more species are present among the 10-to-50 million bacteria
that inhabit each *gram* of moist, fertile. topsoil. A ton of fertile
topsoil probably contains four million unknown species.

For my money, we ought to send men back to the Moon after we have
catalogued, say, 98 percent of the species on Earth, including the
oceans. Which translates to "never."

****

"...the Disney version of science... People can be sent up into space
and hit a few golf balls around on the surface of the Moon...that¹s all
fine if you like that kind of spectacle, but it has nothing to do with
scientific research." ‹Steven Weinberg

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm