If You Could Cause Someone to Land on the Moon Tomorrow by Sending NASA $5 Today, Would You Do it?

On Aug 7, 10:38*am, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 8/7/2010 2:00 AM, Pat Flannery wrote:



That wasn't the reason they scrapped their fleet - when the worth of the
things the treasure fleet was bringing back was measured against the
cost of running it, it was a net money loser.

There's a whole book on that fleet BTW, called "When China Ruled The Seas"
The fleet was made ready and stocked with high quality trade goods for
its voyages through the Indian ocean and down the east coast of Africa.
But all that would come back on it were things like raw ivory and live
giraffes; and once the novelty of the giraffes wore off, it was realized
that the area it was sailing to didn't have anything equal or greater in
value to the trade goods. Spices from the area could be obtained by land
routes or small vessels coming and going from Chinese ports.
In a lot of ways, this is indeed very similar to the current manned
space program - we brought some rocks back from the Moon, the novelty of
them wore off, and it's going to take a lot of economic worth coming out
of the ISS to ever justify the cost of building, crewing, and supplying
it...and there's been no sign of that occurring yet.

Pat

So instead ancient China turned inward, shut the doors, and stagnated
for the next 800 years or so.
End product was Mao sending all society into liquid cow poop rice
fields to try and prevent starvation - unsuccessfully.

On Aug 7, 11:45*am, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 8/6/2010 10:46 AM, Val Kraut wrote:

Obamba just flat out said 'We ain't goin' nowhere' when it was his
turn (the week after massive deposits of water were found on the
moon)!

Or maybe not:http://www.phenomenica.com/2010/08/m...-as-previously....

Pat

You need to be more critical of the mis-information that you post.

Point One:
Serious scientists claim that large amounts of water DO exist in the
Apollo moon rock samples.

"Moon Has a Hundred Times More Water Than Thought
Oceans' worth of water estimated in interior—"total game changer"
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...dings-science/

"The moon's interior may harbor 100 times more water than previous
estimates, according to a new study
that took a fresh look at samples of moon rocks collected by Apollo
astronauts nearly 40 years ago."
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...-amount-water/

Point Two:

I don't trust the 40 year old Apollo moon samples anyway, so lets just
take modern (like one month ago) scientific findings from surface
craters instead, instead:

"The scientists worried that the instruments on the spacecraft were
badly calibrated -- but three different ships, launched in different
years from different countries, couldn't all be wrong in precisely the
same way.

"Deep Impact nailed it," said Pieters."

"Jim Green, NASA's planetary science chief, said today it may only
amount to a quart per ton of soil. But since the moon is more than
2,000 miles in diameter, it would add up."

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wat...8663384&page=2

PS: And just when the researchers gave us the green light for a base
on the moon, Obamba slammed the door and said we ain't goin'
nowhere....

On Aug 7, 11:28 am, lorad wrote:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wat...found/story?id...

PS: And just when the researchers gave us the green light for a base
on the moon, Obamba slammed the door and said we ain't goin'
nowhere....

The various links you've posted do indeed give evidence the moon has
water. But, while there's more water than earlier thought, it's still
quite dry. None of the those links show water in exploitable
quantities.

The last link talked about how Chandrayaan-1 discovered water in the
lower latitudes. These also showed water in concentrations so low it
would take a great deal of time and effort to extract usable
quantities.

But in March, 2010 Chandrayaan-1's findings for the north pole were
released. 600 million tonnes at the north pole. 2 meter thick sheets.

I suspect this is what Val Kraut is talking about when he said "the
week after massive deposits of water were found on the moon" .

On Aug 7, 4:22*pm, Hop wrote:
On Aug 7, 11:28 am, lorad wrote:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wat...found/story?id...

PS: And just when the researchers gave us the green light for a base
on the moon, Obamba slammed the door and said we ain't goin'
nowhere....

The various links you've posted do indeed give evidence the moon has
water. But, while there's more water than earlier thought, it's still
quite dry. None of the those links show water in exploitable
quantities.

I don't know how you can avoid the obvious.
MASSIVE amounts of water are there to be exploited.
If you don't think that .16 percent of rock ore produced water isn't
significant.. there is little else that can be said.

The last link talked about how Chandrayaan-1 discovered water in the
lower latitudes. These also showed water in concentrations so low it
would take a great deal of time and effort to extract usable
quantities.

Sorry, but you are wrong again.
I computed water producing cratered 'ore' to a depth of one foot
covering of 50% of the surface area above 30 degrees latitude (at the
described 1 quart per tonne rate given in NASA's projection) and
arrived at
52640.666 mi² area of water available...
Which would result in a body of water that would be three feet deep
and 229.43 miles by 229.43 miles wide.
(for each pole)

Hey, that's enough for some decent swimming and bass fishing.

On 8/7/2010 9:46 AM, Hop wrote:
Recent data from Chandrayaan 1 and LRO seem to indicate ice sheets at
least 2 meters thick:

http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/20...e-of-the-moon/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mi..._deposits.html

This is one of those cases where I'll believe it when something scoops
up some from the surface and canalizes it.
This time instead of saying "hydrogen=ice" they are saying "rough crater
interior=ice"
It's always some second-hand evidence of ice, not ice itself.

Some casual space buffs have conflated this with McCubbins' recent
speculation that the moon may have more water in it's interior:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...dings-science/

While your phenomenica link may call McCubbin's theory into question,
it does absolutely nothing to contradict the Chandrayaan-1 and LRO
findings. The water in the very cold polar craters is thought to be
frozen out gasses left over from cometary impacts. Not many (if any)
believe the polar ice is from the moon's interior.

One way you might be able to solve this without actually landing a probe
on the Moon is to detonate a large flash bomb over the polar regions
while a orbiting spacecraft photographs them.
Since the lunar surface is pretty dark in color, large ice deposits will
stick out like a sore thumb due to their reflectivity in the
illumination of the flash bomb.
I've been very suspicious of NASA "gee-whiz" discoveries ever since the
Martian bacteria mess.
NASA has a vested interest in finding things that get it more government
funding to further research, and that leads to an innate conflict of
interest in regards to its science findings, particularly among
subgroups of its own researchers who are each trying to get a bigger
slice of the funding pie for their particular projects.


Pat

On 8/7/2010 10:13 AM, lorad wrote:
On Aug 7, 6:00 am, Pat wrote:
On 8/6/2010 10:46 AM, Val Kraut wrote:

This is where I like to tell the story of the Ming Dynasty outlawing the
large exploration ships to keep the merchant class in place. China could
have had colonies in Europe.

That wasn't the reason they scrapped their fleet - when the worth of the
things the treasure fleet was bringing back was measured against the
cost of running it, it was a net money loser.

Pat

Got sources for that conclusion?
I question its veracity.

Read the book "When China Ruled The Seas":
http://www.amazon.com/When-China-Rul.../dp/0195112075
Which goes into detail about the whole episode; the fleet was the idea
of the palace eunuch party who assumed that there were great riches out
somewhere in the oceans just waiting to be found and brought back to China.
So they kept sending the fleet out to find their version of El Dorado
(right down to an elixir of eternal life), and the fleet kept coming
back with less of worth aboard than it cost to operate and stock with
trade goods.
After this happened several times, the whole concept fell out of favor
with the Emperor and the palace Confucian scholars, and the fleet was
scraped and written off as a boondoggle.
Which raises a very interesting point; the reason they couldn't find
much to trade for is that they were the most culturally advanced
civilization on the planet at the time, and wherever they went it was
heading downhill in a cultural and artistic sense.
But assume for a moment that that wasn't the case; they set out and ran
into some sort of civilization more advanced than they were.
Their first concern would have been that that superior civilization was
going to realize that a nation that could build a fleet like that was
very rich indeed, and show up on their doorstep with an army on _their_
ships to invade China.
So it was a lose-lose proposition; either you find only more backward
cultures that don't have much of worth to trade for, or you find
something that is more advanced than you are, and have what started out
as trade end up as invasion.
At least in the Ming fleet's case their were actually other cultures to
interact with and breathable air...which is more than one can say about
anywhere else in this solar system.
And unlike in Star Trek, if you run into alien races, it's very unlikely
that they will be at your technological level, as even a period
equivalent of a few hundred years could give them such a technological
lead over you that they could squash you like a bug if they so desired.
So the Enterprise fires its phasers at the hostile enemy vessel; and
around a day later all the planets in the Federation have their suns go
nova.

Pat

"Sorry, but you are wrong again.
I computed water producing cratered 'ore' to a depth of one foot
covering of 50% of the surface area above 30 degrees latitude (at the
described 1 quart per tonne rate given in NASA's projection) and
arrived at
52640.666 mi² area of water available...
Which would result in a body of water that would be three feet deep
and 229.43 miles by 229.43 miles wide.
(for each pole)

Hey, that's enough for some decent swimming and bass fishing. " -
lorad
_____________________
i'm impressed, sonny.
hee hee
but, lissen...
you might as well face facts.
isn't a 'vested interest' about the same thing as a 'conflict of
interest'?
you probably don't see anything wrong with freedom-loving prison
guards lobbying FOR the az anti-immigrant law or AGAINST the pot
legalisation in ca.

"jobs, jobs, jobs..."

hahahahaha
hahahahahaha
hahahahaha
hahahahahaha
hahahahaha

"gotta get this country moving again.."

hahahahaha
hahahahahaha
hahahahaha
hahahahahaha
hahahahaha

they'll never go to Mars with any sincerity.
hell, what if they found gold?
the price would go through the floor.
THINK, Bubba.

("bass fishin'" my royal asshole.)

On 8/7/2010 10:16 AM, lorad wrote:


So instead ancient China turned inward, shut the doors, and stagnated
for the next 800 years or so.
End product was Mao sending all society into liquid cow poop rice
fields to try and prevent starvation - unsuccessfully.

Don't forget slaughtering the sparrows, as they were eating crops...
they were also eating the bugs that ate the crops, but they found out
about that the hard way.
Napoleon once said: "Let China Sleep, for when the Dragon awakes, she
will shake the world."
About the time the $1.00 laser pointers showed up at a local grocery
store, I could sure see the red glow in that dragon's eye.

Pat

On Aug 7, 6:00 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Which raises a very interesting point; the reason they couldn't find
much to trade for is that they were the most culturally advanced
civilization on the planet at the time, and wherever they went it was
heading downhill in a cultural and artistic sense.
But assume for a moment that that wasn't the case; they set out and ran
into some sort of civilization more advanced than they were.
Their first concern would have been that that superior civilization was
going to realize that a nation that could build a fleet like that was
very rich indeed, and show up on their doorstep with an army on _their_
ships to invade China.
So it was a lose-lose proposition; either you find only more backward
cultures that don't have much of worth to trade for, or you find
something that is more advanced than you are, and have what started out
as trade end up as invasion.
Pat

Which explains why the European exploration of the Americas was such a
spectacular failure.

On Aug 7, 4:30 pm, lorad wrote:
On Aug 7, 4:22 pm, Hop wrote:


The various links you've posted do indeed give evidence the moon has
water. But, while there's more water than earlier thought, it's still
quite dry. None of the those links show water in exploitable
quantities.

I don't know how you can avoid the obvious.
MASSIVE amounts of water are there to be exploited.

Yes, there probably a 600 million tonnes at the north pole. 2 meter
thick sheets.

Reread my posts, this time for comprehension.

If you don't think that .16 percent of rock ore produced water isn't
significant.. there is little else that can be said.

Here are the three links you posted:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...dings-science/
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...-amount-water/
and
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wat...8663384&page=2

The first two talk about McCubbins' notion that lunar magma harbors 16
parts per billion water. While 16 ppb would very much change models of
how the moon was formed, it's pretty hard to mine.

The third one talks about "only a small amount of water and only in
the form of molecules stuck to soil", a quart per tonne as you say.
1.6 parts per 1000. This is 100,000 times the 16 ppb figure McCubbins
gives. There might be more water on the lunar surface due to the sun's
hydrogen interacting with the oxygen rich lunar minerals.

But a quart per ton is difficult to mine. This is drier than the
Sahara desert.

But there are likely richer water deposits than 1.6 parts per 1000. I
will repost these links:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mi..._deposits.html
http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/20...e-of-the-moon/

Or you can just google this: 600 million tonnes ice moon

That will give you a whole boat load of articles on the discovery.

Sadly a lot of people conflate the earlier probe findings and
McCubbins' with the very dramatic Chandrayaan-1 findings released
March, 2010.

Once again:

Sheets of ice at least two meters thick.

600 million tonnes at the lunar north pole.

Please stop posting those articles about 1.6 parts per 1000. Or 16
parts per billion. Rather, post links to articles of two meter thick
sheets of ice.

Once again:

Sheets of ice at least two meters thick.

600 million tonnes at the lunar north pole.

Got it?