We really shouldn't mess with The Moon

[Sucumbio]

Link to original post: [drupal=2520]We really shouldn't mess with The Moon[/drupal]



I mean, ok, NASA's competent.. mostly. They double triple and quadruple check everything before committing to an action. But they did that, technically, before the Challenger ignited (I was in school that day... got sent home early.) Maybe that's an unfair analogy, but seriously, folks, you read The Time Machine? Or seen the remake? Gah. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I just think research of this nature should be taken very cautiously. True the Moon is impacted by like-stellar masses many times a year, and the impact we're creating won't be any more devastating to the Moon's surface than those. But if we've learned anything from history, it's that Nature does what Nature does, but when Man does it, it usually backfires. How could this backfire? I have no idea, don't work at NASA. I just don't like tempting fate.

 

[AlexoftheAura]

Maybe they'll learn after they **** things up beyond repair.

 

[Jam Stunna]

I understand what you're getting at, but this still seems like baseless conjecture. I think we tend to overestimate the impact we have in the grand scheme of things.

 

[†Slader7†]

Jam is correct, we always tend to think the worst possible scenario.

As for the moon, as far as I know, its just rock. What could we do on the Moon that will harm rocks? =/

 

[RyuReiatsu]

Jam is correct, we always tend to think the worst possible scenario.

As for the moon, as far as I know, its just rock. What could we do on the Moon that will harm rocks? =/

It'll awake the Planet's guardian and will doom the Earth :O.
... Well, not really.

 

[Mewter]

What impact?
Did I miss some news article declaring that NASA's going to be shooting nuclear missiles at the moon?

Unless you meant an impact as in total effect, but even then I'm wondering what event you're talking about.

 

[L__]

Wait, what are we doing to the moon?

 

[DtJ Glyphmoney]

Worst case scenario Skull Kid tries to pull it down on our heads and we have to go wake up a bunch of giants to toss it back up there.

Pretty sure that was on the Discovery Channel or something.

 

[Sucumbio]

Not a nuke, but you have the right idea kinda. Basically NASA will be launching a 2-part projectile towards the moon. The first half will hit into the moon, which will create a purposeful explosion outward of surface material. The latter half of the unit will remain above to collect the matter that's flung towards it. This will help us determine if there is water on the moon.

Where will it go from there? Well maybe no where, I don't think NASA would be dumb enough to risk the destruction of the Moon. My point is that even our best intentions can sometimes have dire consequences. Maybe the explosion has an untracable-at-first effect that 20 years from now spells disaster? Maybe not. But my conjecture isn't entirely baseless, as HG Wells so vividly portrayed for us. Now in his fiction, we were mining the moon, so of course there was bound to be greater risk for problems. We're just simulating what happens naturally many times a year, so that we can be there to grab the detritus that's released. I just get nervous thinking about the Moon in general. It IS just a rock up there, but it's a matter of course. It's a rock that basically is responsible for our tides, and arguably, the sloshing effect that gave birth to life itself. Landing on it is one thing, even colonizing the surface I can buy. But shooting at it, eh, not so much. It's like, shooting an elephant with a bb gun. No real harm can be done, until you hit the wrong spot, then you have an elephant where your face used to be.

 

[†Slader7†]

The way you make it sound, NASA is going to nuke the moon to see what kind of rocks there is

Nonetheless, you have to consider that NASA is pretty thorough on these missions. They will not risk having moon debris falling down on Earth because once someone gets hurt, their program would face persecution. These are Top Scientists working, they must know what they're planning.

 

[Mewter]

Or even worse is we have to do it in three days' time. Guys, get out your ocarinas!!! I sometimes think proper grammar ruins the total IMPACT of the joke, if you know what I mean (pun intended).

Lol at the last part of your post. If it's really just going to do as much damage as the average object, though, then I see no reason not to do it. Besides, NASA knows what they're doing, and try to get it done right.

 

[L__]

Thank you for clarifying.

I really hope something totally unexpected happens due to a slight miscalculation.

 

[Underload]

I wonder if we'll be able to see it from Earth.

 

[demonictoonlink]

Y'all just got Underloaded

 

[Sucumbio]

I wonder if we'll be able to see it from Earth.

Yes actually, well it'll be streamed live via internet at the very least, but I will prolly be at work while its happening.

 

[Dracospawn]

Not a nuke, but you have the right idea kinda. Basically NASA will be launching a 2-part projectile towards the moon. The first half will hit into the moon, which will create a purposeful explosion outward of surface material. The latter half of the unit will remain above to collect the matter that's flung towards it. This will help us determine if there is water on the moon.

Where will it go from there? Well maybe no where, I don't think NASA would be dumb enough to risk the destruction of the Moon. My point is that even our best intentions can sometimes have dire consequences. Maybe the explosion has an untracable-at-first effect that 20 years from now spells disaster? Maybe not. But my conjecture isn't entirely baseless, as HG Wells so vividly portrayed for us. Now in his fiction, we were mining the moon, so of course there was bound to be greater risk for problems. We're just simulating what happens naturally many times a year, so that we can be there to grab the detritus that's released. I just get nervous thinking about the Moon in general. It IS just a rock up there, but it's a matter of course. It's a rock that basically is responsible for our tides, and arguably, the sloshing effect that gave birth to life itself. Landing on it is one thing, even colonizing the surface I can buy. But shooting at it, eh, not so much. It's like, shooting an elephant with a bb gun. No real harm can be done, until you hit the wrong spot, then you have an elephant where your face used to be.

This may or may not happen, personally, I agree with you. Mankind sometimes puts it's nose were it doesn't belong. There are probably other ways to find out if there is water on the moon. But too tell the truth, we don't know what the hell is actually in the moon. I'm not some freak obsessed with proving aliens are real but still....anyway, isn't another issue is that the debris can fall onto earth onto some poor counrty? and that we MISS?

 

[Sucumbio]

no that's not a real concern. the debris will be tiny, and technically millions of pounds of such tiny debris come into contact with earth's atmosphere and burn up or fall harmlessly to earth as dust. its the impact site that worries me, but upon further reading apparently the impact site has already been tested for seismology and fault lines, etc. so I guess we all good.

 

[Espy Rose]

...would be nice to get an observatory on the moon...

 

[Teran]

Well technically it would have an impact on the tidal patterns, even if minute.

 

[Darkslash]

Nonetheless, you have to consider that NASA is pretty thorough on these missions. They will not risk having moon debris falling down on Earth because once someone gets hurt, their program would face persecution. These are Top Scientists working, they must know what they're planning.

I will honestly believe that there will be a point in time where NASA will do that. They will want to see what will happen to a moon rock dropped from orbit. Sure they might just drop it from a space shuttle, but where else would the right conditions be? On the moon, where moon rocks come from. The results of the experiments might come up with the discovery new metals, or a new alloy which could improve our life.

The reason why I'm saying that it should be droped from orbit/the moon, rather than a high heated oven is that Moon rocks might have diffrent properties from falling from the sky, rather than being superheated in earthly air.

Infact, I'm willing to bet on the exsitance of a REAL Lunar Titanium which accoriding to a certain science fiction story (guess which one ) is strongly durable, resistant and is a very ideal armor.

Also there is the prospect of Helium 3, a rare isotop of Helium(well rare on earth). Since Helium 3 is VERY vital to Nuclear Fusion reasearch(Fission is the most comon form on earth for now). Fusion according to what I read, is 3 to 4 times more powerful and more safer than Nuclear Fission. And since star's do Fusion naturaly, Fusion would seem to be the "natural" form of Nuclear energy. Of course Fusion will have some radioactivity left over. But still if the Moon has Helium 3, Fusion may become a reality sooner.

/lolrantwithmoonbenifits

 

[Kantō]

the aliens on the moon are gunna be super pissed and vaporize all of us when we accidently blow up one of there franchise fast food moon joints. be prepared.

 

[-Jumpman-]

Do you guys think they're going to blow the whole moon up or something? I'm sure that if NASA decides to launch missiles towards the moon they will have done research on possible effects. And most importantly, make sure that these effect will not harm anyone.

 

[Skadorski]

Thank goodness something didn't happen; I was worrying about this too.
Glad I'm not the only one >.>

 

[Jimnymebob]

This whole moon thing was unimpressive, and nowhere near as exciting as the large hadron collider was. That was a barrel of laughs.

Anyway, scientists aren't the brightest of folk at times, especially when they show no care in the after effects of what they are doing.

But come on, they should of just used the Ark's Eclipse Cannon, find out it was full of lava, doom the planet, and move onto flying to the Sun or something.

 

[finalark]

This whole moon thing was unimpressive, and nowhere near as exciting as the large hadron collider was. That was a barrel of laughs.

Anyway, scientists aren't the brightest of folk at times, especially when they show no care in the after effects of what they are doing.

But come on, they should of just used the Ark's Eclipse Cannon, find out it was full of lava, doom the planet, and move onto flying to the Sun or something.

Beat me to it.

Anyway, why would you want to see if there's water in the moon? What's the point? To come up with yet another insane theory on how we got here? Ugh, some days, scientists just annoy me to no end. I really doubt that anything bad will happen, the worse thing that I can foresee without going to extremes is just some brief tide problems. I don't think we'd send up enough firepower to blow the rock to kingdom come, you know, unless NASA some how screws up big time.

 

[Skadorski]

Beat me to it.

Anyway, why would you want to see if there's water in the moon? What's the point? To come up with yet another insane theory on how we got here? Ugh, some days, scientists just annoy me to no end. I really doubt that anything bad will happen, the worse thing that I can foresee without going to extremes is just some brief tide problems. I don't think we'd send up enough firepower to blow the rock to kingdom come, you know, unless NASA some how screws up big time.

It's to see if there's water.
Water is extremely heavy, shuttling it up would be hard if there ws going to be an colony on the moon.
THIS IS NOT WHAT I AGREE WITH. I think doing that missle was A expensive and B worthless and C DANGEROUS.

 

[Mewter]

You guys make it sound like some kind of devious plot to destroy mankind.

The thing is, I think they're doing it wrong. If they want to do some real damage, they should power up the eclipse cannon and blast it to smithereens! make people wear cursed masks... wait 50 or so years until they can do it on accident with a real nuke so that they can do a lot more damage. invent a large bio-mechanic monster called Crayak and program it to be godly and bent on our destruction.

 

[UltiMario]

I feel that a little-known fact about the moon is that it keeps Earth on its Tilted Axis, so the Seasons as they are, give credit to the moon.

I thought it was pretty awesome to even PICTURE a colony on the moon, but if it means we could put the whole Earth in Jepordy to make it easier for us, hell no.

 

[Dracospawn]

Do you guys think they're going to blow the whole moon up or something? I'm sure that if NASA decides to launch missiles towards the moon they will have done research on possible effects. And most importantly, make sure that these effect will not harm anyone.

These people are not robots, one tiny little miscalculation or mistake can lead to disaster.

 

[_umbra_]

All the serious people in here need to chill. All they did was shoot a little tiny rocket into a little tiny crater on the moon, and watched a litte bit of material go poof. It's not like they went Dr. Eggman on that ****, everything's going to be juuust fine.

That being said, it'll be interesting to see what kind of data they were able to collect.

 

[Kholdstare]

Remember what happened when we ****ed with the Moon last time?

 

[Darkslash]

Beat me to it.

Anyway, why would you want to see if there's water in the moon? What's the point?

If there's water on the moon we can make a moon colony, and breach out into space. Because with water you have

A)The stuff of life
B) Fuel (hydrogen)
C) Oxygen

Not to mention that Water is extremely heavy, and would freeze in space.

 

[Sucumbio]

So the results are in. There IS water! And not just a little, but a lot. The scientific community is stoked as am I, as this means we can really consider a moon colony, w/o having to figure out ways to transport tons of water there. Is it naturally occurring? The result of comet collision? That's the next few questions to answer and it'll take awhile. But this is a great discovery, and will surely lead to a new age in space exploration and colonization. Now if only we can be responsible in what we do with this discovery, in how we proceed. I have faith. I may have been a little skeptical about the experiment that led to this discovery, but it seems to have paid off, and w/o any serious risks to us, so go USA! And thanks for not getting us killed.

 

[Mewter]

Hoorah.
Let's just find out exactly how it got there now.

"And thanks for getting us killed."

Wait. What.

 

[Sucumbio]

lol whoops! fixed it.

yeah, definitely can't wait to find out we just bombed the little green men's backyard pool or something lol

 

[urdailywater]

So the results are in. There IS water! And not just a little, but a lot. The scientific community is stoked as am I, as this means we can really consider a moon colony, w/o having to figure out ways to transport tons of water there. Is it naturally occurring? The result of comet collision? That's the next few questions to answer and it'll take awhile. But this is a great discovery, and will surely lead to a new age in space exploration and colonization. Now if only we can be responsible in what we do with this discovery, in how we proceed. I have faith. I may have been a little skeptical about the experiment that led to this discovery, but it seems to have paid off, and w/o any serious risks to us, so go USA! And thanks for not getting us killed.

Sci-Fi movies are right. Nothing is impossible.

When can I get my teleportation device... ?


I have a feeling we're (current generation) is gonna grow up in a hella huge technological era. I mean we pretty much already are, but I mean a lot huger than now. That's pretty radical if you ask me.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

I am truly blown away that anyone could suspect bad would come from shooting a missile at the moon. It's really, really big, and we don't have to worry about damaging the environment there like we do here on Earth. Even if we wanted to intentionally destroy the moon, it would be really hard for us if not impossible...

The finding of water is really awesome though, and it doesn't take a lot of vision to see why. If we want to put a base on the moon, the biggest problem is the question of supplying it. The moon's sun-facing side has essentially infinite energy (solar power is very effective when the atmosphere is that thin), and this discovery suggests we could easily harness that to draw all the water we could need. That means our problem of the four things we need (food, water, air, energy) is now down to two, and these things aren't wholly unrelated to each other so we could make use of the plentiful water and solar energy to try something like agriculture to take care of all the problems at once (plants are edible and pretty good at maintaining the breathe-ability of air).

Just in case someone reading this truly lacks vision of why a moon base would be awesome, just think about it. Not only would a sustainable moon base be an expansion of the area over which humanity lives (increasing the size of our specie in the best way possible), but the moon is very resource rich. As I alluded, solar power is way more effective on the moon than on Earth which could make it great for things like manufacturing (with the second benefit that we can pretty much endlessly dump waste on the lunar surface with no consequences, even nasty stuff like nuclear waste). The moon is totally untapped in terms of minable minerals. Some quick research tells me that there's evidence of abundant aluminum and iron on the moon and probably in pretty easily obtainable places (that is, really shallow mines could produce high payout since, unlike on Earth, the easy stuff still hasn't been mined yet). Having a massive increase in our supply of those metals would do nothing but help us; those metals are used for everything. Who knows what we stand to find in terms of rarer stuff? There's no reason the moon shouldn't have healthy deposits of gold, silver, titanium, or other valuable metals buried somewhere or another. Those metals aren't just nice to look at either; they're very useful for a lot of things.

NASA has been kinda slow about getting major, useful things done, but this is definitely awesome. I'm not sure why there was so much criticism; even if it turned out there wasn't water, this was pretty important to establish.

 

[Teran]

I really don't see how we could build a moon base.

I really can't see us having the capability to build settlements on other planets.
Also, I really sometimes think NASA is the most elaborate money waster in humanity's history.

 

[Sucumbio]

We could but there are definitely more cons to deal with than say, colonizing Mars.

Eh, NASA -has- been wasting a lot of money of the years because the way government funds works in the US you are allotted a budget, and unless you spend it all, the next year, you don't get as much, so NASA and every other organization do what hey can to spend all their money so they can least get the same amount the next year, w/o doing that, there's an inevitable cascading effect which would reduce your budget bit by bit until you have nothing, and NASA -does- have legitimate purpose, just not annually, more every few years or so.

As for why THIS is important, well the colonization of space is the ultimate achievement left for human kind. Our planet is a great home, but it cannot and will not sustain our populous forever, we ultimately -have- to leave and begin spreading out, or face certain doom. This axiom is at the heart of NASA's goal, as is most other country's space programs. For the time being, we're going it alone in this, but I surmise it will quickly become an international effort, once we trump certain issues that still face us, namely the discovery of Fusion power. With Fusion power we can begin to bend physics to our will, thus enabling light speed, or even faster than light speed travel, along with any number of other currently science fiction ideas, that are definitely within our grasp.

 

[Jimnymebob]

Why do we want to build/ live on the moon anyway?

Living on the moon is as ridiculous as trying to collide two atoms to create a black hol- oh wait .