I haven't seen it at this forum... What do you think about Newt Gingrich'es idea for setting up a moon base by 2020? I know that it's often ridiculized -- but is there anybody who has liked it?

 

Maybe they can move the White House there and move the government there where "space cadets" would feel right at home. :excited:

 

I always did like the way you think

 

:excited: Don't think for a minute that you weren't in my thoughts when I made the comment, lol.

I'm still shocked that I beat you to it.

 

what do I think?

let's see:
Newt's in Florida, looking for votes
Florida has high unemployment
Newt announces a huge program he wants to start if he's elected
see the connection?
my bet is that even if Newt were to win the nomination AND the general election, once he were in office, it'd be a case of "What moon base proposal?".

 

NASA has taken quite a hit with the Space Shuttle being moth balled. I didn't hear, what was Newt's reason for doing this other than to just do it?

 

hello

 

any girl there

 

No, they haven't built the Moonbase yet.

 

We all know the reason is that, "In Space No One Can Hear You Scream".​

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And we all know that it ended up with half the moon blown out into Space.​

 

The Age of Exploration

During the age of exploration, which may be dated from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, there were fortunes to be made discovering new trade routes, countries to settle in, and resources to exploit.

The moon, Mars, and perhaps other locations in the solar system may have valuable resources. It may even be possible to settle there. Until this become cost effective, it will require an enormous amount of tax money with little return.

In the distant future it may be possible to settle planets on other solar systems. However, the distances involved will require travel there to be one way. It will be like the Polynesian settlement of islands in the South Pacific. There will not be back and forth transportation. Communication will require years, decades, even centuries. In the universe the speed of light is rather slow.

This assumes that Albert Einstein was right that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. If the speed of light can somehow be surpassed, interstellar travel and communication will of course be faster.

 

To be fair to old Albert, that wasn't an assumption - it was a conclusion. Experiments have shown that the speed of light was always measured as a constant regardless of the relative speed of the observer; Einstein's theory just used logical deduction to prove that, this being so, the speed of light must, inevitably, be an unbreakable limit.

There is still one possible alternative explanation to those experiments, which is that the Earth really is the motionless centre of the Universe after all! Vast amounts of evidence have piled up confirming the opposite, and all of it would have to be explained away somehow, but it won't be definitively PROVEN wrong until the Michelson-Morley experiment is conducted on a space station. (Unless it already has been while I wasn't looking.)

 

As for the Moon base - which I forgot to offer an opinion on - it couldn't get done for 2020. This is not the Sixties, and people actually expect to work in a safe environment. Even astronauts. The risks that were taken (often without even realising how risky they were) in the Apollo programme so that they could meet Kennedy's deadline, simply would not be taken today.

And, unfortunately, since most people equate "what use?" with one and only one meaning - "how much money will it make?" - there would be very little support for doing it anyway. Establishing a moonbase, and zero-gravity factories on space stations, would be sure to turn up totally unexpected new technologies that would earn billions for someone - but nobody can even begin to guess what they would be. Look at the internet - nobody in 1983 could possibly have anticipated all of the things that it makes possible now. Anyone wanting a billion dollars to lay all the required cabling for today's broadband system, back in 1983, would have been certified. Anyone wanting a hundred billion dollars for a Moonbase, without being able to provide definitive and concrete items which will make money out of it, is not going to get the money.

 

the moon is alot easyer than mars lets go back n do more...

 

Not only that - Mars is a hell of a lot easier to reach if you start on the Moon, although it's not certain that there's anything there which you could use for fuel.

 

I know ... just take a huge supply of "Pop Rock Candy" with you and together with sunlight, you can make fuel to power a spacecraft, lol. :excited:

Car fuel made from carbon dioxide and sunlight

New technology for "photosynthesising" fuel could lead to cars running on "petrol" made from carbon dioxide and sunlight.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring...el-made-from-carbon-dioxide-and-sunlight.html

 

The idea for a moonbase is not somthing Newt Gingrich has dreamed up. NASA announced in the 1980s that it wanted to make a moonbase by 1990. It seemed like it might actually happen at the time because it was on the heels of the Apollo program. We have not sent a single person to the moon since the Apollo program.

The bigger question is, where will the money to do an expensive undertaking like this come from? Likely from increased taxes. Gingrich is dreaming.

 

It is conceivable to me, not being a physicist, that while nothing in the natural world can travel faster than the speed of light there are artificial ways of doing so.

If you have ever listened to a short wave radio you know that Morse Code is still in use. When it was invented, the existence of radio waves was not even guessed at. It was only during the 1860s that a scientist suggested the possibility of radiation on either end of the visible light spectrum, and only I believe two decades later that there evidence of this was discovered.

I think it is too early to assume that Albert Einstein discovered the Absolute Truth.

 

Y'all are so naive! We've (the U.S.) has had a secret moon base since 1978! That's why you no longer hear much about traveling to the moon! I know! I've seen it! It's my moon base!!
Stephen: "Excellent! Stephen is my name. I'm the most wanted man on my (moon base). Except I'm not on my (moon base) of course. More's the pity."
Hamish: "Your (base)? You mean (the moon)."
Stephen: "Yeah. It's mine."
Hamish: "You're a madman."
Stephen: "[laughs] I've come to the right place then."