Should U.S. attempt manned missions to the Moon? Message Board

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Pastimes : Should U.S. attempt manned missions to the Moon?

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To: TimF who wrote (36)	2/10/2005 3:37:10 PM
From: Fangorn	Read Replies (1) of 41

Tim, Those time frames are accurate according to the fossil record of such impacts. We are in fact overdue for a civilization killer by a couple million years. By city killer I mean merely one large enough to kill a city if it actually hit a city. The air burst early last century in Siberia was close, if not that large (and will not appear in the fossil record). Of course you can quibble about the meaning of "near certainty". "Certainty" = 1. Is .9 "near" or do we need .99 or .999? If I remember correctly my time frames carried about a .95 or 95% probability. For me that is near certainty. I bet the farm on those odds every time. Expanding the time frames by a factor of 2 (doubling) would push the probability beyond .999, the fossil record has few if any gaps larger than double my figures so even assuming that record to be perfectly known, i.e. we haven't missed any actual impacts, we are left with a near absolute "certainty" at those time frames. At my original time frames "near certainty" is completely justified. re spinoffs I find it hard to see how profit seeking business could have developed either satellites or personal computers as we know them at the pace we have seen without government funded research spurred by the space race which was spurred by the cold war. Only after the technologies were developed for defense purposes did business adapt them to consumer uses. Eventually tinkers might have developed these things but how much longer would it have taken? Rockets were developed by the Nazis to throw bombs (though Von Braun and others had dreams of space even then), we and the Soviets used German scientists and designs to make rockets to throw bombs, the space race was born in the struggle to gain the high ground to protect our ability to throw bombs. Some of the earliest mechanical computers were used for targeting, as in ww11 submarines firing torpedoes. Their evolution was driven by the needs of military and later space missions. By 1960 they had become cheap enough that larger universities and businesses could buy them. It was only with the decision to go to the moon that the work was done to make them small enough to fit in spacecraft, the work that led eventually to the PC or notebook you are reading this on. Your point that the money would have generated positive results if left in private hands is well taken... as long as we ignore the likely outcome had we not fought the cold war of which the original space program was part and parcel. Granted that that argument is less compelling today... if you ignore China's expressed intention of getting to the moon posthaste and being the premier global power by 2100. Your point also assumes that the money would not have been spent by government on all the other stuff they spend our money on, most of which offers no hope of positive technology spinoffs. Steve

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