Who Will Control the Moon?

[jordan179]

BackgroundAs I'm sure everyone knows by now, Barack Obama has ordered the abandonment of the American Constellation rocket program, whose principal aim was the American return to the Moon (http://www.space.com/news/obama-nasa-space-plan-reactions-100128 ( Read more... )

Comments

[jordan179]

I don't know that China wants to stop the human colonization of space. I suspect that the Chinese would like to control the human colonization of space, and ensure that the rest of the Solar System is populated mainly by Han Chinese. They remember bitterly the mistake they made in the 15th-16th centuries, which led inexorably to the Manchu tyranny and the humiliation by the Europeans and Japanese, and they want to avoid its repetition.

Of course, they would love to hold America back from Lunar colonization. They, too, have scientists who understand the vital importance of Luna in any colonization of the Solar System, and thus they do not want an American-dominated Moon.

The Moon might well be used as a military base also. Many people today regard this as a silly Cold War worry, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Unlike orbital bases, a Lunar base could be dug in deep under miles of crust (indeed, Luna probably has ideally-suited natural cavern systems in which such a base might be sited), and would have easy access to metals for the construction of heavy equipment. And while it's true that you're shooting up a gravity well at the Earth, it's up a shallow well into a deeper one.

The real disadvantage is days to hours of lag between launch and impact, which is a problem if you're shooting against active defenses. But if you're not ... or if you have enough firepower that you can saturate them, that's not such a problem assuming that you are shooting against unmaneuverable targets (such as cities, factories or bases).

You could also have unlimited ammunition if you try Heinlein's strategy (from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) of throwing rocks from a mass driver. Sure, an enemy could knock out your big and thus vulnerable mass driver, but this assumes that your enemy has the ability to reach the Moon. Not all enemies do. And if you have active defenses around the mass driver, the enemy also has to be able to reach the Moon with a sizable strike.

[polaris93]

China's history makes it very clear what China would do if she gained control of space. The Chinese invented gunpowder centuries ago; the mandarin class, through the then-emperor, outlawed its use for anything but pretty fireworks displays, because they knew damned good and well what would happen if the people, God help them, ever acquired the stuff. The mandarin class has survived everything in China, and has done so by adroit use of the power to make and enforce laws, using whoever sits on the throne, whether King Wen or Mao T'se Dong. They'd do it again with space -- if China ever gets control over access to space. Which we dare not let them do. I'm all for sharing, but baring our throat to China? No way.

[polaris93]

"Silly Cold War" policies have a very real application today -- not with respect to Russia, for Russia is dying, but China. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the perfect playbook for how to use the Moon as a launch platform -- and you could obliterate the Rocky Mountains using nothing more than rocks launched via mass drive from the Moon.

[cutelildrow]

memetic thought control and warfare, with cold war origins, is well and alive today after all. i think it ridiculous to believe that just because something is 'old' means 'it no longer works.' alas many people think this way...

- lack of cap letters is because i have a delicious sandwich in hand....

[polaris93]

memetic thought control and warfare, with cold war origins, is well and alive today after all. i think it ridiculous to believe that just because something is 'old' means 'it no longer works.' alas many people think this way...

Something similar is the tendency to think that anything our ancestors believed must by definition be "superstitious," "stupid," "childish," or otherwise ridiculous simply because they and their culture existed when our species was much younger. Another is the idea that peoples who are without our wonderful advanced technology are therefore technologically impaired and thus unable to do anything of note. Captain James Cook got clubbed on the head and a knife in the chest, which thereby permanently put his career on hold, at the hands of "primitive savages" in spite of the fact that their technology was so "inferior" to that of the British. And a black widow spider, a member of a subphylum of creatures that first walked the Earth around 420 million years ago, during the Silurian Period of the Paleozoic Era, has been known to flatten grown men who, in spite of all their advanced technology, turn out to be no match for a soft little thing with only tiny fangs for weapons. Assuming somebody/something is obsolete/inferior/of no consequence seems to be an intellectual sin much in vogue for a long, long time. Disrespect for Cold War psyops weapons, tactics, and strategies is just another expression of that sort of sin -- but it can kill us dead if we aren't careful.

[cutelildrow]

When you consider that ants regularly build structures of breathtaking complexity, a species of jellyfish is potentially immortal, and a kind of insect is capable of effectively coming back to life, and the Real Life Section of "everything trying to kill you" has sheep, birds, insects, cute cuddly things, even trees listed... it makes you wonder why ecoterrorists don't get eaten more often.

[polaris93]

Oh, yeah! We had an incident here in Washington State some years ago in which some Green idiot broke the locks on all the cages in some of the local mink ranches and thereby loosed some 25,000 ranch mink into the wild -- in late Autumn. Ranch mink are not capable of taking care of themselves in the wild, as it is; their hunting and other natural instincts have been so screwed up by overbreeding for commmercially desirable traits that they barely have it together well enough to eat food placed before them and move away from their own excrement when they shit -- and they usually "breed" via artificial inseminiation, because their sexual skills are just about nil. So all those ranch mink were turned loose in the wild in the middle of an extremely cold night. Of those mink that didn't freeze to death in the next few weeks, or starve because they were too incompetent to run down prey and kill it, maybe 5,000 had it together enough to make dens for themselves and hunt and kill prey -- and they devastated the local wildlife. It was a total debacle. The mink ranchers put a huge price on the head of whoever did it, and even the local Greens were trying to track him/her/them down, presumably to do whoever it was in in some grisly way, for making them look bad. They never found out the identity of the miscreant -- maybe because something out there made a meal off him/her. Assuming he/she/they didn't simply fall down a deep hole and perish there, or maybe try to climb Mt. Rainier, fall into the caldera, and perish there.

[polaris93]

BTW, love the linked articles! :-)

[cutelildrow]

^_^ alwats fun to read those.

[polaris93]

:-)

[jordan179]

To be fair to the shepherds and sheep, the reason why the sheep are probably more likely to wound the shepherds than are any other animals is fairly obviously because the sheep are the animals around which the shepherds spend most of their time. If the sheep were really hostile, the shepherds would hardly be able to walk among them save in groups and heavily armed!

[polaris93]

Once in a while, a ram -- or an older female who takes the place of the ram in a herd without a male, acting as the leader -- will take it into its head that that two-legged thing attending the herd is actually a rival for the position of alpha male, and attack it. The results range from hilarious to tragic. I remember my adoptive mother telling me that when she was a little girl, living on her parents' sheep ranch in Rawlins, Wyoming, she got chased the length of the pasture by the ram one day. For some reason he saw her as a threat. She got away, but there could have been a tragedy, instead. The funny thing about it was that her birthday was April 5, making her an Aries -- the sign of the Ram. :-)