the past ain't what it used to be

[the_siobhan]

We have So Many Books, even after giving away a small bookcase worth, that I'll have reading material until I retire.

Right now I'm reading Eon by Greg Bear. I'm finding it a bit turgid but what's really fun is that it was written in 1985 about events in 2005.

The Soviet Union still exists. There has already been one limited nuclear exchange in the '90s between the Soviets and the US, and they are working their way towards another one. There are colonies on the moon and television broadcasts 3D images. The scientists in the story carry hand computers called slates and Apples are stun weapons used by security guards.

I'm less than a quarter of the way through the book, so I'm looking forward to finding out more about what the world was going to be like in 2005. But mostly it's just fascinating to go back to the Cold War and immerse myself in remembering just how fucked up that was. Not that things aren't fucked up now, but back then they were fucked up in a very particular and special way. I tend to think it was worse than the current "everybody be afraid of terrorists" version, but that might just be because I grew up with it so it had more impact on my psyche.

I may have to dig through the stacks for more books about the near future. They make for an interesting perspective on what we've been doing with ourselves for the last couple of decades.

And why don't we have colonies on the moon, anyway? Even just for mining or research?

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

Because there's nothing on the Moon we need, nobody has worked out how to sell Lunar tourism and research can be more inexpensively carried out using machines (probably exploitation as well, if we think of a use for the Moon).

[the_siobhan]

I would have thought Lunar tourism would be one of those things that would sell itself. Maybe we should get Richard Branson on this.

I just went and looked up the mineral makeup of moon rocks, but of course I know nothing about geology so the names don't mean anything to me. I did see mention of Helium 3 being valuable for use in fusion research. If anybody out there is still doing fusion research.

[james_davis_nicoll]

I just went and looked up the mineral makeup of moon rocks, but of course I know nothing about geology so the names don't mean anything to me.

The Earth and Moon have linked origins so their surfaces are roughly comparable:

               Regolith      Earth's Crust
Oxygen 	        40%             46.6%
Silicon 	19.2%           27.7%
Iron 	        14.3%            5.0%
Calcium 	 8.0%            3.6%
Aluminum 	 5.6%            8.1%
Magnesium 	 4.5%            2.1%
Sodium            --             2.8%
Potassium         --             2.6%

Where the Moon tends to get boned is a general shortage of volatiles like water (although it turns out to have more water than we thought a generation ago); as a consequence of that many ore-forming processes we see on Earth would happen to a lesser degree or not at all on the Moon.

One of the annoying things about Earth if one is a space exploitation fan, as I am, is that the Earth is most inconsiderately rich in those things we want and has processes that concentrate them that may not have analogs on other worlds. Well, maybe on Mars.

Lunar 3He is something space exploitation fans latched onto a generation or so ago as something that would justify the enormous cost of building a base on the Moon. The attraction is the 3He+D reaction produces fewer neutrons than T+D (although not no neutrons because there would be D+D side reactions and half of those produce neutrons). The downsides include but are not limited to:

We do not have commercial fusion reactors.
We have not even mastered the much easier T+D reaction.
We do not have commercial fusion reactors.
11Boron + p produces fewer side-reaction neutrons and 11Boron is easily got from Earth.
We do not have commercial fusion reactors.
The lunar regolith is not rich in 3He; it's just less insanely poor in it than the Earth is. We're talking parts per billion here. The amount of energy sucked up processing regolith for 3He turns out to be comparable to the amount of energy we'd get from fusing 3He in those commercial fusion reactors we don't have.
We do not have commercial fusion reactors.

[james_davis_nicoll]

I am a bit bullish on space tourism, although Lunar tourism is going to face some technical issues going to Low Earth Orbit does not, like how most of the billionaires who will form the early market for this stuff probably want a better method of dealing with solar flares than the one the Apollo missions used, which was to hope no flares happened while the astronauts were travelling to and from the Moon.

[the_siobhan]

Yeah, I could see that throwing a bit of a damper on one's enthusiasm for space travel.

[the_siobhan]

Have you seen this? A friend pointed this out to me. (You may have, I sometimes have trouble keeping up.)

http://mars-one.com/

[mschaos]

I have to say that I initially poopooed the elctronic readers. but then I saw one. adn then I got one. Andrew was the same way until he got me one last christmas.

and due to how the house is set up, book cases are not good in the living room so they will eventually go elsewhere when we get the basement sorted

and the book sounds great. I will have to get that on to my reader and start in on it

I agree - it is 2012. we should be out there much more than we are

[the_siobhan]

I will caution you that the book has a lot of theoretical physics so it can feel really slooooow. I'm not far enough in yet to tell if the pacing improves.