Talk:People on the Moon

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Revision as of 05:22, 8 May 2007 by Jriley (talk | contribs) (moved one sided to Miners)
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This page was originally written to develop characters for stories about lunar settlement. I have written about 5 of these stories to date. They are now at:

Back to the Moon wiki Story Index

I would be interested in moving them to Lunarpedia as part of a major addition to actively and aggressively build a vision of success in the American public for the return to the moon.

Jriley 04:41, 3 March 2007 (PST)

Toursists

Why are these transitions prohibited?

  • Tourist to miner (not properly trained)

Why not train the tourist? The tourist will need quite a lot of training before they will be allowed to fly to the Moon, just like tourists to space today. The additional training to become a miner would seem simple enough.

In the interim, the tourist would have more than enough training to support himself/herself working in a retail outlet. This paragraph only Mdelaney

  • Tourist to settler (wait your turn like everybody else, seen as trying to buy your way into the program)

What is wrong with buying your way into the program? That is basically what the toursts are already doing. They would be just staying permanently instead of returning to Earth. If they have the money to pay for it, why not establish retirement community on the Moon for example, such communities exist all over the Earth. People live and work in one country, then retire in a different country. What is wrong with the Moon as a retirement destination?Charles F. Radley 06:42, 3 March 2007 (PST)


First the various groups will probably hate each other's guts. A tourist who bought his or her way to the Moon and then descided they wanted to stay would certainly be dispised by all the people who spend years of worry and training just to get there.

It will take a lot of community resources to support each person in the settlement. Just buying a week as a tourist does not mean you are paying for anything like the cost of perminate lodging. Retiring to the Moon is completely seperate consideration

There would be no restriction a tourist returing to the Earth and appling like everybody else.

--Jriley 03:47, 10 March 2007 (PST)

Licence ambiguity

There is no CC_People namespace. By moving it there you actually moved it into the public domain main namespace. As I'm doubting this was your intent I moved it here until the terms under which it is to be made available are clarified.

What could be done to clarify the namespace formatting, especially for the next time when the next person may accidentally move something into public domain and not have the situation caught in time to prevent someone using it as a public domain resource? -- Strangelv 06:49, 3 March 2007 (PST)

Sorry, this was a only low-on-the-learning-curve editing mistake.

--Jriley 03:52, 10 March 2007 (PST)


I would volenteer to be a lunar miner in a New York minute.

--Jriley 03:51, 10 March 2007 (PST)


Transitions

A brief summary of issues with this section.

  • Requiring that older male miners have vasectomies?
No one would agree to such a proposal. It is a violation of individual rights. People move to a frontier to find more freedom, not to have it taken away. I can understand vasectomies in order to avoid mutations, but this is a dangerous precedent. Once these are set society tends to keep going in a very bad way. The result may very well be a new underclass of the elderly or continued precedents leading to the rise of ingrained fascist ideology and/or stripping settlers of their individual rights. This proposal could stifle the expansion of lunar settlement and the importation of needed laborers.
  • Requiring that all miners be older men and women past the prime of fertility?
Older people shipped off to the mines? Sure they could be in roving miners, but where would they go on the moon? It would be a prison without walls. Denying young people available jobs? Riots and protests are never a happy experience. Look at what happened in France.
  • Limiting Transitions - in General
The idea that people would lose their freedom of choice when it comes to how they live their lives and pursue their careers, or have their choices limited in such a way has many issues, some of which I will discuss. I want to live in a free market where my qualifications speak for themselves and my career path is not limited by a set of arbitrary rules and protocols. These rules would severely limit the creation of small businesses and stifle opportunities for individual entrepreneurship that do not lie in a person's pre-set career path. They would also limit a person's opportunities to change career in order to support himself, his family, or his way of life in the presence of market/price fluctuations for the goods and/or services that he currently provides, or in the cases of layoffs at his current employer or an entire company going under. Such an event will saturate the labor market for many specialties depending on the company. The only ways to avoid the problem of labor market saturation is to rely on state run enterprises creating more government jobs in that specialty (which would saturate the market for the goods it provides and lead to more business failures), funding public works projects (this would only help some specialties), or begin an individual relief program (ie: welfare, goods vouchers used in communist countries). Such a course would open up an even larger can of worms than the one created by these rules in the first place (ie: taxation destroying an already slim profit margin and resulting in loss of private enterprise).

Thoughts/Feedback?

-- Jarogers2001 23:36, 27 March 2007 (PDT)

The line to volunteer for a one way trip to the Moon, under any agreement, will be out the door and around the block. The infertile requirement will dissuade very few volunteers.

This miner definition comes directly from Harrison Schmitt's book, "Return to the Moon".

--Jriley 05:18, 28 March 2007 (PDT)


On the contrary.

  • 1. Telling anyone that they will lose their freedom of reproductive choice will not go over well at all, not since Nazi Germany set that particular precedent in their efforts to both create a master race and suppress unwanted elements of their society.
A. In our efforts to colonize the moon we must consider the mentality of the generations that will live to accomplish it. It goes against our culture. Rational, smart, ambitious young people of my generation and the ones that follow will never actually agree to this kind of requirement. See part 2.
B. Something that seems to be overlooked by Mr. Schmitt is that enforcing this idea is a violation of human rights. Any company practicing it will come under heavy political flak resulting in very bad publicity and severe loss of profits.
We can't rely on NASA to colonize the moon. We've already tried that and NASA failed to meet expectations for 30 years (thanks to washington). We have little choice but to rely on private enterprise to get the job done, and no private company will have anything to do with this kind of public relations nightmare.
  • 2. Even if people are required to sign an agreement before they ship out, enforcement of the agreement becomes a problem. If there were a doctor offering free vasectomies I would be the first in line to get snipped. But.. and it's a big BUT. If someone tried to tell me I didn't have a choice, I would instigate an armed and bloody rebellion without even blinking an eye. I doubt I am the only person that would do so.
A. You could try to filter strong individualists out using psychological evaluations, but fooling those evaluations is easy. One simply lies.
B. Enthusiasm for space travel and colonization has bottomed out among younger generations, including my own. By the time settlement begins, the majority of those who were alive during the days of the Apollo program and share the enthusiasm for space common during those times will no longer pass a basic physical. We're talking younger generations
The quantity of these younger people expected to volunteer for a one way trip to a hostile environment with unknown physiological repercussions where survival is not guaranteed, career advancement is limited and/or not guaranteed, and pay is not likely to be competitive with earth markets offering less risk, is usually overestimated. Often grossly so.

Jarogers2001 11:20, 28 March 2007 (PDT)


We must look beyond NASA and/or the very early days of settlement.

In fact, our current "space exploration" mindset needs to be changed beyond recognition

When you get to a settlement size of about 100+ in a small lava tube, you will begin to see very un-NASAlike changes in the way things operate. By the time that settlement has a population of about 1000 it'll be a small town, with shops and stores and restaurants and people who really aren't required to do much more than say "Would you like fries with that?"

The figures above are purely arbitrary as I have no idea at what level economies of scale will kick in nor do I know what the population critical mass will be.

Are you trying to tell me that someone who'll live in the equivalent of a hotel room inside a lava tube and mostly only go to the office or communal areas and only ever venture outside in a tour bus needs special training?

Yes, sure they need training so they know what to do in an emergency, but not much more than any ordinary crew member on an ocean liner. Yes they'll benefit from some zero g experience for the flight there, but since they wont actually be flying spaceships or doing EVAs they wont need anything like the level of training given to NASA astronauts today.

Additionally, these people will be going there on contracts for months or years at a time, they'll be able to benefit from just having a familiarization and training week (or two) on Luna before working. It's not like they're going on a 14 day closed ended mission.

Mdelaney 21:00, 28 March 2007 (BST)

moved one sided to Miners

I do not think having two boxes at the top works at all.

The problem area seems to be miners as mules (not reproductive). I think one of the boxes should go there. Perhaps the boxes should be swapped.

The mule idea is driven by the likelihood that a lunar settlement simply will not have the infrastructure needed to support children for some time. It is simply a practical necessity. Hopefully the settlement will be able to support families of settlers within a decade or two.

Generally, I do not much like the one-sided box. If a person thinks an entry is one side, he should simply add a paragraph stating the alternative idea.

--Jriley 12:22, 8 May 2007 (UTC)