Talk:People on the Moon

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)

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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)

Indeed the various groups will probably hate each other's guts. But you know, it doesn't take a huge amount of extra training for a tourist to learn how to say "Would you like fries with that?"

Yes, if a tourist wants to become a miner s/he'll need more training, but if s/he just wants to live and work on the Moon why stop him/her from taking on indoor jobs. In addition, these indoor jobs could help offset the cost of training for other jobs. A sort of "work your way through college" scheme. We will need shopkeepers and waiters and cooks and chefs and cleaners and bartenders etc.

-- Mdelaney 18:28, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

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)

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

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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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I have a student working on lunar settlement economic ideas. We should have a list of business plan summaries by early June. If you have ideas for this list email me.

--Jriley 12:26, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

I would suggest looking closely at MIT Space Logistics Project in addition to any other research. (Even if it is somewhat NASA centric)

Balance of trade will be important, so Lunar settlements need to produce something that can be sold to Earth at a price that permits them to maintain their needed import levels.

On the other hand some sort of Lunar agriculture will be vital. I'm one of the people who believes any Lunar colony will be destined to failure if it cannot import or produce enough food to act as say a 30 day buffer. Launch windows can sometimes be missed due to bad weather. We can't have a settlement starving to death because of that.

-- Mdelaney 19:02, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

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Moved one-sided box to Miners

I do not think having two boxes at the top of the article 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 (see Timelines). 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-sided, he should simply add a paragraph stating the alternative idea.

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

No, the problem is the whole article is biased towards one particular NASA and socio-political centric view of how the moon is going to operate. It was in fact you addition of Shop Stewards that was the last straw.

If you're going to add Shop Stewards, then you need to include people other than Officer-Class managers like Scientist, Chief Security Officer, Chief Medical Officer, Fitness Instructor, Lunar Operations Supervisor, Information Technologist (IT), Tour Guides.

Where the hell are the cooks and chefs and waiters and cleaners? What about the Suit Repair people, how about the mechanics and the all important Building Engineers without whom the base would grind to a halt.

Then there's the bartenders and the show girls. The list is almost infinite

Please do not move tags like that unless you have actually complied with them. If you move it again I'll lock the article so only sysops can edit it.

The idea of the One Sided box is to make it known that it's seen as such and to invite input. Though you say you invite input, you have a tendency to ignore or delete such input, and your articles are generally not structured in a way that makes it obvious that input is invited.

In effect, your articles read like Lunarpedia Position Papers, and there are a few more people in Lunarpedia than you, though the amount of actual contributions would seem to belie that.

Please re-read Main_Page#No_Need_to_be_Neutral as it now shows how to add {{PersPosArticle}} and {{PersPosSection}} tags.

-- Mdelaney 17:37, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

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My postings have not supported NASA visions nearly so much as Harrison Schmitt’s vision. I think it would be hard to find an article more critical of NASA’s approach than Adult Themes.

I would have no problem with dozens of more job descriptions in the list. The technician’s positions need particular attention. The Union Steward entry comes from a conflict between the Lunar Bill of Rights and the need to raise massive amounts of capital. On the one hand, the right to free assembly includes the right to form a union. On the other hand, the specter of a crippling mining strike could block investment.

Encouraging written participation is a major problem. The limited Wiki editor is restrictive. The recent advances in form and style have helped. Technical people as a group are not word people and write neither well nor easily. My approach so far has been to try a large number of ideas to find something that works. This is the shotgun approach and I have about exhausted it.

Can you provide an example of an article that you feel encourages participation?

I am currently working on designing a student project on the economics of a Schmitt lunar settlement. There have been a number of discussion entries supporting the importance of economic considerations so I think this idea should support good participation. I would be happy to email you the current draft of the assignment so that you can have input before the first student starts work on May 28.

--Jriley 12:13, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Ack, I need to remember to "Watch" pages once I post in them :)

Yes Adult Themes is counter to the NASA approach, indeed it's counter to the official government style in all western countries (though not counter to the behavior of many in government). In this particular article your whole structure so far is very much along NASA or military lines. While that may be the initial scenario for that first (most likely polar) base, it will not be the arrangement for most subsequent bases.

Harrison Schmitt’s vision is that of one man, who can really only say that he knows the Moon as well as it is possible to know it from 3 days on it and a lifetime studying it from Earth. Even his vast knowledge is only the tip of the iceberg, so we also need to examine other approaches. For instance: What can we get out of Mars Direct that could be applied to the Moon? Are there potential plans in any of the many Lunar Base books that have been published?

I'll try to add some more job descriptions as I think of them, but with ISDC coming up I seem to have lots to do and not enough people to help with any of it.

I have been planning to do something with the wiki editor, but that's on the back burner, I have to finish the upgrades to the Moon Society website first. We'd like to get it streamlined in time for ISDC.

Can you provide an example of an article that you feel encourages participation?

I don't believe we have one that really answers that description yet. However I think our main problem is our relatively small user base. This will hopefully change after ISDC. But I'll see if I can find a boilerplate example somewhere. We may be one of the only groups using a public wiki in this manner though.

On the student project, I would love to see it, but I'm quite sure a couple of others would like to see it also, let me check something and get back to you on that.

-- Mdelaney 14:57, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Did I remember to mention ISDC?

-- Mdelaney 15:01, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

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