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Japan suspends launch of rocket carrying moon lander because of winds (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by schizoidman@lemmy.ml to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

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[-] Chariotwheel@kbin.social -3 points 1 year ago

Earth's fucked. Accelerating plans to advance technology so we can fuck up another planet.

And "we", I am mean "them". The wealthy and their servants.

[-] nexusband@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Earth is not fucked, but having a proper moon base makes key technologys a necessity, like really large scale co2 scrubbers. Also, the moon is basically a new gold mine for Helium-3, which is going to be very important in the future.

Having large scale co2 scrubbers makes a huge difference on earth as well.

[-] iridaniotter@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Helium-3 is a fuel for fusion that does have its benefits, but most scientists are focused on Deuterium-Tritium reactions. On the moon, the most concentrated regolith has only 50 parts of helium-3 per billion. That is super sparse. Like, we may as well be sifting uranium out of Earth's oceans at that point. And if we're doing giant space-based megaprojects, the gas giants probably have higher concentrations of helium-3 or we could just beam power around from giant solar panels.

[-] iridaniotter@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

This is a fair argument against Elon Musk's dream to colonize Mars - it is indeed an escapist fantasy. But with the recent and upcoming moon missions, the involved parties (government orgs!) are quite clear that they're not doing it out of a false belief that they can make a self-sustaining colony. That stuff is over a century away. Only billionaires and their simps believe it lol.