Terrapin Tables

...And you gotta love this:

"Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, a member of the House Science Committee, said he welcomed the move because he has tried to get the president more interested in space exploration...'I had the feeling the last 2 1/2 years people would rather make a trip to the grocery store than a trip to the moon because of the economy," Hall said. "

Yes, I would rather go to the grocery store than hurtle through space to set up a lunar colony. Silly me. And people elected this guy - but, it was Texas...

Doesn't it take forever to get to Mars anyway? Hell people don't even like to travel for the holidays....

what's the weather on the moon? freezing right? count me out of that.

Is it only cold on the dark side of the moon? A simple yes/no answer will suffice.

To the moon, Alice, to the moon!

The Honeymooners TV show is being turned into a movie. It stars Cedric the Entertainer as the Ralph Kramden character.

"There is no dark side of the moon really...it's all quite dark." - Pink Floyd. Which I'm sure is based on solid scientific information. Or drugs.

I'm not sure there is a dark side...doesn't it rotate?

Cedric the Entertainer as Kramden? Bah. If they were going for a black actor, I bet they called Bernie Mac first. Which I think would have been worse. But isn't it John Goodman's job to play all overweight white TV characters in the movies? I'm amazed he isn't signed up for this.

Cedric's is called 'Da Honeymoona's Y'all'

Sorry- I got going on this while the thread was still semi-serious. But I spent a long time typing it, so here it is:

I think going to Mars is a good idea. Forget about actually landing a man on Mars for now, think about all of the technology that will come out of a program such as this. Big technologies take big budgets to develop. Industry isn't willing to put the money in unless they're guaranteed a profit, but NASA is. Take a look at this site for a bunch of the spin-offs from the space program. Yeah, stuff like the space pen might be frivolous, but advances in materials, propulsion, communications, etc, all help to increase the quality of life of all of us down here on the Earth. And without a goal such as the moon or the shuttle program, many of these technologies wouldn't have been developed.

And actually getting to space is pretty exciting. Maybe it's a 21st century manifest destiny mentality, but I'd like to see humans colonize other planets and other solar systems, and we're never going to do that unless we get started. Heck, in only a few billion years the sun's going to explode, anyway, so we're going to have to find a new planet to live one.

Plus, all that Sci-Fi utopian society stuff is crap. There's never going to be a utopian society. Ever. So we can either spend all of our time trying to achieve it, or take part of our national budget and put it into a program that will ultimately yield pretty substantial rewards for all of mankind.

And let's not put this out of perspective. NASA's budget isn't all that big compared to how much the federal government spends on other programs. Look at this site: NASA's budget in perspective

John, to answer your question- no. It gets pretty hot on ther bright side of the moon. related link

Chris- the dark side isn't a particular side. It's just the half that's currently dark. Earth has a dark side, too. And your comment about the rotation- the same side of the moon always faces the earth. Something to do with uneven weight distribution, or something.

Find a new planet to live on? C'mon man, you know that can/will never, ever happen. Just look at the life cycle on earth. It seems species only have a couple million years run at best, and does anyone really care what happens that far away? Hell I'm shocked we haven't been hit by a meteor yet in our lifetimes.

A million years after our existence the 'Lizards with gills and feathers' people will be digging up our bones and wondering why my dental bite is so crooked.

Yeah, captured rotation. Happens naturally to roatating bodies that are heavier on one side than another (the heavier sides attract each other). It's also called "tidal lock" because the tides somehow contribute to it as well.

Nate- that 5 billion year part was sarcasm. But I think that colonization of other planets is plausible. With current technology, if we began immediately, we could terraform Mars to be habitable within 200 years- no space stations. And if we continue to pursue transportation technology the same way we are now, within that same time span, we'll have the technology to travel to the next closest solar system within a reasonable time span. So yes, I do think we'll colonize other planets, even if there is no immediate need for it.

Rick- Do you know how captured rotation works in space? If there's no friction in space, why does the object slow down? Shouldn't it be a continuous oscillatory acceleration, speeding up and slowing down equally as the body rotates? What is the mechanism that slows down the rotation?

So are we only asking Rick about the captured rotation thing because he is the only one who knows or because he is the only one who might care. I know the answer, but I can't tell you. Suffice it to say that it involves an unholy union between Roy and the media.

The loss of rotational energy occurs when the tides drag along the Earth's crust. It also happens with the mantle. I heard the Moon is also locking the Earth, but no so much because it's not as massive, and it's 'tides' occur with semi-rigid rock, so there's not much 'dragging' going on -- but it's still there.

Update: I realized you were probably talking about conservation of momentum with the whole Earth-Moon system. The moon does have to compensate the loss of angular momentum of the Earth by either a) spinning faster, or b) moving further away. Because of the tidal lock thing (I don't understand it 100%), it's moving away from us.

how do you know about the union?

Roy, your people run the media. We all know about the union.

Yeah, Roy. Did you actually expect me to believe that Mike Wallace came over to check out your Jimmy Buffet record collection?

And Fatboy, the spin-offs website mentions absolutely nothing about Tang or freeze-dried ice cream. It is crap. If you go to Table 1 on the NASA expenditure site you can find out neat things like how to express 32% in two equally confusing ways, and that for every 1 dollar we spend on shooting something into space, we spend $2.45 on education. Without which the space program would be one Chad Fisher and a bag of fireworks procured from South of the Border.

I say, if people are prearing to go colonize Mars, said people should be assassinated. Why? Because humanity can't be trusted with another planet yet. We'll just screw it up like we did this one. Until our species gets out of its adolescense - I don't mean Utopia, just the general sense of respect for one another that does not exist on Earth yet - then we don't deserve to get to start over. Also, me proposing assassinations is a sure way to get on the Threat Matrix.

We should have a contest: Team A tries to get on the governments Threat Matrix, Team Two tries to get on CBS' Threat Matrix. Winner gets nothing.

...and as Kornheiser puts it: "Colony on the Moon? Why don't you just hand the keys to the White House over to Howard Dean right now?" Classic.

Told you it was a dumb idea...Kornheiser says so, and he's undefeated at Toss Up.

Rick, thanks for the answer. I was thinking about how the moon lost it's rotational energy. The problem was I was thinking of the moon as a rigid body. I guess that it does deflect, or its rocks even slide back and forth enough, that it will lose rotational energy that way.

Back to the main thread, I say who cares if we screw up Mars? If we don't find any life on it, who are we screwing it up for? It's not like we'd be going in there screwing up the Martian ecosystem.

And we can't postpone exploration or technical advancement until we're "ready" for it. Human nature isn't going to change much over the next several thousand years, probably the next couple million if humans last that long, so we'd be waiting a long time for every one to like each other.