Closer to Deducing the Origin of the Moon 265
eldavojohn writes "A giant explosion on the sun in January of 2005 allowed SMART-1 (a European spacecraft orbiting the moon) to detect what elements the moon is made up of based on the X-rays from the sun's explosion. This allows scientists to speculate on the moon's origins while seeing data from all over the moon as opposed to the core samples we have collected and returned in the past. From the article: 'Scientists responsible for the D-CIXS instrument on SMART-1 are also announcing that they have detected aluminium, magnesium and silicon. "We have good maps of iron across the lunar surface. Now we can look forward to making maps of the other elements." said SMART-1's Principal Investigator.'"
Moo (Score:5, Funny)
Cheesy (Score:2)
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Only try to realize the truth: (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Almighty God created the moon (Score:5, Funny)
14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19And God said, Let the lesser light of the night be composed of green cheese.
It's made of cheese! (Score:3, Funny)
Wenslydale in fact (Score:2)
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Valuable metals? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Valuable metals? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Valuable metals? (Score:4, Informative)
-matthew
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Are you seriously suggesting that humans *manually* mine the Moon? You've got to be kidding. Yeah, I'm sure astronauts are going to be lining up to train for years just to go to the moon to work as slave labor because hauling machinery up there is too expensive. Even in the worst of times, humans have had beasts
Why use people? (Score:2)
Just getting a couple people on the surface to walk around a bit is massively expensive... forget about a sustained effort with mining equipment, life support and everything else you'd need.
Just use robots, remote controlled where neccessary. We can already build machines that can traverse the moon, we can build machines that can mine and extract ore with little human intervention, automated refineries are easy, and power the whole thing with lovely naked solar radiation! The first thing they build are
Re:Valuable metals? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is difficult to calculate because I couldnt find much info on sending stuff back from the moon, I am willing to bet it is quite a bit cheaper. But the infrastructure on the moon etc ruins any math. It would be break even for gold to be sent into space...and retrieving it would probably be long term profitable. (providing you can find enough gold)
Platinum is 1200 dollars per ounce making it much more possible, if sufficient quantities could be found.
The cargo ship would probably be reasonably priced...no equipment on board, doesnt need to be very fast, just a computer control system and the rockets etc necessary to bring it back in. Could be an interesting proposition.
Re:Valuable metals? (Score:5, Informative)
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Or they learn a very expensive lesson.
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"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!" - Grampa Simpson
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Or meters instead of feet to get things onto Mars...oops.
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The density of the moon is 3.35 g/cm^3 whereas the density of the earth is 5.51 g/cm^3.
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OTH, if anybody is betting on the moon having cheap valuable minerals, well, they are making a very long bet.
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I suspect retrieving dissolved gold from the ocean would be more cost-effective.
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Actually, it's about 1516, because things on the moon weighs 1/6 of what they do here. *And* if you mine the gold, you are removing from its mass, making it weigh even less. So, i'd adjust it to an earlier 1500s.
Unfortunately, in the 1500s, exploration of the moon would get you a marked as a looney, and a looney isn't worth very much, especially outside of Canad eh?
Re:Valuable metals? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, nobody has seen the gold in Fort Knox in years, but it's been traded around left and right. Plenty of people are willing to pay for pieces of paper saying they own some gold - why not just prove it's there, stake a claim on it, and then sell it here on Earth?
We can have an entire imaginary Moon economy! Awesomeness++!
That is perfect. (Score:4, Funny)
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Still a better deal than the green pieces of paper not even saying that!
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I love gold people... at a fundamental level they don't realize that both paper and gold are completely useless unto themselves, and are only worth what people will pay for it. If you really worry about your well being in an apocalypse, buy canned food and ammmo, because that is all that will be worth anything.
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In the apocalypse scenario, my checklist would look like this:
Hmm, maybe it shouldn't be an ordered l
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Fine... I've just claimed all the gold on the moon, care to buy it from me? I'll start the bidding at $1,000 and you can have first dibs.
Using that logic, why even mine it here on earth?... eventually we'd wind up with some wierd paper notes completely disconnected from actual known gold amounts... crazy!
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I'm no scientist, but I'm having a tough time thinking how there would be any sort of monetary advantage to firing a bunch of gold in to space. Retrieving it, sure, but sending it out?
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I wonder how much gold would need to be brought to earth to effect the market value of gold. There's a chance that, in order to profit, a company would need to mine so much gold that their returns would faulter on a decline in gold prices due to a surplus.
Moon (Score:2)
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Or were you suggesting that the space elevator connect a point on the moon with a point on the Earth? If so, I recommend you go out one night and watch the moon for a few hours. You may notice a slight problem with your plan.
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Also there's the inflation issue. When the New World was opened up and all that Aztec gold was shipped back to Spain, prices skyrocketed. If you dump a ton of Moon gold on the Earth, the gold won't be worth $625/oz.
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How much it would cost to *collect* and *return* a mined cargo is a completely different matter from how much it would cost to lift a vehicle up there to retrieve it, and these costs likely dwarf the lift costs of the vehicle outbound from
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Re:Valuable metals? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, sunshine. (Score:4, Informative)
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Your point doesn't stand - the moon mineral composition is fundamentally different from Earth's for the straight forward reason that it was made up of materials from Earth's outer layers - it lacks the heavy elements that concentrate in the Earth's core.
Got it. We're dead certain that the moon was ripped out of the earth because its composition is so different ;).
I mean, could be, but it's hardly so QED when you have to explain discrepancies like that.
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Luna, Lunae, f. the moon goddess, identical or related with Diana, and the subject of that sculpture.
Calling the moon Luna isn't that far off at all. I've heard it used in much the same way. Who says we are tethered to the terms astronomy gives us to use?
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On large scales, things will average out. In resource extraction, though, you care about *local differences*. You're saying you can dig a gold mine anywhere and get the same results. I think I'll side with the people who want to dig where the concentrations are. Duh.
The more we know about the moon, the greater the possibility of finding a useful concentration of something. I'd bet that H3 concentrations would have a better shot at economic viability than any metal, but I've
Re:Valuable metals? (Score:5, Informative)
Only tourism and science are likely to be viable there in the foreseeable future. Big exception: if we unexpectedly manage to get automated construction from raw minerals to work, this could make industry on the moon so cheap it could become viable to start mining and export there. However, this isn't going to happen anytime soon, and when it does it will end capitalism as we know it anyway, so it is nothing you could base a business model on.
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Last I looked into the gold market, it is exceptionally easy to own gold without having any transported to you. I seem to recall the US government doing the same with silver, as evidenced by silver certificates.
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The very prospect that the moon -could- be mined will make futures prices on valuables go down, and make'em less valuable here on earth---without ever even sending stuff up there.
Imagine if they find 10x as much gold there as was ever mined on earth... without any mining there on the moon, the price of gold would drop.
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Yeah. But it's the brick wall at the bottom of the hill you have to worry about.
To me, the tricky part of getting it here would be landing it. Sure, you can get it to the Earth fairly easily--Moon has low gravity, Earth has high gravity, etc. The problem to me is that you kind of need to arrange a soft landing for it. So you have to slow down, say, 1,000,000 pounds traveling at, say, 20,000 MPH and set it down gently on the Earth.
That's gonna
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For example Amethyst used to included in the list of cardinal gems, (i.e. diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald). But huge discoveries in Russia and South America has erorded its value to almost that of costume jewellery. On my way to work I pass a shop window displaying an Amethyst geode some three feet long and 1 feet across, partially opened. M
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I assume cardinal gems are gems whch have value because they are naturally rare? If so, diamonds do not qualify as a cardinal gem, despite popular myth. Diamonds are both common and easy to make by man. The only thing making diamonds scarce is the maket manipulations by the like of the De Beers cartel. In other words, diamonds are artificially made scare to maintain their value.
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In 1970, USA oil extraction was at its peak. We had energy to burn, literally.
We're not going to put many more, if any, people on the moon - and we're not going to put people on Mars,
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Assuming the human race face some sort of doomsday scenario (a rather large assumption), my guess is that we'll eventually see one or more disruptive technologies which will provide cheap energy in some form. Whether that comes from advanced solar (maybe something a lot better than the 20% efficiency we can get from cells now, maybe thin films instead of cells), carbon nanotubes which allow a space elevator (hence maybe power sat
Mining (Score:2)
not likely (Score:2)
You hear this sort of talk a lot among space enthusiasts, but unfortunately it is very unlikely that anyone will ever want to build a reactor that runs off of helium-3. Yes, you can make a reactor that burns helium-3, but it is much less technically challenging to build a reactor that runs off hydrogen and deuterium. Since there is an essent
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I like the idea of a no neutron He3-He3 reaction, producing your energy as charged particles. I'm thinking the plants would last longer without the neutron flux, and be easier to decomission when that time finally did arrive. Plus if you're doing everything with neutrons, you're back to spending lots of money in plant costs due to heating water to spin turbine/generator sets, vice some sort of
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I'm not buying into the idea of mining heavy metals anytime soon, as it seems you'd need some extensive infrastructure, like maybe a mass driver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver [wikipedia.org]. Given our tendency toward monkey dominance games, I'm not sure I even want a mass driver on the moon. Sooner or later, s
Origin of moon? (Score:4, Funny)
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The moon was destroyed (Score:3, Funny)
origins? (Score:3, Informative)
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I think that will happen when we have appropriate infrastructure on the moon to make things up there rather than down here.
I'm not all that convinced that it will ever be economically feasible to send raw ore from the Moon to the Earth in order to build stuff down here, versus mining the ore here on Earth. Heck, consider Pittsburgh. It's close to iron ore (raw material), close to the oce
Vast Deposits (Score:5, Funny)
More Details (Score:5, Informative)
"The basic idea is this: about 4.45 billion years ago, a young planet Earth -- a mere 50 million years old at the time and not the solid object we know today-- experienced the largest impact event of its history. Another planetary body with roughly the mass of Mars had formed nearby with an orbit that placed it on a collision course with Earth. When young Earth and this rogue body collided, the energy involved was 100 million times larger than the much later event believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The early giant collision destroyed the rogue body, likely vaporized the upper layers of Earth's mantle, and ejected large amounts of debris into Earth orbit. Our Moon formed from this debris."
Plus, this page has a really cool rendering of the Impact:
http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/que
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http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=6
Excellent, most excellent (Score:2)
discrepancy in lunar rocks? (Score:3, Funny)
ummmmm... (Score:2, Funny)
For God made two great lights, the sun and the moon, to shine down upon the earth. The greater one, the sun, presides during the day; the lesser one, the moon, presides through the night. He also made the stars.
Not all stars. (Score:2)
For more details [wikipedia.org]
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Merodach rested a while, gazing upon the dead body of the dragon. He divided the flesh of Ku-pu,
and devised a cunning plan.
Then the lord of the high gods split the body of the dragon like that of a mashde fish into two halves. With one half he enveloped the firmament; he fixed it there and set a watchman to prevent the waters falling down.
With the other half he made the earth.
Then he made the abode of Ea in the deep, and the abode of Anu in high heaven. The abode of Enlil was in the air.
M
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Possibly even less, because Mon-Chi-Chi's were oh so soft and cuddly.
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Moon Dust (Score:2)
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However, a far more likely reason is that we didn't go down far enough with our core samples, and this nice massive burst of x-rays from the sun gives a chance to look deeper into the moon where we couldn't before.
Luc Besson already showed us! (Score:2)
Heavy Weather (Score:3, Insightful)
'Origins' aside, it's mining companies (and venture capitalists with an eye for off-world enterprises) that will be most interested in these findings, lending the idea that they are likely funding some of this research.
While this may sound absurd, it's perhaps worth asking: How much rock do you have to move off the Moon before the Earth starts seeing climatic changes as a result? Any one know of research into this area? Given the blatant denial certain first word countries have evidence in the face of an eroding Ozone layer, let's hope the moon isn't laden with valuable metals, ores and other resources..
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My guess is that if some highly unlikely situation makes it profitable for independent prospectors to build their own ships and go to the moon to mine it, and there is a gold rush of some sort of these, then we should worry. Until then, howev
Accepted Theory (Score:3, Informative)
Sometime in Earth's early history, before the formation of life, a large Mars-sized object probably collided with the Earth throwing off a massive amount of material.
For a time its believed the Earth might have had a Saturn-like ring system until tidal/gravitational forces caused the material to begin clumping together into what would one day be the moon. Its also likely that some material rained back down on the Earth. Supporting this theory is the well known fact the Earth has a very faint, barely detectable, ring.
Never mind where it came from.. (Score:2)
Findings Make Sense... (Score:2, Interesting)
If they find oil (Score:2)
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That explains the philosophical aspect of the moon's origin (i.e. who did it and why) but not the scientific aspect (i.e. how)
Also, it should be noted that the moon was most likely created in verse 1:
The rest of the first chapter appears to be describing what an observer on the surface of earth might see during the creation (whether it took six literal days or billions of years). For example, the earth starts out as a molten ball without any disting
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Your statement is right, when you say that the Bible need not be inconsistent with science. That's completely true, since science is merely a method of asking and answering questions in order to test hypotheses about the behavior of material world phenomena. But Jesus said that faith can move mountains, and there is no countercheck in the scientific method to compe
Re:Genesis 1:16 (Score:2)
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The original poster gave a hypothesis as to the origin of the moon.
I thought one of the conditions for something to be considered a "hypothesis" was that it can, in some way, be tested. This would be what separates it from a "guess." Though, to be fair, I don't think what the poster quoted was either. I'd more accurately classify it as an "allegory."
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Sunspot Cycle (Score:2)
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See: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html [badastronomy.com]