Nobody (in this thread, anyway) is talking about shipping a significant amount of our population to other planets. It also isn't an argument about how we're using up and destroying our planet.

Here's what it boils down to: Off-site backups. Every good geek should know the importance of those. And we're not protecting against anything we're doing--we're protecting against the stuff we may not even be able to ever predict or control. Asteroid/comet strikes, for example.

So what you're saying is you're not 100% sure he wasn't just a smart 12 year old fucking with you about being 20?

Why are you so butt-hurt over this, anyway? Your own evidence supports the idea of putting radio telescopes on the lunar far side. Why do I have to continue to convince you?

You didn't even read that whole paper, did you?

It talks almost exclusively about optical and infrared telescopes, and concludes that the lunar surface is not optimal for them, for the reasons you cited. But I was never arguing for optical 'scopes there. You do know the difference between an optical telescope and a radio telescope, right?

But near the end, it asks the question of what kind of astronomy WOULD benefit from lunar surface siting:

"One exciting idea reviewed in the workshop is the use of the Moon as a shield against
terrestrial radio interference (both from human-operated transmitters on the ground and in
GEO, as well as natural radiation from the geomagnetic auroral zone). The Radio
Astronomy Explorer satellite (RAE-2) was launched into an inclined lunar orbit in 1973,
with 13-25 MHz receivers fed by large ~200m long V-dipole antennae (Alexander et al.
1975). The satellite was in a 1000 km high orbit, low enough that the Earth and Sun were
occulted by the Moon, which subtended a disk size of ~76. RAE-2 showed remarkable
drops in the ambient radio power density during each such occultation - by almost two
orders of magnitude for an Earth occultation, and less for an occultation of the Sun. RAE-
2 thus established that the lunar farside is, by virtue of it being a large rocky body, the
quietest radio location in the Earth-Moon system. Such galactic background-limited
performance is not achievable anywhere else nearby, and can be hugely enabling for low
frequency radio cosmology probes. Terrestrial implementations of low frequency radio
interferometers (e.g. SKA, LOFAR) are designed to address high priority astronomical
questions, but are limited by their terrestrial siting, and the enormous challenge of
interference rejection. Using the farside of the Moon for such a telescope is thus of
significant interest, and several participants of this workshop, including Jackie Hewitt
and Chris Carilli, have presented ideas on it. It should be noted that telescopes down at
ground level, perhaps inside craters where more than half the sky in the direction of the
Earth is blocked, are likely to be even better shielded from terrestrial interference than
was RAE-2."

It goes on to say the only free-space alternative is to just send a radio telescope really far from the Earth in order to minimize interference.

So, yeah. Lunar far side is a good place for radio telescopes, like I said. It's actually the best possible place to put them as far as limiting interference from the Earth is concerned.

Actually, it's unclear whether the Earth-Moon L2 is within the moon's cone of "radio silence". And anyway, L2 is unstable and requires constant station keeping. The moon is a big hunk of rock. Part of the attraction is that you can set up large arrays on the surface and they don't ever drift apart from each other or have any need of constant course correction to keep them a known distance apart. Plus, the lunar far side is also blocked from the Sun for two solid weeks at a time, which also eliminates another big source of radio noise.

Here's some dudes at Caltech laying out the arguments: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~yukimoon/RALF/

Radio telescopes on the lunar far side are shielded from the radio background noise from the Earth. Among other things, it's probably the best place in the solar system to listen for messages from E.T.

The problem is, it's also the list of symptoms of any number of possible diseases, from the catch-all IBD to colon or stomach cancer.

I mean it in the same sense as when you're talking about limits in calculus. The size of the universe is tending towards infinity--meaning it is growing without limits.

It isn't infinite in size. The size is approaching infinity, though. The universe is finite, but unbounded--meaning it is finite in volume at any given time, but is constantly increasing in size as space expands.

We may never know exactly "how big" the universe really is, since we are effectively cut off from whatever is beyond the edge of the observable universe. Anything that might be beyond that is expanding "away" from us faster than light--so we can never see it from here, and can likely never go there (barring discovery of true FTL travel).

Good. That will prepare them to play the game that is "real life" much better than whatever it is they're doing now.

Prosecutors only get one shot at a conviction. If the jury returns a not guilty verdict in a criminal case, that's it--the prosecution doesn't get to try again.

Well, that still wouldn't apply to the situation we've been discussing, I don't think. If the seller doesn't catch the mistake in the listing before it sells, and the goods get sold and delivered, he has no legal recourse after that, right?

So under UK law, if you sell me a car for a 1000 pounds, and later find out I turned around and sold it for 2000 pounds, you get take backsies and get to come get your share of my profit from me?

How does this work?