Humans need to go back to the Moon.

[EnDash]

*shrug*

Look at it from their perspective. Their technology has been pretty stagnant since the days we were running around as cavemen.

The last time they stopped by to check on us in the late 1800s (look up Aurora, Texas) - we had barely started dicking around with electricity and magnetism and the printing press. That's considerable improvement, considering we had only started working with steel in substantial quantities about four hundred years before that.

Then, 60 years after one of their drunks crashed his ship during a thunderstorm, and we'd barely started the industrial revolution... they detect a gamma ray burst.

"Well... WTF was that?"

They return to find us zipping around in jet powered aircraft, refining uranium, building particle accelerators, and are well on our way to figuring out solid state devices. The existence of vacuum tubes might have even come as a surprise to them (perhaps no records of such technology exists in their own history - or their own history failed to produce vacuum tube technology).

Further, we'd started hammering out a concept of genetics (even though the cause was still suspected to be proteins or enzymes), immunization, epidemiology, organ transplants and even rudimentary experiments in cloning.

Holy ****. These crazy chimps just went from being creative survivors and social hunters to packs of raving engineers unraveling the secrets of the universe in a little more than a generation.

In all likelihood - we'd kick the unholy shit out of any alien we ran across. In the long run.

Short-term - we'd get caught off-guard and take a lot of losses. Through attrition-ensured dumb luck, ingenuity, or downright creative genius - we'd come up with counters to their technology and tactics.

Just because they are advanced doesn't mean they are superior. It wouldn't surprise me, in the slightest, if humanity is a sort of petri-dish experiment where intelligent species in various environments are subjected to stressors to analyze how they develop to various challenges.

In this case - they might have bit off more than they can chew. The capability to eliminate our existence would come at a very steep cost in terms of 'man'power, industry, and energy. No single 'attack' could eliminate all of us - and it would take a multitude of different strategies to make it work - and we're to a point, now, where we can develop reactionary defenses to many avenues they might use for an attack.

Meaning it'd just make us aware of their presence and piss us off.

I, also, doubt the population sizes of such an advanced civilization. We are approaching, in our own line of technological and industrial development, an era where individuals have an exceptional amount of capability. CAD-to-part systems exist that can build a stunning array of structural and functional parts with very little secondary machine support. Do-it-yourself genetic engineering is getting up there, as well (though it's not advertised, since any fool can play around with pox viruses and potentially make nasty things).

Extrapolated over a few hundred or even thousand years at even a dimutive pace (for us), that will easily lead to the point where many individuals will be able to make just about anything their mind and the properties of the universe will allow. That places a lot of power into the individual - and that will force population density to decrease, considerably. Too many people with too many differing opinions will not stand to live under strong governmental structures for very long. Commuting and commerce are fine - but when you can deconstruct the atoms of someone you don't like, everyone needs a little more elbow-room.

So organizing the kind of response necessary to eliminate us is likely pretty difficult, and 'hyper-advanced' civilizations likely have very diffuse populations with loose structures of governance. The attempt to organize it might very well trigger a war amongst themselves. (If ancient texts and stories are to be read into - 'the gods' used to wage war in the sky through certain eras).

It's quite possible that several wars have been fought amongst relatively small groups (a few thousand individuals on each side) over how our existence is to be handled.

Even if they were shocked at our recent developments and could build much of a consensus in favor of our elimination - it would probably be a century or more before they could even begin acting on that consensus (presuming they are still limited to 'reasonable' violations of our current laws of physics - mostly involving relativity - and haven't so mastered the universe as to be capable of truly commanding it... at which point you're effectively god of this tier of existence).

Which is why I'm horribly skeptical of the notion that we've been contacted in any direct or official capacity (and it is unlikely that 'aliens' would recognize our governments or respect the authority of institutions that rarely last more than a few centuries). Merely revealing their existence and intent to ward us would throw away their greatest advantage. Any display of weapon capabilities would, also, be a horribly bad idea (so following up on any threats to give the illusion of superiority would backfire) - we'd analyze the hell out of it and engineer a counter. Even if we dropped the 'let's go into space' idea, we'd have the solution waiting on the ground.

It's in their best interest to stay enigmatic and to observe. They likely descend from predators, as well - so their behavior should not be nearly as alien to us as some might expect.

if you assume that you are too strong to be defeated then you assume wrong. overcondifence in the number one reason for the fall of empires.

 

[Aim64C]

goddamn you why do you drag me into this?

I have a way with people.

yes, everything you said is true and i agree with it. there are definitly benefits for setting up a station or something on the moon, mainly in scientific research and solar power. but metal is of very little concern, i don't think anyone will build a rocket just to start a mining operation on the moon. at least not while we still have enough metal here on earth.

I'm not talking about our piddly-ass attempts at space stations, like the ISS. Even then, those require many tens of launches to deliver the materials and components to make them - which is an insane investment of resources.

Many of your 'heavy' structural components can be mined, refined, and formed on the moon. Then you can 'shoot' them into orbit with a hundredth of the energy (and a thousandth of the cost) to launch them to orbit from the earth. Some things would still have to be developed on the earth and launched into orbit - but we're talking reducing something like the ISS to a five-launch process as opposed to a fifty-launch process - and most of those would be because the astronauts would have to return per protocol, not because of earth-to-ISS load restrictions.

about the USA and NASA, even though your plan will probably work it still has risks, and it's understandable why when the economy is not at best the govermant doesn't really like taking risks. but if enough corporations would give promises that they will buy research stations in space (i don't know the economical term for promises, just proof that US can actully get money back from this) they will be more willing to fund it.

It's not really that big of a risk, to be honest.

When you compare it to the trillions they spend on paying people to exist - a project like this could be accomplished with around 400-700 billion dollars over the course of 15 years - with an initial funding of 100 million during the first year, increasing to a peak of around 150 billion at year ten (or so), and scaling back afterward.

Possibly less - I'm just guessing on the high side and proposing a basic funding model.

When you consider that that investment could potentially create a whole slew of new markets in the economy - that would be a very worthwhile investment, when you figure that we spend that much on feeding 'people' that do little more than eat, ****, and shit out babies that we then pay to do the same thing.

The thing is that we have to fund it and then pull the government off to the side of it. While I'm largely a conservative - it is acceptable to choose an industry, as a nation, to develop at taxpayer expense. The thing is, however, that you have to go about it intelligently and not try to pick 'winners' and 'losers' - you're paying for development, not for pork&barrel.

But - I don't expect any serious funding of such a thing. Politicians are just retarded and wouldn't know a good idea if it bit them in the ass. People are too frivolous and fleeting in their resolve. The investment capital and the time for any ROI to accrue are of such scales that it would pretty much take a government or two to dedicate themselves to the task of developing the infrastructure.

It's possible with private funding - but you would need hundreds of investors each willing to dump -huge- amounts of capital into it with a lot of open-ended cost estimates and development times. I say we could do it in 15 years... we could turn around and be turning out our first lunar product at 5 years ... or we could be beating our heads against a wall at 20.

There are many unknowns, and part of the reality that you have to accept is that in 10 years, we're going to have a '40% better' way of going about doing it. So you will have to convince some people that the time to start doing this was last year - and that we can't wait forever.

I had a model I was working on, at one time, that revolved heavily around automation and operations that took place over 50 years. Within the first five years - automated mining drones would be launched to the moon (power source details were obscure - but I imagine a light nuclear reactor being used for centralized power production with individual solar back-up to allow ferrying back for recharge). This would be basic mining of raw materials. A follow-up mission in about 5 years would place automated smelting facilities on the surface with ferry drones that would begin feeding those facilities ore stock. Five years later, delivery of mass-dimension sintering machines would be deployed, allowing for the 'printing' of refined metals into structural parts. One to two years later, another mission would place assembly drones or manned teams on the ground (whichever would be determined more effective given the technology) to begin using hollowed out sections of the moon's crust to reinforce and seal against the vacuum.

A year or two following that - you deploy a moderately sized manned team (20-40 individuals) to make final preparations to the underground facilities. These would provide better shielding against long-term exposure to cosmic radiation (as well as micro-meteors) and be very spacious - a premium commodity when dealing with the need to contain an atmosphere. This phase would also set up additional power (hopefully fusion has become somewhat mature by this point) facilities and bring organic compounds for the sustainment of a biosphere.

Follow up missions would bring in more mining and manufacturing equipment that has been designed with latest generation capabilities - and much of the research would be devoted toward viable space propulsion technologies (such as advancing VASIMR) as well as beginning construction on additional habitats on the moon and providing the framework for an intermediary space station or two.

'Tug drones' would eventually be launched (likely using VASIMR drives) and sent to recover asteroids and comets - tugging them into a solar orbit. Other tug drones would be used to recover large payloads from Low Earth Orbit and bring them into a lunar orbit (or even a lunar entry pattern) - allowing for much larger payloads to be delivered to the moon from the Earth. A few years after, work would begin on the first stellar-orbiting space station (it does not orbit Earth, but orbits the sun instead) with the primary manufacturing facilities being located on the moon.

Following its completion - you begin pulling those asteroids into place and stripping them of useful compounds. Metals, organic compounds (mysteriously present on asteroids), water (especially in comets), etc would be used for manufacturing parts under true microgravity conditions. More space stations, true 'intrastellar ships,' and any number of things can be built from this location - which would become a key point in manned and unmanned exploration of the rest of our solar system.

This model attempts to allow for 'step 2' to be developed with the advances in technology made since 'step 1,' being task-based as opposed to solution based. Since exactly how each future step is going to be accomplished is not necessary information for the model to work - you can easily adjust the schedule of operations up until manning the facilities (which should be one of the last steps, and should always aim to set up as much self-sufficiency in that step/phase as possible to permit future schedule adjustments).

Now - I'd love to have the opportunity to speak with related industry consultants on this model and what their lists of concerns with it would be (as well as their proposed solutions) so as to refine it and make it much more accurate... but a lot of their time comes at a price that is above my budget. So it should not be taken as the most well researched idea out there - and there are likely many areas that will be very difficult to iron out to work.

 

[Aim64C]

if you assume that you are too strong to be defeated then you assume wrong. overcondifence in the number one reason for the fall of empires.

Complacency is.

Even the most overconfident of empires can rectify that problem after fist contact with the unanticipated. Complacent people refuse to recognize the need to adapt and/or acknowledge the reality of the situation.

I don't accept the notion that something that is more advanced is necessarily smarter or even a difficult challenge to defeat. We're gods in capability compared to a lion. We still prefer to keep our distance from one out of a cage, though.

Sure - it may not yet have figured out how to build a rifle to shoot me... but it doesn't exactly need one of those to be a threat. We are not so advanced as to have completely annulled that threat.

 

[theacknowledgedone]

I'd like to hang out with the Jubbi =D

 

[Netferarri]

No Earth is fine. So many things can go wrong up there.

This is true u_u