2. Are meteor impacts really so common as to create clouds of dust that linger for any appreciable amount of time? Doesn't a lack of air mean it will fall back to the surface pretty fast?
I'm not totally sure. There's no air, true, but there's also very little gravity. It wouldn't take a very extreme impact to eject the dust into a stable or unstable orbit, the latter of which would cause it to rain back down at a later date.
Well, depending on the speed the meteor hit and how loose the dust is, it might impact later, but anything not reaching orbit would fall about as fast as a rock. No air means no air resistance, and 1/6 of a G isn't exactly negligible gravity...
What would Neil Armstrong do?
Hotwire the Lunar Lander with a pencil and eject right before it crashes and explodes, then write the mission report. All of those things really happened, by the way, though not at the same time.
Let me rephrase that. What did the Apollo mission do to avoid the toxicity of lunar dust?
I can see Mercury, given its closeness to Sol and the resultant increase in the efficiency of solar plants, but aside from trying to "spread out" the human population, why?
No, that's pretty much exactly why. Spread the human population like self-replicating peanut butter. The more places we are, the more likely it is that a major cataclysm will fail to kill us all, leaving survivors to rebuild and/or seek bloody genocidal revenge.
What kind of cataclysm? The only thing I can really see posing a threat to all civilization on Earth but not, say, Mercury, is some sort of social issue which doesn't leave orbit, or perhaps an environmental issue. In the latter case, most of humanity will die, and having half a dozen colonies isn't going to be better than one, better-funded one. Depending on how many people are in each and how easy interplanetary travel is, it could easily be much worse. Anyways, the idea that sending people to other planets could stop overpopulation is faulty. Not only is the benefit minimal, barring massive extraterrestrial agriculture, but we'd just be shoving our Malthusian expiration date a little down the line unless we all adopted some form of birth limits.
And I guess there might be interesting and/or valuable things on Venus. Maybe.
It doesn't even have a magnetic field.
And, not to be condescending (a sure sign that I'm about to fail), but...50 kilometers is some really tall stilts.
Who said anything about stilts? The idea is that they'd be balloons, of a sort. It eliminates all the problems except corrosion.
Well,if you're in a dirigible habitat, the acid rain eating at the envelope is going to be a major problem...
You would have to process 150 tons of Lunar regolith in order to extract one ton of He3. It isn't a very cooperative resource.
Erm... I'm not exactly sure what you mean by cooperative, but that's like 6667 grams per ton. Like, 500 times better than the resource-ore ratio you get with a nice gold mine 1 to 150 is like... salt in the ocean. I know 150 tons processed per ton extracted sounds like a lot, but it really isn't.
None of those things are on the moon, though.
I highly doubt that, but anyways your argument is tantamount to disparaging a gold mine for its lack of tin.
Yeah, but it's still a great resource-to-ore ratio. And the real promise of space is as a nice place to move lots of dirty industry. I say we pollute the hell out of the moon. Build big solar panels all over the sky and beam the energy back here. Mine the universe and end hunger, end want. Can you imagine it, a big crate full of cheap plastic crap all stamped "Made on Titan" parachuting out of the sky? Can you imagine it?
The sky's the limit, so don't try for the impossible. I would lower expectations some. This won't single-handedly save the world. Chinese workers shipping from China will still be cheaper than Lunar workers shipping from Luna. It could help, but we'd need a coordinated effort to actually save Earth and humanity.
