AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[james_davis_nicoll]

AAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.


You'll know why when you get to it.

William Hyde's fault

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The Moon is not a rich source of helium three. It's a somewhat less bad source than the Earth. Getting the 3He out of regolith is energetically expense, to the point where it would take less energy per kg to haul stuff off the Sun. The gas and ice giants are a clearly superior source. Granted, we lack the ability to do this but it's not like we know how to sift large amounts of regolith either. The gas and ice giants are just more obviously hard to exploit.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough:

WE DON'T HAVE COMMERCIAL FUSION, NOT EVEN OF THE VASTLY EASIER D+T REACTION, AND WE HAVE NO PROSPECT OF GETTING IT ANYTIME SOON.

Basically, advocacy of lunar 3he should be taken as proof of brain death and it should be legal to harvest organs from anyone who advocates it.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

I see where you're going, you slyboots! You want to use their brain tissue as high-density, impermeable shielding for muon-catalyzed fusion, right?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Also: what's wrong with FISSION? Is uranium ore -- never mind thorium -- so rare we have to mine it on Mars, or something?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Cold War cooties + Three Mile Island cooties + Chernobyl cooties.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And a strange notion that nuclear fusion is inherently clean.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

But it is. SimCity told me so, and I think Civ backed it up.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Earth is the richest-known source ofuranium and thorium, which makes fission fuels useless as a driver for space exploitation.

[silburnl.livejournal.com]

It does however make them useful as a driver for an alien invasion plot (V, I'm looking at you).

Regards
Luke

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

But think of the children! If we run out of helium, how will they have balloons for their birthday parties?

[hattifattener]

And He3 should have, ummm, about 4% more lift than He4! Superior party balloons! Nothing is too good for our children, about whom won't anyone think?

I want to complain about the blinking

[(Anonymous)]

Please do not use the blink tag ever. Seriously. If you want to emphasize something, it rather defeats the purpose when you actually hide it 50% of the time.

Look, even the people involved with early browsers make sure to disavow themselves from the blink tag:

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia says lunar regolith contains 0.01 ppm of He3. For comparison's sake (because I'd just finished researching the subject), gold deposits on Earth are being worked right now, at yields of 5 grams/tonne of ore. Still a full two orders of magnitude higher than the concentrations on the moon, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of economical extraction out of hand.