TOTALLY OFF: Who died...

[M Holmes]

Robert C. Mayo writes:

> I still marvel at the fact that there are human footprints on the
> moon...and still can't decide if i think it's "Right" or not.  Our
> trash is floating all over our little corner of space

Space is basically a radiation bath full of flying rocks. Adding a few
pieces of metal to the mix is hardly any sort of problem.

Admittedly sooner or later we'll have to clean up near Earth orbit so
that our useful stuff doesn't get hit by pieces of defunct spacecraft,
but there are already some ideas on how to do that. Giant lightsails
would reflect enough light to ultimately slow down junk in orbit so that
it burns up.

> we've left what
> can only be called garbage on the lunar surface, with no plans to
> remove it; and there's a golf ball up there too...

That ain't garbage. That's future museum exhibits.

> I'm not sugesting that we shouldnt have gone there, just that perhaps
> if we DO, we ought to clean up after ourselves.  Is the mindset "it
> doesn't belong to anyone, so we dont have to police it"; or more
> likely from a US standpoint, "its ours and we'll clean it when we get
> around to it".  we all know what that means.

Remind me again who's inconvenienced by there being a few pieces of tech
on the Moon?

> can't help feeling that, though these particular areas aren't
> populated (as far as we know), we're going to do the 'evil white
> european male'/manifest destiny thing and take (and pollute) as much
> as we can...because we can.

Space is already lethally irradiated. There's not any pollution we can
offer that would make it any worse.

FoFP