NASA announces astronauts who will fly by the moon next year

Re:NASA announces astronauts who will fly by the moon next year by kjkjadksj on Saturday August 05, 2023 @01:49PM (#37014620)

The first animals in the fossil record aren’t even a billion years old. Intelligent life is probably merely be a temporary phenotype seen on earth anyhow, like countless others that developed, came to dominance, and then disappeared over millions of years. Planning for something a billion years down the road, using current resourses to boot, is a little bit mad.

And if the situation is dominance on the moon over China, a remote operated lunar base is far better than anything human staffed. A battle could happen and all the highly trained operators on earth are fine when their crafts meet their end. For a space based human army, however, when you lose your craft you lose highly trained operators as well as that massive investment you made placing them and maintaining their presence in space. A remote army therefore always wins, since it has a massive thermodynamic advantage of deploying cheap and light cargo into space versus people and the support they need.

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Re:NASA announces astronauts who will fly by the moon next year by twojacobtwo on Saturday August 05, 2023 @02:22PM (#37014934)

Not the parent poster, but they could have added uncharted Oort cloud object collisions, extra-solar system objects, quasar/interstellar jets, nuclear war, runaway climate change, mega volcano/caldera eruptions, bio-engineered runaway viruses, and probably a few other potentially life ending events for humanity that would bring that 'billion' number down by several orders of magnitude for likelihood of our extinction.

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