From: steve (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 09:18:58 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Kuecker" <ckuecker@ckent.org>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2002 3:49 PM
Subject: Re: moon to be made into heritage site
> That's nice, but I don't want to pay 39.95 English pounds for the
privilege
> of subscribing to the Times. Can you give us a synopsis of the article?
>
> Chuck Kuecker
>
> At 12:42 PM 5/26/02 +0100, you wrote:
> >Now here's something to get excited about - in a bad way! Where does this
> >kind of nonsense come from?
> >
> >www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-306772,00.html
> >
> >Steve Davies
>
Whoops! sorry about that - I didn't realise it was "archived" already.
World News
May 25, 2002
Now greens want to save the Moon
>From Chris Ayres in New York
IF environmentalists get their way the latest World Heritage Site will be
visible from everywhere on Earth - but accessible to virtually no one.
That is because it is constantly spinning around the Earth at a distance of
238,850 miles. It is, of course, the Moon.
But the environmentalists' proposal, to be put to an international space
conference in Colorado today, is facing fierce opposition from US and
Japanese corporations bent on exploiting the commercial possibilities of our
closest solar neighbour. As if globalisation is not enough, they want to
build everything from solar power stations to indoor luxury golf courses up
there.
The row may still be theoretical, given the technological limitations of
space travel, but it is already threatening to overshadow the conference in
Denver organised by America's National Space Society.
The campaign to protect the Moon is being led by Rick Steiner, a bearded
fisheries professor with wraparound sunglasses from the University of
Alaska.
"To most people on Earth, the Moon is a sacred icon and it should be treated
as such," he told The Times. "We've already got some broken-down cars up
there and other such junk."
He has enlisted the Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and is working with the
US National Park Service, but for the Moon to be granted World Heritage
Status one of the UN's 189 member states would have to nominate it. Getting
President Bush to support the move "is a long shot", Dr Steiner admits.
Another minor problem is that the World Heritage Convention, signed by the
US in 1973, calls for nominated sites to be on Earth. There is also the
practical difficulty of protecting an entire celestial body with an
equatorial radius of 1,080 miles.
Mr Steiner's proposal has also provoked a furious response from Gregory
Bennett, president of the Moon Society, a non-profit US organisation set up
to encourage space-related private enterprise. "You will want to be prepared
to explain why the Moon (or perhaps any real estate in the Universe) ought
to be the province of an authoritarian socialist state," he suggested in an
e-mail to Dr Steiner.
Although the Moon does not belong to anyone, several countries and private
firms have tried to exploit it. In 1959 the American Government contemplated
detonating a nuclear bomb there to scare the Russians.
More recently, the restaurant chain Pizza Hut looked into beaming its logo
on to the Moon.
Today the Moon is seen as the ideal location for an off-planet solar power
station that could beam energy back to Earth. There have also been proposals
to mine it for helium-3, an isotope rare on Earth, that could be a source of
clean, cheap energy.
But Mr Steiner says that a year of helium-3 mining would create a 60-mile
eyesore that would be visible from Earth.
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