On Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:36:31 -0600, somebody wrote:

> "Kyle" <hob### [at] gatenet> wrote in message
> news:0bakd49unltslh3hhab4b595hd2j7b93b3@4ax.com...
> 
>> ... plus an immeasurable number of side inventions that affect our daily
> lives ...
>>
>> http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/spinoffs2.shtml
> 
> Going to the moon was bad science (well, not even science, just a
> technological tour de force).

There was plenty of science that resulted from the Apollo missions like
the collection of lunar samples that could be radiometrically dated and
used to calibrate the crater counting method of determining the age of
cratered areas. Now we have estimates of the ages of cratered worlds
much further away than the Moon without having sent sample collection
mission to all of those worlds yet.

Those samples are older than most or all rocks we have on Earth so they
tell us about the early history of our neighborhood of the solar system.

Then there are the retroreflectors placed on the Moon that enable precise
determinations of its distance from us and its change.

We also shouldn't be shortsighted and not worry about how things will be
300 years from now because it'll be our descendants who will be around by
then. I won't want them to figure out stuff that we could've easily
figured out and then stereotype us as lazy bums who wasted those
centuries by not doing that research to give them the results sooner, like
how people today see Dark Ages Eurpoe.

We'd have to expand into space eventually if our kind or our descendants
are around long enough because the Sun is heating up slowly during its
main sequence lifetime, which has been predicted to make Earth
inhospitable to modern types of ecosystems within a billion years, long
before its red giant phrase. It'd be difficult through.

http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/2003archive/01-03archive/k011303a.html

Brendan

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