I sort of get the romance and the history and the wonder of The Moon!!!, but the premise here is that it’s guaranteed safe, which means it’s tried and tested, repeatedly. By the time it becomes even relatively affordable, you wouldn’t be the first person to go, or the hundredth, or probably even the ten thousandth. Everybody would be used to the idea by then. It would be expensive, but banal: no more romantic than six back-to-back flights from North America to Tokyo without a stop, in much less space than a commercial flight, and without even the pleasure of Tokyo (world’s greatest city) once you get there, just a bunch of rocks that other people have already trampled and kicked. It would be like taking 72 hours to travel to a quarry in a vacuum chamber while being bombarded with radiation.
As asked, it was would you go if you “had the opportunity.” - and I have to assume that opportunity includes the reasonable ability to pay for it, schedule it, etc… I don’t consider that I currently “have the opportunity” to go lots of places here on Earth, just because it’s expensive or otherwise prohibitive.
r/titlegore
The survey results might have been different if they said you got to drive moon buggies and hit super long golf drives.
I can’t wait for the whalers on the moon ride…
Or stay indoors and explore the possibilities of 1/6th gravity.
An American friend of mine used to have a signature that said “In the US, 100 years is a long time. In the UK, 100 miles is a long distance.”
If you’ve ever experienced either the M62 motorway to Leeds or the Leeds inner Ring-road, you would understand any Yorkshire person’s reluctance to visit it. I’ve lived in Belfast, Edinburgh, the “Home Counties” and Manchester. I’ve visited most other counties in the UK. My wife is proposing to visit a dentist in Huddersfield. “It’s only twenty minutes away” she said. No, I don’t see the point.
Visiting the Moon would be like visiting Rockall. If you’re not a keen geologist or astronomer (in the case of the Moon) or a bird-watcher (in the case of Rockall) what’s the point? It’s an uncomfortable journey with not much to interest most people at the end of it. Just like Leeds.
Bagginses are a rare thing among the Hobbits.
Right now I’d refuse because it’s a return trip.
Why would I want to go back to Britain? I feel trapped here with the willful idiots who think things were better in the past.
There’s a Costco in Leeds; that, and colleagues in the university, were the main attractions for me.
I once had to drive several times in one day between Manchester and Humberside airports while trying to find my wife and son, whom British Air had managed to lose. The worst of it was the damned Humber Bridge, may it rot in hell. I might have endured that better had there been a moon-like guarantee of safe return crossing it.
#NoEditorsWorkAtBoingBoing
This is just ignorance- have they not heard of the shopping? The lunartinis? That Bill Murray and Larry “Bud” Melman might be on their bus to the moon?
The cost of a Saturn V launch was $1.23 billion dollars (adjusted for 2019). $110 million was for the rocket. It carried over 2.5 million kg of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as fuel.
And the rockets are that big because physics dictates they need to be. It takes that much energy to get there and back. And it takes that much fuel to lift the fuel you need to get it all up there.
Of course you’d be splitting the price 3 ways, so there’s that.
@frauenfelder Check that title: “… return-trip the the Moon…”
A heavy modification of a Chelm joke:
Two citizens of Yorkshire are sitting on a porch, watching the Moon. Says one to the other, “I wonder which is further away — Leeds, or the Moon.” In answer, the other says, “Silly! You can see the Moon!”
A mondegreen! One of the best is Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light”; “revved up like a deuce” is usually heard as *"wrapped up like a douche "
