This planet is no longer as suitable for life as we would like, and more problems have accumulated here than it is possible to solve. And a completely natural desire is to drop everything and fly away to hell, if only to the moon.
Apparently, guided by roughly such considerations, the administration of US President Donald Trump, according to media reports, began developing an agreement on mining on the moon.
The year is now important for the United States in all respects. It is actually important for the whole world, but it’s like in American films - it simply does not exist within the selected plot of other countries. And the year is elective, the year is viral and difficult. Nobody understands how to fight for the presidency, because the incumbent president is in the first positions, in the very sight. Every day he must make statements and demonstrate measures taken in the fight against the pandemic - and in the United States there are already more than a million sick people. Under these conditions, the other candidates simply cannot prove themselves. What can they do? Criticize the current government? But still they understand that this is all idle reasoning caused by forced idleness.
And Trump once every two weeks changes the direction of his statements. That he has all this is a common cold, then he says that he called it a terrible pandemic a month ago. He claimed that once the virus simply dissolved, disappeared, he said that what was happening was worse than Pearl Harbor and September 11th. The number of victims is already worse, yes. We sincerely wish you all good health.
But, apparently, the mechanics of the American government are so arranged that it must constantly build up its energy and channel everything into new and new channels. And at the peak - was he already? - the fight against the epidemic, in the conditions of an economic storm and growing internal tension, the presidential administration decides that right now is the time to discuss mining on the moon.
It is assumed (again, so far according to media reports) that several European countries and the UAE will be included in the agreement. Meanwhile, Russia (NASA's main partner in the work on the ISS) did not get into this agreement, according to a source in the White House. And at the UN the United States is not going to discuss this program - the UN has already become some kind of souvenir organization, they are not discussing anything important there. Everyone understood that the former global world had disintegrated and it was now necessary to come to an agreement in private.
Why only in this agreement is the UAE a country specializing in oil, which is not and cannot be on the moon? On the moon, however, there have never been dinosaurs that have been rotted into oil for millions of years.
And why do we need more oil on Earth? We have nowhere to go - everyone sees how the cost of a barrel jumps and how hundreds of tankers flooded to the eyeballs stand off the coasts around the world, because all storage facilities are also full.
Maybe it turns out that the essence of the agreement is different? Maybe, on the contrary, it is supposed to send our surplus there? Indeed, on Earth we have a lot of things that we no longer need at all or do not need in the same amount.
This oil, again. Rubbish. Here the pandemic, let’s say, will end, there will remain an overabundance of medical masks. They can also be thrown to the moon, otherwise we have no place here.
And, perhaps, everything is much better, more interesting: the USA is striving to make the world’s balcony out of the Moon so that it can breathe more freely. You know, everyone has such a balcony - for example, there are two boards and a can of dried paint after repair. There is a snow scooter, an old stool, a bag with bags that are no longer needed, but it is impossible to throw them away. There are college textbooks and a rusty pot.
So humanity may have such a balcony.
But this is all fantasy. And fantasy from all sides. So, Trump has repeatedly stated that the new lunar mission should be completed no later than 2024. These are such guarantees for long-term projects - you will re-elect me, and in four years I will equip American bases on the Moon.
But seriously, it is not so difficult to fly to the moon, as it is difficult to figure out why to fly there. Of the minerals that are present in serious quantities and may be of interest, helium-3 can be called a rare isotope that nuclear energy needs to start a thermonuclear reaction.
It is believed that on the moon its 500 thousand tons, and its total cost - 10 quadrillion dollars, that is, 500 US GDP. These, of course, are serious figures, and it seems worth living, working and flying into space for their sake.
But here another question arises - who should sell all this? Who will pay for these thousands of tons? It seems that scientists have calculated that even taking into account the delivery of helium-3 from the moon, energy production using it will cost 50 times cheaper than at current nuclear power plants. Academicians from the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry. IN AND. Vernadsky RAS say: in order to provide electricity to all of humanity for a year, you need only 30 tons of this isotope.
So, everything is going well. The United States is fighting a pandemic and, of course, winning, signing agreements with European countries and the UAE, all fly to the moon, make land surveying there, distribute plots, put towers and pumps to pump out from the lunar surface of helium-3, deliver it to Earth is provided with the planet’s need for energy for some quadrillion there. What do we feel sorry for quadrillion?
And even suppose that they arrive there in the right amount, and build a base of constant presence, and find where exactly that sought isotope is hidden. But here it turns out the following - to start the thermonuclear reaction of the required type, the plasma needs to be heated to a billion degrees, and while science can only heat up to hundreds of millions, and most of the energy generated by this goes to maintaining the temperature of the plasma itself. And this problem cannot be solved neither in the next four years, nor in the next 40 years. No one knows for sure whether it can be solved in principle and what level of technology will be required to solve it.
In the meantime, this is the case, you can sign any kind of agreement and divide the plots on the surface of the celestial body, under which there is probably something that we again find completely unnecessary.
Still, listen to my advice - work to get the excess away from here.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.