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Global warming is a preventable threat. All we need is a little more shade over the earth -- preferrably over the equatorial areas. A very modest ring could be formed by blasting out 10% of the lunar surface.
We could do this on an incremental basis, i.e. any time some rogue country did something
to really piss off the world, we would blow out another piece of the moon. Occasionally, we would 'accidentally' permit a larger chunk to blast a crater out of any offensive countries. You could say that their penalty would be hanging over their head. The beauty of this is a) we provide a public service to law-abiding countries; and b) we avoid having to use our nukes on any country that is behaving badly.
To really make an example of particularly hideous despots, we could strap them to our Moon excavating equipment (well, we might still have to use a nuke then).
orbital space frame
http://www.halfbake...tal_20space_20frame
Almost Halfbaked already - except that this idea is more to do with shading the Earth [hippo, Oct 02 2001, last modified Nov 26 2001]
[link]
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Bones, bones. Bones! You haven't made it clear enough that you're just joking. Right, [pathetic]? You ARE only kidding. |
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Would the ring be far enough above the Earth so that sunlight would reflect off it at night? That would be cool, a silvery river through the night sky. Except if you couldn't get to sleep for the light coming in the windows. Lucky my bedroom faces North. |
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No, but this is a good way of getting your frustrations out on stuff in a less harmful way than bombing hundreds of thousands of semi-innocent people. Apart from the difficulty of controlling the chunks (and come to think of it about 10000 other practical difficulties), I say let's get going. |
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I think so too. I like the moon, and nobody'd miss ten percent of six billion people anyway... |
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doesnt the moon control loadsa stuff on earth? hence if chunks of it go, then there wont be as much gravity to do all stuff that the moon does (tides etc) |
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and also, a spherical (ish) earth is boring, yet more reasons to blow massive chunks off it. |
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Peter: surely 10% of the earth is more actual matter than 10% of the moon? |
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dekoi: Do tides serve a useful purpose? I think not. All they do is beach whales and make oil tankers run aground. I say we split the moon in 2, orbiting 90 degrees from each other, to eliminate tides altogether. |
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Without a large moon in a prograde orbit, life on earth probably would be impossible. See, for example, the recent book "Rare Earth". |
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Tides are probably necessary for life, evolution AND the continued health of the ecosystem. |
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Other than that, they're useless.
--Boris |
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Well who cares about life on earth? Not me, not Osama, and I doubt Georgy W also. |
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i didnt just mean tides, i'm sure it does other stuff as well, i cant think of anything but boris seems to know what he's talking about |
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