re what if the ussr had reached the moon first in article c qiv h o cs cmu edu nickh cs cmu edu nick haines writes in article apr ke zv uucp gary ke zv uucp gary coffman writes if i read you right you re saying in essence that with a larger economy nations will have more discretionary funds to waste on a lunar facility that was certainly partially the case with apollo but real lunar colonies will probably require a continuing military scientific or commercial reason for being rather than just a we have the money why not approach ah but the whole point is that money spent on a lunar base is not wasted on the moon it s not like they d be using r bills to fuel their moon dozers the money to fund a lunar base would be spent in the country to which the base belonged it s a way of funding high tech research just like darpa was a good excuse to fund various fields of research under the pretense that it was crucial to the defense of the country or like esprit is a good excuse for the ec to fund research under the pretense that it s good for pan european cooperation now maybe you think that government funded research is a waste of money in fact i m pretty sure you do but it does count as investment spending which does boost the economy and just look at the size of that multiplier actually i favor government funded research it is a pump prime for a lot of basic technologies i also understand the short term value of high tech welfare programs but they can t substitute for long range wealth generation via commercial enterprise that s what s needed to maintain a healthy economy anywhere on earth or luna i don t see that long term potential on luna due to a bunch of factors i outline in another post gary gary coffman ke zv you make it gatech wa mei ke zv gary destructive testing systems we break it uunet rsiatl ke zv gary shannon way guaranteed emory kd nc ke zv gary lawrenceville ga
