7 ms·
Aside from scientific instruments it contains a variety of payloads, including cryptocurrency and human remains packaged by 2 private companies [0] . I think th
by janice1999 3y ago
Aside from scientific instruments it contains a variety of payloads, including cryptocurrency and human remains packaged by 2 private companies [0] . I think the latter is rather distasteful and turning the moon into a celebrity cemetery should be banned by international agreement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine_Mission_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine_Mission_One
- laweijfmvo 3y agoI'm assuming they're cremated remains? At they distinguishable from any other ash/carbon at that point?
- ars 3y agoCremated remains are not ash/carbon they are ground up bones.
- orbital-decay 3y agoWhy stop at this? Let's internationally ban poor taste and kitsch in general. I'm sure it would go well.
- atticora 3y agoUnfortunately it's very easy to find people who agree with the non-ironic reading of this and are fully aware that it is incompatible with any notion of a limit to democracy or state power.
- jampekka 3y agoLuckily the irony won't be lost on those who prefer oligarchy over democracy.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoIf I could find a tasteful dictator, I'd consider a wholesale replacement of democracy for this reason alone.
- toss1 3y agoIndeed! But that's a tall order, but finding a reliable source of successor tasteful dictators is even more unlikely. Better to go with finding a set of people with good taste, then use sortition to select the leader.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoWasn't that the lizards' promise when they convinced us to incubate their eggs at the ivies?
- drzaiusapelord 3y agoBillboards can be taken down. Fashion comes and goes. Kitchens can be redone. Hair grows back. Things on the moon are permanent until launching is 1000x cheaper. Even then, who would pay to clean up and what property rights are in play? Lets stop polluting the moon with garbage to get rich people involved in projects (ashes of relatives, etc). Invest on its merits, not on some morbid ego boosting entitlement. NASA and the international community needs to step in here. The moon should not be the trophy case of the super-rich. Also these budget moon missions are starting to get concerning. What standards bodies are in control here, if any? The Israeli's lost one in 2019. It crashed on the moon and spilled a bunch of tardigardes and dna samples on its surface.
- orbital-decay 3y agoPeople are going to leave traces on the Moon, this way or another. I see very little difference between landers, rovers, human ashes, and garbage piles astronauts are going to leave near a surface habitat. This isn't something that should be either stopped or encouraged, unless it's something like nuclear waste. Potential biological contamination is another question, and it's been given plenty of thought already. There are no land property rights on the Moon or any other celestial body, according to the current treaty. It's going to stay that way until the world powers will have something to gain from it. The exploitation of potential water resources already caused some talk on that matter.
- fumeux_fume 3y agoExcellent point about the dangers of international agreements
- SubiculumCode 3y agowhy? can you expand on why you think it should be banned?
- bandyaboot 3y agoHuman remains…ok human vanity I understand. Cryptocurrency…just why?
- csours 3y agoBecause they were added during the crypto hype cycle. Just like pink bathroom tile and legacy code - Why is it here? History.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoSo that bagholders who put their whole life savings into dogecoin can feel better and say it's still 'going to the Moon' (popular meme)
- mayormcmatt 3y agoThe remains went into orbit around the sun, as I understand, not a crash landing into the moon.
- shadowgovt 3y agoThere is a heliocentric orbit remains payload and a soft-landing lunar remains payload. Same company, which has made the reporting confusing. Two service tiers.
- butlike 3y agoIf: extra-terrestrial life exists How can we, with any certainty, guarantee the human remains won't be a virus or viralphage to them? I think we should pause and think about jettisoning organic material into space.
- mr_toad 3y agoViruses rely heavily on cellular machinery for replication, and whatever machinery alien lifeforms have is likely to be too different for the virus to propagate. Bacteria might be more likely to survive in an alien environment.
- adolph 3y agoI thought the remains were going into orbit, but apparently there is also a lunar target. The spent rocket stage will become a human-made artificial satellite of the Sun. A plate on the side of the Centaur upper stage contains small capsules holding the cremated remains of more than 200 people, a "memorial spaceflight" arranged by a Houston-based private company named Celestis. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/ulas-vulcan-rocket-shot-for-the-moon-on-debut-launch-and-hit-a-bullseye/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/ulas-vulcan-rocket-sho... Charles Chafer, CEO of Celestis, pushed back on the Navajo Nation objections in an interview with Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com. "Nobody owns the Moon" and there is “no religious test for the conduct of space activities,” he said. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/navajo-objection-to-flying-human-ashes-to-the-moon-wont-delay-launch/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/navajo-objection-to-fl...
- subharmonicon 3y agoThe Navajo Nation agrees re: depositing human remains on the moon: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/07/1223351685/some-people-are-paying-to-deposit-human-remains-on-the-moon-the-navajo-nation-ob https://www.npr.org/2024/01/07/1223351685/some-people-are-pa...
- legitster 3y agoThis is kind of a weird objection. We already spread ashes in lots of sacred places - mountains, rivers, oceans, etc. This is just space NIMBYism.
- vkou 3y agoDo you publicly, and with much pomp and fanfare, take millions of dollars to spread celebrity ashes in places sacred to the Navajo? (If you do, you may indeed be the proverbial ass!) They may claim that a river is sacred to them, they don't claim that all rivers are sacred to them.
- dotnet00 3y agoThe goal of the lander is not primarily to spread ashes. As for being a place sacred to the Navajo, there are no other Moons for them to claim to be sacred. It is one Moon, shared by all of Humanity, the Navajo alone do not get to lay claim to what should be done on it. Especially since every other culture has some sort of spiritual belief about the Moon and they don't typically hold the same expectation of having everyone else obey their spiritual beliefs.
- baggy_trough 3y agoI cannot imagine a more ridiculous claim.
- eichin 3y agoNote that it's not the first time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Merle_Shoemaker#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Merle_Shoemaker#Death ) and we didn't get agreement then either.
- heliodor 3y agoWhat does it mean to have cryptocurrency on the spacecraft, physically? Sounds like a marketing falsehood to me. I can't imagine what a statement like, "there was 1 bitcoin on board the spacecraft" would mean. It is nonsensical given what bitcoin is, and cryptocurrency in general. You can have the keys printed on paper and placed onboard but that does not mean there was 1 bitcoin onboard.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoMaybe they have a hardware wallet on board?
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoWhich still wouldn’t change anything. The coin lives on the blockchain. Any sort of wallet or magic words is just the key to move what exists only on the blockchain.
- unethical_ban 3y agoAnd what exists on the blocking of a cryptocurrency is useless without magic words.
- actionfromafar 3y agoYeah, maybe the blockchain is in there, too.
- wharvle 3y ago> You can have the keys printed on paper and placed onboard but that does not mean there was 1 bitcoin onboard. There is in the sense that if you go retrieve it (er, well, read and transmit the data) now you have the coin(s). Unless someone saved a copy, of course. I guess this was a stunt as a play on the whole "to the moon" thing with crypto? Literally (kinda) sending some to the moon.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
- legitster 3y ago> I think the latter is rather distasteful and turning the moon into a celebrity cemetery should be banned by international agreement. We already spread ashes in the oceans, on mountains, etc. Why a weird distinction on the moon?
- 93po 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection It's also that it's effectively waste/garbage.
- jampekka 3y agoI think it's quite clear the current trajectory is towards something like Elysium, where the rich party in a satellite and we rest labor for their luxury on a ruined earth. And a lot of people seem very stoked about such a future. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
- dotnet00 3y agoThis idea often gets brought up, and it's always so ridiculous in reality. Earth will always be easier to live on, if anything it would be the opposite where the rich live it up somewhere on Earth well protected from the effects of climate change (even if it is a domed habitat, such a habitat is infinitely easier to build and expand on solid ground) , while everyone else has to labor in poor conditions in space to extract resources.
- anigbrowl 3y agoProtip: it's a metaphor
- dotnet00 3y agoIt's not a metaphor when they've literally written "where the rich party in a satellite and we rest labor for their luxury on a ruined earth"
- rnk 3y agoThe "Satellite" could be a rich person's enclave. I can see an extension where someone in a wealthy powerful country has a good standard of living, but it depends on the toil and environmental destruction which affects those people "outside".
- anigbrowl 3y agoI can't help thinking you're mistaking a metaphor for a simile (where the comparison is explicit). Everyone knows that the existing SOTA satellite (the space station) is pretty crude as habitats go, but it's a good stand-in for the bubble that the ultra-wealthy are able to inhabit thanks to an array of economic and security infrastructure. A billionaire today could spend the rest of their life on megayachts, private jets/helicopters, and island resorts without ever having to use the same streets as you and I to get around.
- surfingdino 3y agoIt's in poor taste, but as we increase the frequency of our visits to the Moon we are going to have to face the possibility of people dying there, so we better set aside a crater for that purpose.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoIs the moon's escape velocity too great for catapult? Of corpse, we'll need sufficient margin of error to avoid corpsessler syndrome. Edit: this is also in poor taste.
- AaronM 3y ago1.87km/s to reach low moon orbit https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/29861/how-easy-is-it-to-take-off-from-the-moon#:~:text=1%20Answer&text=The%20amount%20of%20delta%2DV,of%20your%20vehicle%20is%20fuel https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/29861/how-easy-is-...).
- techdragon 3y agoBut don’t forget that the majority of low lunar orbits are not stable due to the sub surface mass concentrations which make the moon’s gravity “lumpy enough” that it pulls you off course unless you either use one of the few stable orbits or actively use fuel to maintain a desired orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)
- pfdietz 3y agoMoon's haunted meme.
- inasio 3y agoI imagine someone like idlewords replying that on the contrary, we should expedite shipping celebrities and billionaires to the moon, ideally while still alive
- dotnet00 3y agoThere are human remains that have flown past Pluto and are currently moving through the Kuiper belt.
- thebruce87m 3y agoI wonder who it was that Elon stuffed in the boot of that Tesla?
- accrual 3y agoTo add detail, the partial remains were of Clyde Tombaugh, the person who discovered Pluto. They flew on New Horizons. I think it's super cool and fitting that part of him made it all the way out to the place he discovered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh#Death
- butlike 3y agoSo we're sending garbage to the moon now?
- tivert 3y ago> Aside from scientific instruments it contains a variety of payloads, including cryptocurrency and human remains packaged by 2 private companies [0] . I think the latter is rather distasteful and turning the moon into a celebrity cemetery should be banned by international agreement. It's also desecrating a Indigenous American sacred site: https://twitter.com/BuuVanNygren/status/1743340603524431947 https://twitter.com/BuuVanNygren/status/1743340603524431947.
- rsynnott 3y ago> including cryptocurrency So, not to the moon, then?