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Comment by janice1999 | Hacker News Reader

janice1999

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

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What 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.

Maybe they have a hardware wallet on board?

Which 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.

And what exists on the blocking of a cryptocurrency is useless without magic words.

Yeah, maybe the blockchain is in there, too.

> 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.

Yes, continuing the running joke that is DOGE

https://twitter.com/DogecoinFdn/status/1744189433274941571

>What does it mean to have cryptocurrency on the spacecraft, physically?

Someone took 'to the moon' literally?

Maybe it’s several bitcoins and the first person to get there keeps them all.

Imagine astronauts fight each other on the moon for the bitcoins!

What could be more “maximum crypto “, take the grift to a whole new level.

When someone talks about physical location of some cryptocurrency they mean physical medium with a key to a wallet.

It's a metaphor, arguing over it is unproductive.

They were sending dogecoins. Both the coin and “sending it to the moon” were meant to be a joke in the first place.

Why stop at this? Let's internationally ban poor taste and kitsch in general. I'm sure it would go well.

Unfortunately 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.

Luckily the irony won't be lost on those who prefer oligarchy over democracy.

If I could find a tasteful dictator, I'd consider a wholesale replacement of democracy for this reason alone.

Indeed!

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.

Wasn't that the lizards' promise when they convinced us to incubate their eggs at the ivies?

Billboards 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.

People 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.

Excellent point about the dangers of international agreements

I'm assuming they're cremated remains? At they distinguishable from any other ash/carbon at that point?

Cremated remains are not ash/carbon they are ground up bones.

> 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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection

It's also that it's effectively waste/garbage.

Note that it's not the first time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Merle_Shoemaker#Death ) and we didn't get agreement then either.

I 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-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-fl...

It'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.

Is 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.

1.87km/s to reach low moon orbit

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/29861/how-easy-is-...).

But 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/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)

Moon's haunted meme.

Human remains…ok human vanity I understand. Cryptocurrency…just why?

Because they were added during the crypto hype cycle.

Just like pink bathroom tile and legacy code - Why is it here? History.

So that bagholders who put their whole life savings into dogecoin can feel better and say it's still 'going to the Moon' (popular meme)

The Navajo Nation agrees re: depositing human remains on the moon:

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/07/1223351685/some-people-are-pa...

This is kind of a weird objection. We already spread ashes in lots of sacred places - mountains, rivers, oceans, etc. This is just space NIMBYism.

Do 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.

The 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.

I cannot imagine a more ridiculous claim.

The remains went into orbit around the sun, as I understand, not a crash landing into the moon.

There is a heliocentric orbit remains payload and a soft-landing lunar remains payload.

Same company, which has made the reporting confusing. Two service tiers.

If: 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.

Viruses 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.

There are human remains that have flown past Pluto and are currently moving through the Kuiper belt.

I wonder who it was that Elon stuffed in the boot of that Tesla?

You mean inside Starman :)

Not in the boot! The (joke) conspiracy is that the Starman is a cryogenically frozen person.

To 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

I imagine someone like idlewords replying that on the contrary, we should expedite shipping celebrities and billionaires to the moon, ideally while still alive

why? can you expand on why you think it should be banned?

So we're sending garbage to the moon now?

We could send nuclear garbage there. The place is already a radiation-soaked hellhole. An astronaut on the lunar surface experiences 50 rem of radiation per year.

Good idea, but only once the transport mechanism doesn't involve a significant risk of explosion.

> including cryptocurrency

So, not to the moon, then?

I 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)

This 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.

Protip: it's a metaphor

It'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"

The "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".

I 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.

So, the Expanse.

One of the two companies providing remains-transportation service is actually called Elysium Space. https://elysiumspace.com/

> 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.

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