Why China is fixated on the Moon
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The article kindly submitted here reports the thoughts of a British space scientist (not a Sinologist): "He believes China could have astronauts on the lunar surface by 2025." I will make a testable prediction here, which I hope all of us live to see confirmed or disconfirmed. China will not have astronauts (the Chinese term is "taikonauts") on the lunar surface as part of a Chinese national space mission by 2025. (By contrast, I think it is barely possible, but not particularly likely, that an international space mission with a crew from several countries may return astronauts to the lunar surface by that year.) As China democratizes, which is something I fully expect to happen between now and then, China will readjust its national policy priorities. The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis. China has a lot of issues to work on that are a lot more important than putting taikonauts on the moon as part of a Chinese national space mission.
> avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating
http://i.imgur.com/flymMWZ.png - if they can avoid a crisis in the next 2 years, I'll be surprised.
On the whole moon thing ... it's 10 billion a year for 10 years. From this article (http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/04/a-breakdown-of-chinas-t...), China spends about 150 billion (US) per year on defence. And a truly ungodly amount on "payments of unspecified or unknown purposes", by local governments.
Isn't the point to keep population growth in check? Hasn't it worked?
If you look at a graph of China's fertility rate (http://coolgeography.co.uk/Side%20bar%20Pages/Buttons/Index%...), you can't even see the once child policy. Hint - it's after the really big drop. Fertility rates were trending down to about 2.0. Instead, they went down a little bit more (to about 1.8). A slight reduction in fertility rates isn't really worth all the problems it causes.
It probably knocked the population down a bit, but on the flip-side there's tens of millions of poor angry young men with no families and nothing to lose. Which isn't great if you want a "harmonious society".
Well I'm sure they see this as a potential long term solution (though, outside of very advanced first world countries, this doesn't seem to hold). But in such a crowded country that seems like a luxury they can't afford in the shorter term.
It seems incongruous to say that the policy has no effects on fertility rates, while leaving devastating social consequences.
Are you saying that if the policy was not in place some people that are having a child now would have had none ? And that families that would have children wouldn't care about their gender?
I think India is a good picture of what happens if you don't implement a one child policy. They tried to convince people to have fewer children and failed miserably.
You might be right that it's not just economic growth, though. Literacy in women is a huge factor, and one which India lagged behind on.
No it isn't, the Chinese use yǔ háng yuán, or háng tiān yuán, or if providing english translations they use the term astronaut. English language news organisations outside China invented the term Taikonaut.
edit - also the Chinese space program has a budget of between 0.5 and 1.5 billion dollars, depending on whose figures you believe. The national budget is between 350 billion dollars and a trillion dollars, again depending on who you believe, so the amount they spend on space doesn't seem to be that high. Now I agree that the Chinese government is pretty totalitarian, however I do not think that their space spending is a symptom of that, as if anything it is rather low for a moon shot.
> This fixation on the moon in a country with
> stark poverty for most of its rural majority
> is a sign of China's tyrannical government.
I don't have the intimate knowledge on China that you do, nor do I agree with its government, but it's a country that's moving so fast to being industrialized that it has some parts that are effectively in the early 20th century, and some that are as high-tech as you can get.
Don't you think China spending a relatively minuscule part of its resources on developing high-tech industries is likely to do its part in developing these rural areas that you're concerned about in the long term? As for the short term surely China is also working on those issues.
China lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2004. The ongoing Chinese urbanization effort is massive. From 2010 to 2025, 300 million Chinese (little less than US population) now living in rural areas will move into cities.
China has tyrannical government, but it's not incompetent like it was during the Mao era. They know that they can keep the power only as long as they keep making things better for majority of people. If they fuck up, no security apparatus can keep people from toppling them.
China must ensure that China has the energy needed to reduce poverty and increase living standards. The great sucking noise in Africa is part of that, so is the conflict in the China Sea. If they look for the Moon for resources, that's not surprising.
That is even less likely as no countries will spend the resources in collaboration with others(when it has already been done for starters) when the whole purpose of landing a man on the moon would be national pride.
>>The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis.
China is already moving past the middle income gap phase, there isn't a big risk it will be stuck there. A far greater worry is economic stability and dealing with bubble forming concentrations of capital in real estate.
Democratic states are fully capable of spending money on things that aren't a great use of money. India has similar goals to China and an active human spaceflight program.
India's political system is far from that of China's, but they've been in the news lately for the preparation and launching of their Mars probe. That probe has no direct application to improving the lives of the many Indian peasants who live in 'stark poverty' as well, but it sure as hell doesn't signify anything about the Indian government's commitment (or lack of) to basic freedoms. This is a non sequitur.
> I wish there were a higher percentage of participants on Hacker News who have both thorough knowledge of the language and culture and regular access to the Chinese press and mass media to comment on stories submitted here about China.
I do too. Maybe we'd get a more nuanced view than the caricatures which always show up about modern China (recycled from those about Cold War China) here on a regular basis.
> ...thoughts of a British space scientist (not a Sinologist)
I'd trust a space scientist more than a Sinologist on this (or just about any other matter).
> (the Chinese term is "taikonauts")
The Chinese term is not taikonauts. 'Taikonaut' is a made up word used by English media outlets that is meaningless in Chinese (it lops off the latter half of 'tai kong', space, and splices the '-naut' suffix to the end).
> The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis.
There is no reason China cannot do that and maintain a robust national science program at the same time. None of China's recent third plenum discussion points had anything to do with their space program; many of them involve economic reforms intended to address the urban-rural divide. To claim that their space program is anything more than an afterthought in terms of national priorities and decision-making is utterly daft.
To get back to the substance here, what is different about the world in the 2010s compared to the 1960s (when I was alive already and very aware of and very supportive of the space program) is that no one had ever been to the moon back then, but now there have been twelve people who walked on the moon and collected rock samples and placed scientific instruments there, all American astronauts, so no one is going to gain a lot of new knowledge nor much new glory by going there. The significant fact that no Russian cosmonaut has ever visited the moon, even during the era of Cold War superpower rivalry, suggests that NASA's sharing of moon rock samples and lunar scientific data around the world has satisfied most country's desire for knowledge about what's on the moon: a bunch of sterile rocks not so significantly different from earth rocks.
I used to read books by various authors when I was a kid with the full case for space exploration, up to and including colonization of the moon and Mars, laid out. Those books were very convincing to me in my childhood, even though those books were written in willful disregard of economic reality. I went to a high school that was named after the first man who set foot on the moon, and while I was a student there I reported my personal ambition to be the first man to set foot on Mars. (I could STILL be that man, which boggles my mind.) But over the years, I've grown up and traveled a lot and seen the world beyond the science fiction and space exploration sections of my town's public library, and while I continue to support sending out manned space probes hither and yon, and tolerate the low-return, high-expense International Space Station program, I see no need for my country or any country to send human beings outside the expensive grip of earth's gravity well until we take care of plenty of problems down here. If there has never been political will for manned moon exploration in Russia, nor any in any other country that has launched satellites since 1972, I have to think that China's program to plan for manned moon exploration is based on a glorious ignorance of economics and misplaced policy priorities in the interest of keeping the ruling party in power.
All China could do on the moon with a manned mission would come at a punishingly economically inefficient cost. If China wants to impress the United States, my suggestion is that it try lifting press censorship and allow free and fair local and national elections, an example Taiwan has already given China for about two decades. That really would be an impressive sign of modernity and progress. And that would be a great contribution to the peaceful wellbeing of all humankind.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts+site%3A.cn
Why? This isn't the '60s, space travel is a lot more accessable than it was. Going to the moon is going to be the equivalent of a rounding error on the Chinese national budget.
On the other hand, the scientific advances required to solve that issue would probably have wondrous consequences even for transportation that doesn't leave the planet.
Once China masters the basics I believe they'll find it much easier than most expect to build a small colony on the moon. Many people may die in the process, but that's likely to be a sacrifice they're willing to make (which many countries would not be).
If you're willing to fail a lot more often - resulting in deaths - you can reduce costs significantly and expedite the timeline. The Soviets demonstrated that in many ways space can be brute forced if you're less worried about death. Strap people to rockets and shoot them at the moon, many will make it there intact.
The Soviets demonstrated that in many ways space can be brute forced if you're less worried about death. Strap people to rockets and shoot them at the moon, many will make it there intact.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...
This sounds like a "we shouldn't have any fusion or fission in space!" argument.
>"The Moon is full of resources - mainly rare earth elements, titanium, and uranium, which the Earth is really short of, and these resources can be used without limitation.
Titanium is ninth-most abundant element in the Earth's crust. Normal soil contains 0.5% - 1.5% titanium. All we need is energy for the process of separating them.
Rare earth elements are expensive but not so expensive that we need to go to the moon. After we have used all conventional mines for rare earth, we can get them from the bottom of the sea more economically (see for example: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110703/full/news.2011.393.ht... )
Uranium would be incredibly expensive if it would be mined on the moon.
In theory HE3 mining could be viable, unless investments in deuterium+tritium fusion reactor that would produce HE3 for helium reactors is better investment.
The resources don't need to be returned to earth if they can be put to immediate use on moon station.
1. One civilization/nation conquered/destroyed all others
2. One civilization/nation managed to assembly a spaceship and launched it to fly to the closest Solaris -- Alpha Centauri
The first goal seems easy and tempting to follow, but turns out very difficult. In the end, to win the wars over those nations that often have huge cities (20plus) and perfectly armed with numerous tanks and battleships, you often resort to nukes to take them over. In more difficult levels such as deity level, it's very likely your populous cities get nuked. After a short while, I started focusing on building spaceships instead and had a few wins and felt better that way.
In retrospect, it may reflect the believing of the designer Sid Mier's, whom I totally agree with and respect for. Following the same spirit, we as human beings might as well put our inner conflicts aside and target the space instead.
Thus any nation that can establish and maintain a permanent presence on the Moon, and build the facilities for throwing chunks of the moon at any particular point on Earth, Will have overwhelming military superiority over any nation that cannot do that. Up to this point, the US has been the only country with the economic strength and technology to pull that off. That we did not do that, reflected more on the fact that we did not need to, rather than we could not.
If you are a foreign policy wonk, China getting a permanent moon base with manufacturing capability makes Iran developing a nuclear weapon seem insignificant. There are many nations in the 'nuclear' club, there are none in the 'moon' club.
In order to destroy a Moon base, you have to get to it to destroy it. That takes time, up to several days if you don't have a favorable launch window from your launch pad.
Next you need a pre-text. I'm going to assert that it is a reasonable assumption that the Moon base is presenting as either entirely docile (scientific research etc) or entirely hostile (sending rocks at the planet). If its the latter taking out the handful of launch facilities is pretty straight forward which prevents any future attack from that vector. If its the former, well your attacking country needs to come up with a reason why they are flying what is no doubt a nuclear warhead, in the guise of a satellite toward the Moon.
Then there is terminal control (targeting at the site). So you may know in general what facilities are on the Moon from an initial landing point, but if the base has existed there for any length of time all bets are off. Also making the initial establishment on the dark side would force an adversary to first orbit the moon trying to identify your base, and then de-orbit into an attack orbit.
During its orbit your attack device will be vulnerable to orbiting defensive satellites which probably also play the role of communications relay which justifies them in lunar orbit in the first place.
My point is that mounting an attack on the Moon from the Earth is much more difficult and expensive than mounting an attack on the Earth from the Moon. Because the moon has a much shallower gravity well and the Earth has a much wider variety of targets which are more easily threatened.
The US and Soviets understood this although the technology to implement it was so expensive neither could afford to carry through. The cost of the technology has come way way down and once again there is another country putting its hat in the ring as 'superpower.' In a weird way, that means someone is going to the Moon, to create a permanent installation. My thought is that the US is like the hare in the story of the tortoise an the hare, confident in its ability to make that happen if it becomes necessary.
for just how large the moon is and how limited earth resources are for even reaching the moon.
There is no environment on the Moon. Can't 100% guarantee that for Mars but it's still the smart bet.
Repeat that as often as it takes to understand it. In the way most people mean the term, there is NO environment on the Moon. There is NO environment on the Moon. There is not a SINGLE LIVING THING on the Moon. If you want to be a Moon environmentalist, then you should be in support of Human growth onto it, because until that happens, there is no environment on the Moon to even become "changed".
Unless you really are in favor of some right for literal rocks, utterly lifeless, sterile, dead, unconscious rocks with absolutely 0 probability of any of that changing to remain "undisturbed", there is no current environmental concern for the Moon.
Btw, there is an atmosphere on Mars but I believe it is only CO2 and very thin. Mars missions have recorded Martian winds blowing sand on the tiny rover.
I believe I said: "In the way most people mean the term, there is NO environment on the Moon..."
I stand by that.
Enforcement is another thing.
"As of 2013, only 15 states (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Uruguay) have ratified it. France, Guatemala, India and Romania have signed but not ratified it."
The only country in the list with a current space capability is India.
Same here... execpt this time, there is no need for a genocide.