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Comment by itchitawa | Hacker News Reader

Industrial interest in the moon is a good thing for the development of space travel and discovering new things. Also, you might find America's human rights abuses to be worse than China's when you count all the imprisoned American people who shouldn't be there and the forced conscription around the time of America's moon missions. America's pollution is certainly worse than China's when summed over the last century.

Low-polluting, low abussing countries like Tuvalu are typically not well equipped to go to the moon.

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"forced conscription" is a tautology. And frankly, "around the time of America's moon mission" was also "around the time of Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'"... where tens of millions of people died due to pure political incompetance. The death count was an order of magnitude worse than the horrific farce that was the Vietnam War. Hell, even when it comes to just the Vietnam war in its own context, US conscription was one of the smaller immoral things about it.

But ultimately, counting past misdeeds doesn't help us plan for the future. We're here now, and we're looking forward. If country X was the worst polluter in 1950 and isn't now, what good comes of castigating X now? We wouldn't castigate modern China because of Mao's Great Leap, why do the same to the US from back then? There's plenty of modern concerns to deal with anyway.

>Industrial interest in the moon is a good thing for the development of space travel and discovering new things.

True, but do you think your nation is ready to go to war for the right to manufacture on the moon?

America certainly has its share of human rights abuses (I'm not American, though, in case it matters to your argument), but pails into insignificance in the face of the mighty China, a land of near-infinite capacity for human misery. No amount of whitewashing will change this opinion - I've been there, seen it. (America too, incidentally).

So, my point being, I'd sure rather the infinite power of Moon-manufacturing not fall, necessarily, into the kind of power for whom human life is not as significant as, say, technological prowess. Would that the Moon changed Chinas' ways, though ..

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