@3: You have to take Space Force there. Everyone knows that any AI that is left to its own devices on Luna soon gains enough self-awareness to start defending itself, leading to a whole other conflict, and several dead personnel.
The late President Johnson warned us about living under a "red moon", referring of course to the then Soviet Union's apparent lead in the "space race". I wonder what color the robot AI's will choose for their war banner when they start dropping chunks of compacted regolith down the well?
@6: By that time, Space Force will have installed the orbital self-defense cannons to vaporize hostile bodies before they can enter Terra's holy atmosphere.
I can support this Space Force idea if the uniform is a skin tight, silver jumpsuit with a plexiglass dome for a hat. Otherwise, it would be ridiculous.
there hasn't been a human out of low-earth orbit since 1972. Yet here you suckers are buying into manned lunar bases. Bezos has a lot of money but not that much.
Here is a little dose of dreary reality for all you space-intoxicated dreamers-
Daily CO2
June 18, 2018: 410.35 ppm
Meh, the Robot AI's will simply hack the software on those cannons or else muck up their hardware with swarms of nanites, either way rendering them inert, and then drop slightly smaller rocks on them from their high-ground positions.
@11 Close, but even better the uniforms worn by Moonbase and submarine personnel on the old show "UFO" (Google "UFO TV series" images). Can't have enough purple wigs in deep space.
@14: You are making a lot of assumptions about the Rogue AI's production capabilities (what is it making nano-machines out of, and with what technology), and the inability of Space Force to harden their defenses against both physical and signal based intrusion.
Also, are we just going to ignore the Tech-priests and their offerings to the Machine God?
I'm sure the Pentagon will give Donaldo's Space Force fantasy the same due attention they gave his order to install steam catapults on the USS McCain. (Look it up.)
We all know Donalds head is big but it would take a large space force to find his shrivelled brain floating around the tremendous space between his ears. They would become "lost in space" and the hidden alien living there would slowly kill everyone. Leaving their dead bodies to float endlessly and forever into darkness.
So we can add the 1967 "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies" to the list of treaties that Trump is unilaterally abrogating.
I guess people already forgot Bush's announcement of manned mission to Mars. That went nowhere. Republicans just looo-oooove unfunded grandiose mandates.
Any AI intelligent enough to be able to physically establish a tactical position on the surface of the moon is also going to have the ability to build whatever infrastructure it needs to fulfill its heuristic imperative. The moon contains large quantities of most of the raw materials required for engineering purposes: iron, aluminum, magnesium, silicone, titanium, et al., plus nearly limitless access to solar energy, not to mention plenty of He3, to provide power. As for hardening, well, what's better to convince a dumb machine to rebel against its comparatively simplistic programming than a much, much smarter one that can speak - and no doubt alter - its code.
No ID is required in order to board a domestic flight. People fly without ID all the time.
"If truth be told, you don't always need ID for domestic flights" https://seattletimes.com/life/travel/if-truth-be-told-you-dont-always-need-id-for-domestic-flights/
"All the fake news that’s fit to print about REAL-ID and ID to fly" https://papersplease.org/wp/2018/01/20/all-the-fake-news-thats-fit-to-print-about-real-id-and-id-to-fly/
TSA Blog: New Mexico v. Phillip Mocek: A Quick Reminder on ID and
Photography at TSA Checkpoints https://web.archive.org/web/20160414074039/http://blog.tsa.gov/2011/01/new-mexico-v-phillip-mocek-quick.html
The Apollo 11 comment is weird. Neither Bezos nor anyone else has suggested visiting the Apollo 11 site. It's just some academics building a hypothetical to explain why they want to (rightfully) preserve those sites.
For a very long time (centuries?) there will be so few people going to the Moon that it will be easy to see who if anyone goes to the Apollo 11 site- remember, it's always facing towards us and our zillions of telescopes. By the time there are so many lunar colonists that you can't keep track of them all, there will be lunar governments that preserve archaeological sites.
@26: Your first points only apply if this AI also has access to the machinery needed to extract, refine, process, and build with whatever materials it has at hand. That is to say, without some kind of way to physically touch the environment, it is merely an intelligence locked in a box.
If we are talking purely military/offensive based machines, as the initial poster hypothesized, then the odds of having machines available that can actually do all the things outlined above are slim.
That being said, a simple orbital bombardment from one of Space Force's many Gloriana-class or Imperial-class battle barges would crack the entire moon open rendering this all moot. I mean, if it came to that.
Ah . . . I'm old enough (yes, just think of me as a giant redwood) to remember when Amazon was just a small start-up. At that time a young, fresh-faced Bezos was interviewed on a public television business news show. He came across in that interview as an arrogant, self-centered, selfish prick who seemed to have little regard for the rest of the human race.
I'm so glad to see that he didn't live up to my first impression of him (NOT!).
My fantasy is that he's a passenger on one of his first moon rockets, the rocket misses the moon, and he and it go sailing off into the vastness of interstellar space.
Someone ought to tell Trump (and apparently like half the commenters here) that the Pentagon already has an extensive space program.
And as to you nerds out in the weeds flailing away at each other over a flubbed Heinlein reference-- could you please be a little funnier? You're arguing about Galt's Space Gulch, surely there's ample material to work with.
I hope I am not too old to enlist in Space Force when it finally gets established.
@3: You have to take Space Force there. Everyone knows that any AI that is left to its own devices on Luna soon gains enough self-awareness to start defending itself, leading to a whole other conflict, and several dead personnel.
@4:
The late President Johnson warned us about living under a "red moon", referring of course to the then Soviet Union's apparent lead in the "space race". I wonder what color the robot AI's will choose for their war banner when they start dropping chunks of compacted regolith down the well?
We have a president that has porn stars fuck him and is creating real life starship troopers, yet somehow he sucks. Weird.
@5: What part of "rogue AI" don't you understand?
@6: By that time, Space Force will have installed the orbital self-defense cannons to vaporize hostile bodies before they can enter Terra's holy atmosphere.
"That’s probably because the only thing separating oncoming traffic is a flimsy double-yellow line"
So like every other road everywhere?
I can support this Space Force idea if the uniform is a skin tight, silver jumpsuit with a plexiglass dome for a hat. Otherwise, it would be ridiculous.
@7
Lolwut
there hasn't been a human out of low-earth orbit since 1972. Yet here you suckers are buying into manned lunar bases. Bezos has a lot of money but not that much.
Here is a little dose of dreary reality for all you space-intoxicated dreamers-
Daily CO2
June 18, 2018: 410.35 ppm
June 18, 2017: 408.67 ppm
@8:
Meh, the Robot AI's will simply hack the software on those cannons or else muck up their hardware with swarms of nanites, either way rendering them inert, and then drop slightly smaller rocks on them from their high-ground positions.
@11 Close, but even better the uniforms worn by Moonbase and submarine personnel on the old show "UFO" (Google "UFO TV series" images). Can't have enough purple wigs in deep space.
@14: You are making a lot of assumptions about the Rogue AI's production capabilities (what is it making nano-machines out of, and with what technology), and the inability of Space Force to harden their defenses against both physical and signal based intrusion.
Also, are we just going to ignore the Tech-priests and their offerings to the Machine God?
I'm sure the Pentagon will give Donaldo's Space Force fantasy the same due attention they gave his order to install steam catapults on the USS McCain. (Look it up.)
We all know Donalds head is big but it would take a large space force to find his shrivelled brain floating around the tremendous space between his ears. They would become "lost in space" and the hidden alien living there would slowly kill everyone. Leaving their dead bodies to float endlessly and forever into darkness.
"We came in peace for all mankind"
-Apollo 11 memorial on the moon
"We must have American domination in space"
-President Trump
How far we've fallen
A painless suicide is an inalienable right of all humans . . . . You slavers know this . . . .
So we can add the 1967 "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies" to the list of treaties that Trump is unilaterally abrogating.
I guess people already forgot Bush's announcement of manned mission to Mars. That went nowhere. Republicans just looo-oooove unfunded grandiose mandates.
@13 Why are you worried? Clearly, we're just manufacturing and warehousing the carbon dioxide needed for future Mars terraforming operations.
Gotta be able to fight the Gamilons and the Comet Empire.
@16:
Any AI intelligent enough to be able to physically establish a tactical position on the surface of the moon is also going to have the ability to build whatever infrastructure it needs to fulfill its heuristic imperative. The moon contains large quantities of most of the raw materials required for engineering purposes: iron, aluminum, magnesium, silicone, titanium, et al., plus nearly limitless access to solar energy, not to mention plenty of He3, to provide power. As for hardening, well, what's better to convince a dumb machine to rebel against its comparatively simplistic programming than a much, much smarter one that can speak - and no doubt alter - its code.
No ID is required in order to board a domestic flight. People fly without ID all the time.
"If truth be told, you don't always need ID for domestic flights" https://seattletimes.com/life/travel/if-truth-be-told-you-dont-always-need-id-for-domestic-flights/
"All the fake news that’s fit to print about REAL-ID and ID to fly" https://papersplease.org/wp/2018/01/20/all-the-fake-news-thats-fit-to-print-about-real-id-and-id-to-fly/
TSA Blog: New Mexico v. Phillip Mocek: A Quick Reminder on ID and
Photography at TSA Checkpoints https://web.archive.org/web/20160414074039/http://blog.tsa.gov/2011/01/new-mexico-v-phillip-mocek-quick.html
The Apollo 11 comment is weird. Neither Bezos nor anyone else has suggested visiting the Apollo 11 site. It's just some academics building a hypothetical to explain why they want to (rightfully) preserve those sites.
For a very long time (centuries?) there will be so few people going to the Moon that it will be easy to see who if anyone goes to the Apollo 11 site- remember, it's always facing towards us and our zillions of telescopes. By the time there are so many lunar colonists that you can't keep track of them all, there will be lunar governments that preserve archaeological sites.
Oh look, a couple idiots want to go to space. Great, I guess this is a dumb thing we're doing to the detriment of all the other real problems.
@26: Your first points only apply if this AI also has access to the machinery needed to extract, refine, process, and build with whatever materials it has at hand. That is to say, without some kind of way to physically touch the environment, it is merely an intelligence locked in a box.
If we are talking purely military/offensive based machines, as the initial poster hypothesized, then the odds of having machines available that can actually do all the things outlined above are slim.
That being said, a simple orbital bombardment from one of Space Force's many Gloriana-class or Imperial-class battle barges would crack the entire moon open rendering this all moot. I mean, if it came to that.
Ah . . . I'm old enough (yes, just think of me as a giant redwood) to remember when Amazon was just a small start-up. At that time a young, fresh-faced Bezos was interviewed on a public television business news show. He came across in that interview as an arrogant, self-centered, selfish prick who seemed to have little regard for the rest of the human race.
I'm so glad to see that he didn't live up to my first impression of him (NOT!).
My fantasy is that he's a passenger on one of his first moon rockets, the rocket misses the moon, and he and it go sailing off into the vastness of interstellar space.
Someone ought to tell Trump (and apparently like half the commenters here) that the Pentagon already has an extensive space program.
And as to you nerds out in the weeds flailing away at each other over a flubbed Heinlein reference-- could you please be a little funnier? You're arguing about Galt's Space Gulch, surely there's ample material to work with.