Hurry! You can put down a deposit of only £4,400,000 (dollars, multiply by 1.39) for the first house on the Moon. The price is only £44,525,536.42, and your monthly exoenses will be only £234,000 – mortgage, water, power, food, meteor protection, and average property markup of 27.61 percent.
So says a message received from Eve (and Adam?) today, March 30. Postal and trash collection services, school and medical facilities, and council tax – oh, and oxygen – are not mentioned or may be in the small print. The message must have got past the spam filter quicker than expected, being surely intended for tomorrow, April 1.
I agree that from the lonely luxury of my lunar mansion I would have the purest view of the starry universe, and of a gray desert. Nevertheless, you couldn’t pay me to take up the offer, let alone ask me to pay the millions I don’t have. I’d rather live amid air, trees, clouds, and all the hazes created by man and other biota, and forgive them for interfering with the sky.
__________
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Hello Guy,
I agree, a pretty bleak aspect.
At least with no atmosphere neither earthshine or even the sun itself would interfere with a clear view always of the stars.
Location, location, location. At that price you ought to get to pick where the Earth will be fixed perpetually in your view of the sky – albeit with some barely perceptible wobble from your own libration.
Pick your estate in the lunar northern hemisphere and get to watch the Earth rotate every day from left to right and the Earthly terminator move over a month from right to left. Just the opposite if you locate in the lunar south.
How weird it would be if here on Earth we looked up and saw the moon rotate (i.e., more frequently than exactly once a month).
It did, before tidal lock. And it was a lot closer too.
Gives me ideas for possible illustrations.
That would be great.
Gives me ideas for possible illustrations.
Gives me ideas for possible illustrations.
Or perhaps you could move to Mars with slippery oligarch Elon Musk who seems to have declared himself the owner of said world.
I hope we’ll have big radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon during my lifetime, and I hope they get there before we create the same sort of noise across the radio spectrum that is increasing exponentially everywhere on Earth. I suppose engineers and technicians would need to maintain, repair, and upgrade the equipment, but if they’re living on the Moon hopefully they’ll live on the near side and commute to work when needed.
And, much sooner than the radio telescopes on the far side, for the pure beauty and wonder of it, let’s put a small optical telescope on the near side pointed continuously at Earth, with a live video feed available on the internet. It would be a pleasure just to see the Earth from the Moon at any random moment, and quite dramatic to see a solar eclipse from the Moon when we here on Earth are simultaneously experiencing a lunar eclipse. I want to see the Earth ringed by 360 degrees of sunrise and sunset.
“Magnificent desolation”
It reminds me of the Mars One project. The sad part is that 200,000 people applied for the 1 way trip. Many of us search for happiness outside of ourselves.
To paraphrase the Dalai Lama in the “Art of Happiness”, we don’t need more money or the perfect mate to be happy. We only need our mind. We have to learn that negative emotions and behaviors are harmful to us and society, white positive emotions and behaviors should be cherished and developed.