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by protagonist_h 5039 days ago
With no plans to go to the moon again, we will soon be out of living moon-walkers.
1 comments

xkcd ran the numbers: http://xkcd.com/893/
Ah, yes, the mouseover text on that is brilliant, and apt:

"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

Personally, I'm optimistic that there'll be boots on the moon sometime around 2020 (although I suspect they won't have NASA logos on them). Looks like there will be 2-6 moonwalkers left to see that, with a 90% confidence interval...

I too am optimistic. All day I've seen people claiming America's moon landings for all humankind, and then blithely ignoring planned Indian, Japanese and Chinese lunar programmes. It would be a shame to think that people were only excited at the thought of white people going back to the moon.
I'm going to need to see some evidence before I believe societies make economic decisions sensibly.
It ended up being fairly accurate (and in one of the lower percentiles)