Mirror, Mirror on the Moon

Dumb ideas: flashing aliens AND covering Earth's Moon with mirror.

Like some presidential candidates in the United States, Earth's Moon's Near Side presents an apparent blank face to the naked eye, and every individual Human who has bothered to contemplate it has projected upon that blankness their dreams and often silly notions, sometimes paid for by taxpayers.

The same could be said of the pragmatic lunar explorers who wouldn't hesitate to grab one of the last rides on the Shuttle, or who is driven to become one of NASA's newly beloved "entrepreneurs," (like me) without stopping to pay homage to regulatory hurdles as formidable as timing a trans-lunar insertion burn. But sometimes the ideas presented even among the pragmatists is just plain dumb, and you know your tax money went to pay for developing the dumb idea, too.

Whether or not the proposal to cover "half" of Earth's Moon with mirrors (half the land area of the continent of Africa, by comparison) is dumber than the purpose being to flash light into the eyes of presumed benevolent extra-solar civilizations is hard to say. On the surface, so to speak, there is a certain logic to the idea; if not in engineering, than in flashing a very large area of the distant neighborhood with a periodicity that would be apparent to distant "eyeballs" to the point where they might even guess the upper and lower limits to the host Moon's relationship with a larger Earth, if it can be separated from the glare from the Sun.

The Sun is invisible to the naked Human eye only 50 light years away. (That's a stark testimony to our sun's real smallness in even the neighborhood's scheme of things. How much less obvious would be the glare from a mirror, mirror on the Moon.

Anyway, if the romantic side of lunar lore is your bag, than you can read more about this Dumb Idea here and here. Personally? I like to think that I'm among the more pragmatic who have hopes a culture of authentic, stark reason and reality will eventually emerge with the fulfillment of the actual and true Space Age ahead for our grandchildren, if we can help rather than hurt their cause in the present. As I never tire if saying, real space exploration is about what works and what doesn't work.

Most window seals on Earth are increasingly Silicone-based, but it's a deadly contaminant in the cold and hot, rarefied, foaming and hostile vacuum barely 100,000 feet over your head. Even if Silicone on the fingers gets into the window seal, you're likely to be sucked out the window hole after 100 hours or so of Real Space. Those who make it to the stars will be not be romantics, unless of course, they give first place to practical engineering.