Be Excellent To Each Other

What the hell is this thread about, eh?

I'll tell you. It's the Moon Men. Yes, the Moon Men, and they've pissed us off. But what can we do? We're not allowed to weaponise space, by international treaty!

Don't worry folks, you're all safe. What we're actually going to do is drop a massive fuck-off lump of metal on the moon from orbit, causing the release of massive amounts of kinetic energy at the moon's surface, and an explosion and plume of debris 30 MILES HIGH!

How cool is that?! Yes, at 12:31 BST tomorrow, NASA's LCROSS satellite will drop a big heavy load of sensing equipment onto the Earth's [EDIT - NO! Moon's! Damned Moon Men saboteurs.] surface. Not to kill Moon Men, but in order to analyse the plume kicked up for traces of subsurface water and other useful compounds.

There's a phrase for this sort of weaponry I've seen in a few scifi books, although I don't know where it came from: "Rods From God".

Let's hope they don't make the same mistake as you have.

Er - oopsie.

Ho ho.

30 miles won't be big enough to see with the naked eye.
I take it there's going to be a live feed somewhere (hopefully from that satellite).

I hope so as well, because this sounds awesome.

And with any luck won't knock the moon out of orbit creating massive tidal waves and death.

Or break it in half. Mind you, we do have the biggest moon. Maybe two smaller ones would be better.

I think they should leave the poor Moon alone.

Weep.

Hopefully the moon men won't be planning a pre-emptive strike on us.

Happily, given the Moon's history of being massively impacted by very large and fast moving space detritus, I think dropping something the weight of a people carrier will have a negligible effect.

I bet they don't find water, though.

What if they shatter the innocuous outer shell, releasing the long-slumbering Conflagrant Eye of Chaos. We'd all be in for it then. Aw, heck.

Can someone be a pal and bump this thread/Tweet tomorrow when this is going live? I would very much like to see this.

But yeah, I'm sure they won't find a lot.

Can Bruce Willis not go up there and do some drilling instead?

Impossible. The Eye moved to Io about six million years ago, citing noisy neighbours or something.

I've heard there's a very strong possibility of this creating a black hole beneath the Swiss/French border and swallowing us all. Think of the children.

I'd laugh if it went through one of the holes in middle and Mr Spoon had to go and get it back.

Dual comedy post of the week for me.

Not sure we do, in absolute terms... Mind you, if we're talking relative to the size of the planet it's orbiting then yes I think we do.

Anyway, though, space-smashing stuff sounds ace.

I remember in Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's almost-great 'Footfall' (marred only by a complete Gary Stu of a character, a handsome motor-biking sci-fi writer who saves the world, for flips sake) space-elephants invade Earth and take out our armoured divisions with metal boomerangs fired from space. 'Kinetic weapons' they called it, and I found it awesome.

Sorry, yeah - Ganymede (which orbits Jupiter, and is big enough to eat Mercury and have Pluto for pudding) is the biggest moon, but compared to the host planet, ours is the biggest.

I fucking love it when scientists get pissed up and write an email saying "We should lob a washing machine into the moon as it'll tell us decent stuff" and someone picks the idea up and runs with it, and, all of a sudden, there's proper science happening.

Didn't Pournelle also write Fallen Angels, in which the two stranded heroes are aided by sci-fi fanboys?

It seems standard practice to put perverse fantasy into your story - there's a great survival adventure two-parter in the Man-Kzin wars books which is marred somewhat as it's about a nerdy ethologist who finds himself alone in an alien nature preserve with a bevy of perpetually horny underage prehistoric girls.

Well, given the Sci-Fi author is trying to communicate what sex is to the average Sci-Fi reader, so it's always going to be awkward.

Ben Elton's books are the worst for that - how many of his heroes are complete nerds or social outcasts yet manage to save the day?

Also don't forget in Footfall a journalist gets killed by getting his head shoved down the bog or somesuch then stuck under some compost (few years since I read it so that might be not 100% right) . Fantasies galore in there

I dislike Ben Elton books.

Are Bullets classed as kinetic weapons?

One would imagine so.

Yes, because the damage they do is a result of their mass and speed. An RPG, for example, would not be a kinetic weapon. Unless it hit you in the eye and failed to explode.

None, with the exception of The First Casualty and Past Mortem (and he's not really an outcast).

OK not quite save the day but in a lot of them the protagonist or other main character has some form of social pariah stigma. Stark - Nerd, This other eden - nerdy and black and weedy FBI agent, in Gridlock he seems to take the piss out of himself and have as many minorities in one social group as he can, Dead Famous - not really that much of an outcast but someone who doesn't get a lot of modern life.

It just seems to me like a lot of his characters are on the outside looking in which reminds me of his old stand up routine about "fartys" as if everyone except the beautiful people was a member of the nerd class rather than just a select few. I don't make any pretences to not belong in the nerd caste but I don't need some vicarious success through literature to make myself feel better about that.

10 minutes!

Death from above, moon suckers!

I would love it if we ended up nuking it from orbit.

Ooh. Ta for the reminder!

Just time to get the computer and the router turned on.

is there a link for watching the boom?

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Malc

Thanks!

One minute!

Is that really a live picture out of the front of the space thing as it heads towards the moon? How awesome is that?

They could have put the video in colour at least!

I'm waiting for the HD feed.

Haha, they just did!

WHERE'S TEH BOOM?

Talk about disappointment!

Noise doesn't travel in a vacuum, does it?

There's a fantastic beardy man in the control room. A control room that looks like it's in the Stationery Cupboard.

Boo

Hopefully they'll get some footage from the Mauna Kea telescope.

Well that was dull.

Did anyone else see the guy in the control room go for a hi5 and get totally blanked, though?