SSI Activity

Apologies for the clunkiness of this reply. I haven't figured out a
good way to use GMail to nest responses in other messages yet, so
snippets will be short since I need to add the carots manually.

1) Lunar simulation

> This could be interesting. What kind of simulation do you have in mind?
> Are you talking about simulating the materials needed to construct it,
> the extraction of oxygen and other lunar resources, a simulation of
> what would be necessary to support life on the Moon, some combination
> of these, or something else entirely?

The goal of the simulation I had in mind would be to provide as strong
a picture as possible of the resources we would need to provide to
establish and maintain a lunar settlement, with adjustments to the
simulation being made as different technogies are assumed or proved to
be usable for extraction of lunar resources to improve the
self-sufficency of the settlement. Ideally, such a simulation should
be able to provide us with a good idea of what technologies would give
us the most "bang for the buck" resource-wise and might help us
prioritize our research. The interface as I had been imagining it
would have been a blah text interface or a rudimentary GUI, but with
your background we could build some really nice images and turn it
into a fun advocacy tool as well.

BTW, for any of these ideas, I fully admit to being in the early
stages of learning what's already out there, so all these could
already be done and I just haven't found it yet.

2) NEO online database

> Hm. That could be kind of neat. Here's the closest thing I found:
> http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/

Nice site, thanks! There's a complete searchable/sortable database of
known NEOs at the same site here:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_elem but unfortunately all this
has is the orbits of the NEOs, nothing about their composition.
Whether this is because we don't have the technology to determine
their composition at this time or no one at the neo.jpl.nasa.gov site
has bothered to record them, I have no idea.

3) SE 3-D models

That's a nice animation. I'll pass it along and see what the other
group has to say.

--Justin