I can spend an entire day reading at www.space.com, frankly I could spend everyday reading there. A recent article was on sending a small orbiter piggy backed to another rocket to study the moon dust. As most people know the regolith, or moon dust, is like tiny glass particles. These particles can be dangerous to human skin and lungs and the moon dust tends to cling to everything. Astronauts have to spend a fair amount of their time managing it.
The first thought that comes to mind is how much we are still in the baby steps of space travel. When we are just now struggling with the concept of handling moon dust problems and have to spend an approximate $80 million dollars for just the orbiter to study it. This doesn't include the man hours on Earth needed to extrapolate those results.
Two thoughts run through my simple mind. First, if there are other life forms out there travelling through space already - how much money or currency they must have already invested must be staggering. Or perhaps their intelligences are so vast that they took less time and resources to do what we are attempting.
The second thought is if that $80 million dollars, along with the other $340 million dollars that are part of the rest of that rocket launch program couldn't be spent more wisely saving this planet and it's inhabitants.
I don't see the moon as some great resources for Earth. I'd rather see our monies put into exploring new planets and worlds that might contain actual environments we could live in or resources we could bring back. But what do I know??? The link for the article I mentioned is:http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080410-ladee-moon-dust-mission.html