The unmanned $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been designed to examine radiation levels and identify natural resources on the moon, such as ice, for possible use by future human outposts. Professor Mark Robinson, views the moon as a way to study the early stages of planet evolution. Scientists want to explore the geology on various parts of the moon.

Past moon missions collected rocks only around the moon’s equator. “Imagine if you were Martians and you sent six missions to Earth, and they went to six places in Africa,” Robinson says. “And when you landed, you could only go 2 miles from where you landed. Do you think you could understand the whole continent of Africa?”

Good question. But if these aliens were to travel farther afield, would they gain a better understanding of Africa? For example, would they understand why;

Despite resources of platinum, gold, diamonds, petroleum, manganese, limestone, salt, uranium, copper, cobalt, zinc, iron ore, phosphates, potash, bauxite, gypsum, soda ash, rubies, titanium, tin ore, coal, clay, lead and cobalt in every country of the African Union;

Despite the continent contributing 48 per cent of its diamonds, 29 per cent of its gold, 48 per cent of its platinum and 46 per cent of the world’s chromium to global markets (with diamonds alone generating around $76 billion in sales at the retail level each year);

Despite a land with oil reserves of 75.4 billion barrels and one third of the world’s new discoveries of oil since 2000, having taken place in Africa;

Despite from 2002 to 2003, trade between China and Africa doubled to $18.5 billion; by 2007, it had reached $73 billion. (Much of the growth was due to increased Chinese imports of oil,copper, and diamonds from African nations);

Would they understand why that despite all this, 47 percent of the population live below the poverty line of a dollar per day. And half of female-headed households live on less than one dollar a day? (According the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) .

Would they understand why 34 of the 50 nations on the UN list of least developed countries are in Africa? Of the10 countries with the lowest recorded adult literacy rates in the world, seven are in Africa. In West Africa alone 65 million people are illiterate - 40 million of these are women.

According to the United Nations, 62 percent of Africans do not have access to improved sanitation. More than 5,000 children, mostly under five years of age, die every day due to lack of sanitation and hygiene.

Hunger and malnutrition are killing nearly six million children a year, and more people are malnourished in sub-Saharan Africa this decade than in the 1990s, according to a United Nations report. With recent statistics from World Food Programme (WFP) suggesting that one in three people in Africa goes to bed without food everyday.

Yet companies from the United States to the Middle East and Asia are eyeing investments in large farms on the world’s poorest continent, looking to buy or lease tens of thousands of hectares of land as they seek greener pastures to help secure food security at home.

Despite nearly 1 billion people, accounting for over a sixth of the world’s population, Africa generates only 4% of global electricity. The World Bank reckons that 500m sub-Saharan Africans are without what it calls “modern energy”

Yet a consortium of around 20 companies, including Munich Re (MUVGn.DE), Siemens (SIEGn.DE), RWE (RWEG.DE) and Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), plans to build a 400 billion euro ($555.3 billion) solar power project in Africa. However the project, led by Munich Re, would use the energy from the Africa-based solar project to provide electricity to German households.

Would the aliens be able to understand how the above scenario has evolved?

If they visited around 200 years ago, perhaps this may have helped them draw conclusions on the situation today.

They would have seen one of the main industries taking place in Africa - the slave trade. The slave trade in Africa existed for thousands of years. “The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. “Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean” Elikia M’bokolo, April 1998.

If they decide to drop by in the near future they can read an in-depth study the British government will embark upon to measure how monies accrued from this slave trade were spent. The Right Reverend Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark, United Kingdom, recently noted that “The profits from the slave trade were part of the bedrock of our country’s (Great Britain) industrial development…” and “no one who was involved in running the business, financing it or benefiting from its products can say they had clean hands.”

The government announced that it will set up an online database of all slave owners in the country during the abolition of slavery in 1833 and will trace how the wealth was spent.

Some of British and American wealth was used to finance Sir Ernest Oppenheimer who founded the Anglo American Corporation, a gold mining company, in 1917 with £1 million, raised from U.K. and U.S. sources. The AAC became the majority stakeholder in the De Beers company in 1926.

De Beers group is the worlds most valuable diamond producer. De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed in 1888 by the merger of the companies of Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes, by which time the company was the sole owner of all diamond mining operations in South Africa.

In 1889, Rhodes negotiated a strategic agreement with the London-based Diamond Syndicate, which agreed to purchase a fixed quantity of diamonds at an agreed price, thereby regulating output and maintaining prices.

In August 2007, the British charity, War on Want, published a report accusing Anglo American of profiting from the abuse of people in the developing countries in which the company operates. According to the charity, “in South Africa, local communities threatened with Anglo American mines have faced severe repression in their fight to stay on their land, while in Ghana and Mali, local communities see little of the huge profits being made by AngloGold Ashanti but suffer from fear and intimidation and from the damaging impact of its mines on their environment, health and livelihoods”.

Surely someone in Africa must benefit? Well if the aliens landed in Accra, the Ghanian capital, they would more than likely come across the Golden Jubilee Presidential Palace complex.


According to the consultants, the project covers an area of 16,750sqm, consisting of a ‘presidential and vice presidential offices, the president’s palace, ceremonial public spaces and allied service buildings.’

Official correspondence from the Indian Consultants to the project, STUP Consultants Limited, put the cost of the Golden Jubilee Presidential Palace complex at $135 million.

If they were to travel to an area a few miles away they would see filthy children working in a highly toxic environment extracting metallic parts. Here, where the air is poisoned with burning lead and plastics, is the final resting place for old PCs, TV sets or mobile phones from affluent countries.


An illegal e-waste dump scattered with computers originally used by British National Health System (NHS). Investigators found stickers indicating the computers were the property of Thames Gateway NHS Trust. They even found confidential data stored on some hard disks.

Although Great Britain and Ghana have signed the Basle Convention which supposes to combat hazardous waste dumping, the crime against the environment and the African people continues.


What discoveries would the aliens make with regard to water resources within the African environment?

Well they would, in many areas, find that a lack of toilets makes it impossible to separate drinking water from waste water. As a result, drinking water becomes polluted. People must either buy water or drink polluted water. Yet for many, the average income is less than a dollar per day; when they are forced to buy drinking water they use more than 30 percent of their income.

Polluted water and an inadequate water supply for people to wash their hands cause waterborne diseases. Residents live under the constant threat of contracting typhoid fever, cholera, enteritis, and malaria.

However, to counter this problem there has been a recent innovative introduction - the “Peepoo bag”. People can carry around biodegradable bags to use when needed. The bag is a disposable toilet. Similar to doggy poo bags.


How does this compare with our aliens’ fellow space travelers toilet requirements at NASA? Have they sanitary problems? They did have. This has been resolved too.

The US space agency NASA recently shelled out $19 million to order a new toilet from Russia for their segment of International Space Station (ISS)

“The US astronauts were sick and tired of toilet breakdowns and unpleasant odors. NASA was eventually forced to order a toilet system from Russia. US tax payers paid $19 million for the space toilet. The new construction was installed in the US segment of the ISS,” Pravda.Ru website reported.

The daily ration of Russian cosmonauts is wholesome - more savory, more natural and more diverse resulting in thicker “outcome”, while the US space ration, equally nutritious, but low calorie, results in softer waste and this difference could have ruined the US space toilet after visits by the Russians, the report said.

That’s a lot of money for a toilet. Where did it come from?

NASA will see its 2010 fiscal year budget from the government increase to $18.7 billion. Combined with the $1 billion NASA got from the new stimulus package, that’s $2.1 billion more than the space agency received in 2008.

A look at NASA’s $17.6 billion 2009 fiscal year budget reveals that:

$5.78 billion for space shuttle and International Space Station projects,

$577 million for heliophysics, the study of the sun and its effect on the solar system,

$447 million for aeronautics research,

$173 million for entrepreneurs to develop commercial transport capabilities to the International Space Station,

NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2008 amounts to $416 billion dollars.

What about its employees:

Average Salary of Jobs with Related Titles

In USD as of Jun 14, 2009
aerospace

$72,000
aerospace engineer

$75,000
secretary

$33,000
general engineer

$74,000
contract specialist

$55,000
information technology specialist

$65,000
quality assurance specialist

$53,000
program analyst

$64,000
it specialist

$66,000
human resources specialist

$56,000
electronics engineer

$72,000
computer engineer

$76,000


So what would our alien friends make of all that? Would they be able to understand Africa in comparison to other industrialized countries? Why, with so many natural resources, is it in this position while other less resourceful countries have become much more advanced and have grown into economic giants? A country whose taxpayers pay for a $19m toilet and lead an affable lifestyle in which it can purchase expensive stones from the ground. While many in Africa struggle to buy a bottle of drinking water a day and have to use a doggy poo bag.

NASA and its scientific resources could be put to use creating a sustainable life and infrastructure for the African people whereby literacy, adequate food supply and modern sanitation can be shared by all the African people, not just presidents. After all it was the labor of the African people that initiated the industrial revolution creating wealth without which there would be no space travel today. We don`t want our alien friends to think we let our children die at the expense of traveling to the moon.

Or perhaps they understand that by limiting resources you keep the price high.

Aliens in Africa | arch1design - Heroin and Cornflakes