Space elevator/tether all the way to the moon. (What do you mean, a day doesn’t equal a month? Details, details.) Climb it.
Once you’ve got that, just pull the moon close enough to make the transfer trivial.
Jump really really high.
Discover a material opaque to gravitons, sit on it, and push off lightly in just the right direction. (This is totally how gravity works.)
Pray really hard.
Sell your soul to the devil in exchange for getting your object to the moon. (Note: probably do this one after 6.)
Get abducted by aliens who happen to live on the moon.
Send it to the place where they filmed the fake moon landings.
Put it in an envelope addressed to “The Moon” and let the postal service handle it. They’re really good.
Project Orion (huge lead plate, set off nuclear bombs underneath it for thrust).
Just wait. The uncertainty principle, it’s a hell of a thing.
Put it on the largest satellite yet made and launch it. Then blow up the moon. “The” moon is presumably now whatever earth’s largest satellite now is. Done.
Railgun.
Same idea as 3, but move the earth instead of the moon. Extremely large rockets, perhaps.
EmDrive. (Yeah, maybe this one is too silly to be on the list.)
Make a very large fan and blow it upward.
Throw it very hard.
Write a novel in which the object is on the moon. (Does Sherlock Holmes live at 221b Baker Street? Yes. Is the object on the moon? Yes.)
Just believe really hard that the object will be on the moon. However can that work? I can’t tell you, it’s a Secret.
Take a photograph of the night sky, showing the moon and stars and whatnot. Place a small coin on Sirius. Place your object on the moon.
Buy a horse and name it “The Moon”. Put the object on the horse’s back. Or, if you want to stress “sending to”, change one letter: buy a house and name it “The Moon”, and send the object there.
Birds. Lots and lots and lots of birds.
Hold its hand and kiss it. (Howard, 1954; Sinatra, 1964)
Gigantic peashooter.
Very large hot air balloon.
Tell Donald Trump that Barack Obama went to great lengths to keep this object away from the moon.
Catapult. May require some research into extra-strong elastic.
Make getting it to the moon the largest term in a superintelligent AI’s utility function.
Very, very large seesaw. Not clear where the fulcrum should be (cf. Archimedes)
Send spaceships out to the asteroid belt to collect asteroids and bring them to earth. Not to extract valuable minerals, just to make the earth bigger and heavier. Both the increased radius and the increased gravity will bring the moon closer. Eventually it will be close enough that I can just reach out and put my object on the moon.
Star Trek-style teleporters.
Install Diamond Age-style nanofabricators on the moon. Transfer (necessarily destructively) the object’s entire quantum state to the moon for reconstruction there.
Write a space-simulation game featuring both the object and the moon. Getting the object to the moon in-game is then straightforward.
The moon was probably formed from bits of the earth. Historically speaking, the earth and the moon are two parts of the same object, and our parcel is therefore already on the moon.
Instead of making the earth bigger heavier as in #31, make the moon bigger and heavier. Again, this will eventually bring the earth close enough to it to make the problem trivial.
Solar sail. (Initial direction will likely be wrong; may need to arrange for slingshot manoeuvres around other planets.)
“Solar” sail, but propulsion not from the sun but from a giant laser on earth. (Easier to get the direction right.)
Attach to branches of an extremely large tree (cf. de St-Exupery 1943).
Same as 10, but without the requirement that the postal service actually finds a way to do it. After all, the challenge was merely to send the thing to the moon and didn’t say explicitly that it actually has to arrive.
Give it to Hati Hróðvitnisson who perpetually chases Máni, the moon—eventually, at Ragnarök, he will catch it.
Wait for the Vietnamese Mid-Autumn festival, when Cuoi, the man in the moon, descends to earth. Hand the package to him.
Find a copy of the Qur’an and open it to sura 54, The Moon. Place your object thereon.
Persuade David Marks, Matt Moore, Larry Brown, and David Jackson to re-form their psychedelic pop band The Moon. Send the object to them.
Bow and arrow.
Ion thrusters, powered by a small nuclear reactor. (Would need other means to get into orbit; many of the other methods here would do.)
VSIMR (it has “rocket” in the name but is different enough from e.g. Saturn V type rockets to count as a separate method).
Construct a closed timelike curve using, say, a Tipler cylinder. Use it to bring the object back to before the collision that split the moon off from the earth. Place the object on a part of the earth that ended up as Moon. Wait.
Getting the object to the moon is left as an elementary exercise for the reader.
Some comments:
I didn’t have the experience of getting stuck, writing some stupid things, and then having obviously-good ideas. I mean, I did find some more-plausible answers later on, but I don’t think the stupid answers helped me get to them; they just filled in the time before I thought of them. (Of course I could be wrong about that. Introspection is hard.)
It felt to me as if getting as far as 50 wasn’t so much a matter of thinking further and further outside the box, but of how willing I was to “milk” certain general-purpose techniques. (Things that let you get things high up on earth but obviously wouldn’t really get as far as orbit, never mind the moon. Wilful misinterpretation of “the moon”. Fiction/imagination/etc. Magic and mythology and religion. Getting someone else to do it and not specifying how they would.) I’m pretty sure it would have been easy to find ten more of most of those, but it would have felt like cheating. (The amount I did felt a bit like cheating too, but I hope it was reasonable. In so far as anything here is supposed to be reasonable.)
Getting to 50 ways without feeling too cheaty was difficult, of course.
I’m pretty sure it would have been easy to find ten more of most of those, but it would have felt like cheating.
I felt the same way. It’s easy to generate something similar to an existing choice, like I included both catapult and trebuchet, but it feels wrong. But when I think about it feeling wrong, that’s premature pruning...
Apollo-style rocket mission.
Space elevator/tether all the way to the moon. (What do you mean, a day doesn’t equal a month? Details, details.) Climb it.
Once you’ve got that, just pull the moon close enough to make the transfer trivial.
Jump really really high.
Discover a material opaque to gravitons, sit on it, and push off lightly in just the right direction. (This is totally how gravity works.)
Pray really hard.
Sell your soul to the devil in exchange for getting your object to the moon. (Note: probably do this one after 6.)
Get abducted by aliens who happen to live on the moon.
Send it to the place where they filmed the fake moon landings.
Put it in an envelope addressed to “The Moon” and let the postal service handle it. They’re really good.
Project Orion (huge lead plate, set off nuclear bombs underneath it for thrust).
Just wait. The uncertainty principle, it’s a hell of a thing.
Put it on the largest satellite yet made and launch it. Then blow up the moon. “The” moon is presumably now whatever earth’s largest satellite now is. Done.
Railgun.
Same idea as 3, but move the earth instead of the moon. Extremely large rockets, perhaps.
EmDrive. (Yeah, maybe this one is too silly to be on the list.)
Make a very large fan and blow it upward.
Throw it very hard.
Write a novel in which the object is on the moon. (Does Sherlock Holmes live at 221b Baker Street? Yes. Is the object on the moon? Yes.)
Just believe really hard that the object will be on the moon. However can that work? I can’t tell you, it’s a Secret.
Take a photograph of the night sky, showing the moon and stars and whatnot. Place a small coin on Sirius. Place your object on the moon.
Buy a horse and name it “The Moon”. Put the object on the horse’s back. Or, if you want to stress “sending to”, change one letter: buy a house and name it “The Moon”, and send the object there.
Birds. Lots and lots and lots of birds.
Hold its hand and kiss it. (Howard, 1954; Sinatra, 1964)
Gigantic peashooter.
Very large hot air balloon.
Tell Donald Trump that Barack Obama went to great lengths to keep this object away from the moon.
Catapult. May require some research into extra-strong elastic.
Make getting it to the moon the largest term in a superintelligent AI’s utility function.
Very, very large seesaw. Not clear where the fulcrum should be (cf. Archimedes)
Send spaceships out to the asteroid belt to collect asteroids and bring them to earth. Not to extract valuable minerals, just to make the earth bigger and heavier. Both the increased radius and the increased gravity will bring the moon closer. Eventually it will be close enough that I can just reach out and put my object on the moon.
Star Trek-style teleporters.
Install Diamond Age-style nanofabricators on the moon. Transfer (necessarily destructively) the object’s entire quantum state to the moon for reconstruction there.
Write a space-simulation game featuring both the object and the moon. Getting the object to the moon in-game is then straightforward.
The moon was probably formed from bits of the earth. Historically speaking, the earth and the moon are two parts of the same object, and our parcel is therefore already on the moon.
Instead of making the earth bigger heavier as in #31, make the moon bigger and heavier. Again, this will eventually bring the earth close enough to it to make the problem trivial.
Solar sail. (Initial direction will likely be wrong; may need to arrange for slingshot manoeuvres around other planets.)
“Solar” sail, but propulsion not from the sun but from a giant laser on earth. (Easier to get the direction right.)
Attach to branches of an extremely large tree (cf. de St-Exupery 1943).
Same as 10, but without the requirement that the postal service actually finds a way to do it. After all, the challenge was merely to send the thing to the moon and didn’t say explicitly that it actually has to arrive.
Give it to Hati Hróðvitnisson who perpetually chases Máni, the moon—eventually, at Ragnarök, he will catch it.
Wait for the Vietnamese Mid-Autumn festival, when Cuoi, the man in the moon, descends to earth. Hand the package to him.
Send it via Julian Barratt or Noel Fielding. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recurring_The_Mighty_Boosh_characters#The_Moon)
Find a copy of the Qur’an and open it to sura 54, The Moon. Place your object thereon.
Persuade David Marks, Matt Moore, Larry Brown, and David Jackson to re-form their psychedelic pop band The Moon. Send the object to them.
Bow and arrow.
Ion thrusters, powered by a small nuclear reactor. (Would need other means to get into orbit; many of the other methods here would do.)
VSIMR (it has “rocket” in the name but is different enough from e.g. Saturn V type rockets to count as a separate method).
Construct a closed timelike curve using, say, a Tipler cylinder. Use it to bring the object back to before the collision that split the moon off from the earth. Place the object on a part of the earth that ended up as Moon. Wait.
Getting the object to the moon is left as an elementary exercise for the reader.
Some comments:
I didn’t have the experience of getting stuck, writing some stupid things, and then having obviously-good ideas. I mean, I did find some more-plausible answers later on, but I don’t think the stupid answers helped me get to them; they just filled in the time before I thought of them. (Of course I could be wrong about that. Introspection is hard.)
It felt to me as if getting as far as 50 wasn’t so much a matter of thinking further and further outside the box, but of how willing I was to “milk” certain general-purpose techniques. (Things that let you get things high up on earth but obviously wouldn’t really get as far as orbit, never mind the moon. Wilful misinterpretation of “the moon”. Fiction/imagination/etc. Magic and mythology and religion. Getting someone else to do it and not specifying how they would.) I’m pretty sure it would have been easy to find ten more of most of those, but it would have felt like cheating. (The amount I did felt a bit like cheating too, but I hope it was reasonable. In so far as anything here is supposed to be reasonable.)
Getting to 50 ways without feeling too cheaty was difficult, of course.
13 and 19 are cool
I almost put down #12 in my list as well, I’m glad to see it made yours
These are much more creative than mine, good job. I especially liked 8, 12, 27, and 29.
I felt the same way. It’s easy to generate something similar to an existing choice, like I included both catapult and trebuchet, but it feels wrong. But when I think about it feeling wrong, that’s premature pruning...