Ken you need to go back to a time when I was polite to Ed. This "debate" has been (for me) going on for several years. I would ask Ed for proof he would provide a link to a PDF or state some statistic taken form an online poll. The PDF would contradict him and the poll was taken just after Deep Impact came out. Since then this debate has just gone down hill till people asked that we either stop or clean it up. Note Ed hasn't stopped with the "Mars Nuts" and circle jerk references and just hides every time someone asks for proof of a claim. I have a long list of things he claims are true, non of which seem likely to have the evidence it would require to make this back into a debate.

You mentioned the concept of protecting a telescope form the sun's warmth by putting it in a deep walled crater, well as Nick has pointed out this defeats the propose of having the telescope on the Moon. Any crater that would offer protection form the sun removes the scope from the elliptic viewing area thus out of more than 95% of the possible impactor detection game... L1 or L2 detection systems doesn't have the problems the Moon has or the high cost. Any shielding doesn't have to be attached in such away as to easily conduct heat into the scope it self. This is a design issue and Tom or Gary or some other bright person can come up with three or four ways of blocking heat. By the time you had a single setup up and running on the Moon you could have three or four orbital scopes up and running at a lower cost. Which do you think the US Congress would buy?

Don't make the same absurd assumptions Ed does, please. Everyone on this Board has concern for humanities safety and want detecting of hazards of all kinds. The problem is...Ed has placed the hazard of a major imapct as very high with in our life time and the facts so far don't support him. A big NEO could be headed for us right now, but the statistics would put the odds of that around than of both you and I winning Power Ball and Mega Lotto in the same week. As to Ed's claim there is evidence that there is a 65 million year cycle in impators...if he would lay out his actual evidence for this claim maybe his "chicken little" act would make more sense.