Just to be clear, the "vast stores" of water are only theoretical. There are no implications for Moon colonies. You are not going to try to extract water from glass beads. You would need to go through thousands of tons of regolith before extracting a single liter of water, and that's only if you have 100% efficiency, which you will not have.
If we ever decide to have Moon colonies we'll have 3 big problems: we won't be able to source easily carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. I predict that when we'll have such colonies, the phrase "you're worth your weight in gold" will mean you are useless, since your weight in carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen will exceed many times your weight in gold (which can be sourced locally). Similarly, "you're full of shit" will be a high form of praise, since shit will be thoroughly recycled and highly valuable.
Certainly, getting those elements in larger quantities will be important, but by the time we have the cargo capacity to build colonies on the moon it seems likely that someone would be very happy to trade, say, 100t of Earth-sourced C/N/H for 100t of Moon-mined Au, shipping included.
I don’t expect there to be much in the way of heavy elements on the moon. It’s mostly made of lighter stuff that got blasted off in the collision with earth when the moon was formed.
The surface has been slowly bombarded long after the moons creation. So surface mining could have a very different elemental mix than subsurface mining.
~48.5 tons of material hits the earth’s atmosphere per day. The moons smaller, but suck impacts where likely more common in the past * 4 billion years and you’re talking a few feet of such material across the entire surface. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/me...
Impact sites of larger asteroids are also great targets for mining operations. For example there's some speculation about the gigantic impact crater on the far side of the moon containing a gigantic metal lump below the surface
It's not entirely clear to me why you'd want to find asteroids on the moon rather than finding them in space, where the mass wouldn't hardly have to be lifted.
On paper, it would be easier to lift them from the moon than it would be to intercept and slow them down enough to land them on earth. When the asteroid hits the moon it expends huge amounts of energy in the impact, slowing it to the a near-stop as compared to its speed while free in space.
It may be possible to aerobrake asteroids at orbital velocities in earth's atmosphere, but that is a VERY dangerous proposition. It might work for small rocks, but a commercially-relevant chunk of iron would be a very dangerous object to point at earth.
The problem with asteroids is the population dynamics and time required with these heliocentric orbits. Yes, there are asteroids at a lower Delta-V than the surface of the moon. There might be only a handful that are even worth capturing and mining. If this scaled up, however, you would quickly deplete this population of NEOs.
While the Delta-V might be less, it's not less by MUCH because you spend most of your fuel getting to Earth's escape velocity in the first place. The Delta-V benefit is also balanced against a massive time lag involved in sending a robotic spacecraft to capture and boost it to an orbit where we can better access and refine it. Or you send the refinery to the asteroid for larger asteroids. Problem there - you'll basically have to build a new refinery for each asteroid. Even for larger NEOs at higher Delta-Vs, the mass is not all that much. It's also not clear that microgravity will be any better than 1/6th gravity.
There are very strong arguments for Lunar mining. We're talking about ~1 week for transit time from Earth to there. The moon can build vast Earth-like industry. You get to cherry-pick a wide variety of asteroid material types (except for volatiles) without building a new factory for each. Surface transportation isn't particularly hard. Materials to build solar panels are widely available.
Asteroids will be useful at some point, but only after we can reach the frost line. Otherwise, the asteroids we get will be parched and not offer much beyond what's on the moon, or what we can lift from Earth. After we get to the frost line, we will get vast troves of organic material, but this is at tremendous Delta-V cost and outrageously remote and time consuming to access.
A space elevator is really an optimization in reducing fuel costs for upfront investment. Such a thing becomes attractive past a certain volume of launches.
While it’s never necessary, it will make sense at some point.
Without an atmosphere can use coil guns etc to launch projectiles just as easily. You get more cargo capacity for lower investment and can still operate on solar or nuclear power.
If the moon rotated faster a space elevator might be more interesting but it would just be really slow, expensive, and a large risk if it where to break.
But shipping from the moon to the earth should be much cheaper? I don't have the math (so someone please do?) but based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be trivial to send stuff to earth.
Looking at our handy solar system delta-v map[1] it takes 2.5 km/s of delta-v to get from the Moon's surface to an Earth intercept course (you can aerobrake to a landing) and 14.6 to get up from the Earth surface to the Moon's (no aerobraking, you have to use rockets to land). Also without an atmosphere you can use railguns and such to take off on the Moon, if you get more than a few km/s of boost on the Earth that way you'll burn up.
>> ... based on the size of the Apollo 11, it seems to be trivial to send stuff to earth.
You mean the worlds largest rocket? That machine that launched from the moon first had to be brought to the moon, a task requiring an enormous rocket and untold support structures on earth. Of course one might say "build the rocket on the moon from moon rocks" but that requires significant handwaving. Try smelting aerospace-quality metal in your garage before suggesting that anyone simply park an aluminum smelting facility in a lunar crater.
The machine that does this first has to leave Earth and land softly on the moon before it can start boosting stuff back. You can’t skip the first two steps.
The machine that does this needs to be built by a machine that is carried by the machine that is first built and launched from earth before you can start boosting stuff back.
It is feasible to build a space elevator on the moon with existing materials.
a recent megaprojects video claimed harvesting water from asteroids was more worth the time and money than to do the same for rare earth metals.
apparently bringing tons of rare earth metals back to earth would only lower their price and therefore not make the trip worth the money, but i guess this isn't a problem for the water that those asteroid might hold as that would still be not only valuable but worth the expense of harvesting it from asteroids.
if the moon is closer, and not only less complicated to harvest from but has the advantage that you can keep a permanent drilling rig set up without needing to re-land on a complicated surface every single time, that would seem better than harvesting water from asteroids to me
That seems like a bizarre take. Even with efficient fully reusable rockets, surely desalination will still be much cheaper than mining water from asteroids and bringing it back to Earth?
And sure, maybe bringing huge amounts of rare earth metals back might reduce the price a bit, but to the point where rare earth elements are cheaper per mass unit than water?
If we ever have a space elevator bringing water down from space could actually be a net negative expense, since you could be using the weight to carry stuff up out of the gravity well.
"If we ever have a space elevator" such a simple phrase doing a lot of rhetorical lifting. The logistics and problems of space elevators make them extremely unlikely in any timeframe that is less than fantasy.
it seems bizarre to me too, i'd also think the practical use of having stores of rare earth metals outweighs their initial value simply due to current inaccessibility but i think the video was saying this as a long-term business strategy wouldn't work, as the cost would decrease over time for the initial cost of all the engineering
i'm unfortunately unable to comment on the economics of space water
Seems like the 28 day, uh, day will be a bigger problem. Everything from keeping power on for 14 days without solar to keeping the temperature up to human habitability levels will be challenging won’t it?
It's a different kind of problem. The Moon is a big ball of stuff outside of the Earth's gravity.
If that's stuff is valuable, then the Moon is a very valuable target, and there is a reason to solve problems like the 28 days long day. If that's stuff isn't valuable, then the size of the day is an insurmountable issue.
Every such discovery reaffirms that the moon is a time machine.
Next to (or inside) the ice from the Permanently Shadowed Regions, there may be clues to how life got started on Earth. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-6546-7_... It's estimated that this trapped ice may be from the Earth and the Moon from 3.6B to 4.2B+ years ago. Along with other volatiles, this may give humanity an unprecedented look at what the Earth and the Moon were like before life arose. And if we're truly lucky, depending on how old life is, it may even help us understand how our planet changed while life arose and after life arose.
If it's not there, then the glass beads that they found the water in could also contain trapped gases and compounds that we've become better at detecting. Gases were found in one of the beads brought back by Apollo 15, https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1991LPI....22..409...
It will likely take decades to figure out most of the information those samples will contain. Helium 3 wasn't discovered in the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 samples until the 1980s. The Apollo samples are still yielding new science all these decades later.
I'm so excited about what the future has in store for us.
I’ve always wondered if this ice could have been the remnants of a comet, which after centuries of slowly spiralling closer and closer, landed gently on the moon in a soft cloud of dust.
There's no fluid bodies on the moon to cushion an incoming asteroid or comet - even if there was an initial gentle capture by the moons gravity, the object would either orbit indefinitely, be cast off, or meet a violent end, scattering atomized material across the surface in a wide debris field. This is why theres so much lunar dust coating the entire surface of the moon, and why that surface is so tremendously scarred. The ice is likely the result of countless violent collisions like this, and the ice crystals that manage to land in shaded craters accumulate while those exposed to the sun quickly sublime away.
The staff are a bit a let down, there's this one human spieces person who keeps mumbling on about how he ruled something called Twitter back in 2023 AD.
I am still waiting on them to put casks on a space ship, put it in orbit, and ship it back to Earth, like Linie Aquavit crossing the equator twice.[0] Space Aquavit (or Rumakvavit, if you will) will surely be a thing.
The radiation level exposure on the Moon is estimated to be around 60 microsieverts every hour [1], while the limit of amount of radiation received by the general public in a year is set to 1'000 microsieverts (1 millisievert) [2].
It would then be necessary to be achieved the regenerative medicine in the first place, with a major revolution in radiation shielding technology.
Unfortunately does not appear to be on the verge of being a reality (in short term?), if one look with cold eyes the current state of medicine is amputation.
60 microseverts an hour works out to about 525 millisieverts (mSv) per year. The general public limit is set very low, so for additional reference, the annual limit for emergency worker was raised to 250 mSv per year after Fukushima, half of what you'd get on the Moon. An effective dose (whole body, sum of all equivalent doses for the organs) of 200 mSv is enough to increase your risk of fatal cancer from 25% to 26%, so 525 mSv obviously represents a substantial stochastic risk.
The ICRP occupational equivalent dose limit for hands, feet and skin are 500 mSv per year, so for these you're under the limit (the 525 mSv effective dose above is spread across you, not on one organ). However the equivalent dose limit for eyes is 20 mSv average with no more than 50 mSv per year. I haven't done the math but I think 525 mSv effective dose over a year would put you at substantial risk of deterministic damage to the lenses of your eyes.
In other words, Moon men probably get cataracts and are more likely to die of cancer.
It is not my field, but if plentiful and accessible, we are talking about several thousand tonnes of water around a small habitat that could theoretically be used. Nevertheless, if I understood right, that immense amount of water would have a limited shelf life until acidification corrodes the containment structures, so it would need to be continuously treated and refrigerated,
" Ionizing cosmic radiation is mostly gamma rays and protons, which are overall very similar to the radiation from nuclear waste. Protons are slightly lighter and so would have less energy at a given velocity (more easily stopped); but, because they're protons, if captured by the water they'd basically become H+ ions which could acidify the shielding water in time (not seen as much with nuclear waste). " [1]
Chemically neutralizing the shielding water should be trivial. But why would the water need to be refrigerated? Energy absorbed from radiation would be emitted as thermal radiation, and lose a ton of thermal energy during the long lunar nights. If well insulated, the water tanks could serve as thermal batteries to keep the rest of the base warm.
I said it for to maintain undesired chemical reactions under control. My first thought after to read some papers would be below 25°C, but this is not my field so take it with a grain of salt, as the water temperature in normal operating conditions within nuclear waste water pools seems to be held below 50°C by the refrigeration systems.
PS. I'm not sure if it would be trivial to treat the water for to keeping it operative more than one year as effective shield.
I did a few rounds with an AI on this topic, so excuse me if there are inaccuracies, but:
- According to a study conducted NASA, a 1 mm layer of polyethylene reduces solar and cosmic radiation by approximately 50%
- A 1mm, 1m^2 layer of polyethylene weighs approximately 0.92kg
Maybe the polyethylene would decay, but maybe it can also be remanufactured, harvesting the contaminates in the meanwhile?
That said, this all implies that working under a polyethylene sheet of 5mm would reduce exposure to about 33 mSv a year (assume 8hrs a day working on surface, 260 days/yr).
That said, Maybe robots can work on the surface instead?
What nobody talks about is that the average temperature of lunar soil is below the freezing point of water and never gets above the freezing point over day-night cycles.
If you buried a chunk of ice under a few meters of soil it might sublimate but if there were appropriate geological trapping structures for the vapor, underground ice could be stable on the moon and could be produced by drilling into it.
Such ice could not be detected by remote sensing the way people have detected signs of water on the moon so far.
Now it's just speculation, you'd need some mechanism for the ice to get there, I'm not so sure if any ice would remain if a comet hit the moon and some of it got buried by a landslide. I think how the
"But there is water there. And two new studies—one Chinese, the other American—suggest that lunar soil may have a good deal more water in it than modern space scientists previously believed. It’s still very, very dry; NASA’sArtemis program is looking for ice in shadowed craters near the moon’s south pole, and mission managers should not change those plans."
Hard disagree. Finding 'water' trapped in glass beads isn't something useful to us. Converting that to potable or even just liquid water will take far more energy than taking that water out of Earth's gravity well using conventional rockets.
The universe is still a harsh, bleak, unforgiving, inhospitable, irradiated wasteland of empty nothingness. Humans need very specific temperatures, air pressures, atmospheric compositions to survive. Humans need food that also needs those things to survive. We can alter extra terrestrial objects to suit our needs, but that costs us energy, materials, and money/time. Right now, we are far too busy chasing fads and trinkets, and bashing in the skulls of our own fellows to be able to manage this.
I wonder if there are locations along the dark side / light side border, where some of this water boils off during the 'daytime' heat, and then freezes again during darkness, and is just sitting on the surface as a fine layer of frozen crystals? I know there in very little atmosphere, but maybe just enough to hold a little water vapor? Maybe over time this would allow more accumulation in permanently shaded parts of the lunar landscape, including of course the dark side.
Reminder that the moon does not have a "dark side". This is a misnomer. The back of the moon gets the same amount of sunlight as the front. Unless you mean the side which is not presently illuminated. Water could freeze there but it would boil off again when the sun lights it up again.
However there are craters at the poles that never experience sunlight, and water does accumulate in them. You don't need any atmosphere to hold water vapor - the water vapor itself is held in the moon's gravity well and floats around until it cools somewhere, such as these craters.
>The back of the moon gets the same amount of sunlight as the front.
silly me, yes even better then, since in theory there should always be some amount of water vapor floating around? I just recall a weather phenomenon in Finland when the atmospheric temperature drops sufficiently that even the water vapor freezes and falls like 'stardust'. So would a big sun shield on the moon create a similar temperature drop allowing capture the ice crystals? maybe the moons gravity is insufficient.
> Reminder that the moon does not have a "dark side". This is a misnomer.
It isn't. The side of the moon that cannot be seen from Earth is called the dark side of the moon. It's called that for the same reason that the Dark Ages are called dark: because we can't see them.
It is true that the dark side of the moon gets just as much sunlight as the light side does.
AFAIK the "Dark Ages" are named like that because the Renaissance people thought they were enlightened, compared to the "barbaric people" who lived before them, not because we have less documents (although we do)
Perhaps originally, but the reason it persists as a term even when used by people who don't think medieval people were relatively unenlightened is that it can also be construed as referring to the lack of documents. (And for those who do regard medieval people as relatively unelightened, they might regard the lack of documents as something intrinsically associated with that.)
I work in aerospace (lunar exploration actually), and everyone involved goes out of their way to always use the term far side and explain to laypeople about it. Regardless of its origin, I've commented on it in conversation at least a dozen times and I don't think I've yet had the other person use the phrase and not also think there is a permanently dark side of the moon.
Online there is often also some pedant who explains "well actually there is a dark side but it changes". Because your last sentence is about sunlight I actually interpreted "dark side of the moon" as the unlit/ lunar nighttime side on the first several reads.
Anyway it can be interpreted at least three ways:
- Referring incorrectly to the far side
- Referring correctly to the far side because actually dark means something else (but it will be interpreted incorrectly anyway)
- Referring to the side currently in lunar nighttime
The terms "near side", "far side", "lunar night" and "lunar day" are much better.
The current consensus is that any water deposited by a meteorite will be vaporized and lost unless it happens to end up in a "cold trap" permanently shadowed area. What you described is close to what happens when a meteorite with water hits the surface -water is dispersed and whatever water molecules randomly end up in a cold trap stay there.
Evidence of water in sunlit areas as in the article is new and it's thought that it is trapped in glass, so I think it's a separate mechanism and water escaping from inside of glass, being evaporated and then also ending up in a cold trap must be very unlikely.
It’s incredible to think about the implications of these new findings on the moon’s water content. Not only could it potentially aid in future space missions and colonization efforts, but it also raises questions about the moon’s formation and history. The fact that the water in the glass beads is of solar wind origin adds another layer of complexity to the moon’s story.
Considering the lack of an atmosphere, an infinity pool on the moon would be frozen during sundown, and sublimate away as soon as the sun reached it. Unless your 'completely different league' meant 'completely useless', then no.
Not for long. Wait until this greedy virus called humans comes along. Takes everything without having the slightest clue of the long-term implications. All the intellect makes them think they are god-like yet all of the creations look like Frankenstein.
Even assuming the ice is pure water, wouldn't it be radioactive given that some molecule come from the sun and the moon is exposed to radiations with no protective atmosphere?
Hydrogen from the sun is generally not deuterium, let alone tritium. Irradiation does not, as a rule, make the irradiated thing radioactive; the hydrogen nuclei aka protons are "radiation" because they're moving very fast and cause damage when they hit things, not because they're inherently different from other protons.
Being exposed to radiation does not make something radioactive. Radioactive particles settling on the thing is what usually causes things to become radioactive.
Correct, the lunar soil is itself radioactive because it's subjected to neutron radiation. What's more, the radioactivity of lunar soil increases with depth; the Apollo 17 Lunar Neutron Probe Experiment found that the radioactivity peaks at about 1 meter under the surface. I believe this is because the lunar soil moderates the incoming high energy neutrons (thermal neutrons are more likely to be absorbed.) This effect means that careful planning would be required when shielding a Moon colony. If you just haphazardly bulldoze lunar soil onto your habitat, you could easily make your problem worse.
Also we could do some approximations how much radiation does the atmosphere block? Even at factor of passing 1 to million or billion. We would still have huge amount of radioactive water in our seas and glaciers. But we don't.
Well SpaceX is very close to launching the big rocket, which if successful will totally change the economics of space exploration and settlement. Current launch date is no earlier than April 17th, which is quite soon!
Actually moon water can be quite valuable. Because it requires so much less energy to escape lunar gravity, if you have water, and if you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen, you can make a very effective gas station for rockets going to Mars and further and get a little respite from the tyranny of the rocket equation.
With the ultimate goal of financing a new crusade, and retaking Jerusalem for Christendom. No, really.
All the profits and the gold he was obsessed with? They weren’t for him, they were for the crusade; meanwhile he was spending much of the time dressing like a monk.
Does the lunar gateway meet your definition of a "moonbase"?
Because if you mean "long-term human presence at the moon" (at least, in the same sense in which we have "long-term human presence in orbit" with the ISS) then the answer seems to be "possibly as soon as the early 2030's.
but seriously, it could be used as a manufacturing and industrial hub for deep space operations like asteroid mining.
think about it like this. if we can manufacture things on the moon we can launch things for almost nothing into both earth orbit and the outer solar system due to how the orbital mechanics work.
this means we can build a million probes and send them all over the solar system, manufacture generation ships, permanent self sustaining space based habitats.
a new era of expansion, exploration, and discovery.
You know, they used to say the same thing about big mountains, right?
Here's a slightly older take on it from that era:
"""
People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'
There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation.
But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron...
If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go.
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.
> """[...] What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. [...]""" (That's from George Mallory, for the curious.)
For many who are climbing the highest mountains that sheer joy turns into literal end if life. Wikipedia is trying to collect a list of them [0].
Which is fine. As much as it's a cliché to say "they died doing what they loved", most people die in absolutely horrible circumstances. Death is death. I've had a few friends die mountaineering, BASE jumping, climbing etc. and once I've grieved I actually admit that they did, in reality, die doing what they loved. I may miss them, and call them selfish for engaging in dangerous activities, but I respect and admire the drive to push limits that border on the impossible. There are many more deaths that are purely senseless, easily preventable and just as tragic. No one other than the friends and family of those people seems to care or comment on the circumstances of those deaths.
Yeah, if a huge chunk of DARPA's budget was spent sending people to climb mountains "Because it's there," people wouldn't be happy. The NASA budget for aeronautics is 1/8th the budget devoted to sending people into space "because it's there." Yet the aeronautics research is much more likely to have an actual positive impact on people's lives.
Earth is a spaceship, unfortunately somehow a bunch of monkeys went rampant
and now they're busy tearing up the life support system.
If we can satisfy their (limitless and still growing) hunger for energy and resources by exploiting the rest of the solar system, the monkeys can be kept pacified. That could buy us time to figure out a more permanent, and balanced, solution.
The great thing about the Moon/Mars/asteroid belt is that we can strip mine it. Can't ruin the ecosystem if there isn't one.
Because we are well over 75% through the window this planet can support life and are headed towards a complete extinction event with little chance of survival?
Life has been here for ~4.2bn years, has another good 500-800m years left until our carbon cycles grind to a halt.
"Why do we need a space station?"
"To save all life on Earth"
I've grown rather disenfranchised with most ecological movements (outside of the Whole Earth branch). Given what we've learned about our planet in the last few decades, and our current understanding of where this planet is heading, it's hard to interpret their arguments as anything other than advocating for letting all life on Earth die a slow death over the next 1Bn years.
more people is better than fewer people. it means more of humanity, more discoveries, artwork, music, philosophy.
the more we spread out the more freedom we have to pursue our individual dreams and aspirations. (I believe individual freedom is inversely proportional to population density)
the more we spread out the less likely we are to become extinct in a single catastrophic event.
the instinct to explore discover and expand is intrinsically human. Implying humans should stay on earth is about as silly as thinking humans never should have left a small valley in Africa that could only support 100 people.
to stay is to die and become extinct. that might be preferable to some. and you are free to do so yourself, but please don't prevent those of us who have that unquenchable fire from pursuing that which will set our entire species free.
“Because our population exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet, and if it does not do so already, will likely do so in the future, and if it does not do so in the future, it is still a good idea to have a backup plan for our descendants in case we manage to wreck this planet some how. Having a plan B just makes sense doesn’t it? Bet you the dinosaurs wished they had one”
It’s doesn’t, though. Per capita consumption varies. It’s more that a minority of our population vastly over-consumes. That problem would exist on another planet too.
That's a popular argument that falls apart when you look at the aggregate level of material wealth on this planet. Using GDP per capita as a passable proxy: current world GDP per capita is around $12k afaik, which is about where Mongolia and Indonesia are. Considering high level of inequality there (when you go there as a tourist, you're exposed to the wealthiest part of the society, and we're talking about the average), do you think people would be happy to freeze their consumption on that level? Or even lower, because most people talking about "over-consumption" also think that the current level of consumption is unsustainable?
To make things worse, there are also embedded emissions. You can see it with China, coming out of poverty requires infrastructure expenditure, which means "wealth averaged out" would be even worse than the average would suggest, as you can't average sewers and highways, you have to build them anew.
There is just not enough wealth on this planet as it currently is. When you're saying "they'll be happy far below the most conspicuous of over-consumption", it actually means "worse than an average citizen of Mongolia, forever", which doesn't sound as enticing, does it
That would assume GDP is a measure of resources and production capacity as opposed to just vaguely correlated. It would also assume there is no way to reduce unnecessary production costs, like profits.
It’s entirely possible to start from today’s resources and build production far more efficiently if we produce rationally for use.
Look at the scale of the numbers involved, profits are around 15% across developed economies [1], which is not nearly enough to offset the difference between average Mongolian and what you'd consider a decent QoL.
I don't see any evidence for that claim. What's more, planned economies don't seem to be particularly efficient at reducing waste or improving QoL, examples are plenty, from lake Karachay to unavailability of basic feminine hygiene products in USSR up until its breakup.
you dont need to go further than asteroid mining and some robotic assembly platform. planets/moons are one of the worst uses of mass. I believe we'll end up making giant habitats like O'Neil cylinders and expanding using them.. pretty soon.
if you combine AI with robotics and space exploration, there is not much point to doing all this manually.
For expanding humanitys footprint to non-terrestrial areas. In a sustainable way. The only way to do that is learn bit by bit what works and what not. It's too complex problem to completely tackle by preplanning (unless we reach singularity first and we figure out it's actually possible to design robust life sustaining systems without prototyping).
Legality will not be a very easily enforced facade if those who don't have "legal rights" have the means of getting to that parcel, taking it and keeping it. Not gonna be that much different than the Age of Discovery. Except, you know, no Natives to enslave/kill/influence/exploit/befriend/ally with.
The moon is about 1/4th the size of the Earth, or about as wide as the United States. The moon also significantly impacts our tides here on Earth. Now, the optimist in me would say there's no way little old humanity could manage to find a way to screw that up. The pessimist in me notes that in roughly a hundred years we've managed to push our planet to the brink of ecological disaster, so to answer your question: yes, a little bit (but not the ecosystem you're referencing).
Ah well then pardon my snark - of course we humans are very determined when it comes to exploiting our environment but a crude look at the figures might set your mind at rest:
Moon's mass - about 0.7x10^23 kgs
Global annual iron ore output - about 2.5x10^12 kgs (per [1])
One over the other - 2.8x10^10 years
So on the order of a billion years to remove one percent of it. And that's assuming we develop the same kind of demand for moon iron as we have here on Earth - so we have some time to think about it at least.
Humans have a way of supply creating demand. And tech will evolve. Tell the chatbot you want a USS Enterprise kind of thing and use your free startup credits to fund it. Might be possible within next say 10k years? Much less than a hundred
billion.
meh.. automated mining to solar panel construction & using the metal+energy to make a mass driver in a fully closed loop system. Now you'll have a exponentially increasing mining and space habitat and/or dyson swarm construction platform. I'll bet we can shred the moon clean off in under a few 100k years.
It will become so ugly once exploitation starts. You know the pristine look of a field with new snow? To compare with once there are footsteps and tire tracks everywhere? The moon's beautiful undisturbed dust will become an ugly mess and look like garbage.
I think you might be underestimating how large the moon is. Also moon is receiving thousands of meteorite impacts every day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some unchanging museum exhibit - it's an always changing planetary body.
“I think you might be underestimating how large the Earth is. Also Earth is receiving thousands of meteorite impacts every day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some unchanging museum exhibit - it's an always changing planetary body.”
It's not like pristine snow at all, but like dusty asphalt(it really does have such color) constantly churned by meteoric impacts. It's possible however, that we avoid using such a hostile environment to a bare minimum and stay and mine underground instead.
I can see Mars landscape as beautiful and worth preserving, but drawing the line there.
The regolith is replete with embedded elements from the solar wind and micrometeorites etc. Most in situ resource extraction would be surface strip mining. But the percentage of the surface needed would be small. Both the moon and mars having no oceans have vast surface areas. A totally exploitive approach would only touch such an infinitesimal tiny portion of the area it’s hard to imagine conservation is a top priority.
Parent was concerned about spoiling pristine regolith by footprints and tracks.
Anyway, multiply the mine areas several times, it's unlikely the raw regolith will be exported. Processing will need solar power plants and radiators to dump waste heat (can't dump it into atmosphere as we're used to).
You could conduct the heat via heat pipes into the crust. The lunar basalt has decent thermal conductivity. Using something like mercury or alcohols (which have a low freezing point, and have ok phase change temperatures), or something more exotic you should be pretty ok. Radiators are mostly useful off a surface that can act like a heat sink, especially one as cold as the moon.
Oh I’d say you wouldn’t process regolith for export at all, but for use on the moon. I think you wouldn’t process and export raw materials on the moon I think you would do heavy industry you wouldn’t do on earth in the cave systems of the moon and export manufacture goods. I don’t think you would even export them to the earth but into orbit or interplanetary. Exported materials from the moon to mars would be a lot more economical than the earth.
If you were to just heat sink underground all the time, it will be a non renewable resource. That already happened in London underground that the ground heated to uncomfortable temperatures over time. But coupled with bidirectional heat pumps and surface radiators, there's heat storage potential.
It is like pristine snow in that it does not have traces of human activity all over it. But in contrast to snow, it changes very slowly, and no weather to smoothen out traces either.
by that logic our sun burns off a moon worth of mass in about a million years. thats the ultimate waste. I say convert it all into space habitats & dyson swarms.
Not for long. Wait until this greedy virus called humans comes along. Takes everything without having the slightest clue of the long-term implications. All the intellect makes them think they are god-like yet all of the creations look like Frankenstein. Lol
If we ever decide to have Moon colonies we'll have 3 big problems: we won't be able to source easily carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. I predict that when we'll have such colonies, the phrase "you're worth your weight in gold" will mean you are useless, since your weight in carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen will exceed many times your weight in gold (which can be sourced locally). Similarly, "you're full of shit" will be a high form of praise, since shit will be thoroughly recycled and highly valuable.