Sorry to Crush Your Dreams, but We’re Not Colonizing Space Anytime Soon
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Similarly, I don't know if it makes sense to colonize Mars, but I think it makes absolute sense to have permanent bases there. With a human presence on Mars we will learn things about that planet in years that will otherwise take many decades through robotic exploration.
It also has the bonus of not being millions of kilometers away, and hundreds of billions of dollars for a small crew to reach.
It feeds into the dangerous fantasy that once we ruin the earth we can all just go to mars and teraform it.
We can't, not even remotely close, and neither will your grandchildren's grandchildern's grandchildren.
We could very easily build a colony in Antarctica - but nobody wants to live there. Plenty of people want to live on Mars.
No doubt, tech has changed the world and will continue to do so. But I increasingly take it with a grain of salt when I hear predictions about robots being superior to humans in every way and making humans obsolete for various things.
* https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/05/economy/september-jobs-report...
How do you expect all 8 billion people to remain ““useful”” without artificially holding back technological advancement?
A hundred years ago, a high percentage of Americans lived and worked on farms. It was pretty common to not complete high school. This is why the military created the GED. Now, most Americans live on cities and it is stigmatizing to drop out of high school.
Education levels have generally risen over the years. It seems to me that additional education beyond high school could well become a normal expectation.
There have always been "useless" humans such as infants, the very old and those who are disabled. There will always be such, though we are living longer and tech (among other things) is changing things for people with disabilities.
But I don't see any reason to expect, say, 80 percent permanent unemployment as the new norm. I think it is much more realistic and healthy to expect people to stay in school longer.
Students are not generally counted among "the unemployed" and are generally not considered "useless," even if they don't have a paid job. Granted, there will be challenges in providing that at scale and paying for it, but, unlike UBI, it at least ties money to socially desirable outcomes and increases capacity for productivity.
A Moon-based telescope would marry the benefits of a space telescope (no perturbations caused by the atmosphere), with the benefits of being able to build on solid ground. Gravity is actually quite helpful if you need to keep a large structure well aligned. But not too much gravity, else it's getting hard to erect the building. The gravity on the Moon (one sixth of ours) may be the sweet spot.
Oh, and half of the time, you have a huge mass of rock between you and the Sun, which is quite helpful to reduce background noise. If you are worried about the light reflected by the Earth, then a quarter of the time you are facing away from both the Sun and the Earth, to get one of the darkest nights imaginable. And no radio polution at all, if you prefer to use a radio-telescope. Did I mention that radio-telescopes have a collecting area that put optical telescopes to shame? For example the Green Bank Telescope [4] has a collecting area of 9300 sqm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_optical_reflec...
[taken from https://www.universetoday.com/12726/building-a-base-on-the-m...]
I can't imagine keeping those telescopes free of dust will be a trivial task even if you somehow manage to install them without issues - maybe you're imagining a single mobile package deployed to the moon ala the mars rover?
Yes, building anything on the Moon won't be easy. Let me just add here some other obstacle not mentioned elsewhere: you can't build a "spaceport" on the Moon. Every lunar landing will result in lots of debris flying at bullet speed for kilometers without any air to brake it. More precisely, some of the debris will acquire escape velocity, some less, so some will end up thousands of kilometers from the landing site.
But that doesn't mean solutions can't be found. I personally envision a telescope being covered by a dome with retractable foil layers. During the day, when you face the unobstructed Sun (and the solar wind), you cover up. You use several concentric shells, with a small pressure differential between them, so any small (or large) hole causes only a small leak, rather than a catastrophic rupture. Inside the inner shell you have some atmosphere to help you deal with dust, but it does't need to be 1 atm, it can be 0.01 atm, for example. As the foils get punctured by micrometeorites or the aforementioned particles kicked up at landings, you repair them and ultimately replace them on some rotating basis. If regular airlocks can't fully deal with the lunar just, use multi-level airlocks. Etc, etc. I think pretty much all the problems will have solutions.
The only question is what benefit we get out of it, apart from the vague desire to colonize the space? Andy Weir in Artemis only thought of tourism, and (no spoiler) some other application that seems quite unlikely.
I personally think telescopes are a better business proposal. I did not think of all the details, but since you ask, I think a mobile package would be a natural first step, and then if it works, a modular solution would be a second one. Many years later, we could end up building the instruments themselves on site, but until then, we'd probably need to bring them from the Earth.
How just having a clean landing pad? I was going to say it's not rocket science, but it is. With gravity being significantly lower, landings will be correspondingly lower energy affairs.
Also keep in mind that without an atmosphere there will be significantly higher energy micrometeorites with significant velocities. Those are the threats you need to design around, not some shuttle landing in 1/6th gravity.
Lots of engineering problems to solve here.
Apollo 12 landed about 200m from Surveyor 3, an earlier unmanned lunar mission.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/...
The total amount of dust displaced per landing is estimated at about a ton, moving at 400m/s (900 mph), and travelling easily 3km, with lighter dust being blasted into orbit.
Alan Bean's mission gave us an absolutely unique chance to really measure this blowing dust. After landing, Pete and Alan walked over to the S3 spacecraft and cut off pieces that had been subjected to the intense sandblasting of their LM landing just 160 m away. As Alan rounded the large "Surveyor Crater" and approached the S3 spacecraft he said to mission control via radio, "I thought you said this spacecraft is supposed to be white." (Not exact quote - I'm going from memory here.) Mission Control asked "Why? What color is it?"
Alan said "It's brown!" This set off a lot of discussion back here on Earth. What did the lunar environment do to that spacecraft to change it from white to brown??? The leading theory was that radiation changed the chemistry of the paint. That theory held for 40 years.
Around me 2008 I traveled to Houston and officially checked out all the white painted pieces that had been cut off the S3 spacecraft and returned to Earth by Apollo 12.... We used Scanning Electron Microscopes, laser scanners, X-ray photoionization spectroscopy, and electron dispersive spectroscopy. We discovered the paint's surface was penetrated by sand-sized (100 micron) lunar soil particles travelling about 400 m/s. Each one made a pinhole in the paint, and we could see the soil particle lying in the bottom of each tiny hole.
Funny thing about devils and details.
I may not be thinking about this clearly, but isn't the Moon tidally locked with Earth? In which case, your options for facing Earth are either 0% or 100% of the time.
Nope, not buying it.
Where are we going?
Should we just keep pouring our economy and resources into our militaries and espionage until...what?
We already know of certain types of manufacturing which is more effective or even made possible in zero-g (fiber optic as one example). Plus we can despoil the area with fewer negative consequences due to the lack of a biosphere.
Next the extraction of elements that are only available in low quantities on Earth, or which are too expensive to lift into space.
Until these operations expand to such a level that zero-latency human oversight is required, they can probably be managed safely and cheaply from Earth.
The second best is today.