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Comment by tesalrk | Hacker News Reader

despite extraodinary good data regarding human experience of living in isolated/enclosed conolies, we persist on believing the fundmantal obstacle to livign on the moon is technological.

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But we've addressed this repeatedly, with submarine crews, Antarctic populations, iceberg outposts. It's manageable.

Assuming we establish communication relays between the Earth and Moon, Moon dwellers would probably be able to use the internet (albeit probably with a laggy connection by Earth standards). While remote socialization during the pandemic has been far from ideal, I think our last year's experience collectively has proven that socializing digitally is somewhat possible and might prevent (or at least mitigate) the worst effects of isolation.

If there are any physicists/engineers reading this that have the appropriate expertise to potentially work on something like it, I'd be super curious to hear your thoughts about how it could work.

Assuming we're supporting a Moon colony of nontrivial scale (~100 people maybe?), what would the experience of connecting to Earth's internet be like for the colonists? What infrastructure would we need to create to make it possible and/or improve it?

I guess moon dwellers would be careful not to overload the space around them with radio waves, so the bulk of communications with Earth will be in focused optical beams. NASA had good results testing that with small optical trancivers.

Major cloud providers would perhaps have some presence on the Moon, so anybody could watch videos available over the Internet from local access points, no delays. Most communications at some point would also be local; talking with Earth will incur that unavoidable delay.

Moon-Earth ping time would something like 2580ms [0]. If anyone remembers the days when phone calls to Australia were via geosynchronous satellite (vs undersea cables), there was maybe ~500ms delay and that was annoying enough, although you got used to it. TBH 2580ms for many applications would be fine (e.g. youtube, netflix, social media, github, chat/slack/teams etc).

If you take sci-fi as inspiration (e.g. The Expanse!), we might see less "realtime/two-way" voice/video chat and more one way "vmail" type messaging when RTT is too great for realtime.

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ping-between-earth-and-the...

I'd guess the barrier is personal wealth for most people. That's certainly what I blame my lack of landing on the moon thus far on.

As for being excited about paying for someone else living on the moon rather than more immediate social concerns—fat chance of that.

Personally I believe the fundamental obstacle is gravitational.

It seems as if low gravity on Mars would make it a one-way trip.

Same, all other obstacles are within the range of current tech. Long-term (decades & human development) habitation under reduced gravity is not understood. Hopefully it’s not a problem.

Gravity can be relatively easily improved with large rotating modules on the surface of the Moon or under the surface. Not for the very first colonists though, but if we're serious about colonizing, we'll get to solve this soon.

IMO it won’t count as a proper colony until it is big enough to not feel isolated.

Neuralink will make sure we don’t feel lonely on the colony.

Neuralink (or, at least, the designs I've seen) would be worse than VR, and it's a little amusing to consider the idea that it might somehow directly prevent lonelinesss.

You just load up the map for the kind of lobotomy you want to simulate and say good bye to loneliness.

Turning humans into emotionless robot workers via brain implants.

If it is always-on, it’s like slavery.

If you can turn it on/off, it’s like schizophrenia.

This whole thing brings up so many practical phylosophical and ethical questions.

• Neuralink – or, at least, the prototypes I've seen – can't do that.

• I wouldn't let anything that could anywhere near my brain, and I doubt I'm the only one.

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