If it can be automated you could essentially launch space craft factories that land and build solar panels prior to humans arriving. Far fetched but neat to think about. Approaching von Neumann probe territory
If it can be automated you could essentially launch space craft factories that land and build solar panels prior to humans arriving. Far fetched but neat to think about. Approaching von Neumann probe territory
Our moon is something like 45% silica on the surface. That is a fuckton of silicon. Step one is definitely making a solar panel factory, and then using that power to smelt aluminum, iron, titanium, etc. It seems to me that the moon would make for a good floating semiconductor fab, and eventually, data center. It would be great for making large structures for spacecraft, since the materials are right, and the lower gravity makes it much cheaper to get the parts into space.
It doesn't make sense for a ton of people to live there, since we would have to bring all of our own carbon, which is kind of important for biological life.
Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?
(edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing, the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary about this)
At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be done, but any moon colony will basically always be dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can eventually be.
It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon, assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live there.
Everything is easy to do in theory. Recycling carbon in practice is very, very hard if you don't have plants to help you.
Additionally, flame is very restricted on a sub. You wouldn't be using any sort of methane to cook.
https://www.answers.com/Q/What_fuel_does_a_submarine_use_for...
Going CO2 -> C + O2 -> (+ 2x H2) -> CH4...
But the combustion of CH4 is CH4 + 2x O2 -> CO2 + 2x H2O.
The loss of O2 to water means that each time through this removes O2 from the atmosphere which would need to be replenished.
That ignores all the energy losses in the process and requirements...
As to the uboat - https://uboat.net/men/foodstuffs.htm
> The galley was located on the starboard side, between the chiefs' quarters and the wardroom, and was made up of three hotplates and two small electric ovens. It also contained a refrigerator, self-heating soup kettle, provision lockers, and an enamel sink with hot and cold fresh water and hot salt water.
https://maritime.org/tour/cm.php?pano=nr
https://maritime.org/pres/potrack/pots.php
> The custom built pots were designed fit the Edison Type B range/oven built used on the fleet boats.
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/pig-boats-fleet-boat...
> Fleet subs of the Gato (SS 212) and Balao (SS 285) classes boasted sizable freezer and refrigerator compartments, and their galleys, though diminutive, were well-equipped, generally with two griddles, a deep-fat fryer, two electric ovens, a hefty electric mixer, and a two-gallon coffee urn. Fleet boats usually boasted an ice cream maker as well, even when lack of space in the galley or crew mess made it necessary to install the machine among the bunks in the crew's berthing space.
(Note the 'deep-fat fryer' bit and the modern sub https://youtu.be/bPJUVKizh90?t=364 )
Do note that submarines were built by the Electric Boat Company founded in 1899. Electric systems were in use since the start.
Well you're missing half the equation on the CO2->CH4 process. To get the 2 H2 molecules you'll need to split 2 H2O in all likelihood so you're already getting the 2 O2 from splitting the CO2 and then the 2 H2O so in theory it's oxygen neutral.
That said it's a silly process to go through because there's already absolutely massive electrical supplies available on submarines to power the engines while submerged or to recharge those batteries while on the surface in the case of old subs or modern diesels. Why add a whole "mini" sabatier reactor just to cause more problems with your air quality and recycling when you can just cook electric and toss the captured CO2 overboard.
Neat info about the UBoats. Wonder if they were allowed to use the electric ranges while submerged. UBoats exist in this fascinating in between period where they were both surface and subsurface ships because of the limitation on things like their speed underwater.
As to the ranges while submerged...
https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/life-aboard-wwii-subm...
The serving of food was often times also dictated by restrictions on the submarines movements. Submarines were under strict orders not to surface during the day when they were within 500 miles of a Japanese airfield in order to avoid aerial observation and attack. In the early days of the war in the Pacific this meant just about everywhere as the Japanese were in control of vast swaths of territory and ocean.
This meant that the submarines stayed submerged during the day and only surfaced at night. In order to compensate, many crews flipped their schedules doing their normal daily routines at night. The crews called this “going into reverse.” This allowed the crew to take advantage of the time the sub was on the surface.
This was important because once the submarine dove after running its diesel engines for hours, the boat would quickly heat up. The engine room temperature could soar to over 100 degrees before spreading throughout the sub. Combine that with the 80 men working and breathing and the air inside could quickly become foul.
The men knew the air was getting bad when they had trouble lighting their cigarettes due to the lack of oxygen (oh the irony).
---
That leads me to https://web.archive.org/web/20170121073605/http://www.public...
Much of a submariner's limited physical activity consequently took place after dark. Some crews still adhered to the standard meal schedule for a U.S. warship at sea, but others turned night into day, adapting meal times to their upside-down shipboard routine.13 The crews called this "going into reversa." Breakfast was served at nightfall. Lunch was dished out at midnight. And dinner, the heaviest meal, came at dawn. The "reversa" timetable was particularly suited to the oppressive conditions on the antiquated S-boats, with their lack of air conditioning. Cool night air entering the surfaced submarine not only reinvigorated the sweating, oxygen-deprived crewmen but helped counter the additional heat of a busy galley.
Even on air conditioned fleet subs, some kitchen crews chose to do heavy cooking at night, when the submarine would not be buttoned up and the ventilation system could whisk cooking smoke along with other foul odors right out of the boat.14 Having the boat open to the atmosphere was particularly helpful for dissipating the intense heat of baking. USS Gudgeon (SS 211), which conducted the first submarine war patrol out of Pearl Harbor, continued to serve meals at standard Navy hours throughout the patrol, but her galley crew put off baking until after dark.15 A bold submarine commander might keep his boat on the surface for all or part of the day, but the galley crew could never count on that, and a boat exposed on the surface in daylight was more likely to make a crash dive at any moment, not an ideal situation for anyone trying to do something complicated in the galley.
...
Bad cooks could certainly decimate a potential meal. Battle could do the same. Whenever Bullhead's deck guns fired, Piatt's muffins and cakes invariably collapsed into lifeless deflation.25 A maritime cooking disaster occurred on USS Harder (SS 257) in 1942 when torpedomen flooded the forward tubes with far too much water. Result: an unexpected nosedive of many fathoms. The crew quickly regained control, and the boat leveled off. A safety inspection revealed no injuries or damage — until it got to the galley. There stood Ship's Cook and Acting Commissary Steward Thomason, "ankle-deep in mashed potatoes garnished with a glittering sea of what had been steaks, gravy and fried eggs."26 In all probability, the meal that eventually got served was a mixture of tinned ham, sugar, salt, water, and modified potato starch, with a little dash of sodium nitrate to preserve its rosy color.
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That article is a good read for some of the stories. It appears that cooking was preferably done on the surface - not for battery reasons but rather air / veneration. Also not the USS Harder was cooking while firing torpedoes - suggesting submersed operation.
https://www.wisconsinmaritime.org/programs-and-events/think-...
> April 6: Food Stories of WWII
> Ever wondered what the food was like in WWII? During this talk, we will explore common meals for those on the Wisconsin home front as well as submariners at sea.
They even have a Sub BNB (through Air BNB) https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/44643094
Food https://youtu.be/bPJUVKizh90
Air https://youtu.be/g3Ud6mHdhlQ (MEA and LIOH for CO2, electrolysis and "candles" for oxygen)
Toilet https://youtu.be/SYFuA3xnkUE?t=985
Nothing is "recycled" as such - and certainly not any of the carbon (you're not eating the carbon captured from MEA or LIOH... or your waste).
> The story follows Trish, the sole survivor of a terrible crash landing on the Moon. After regaining her senses, she contacts Earth and learns that it will be thirty days before a rescue mission can reach her. In the meantime, she depends on a wing-like solar panel to provide power to her suit's recycling facilities, and lunar night is approaching.
But yes, real-time video chat and gaming will be kinda hard. Full disclosure, Google asked me this on a PM interview once: "knowing these lasers exist, how would you design an internet for Mars astronauts, and what limitations would it have?"
And yes, I failed. So take my words with a grain of salt. (Though I actually felt like this was the one question I nailed.)
[1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220913005840/en/Aal...
Yes, and those usecases that "could tolerate it" will be a super-minority of usecases compared with usecases that "prefer moon-local latency".
Specifically for moon-local activities:
For example, the moon will likely host the largest telescopes and other measurement devices. Think JWST but 10^5x bigger! Including other measurement devices important for deep space exploration.
It'll be significantly cheaper to use AWS' moon-region (with 3 AZs of redundancy) for storage and processing, rather than shipping the data back to Earth for initial processing. Earth based users of the data can get local read-replicas of the post-processed data, with the ability to request transfer of the raw files.
It will also likely host the largest hadron collider, fusion research lab, etc. Anything that requires lots of land, few humans, and would otherwise disproportionately "impact the environment" or "cost too much based on land value" will likely be hosted on the moon. Additionally, anything like anti-matter research that might be considered "too risky for Earth".
Including ofcourse the moon wide Iron Dome's processing needs to protect the upcoming infrastructure from asteroids.
Additionally, coordination of large scale robotics on the moon for infrastructure creation will also be cheaper to host storage and processing on the moon.
Not really, silicon is abundant everywhere with rocks. Most rocks anywhere are going to be about half silicon, not that this is exactly true everywhere but nobody is ever going to wonder where they’re going to be getting their silicon.
That's a big citation needed.
There is very little carbon on the sites that we have studied, but they were all fairly similar equatorial locations. CO2 is heavy enough that it doesn't immediately escape moon, when some is delivered (for example by a meteorite), it will bounce around for a while. If, during that time, it hits a really cold surface, it will freeze and stay there. Such cold surfaces are available in abundance at permanently shadowed craters at the poles, and also inside lava tubes.
We have gone a long way since we thought that moon was dry and lacked carbon. These days, most of the people studying it are fairly confident that every single permanently cold crater holds a glacier, composed of mixed ices, mostly water, CO2 and methane.
The only element needed for people that we still think that the Moon has a shortage of is nitrogen.
[0]https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL09... [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13521.pdf
Moon dust is toxic and jagged ( https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex... and https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-brain.... ).
> In several lab tests, a single scoop of replica moon dust proved toxic enough to kill up to 90 percent of the lung and brain cells exposed to it.
I can see the end of certain rituals on account of that little fact.
I wish more people on HN would talk about von Nuemann probes and things like seed factories[0] instead of smartphone apps and people pooping on the streets of San Francisco.
I just reposted it[1], Let's see if it gets some comments this time.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/user/danielravennest [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795006
But really what needs to be solved for self-replicating machines is determining a way to make actuators. On the Moon this is harder due to the difficulty of making bearings and gears. Because of vacuum welding making bearings is much more difficult. While solid lubricants do exist, it's difficult to obtain the materials necessary on the Moon. Traditional machining and polishing processes don't work well in a vacuum either due to vacuum welding and the inability to use lubricant.
If we wish to carry out said processes in a pressurized environment we run into another problem: seals. In order to make good seals we need elastomers, and elastomers require elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen which are difficult to obtain on the Moon.
If it is the former it seems like the solution is as simple as building a pressurized manufacturing facility.
You likely still have to send along a whole lot of electronics pars because making those on the spot would be difficult.
They wouldn't use pure ice. But in cold places, with ice mixed with some other materials you can actually make quite good materials. Consider that in most places gravity is much lower then on earth so it doesn't need to be carbon fiber to be useful.
Yes things still have mass but if you are building a robot that moves around there is a big difference in what kind of quality structural materials you need for the robot to be viable.
Part of the research that would go into such project would be to look at what local resources are, and how to make them into useful materials. For example, using ice in combination with some filler material has been shown to be quite usable in cold temperatures.
The exact materials you would use depend on where you would want to use this kind of system. Maybe in the far future these kind of system would look around to analyses the environment and make smart choices about what materials to use to build themselves.
Unlikely. We have yet to master nutrition when it comes from plants, it will be even worse for a bioreactor. Unfortunately, the list of food ingredients that you see listed in minimum recommended intake values is woefully incomplete. There's a whole bunch of micronutrients we get from food that are difficult to replicate.
Bioreactors could be useful for making supplements (say, Omega-3) to offset specific deficiencies.
If we are to eat just processed food in space, we'll need a lot more research on this. It would be better if we just grew food from plants.
The problem is not finding food that is still edible after years in storage, but food that the crew can eat long term without getting sick and without developing deficiency diseases. For example, the Pentagon says you can't eat MREs for longer than 21 consecutive days.
The space food problem is genuinely hard and interesting, you can get a sense of it in this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221455242...