Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
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.
~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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole%E2%80%93Aitken_basi...
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nasa-moon-mass-crater-met...
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.
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.
While it’s never necessary, it will make sense at some point.
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.
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 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.
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
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?
i'm unfortunately unable to comment on the economics of space water
Extra special relativity.
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.
Your weight is the same in any element, maybe you meant your worth?
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.
If you'd like to learn more, this is a fairly approachable article written by NASA's former Chief Scientist, Dr. Jim Green, https://room.eu.com/article/evolution-of-volatiles-on-the-mo...
The Moon as a Recorder of Organic Evolution in the Early Solar System: A Lunar Regolith Analog Study — https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2014.1217
Potential for prebiotic chemistry at the poles of the Moon — https://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.4...
Me too. But sometimes I read too many snarky HN comments and I forget.
We are very fortunate.
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.
[1] https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/the-threat-of-space-r...
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.
" 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]
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1336/what-thicknes...
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.
- 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?
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/19906/constant-lun...
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater
was made by an iron meteorite but very little of the material was left at the site.
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.
How about 1,000,000 years ago?
How about 1,000,000,000?
Thought so.
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.
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.
Actually, doesn't the back get more sunlight? The front of the moon is occasionally eclipsed by earth.
Also, if there is X amount of water, and ever thaw / freeze cycle loses some amount Y, can't we estimate what X was Z years ago?
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.
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.
Your clap-back might make sense when somebody is criticizing Pink Floyd, but it doesn't make sense here.
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.
We actually use radioactivity to sterilize food.
I thought shadowed moon craters stay at roughly 63 degrees?
You might remember, Columbus did not go to America for a vacation.
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.
“Why do we need a space station?”
“As practice for getting to the Moon!”
“What can we do on the Moon?”
“Build spaceships for getting to the asteroid belt!”
“Why do we need to get to the asteroid belt?”
“So we can make components for the Mars colonies!”
“Why do we need a Mars colony?”
…
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.
"""
(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].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_clim...
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.
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.
We are the grey goo of the universe. Expansion is our thing.
I know how these question chains go, I have a young son.
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.
Arguably most people are forced to under-consume, but they’d be happy far below the most conspicuous of over-consumption now happening.
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
It’s entirely possible to start from today’s resources and build production far more efficiently if we produce rationally for use.
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.
[1]: eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/us-corpor...
if you combine AI with robotics and space exploration, there is not much point to doing all this manually.
I have faith in capitalism, at least in this regard.
Could <$big company> legally pour a lot of money to assure control over a parcel or a mine in Mars?
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_or...
I can see Mars landscape as beautiful and worth preserving, but drawing the line there.
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).
Or Montana.
It's because there's clearly alien spaceships hiding behind the moon.