A high energy hadron collider on the Moon
iopscience.iop.org
iopscience.iop.org
I love the audacity of this proposal.
The best part of experimental physics is the risk!
First thoughts without reading the paper: there's too much noise and the moon is hollow (*), so even if you could assemble it [a particle collider] by bootstrapping with solar and thermoelectric and moon dirt and self-replicating robots, the rare earth payload cost is probably a primary cost driver barring new methods for making magnets from moon rock rare earths.
Is the moon hollow?
Lunar seismology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_seismology :
> NASA's Planetary Science Decadal Survey for 2012-2022 [12] lists a lunar geophysical network as a recommended New Frontiers mission. [...]
> NASA awarded five DALI grants in 2024, including research on ground-penetrating radar and a magnometer system for determining properties of the lunar core. [14]
Spellcheck says "magnometer" is not even a word.
But how much radiation noise is there from solar and cosmic wind on the surface of the moon - given the moon's lack of magnetosphere and partially thus also its lack of atmosphere - or shielded by how many meters of moon; underground in dormant lava tubes or vents?
> Structure of the Lunar Interior: The solid core has a radius of about 240 km and is surrounded by a much thinner liquid outer core with a thickness of about 90 km.[9] The partial melt layer sits above the liquid outer core and has a thickness of about 150 km. The mantle extends to within 45 ± 5 km of the lunar surface.
What are the costs to drill out the underground collider ring at what depth and but first to assemble the moon-drilling unit(s) from local materials just and given energy (and thus on-the-moon production systems therefore)
With that in mind you could suppose we do the manufacturing on the moon or in orbit and ship the material up the well (assuming this is before asteroid mining takes off) but the density of wiring isn't really all that different from the base materials so it'd still be the same mass you'd have to bring up the well. And wire coils & packs quite well in a cylinder so volume is probably not going to be the constraining factor for launching it into orbit. So at that point you might as well just manufacture on earth and cut to size in orbit/on the moon.
Now if you want to expand the definition a bit (from your basic polymer insulated copper wire to just insulated wire in general), then we could actually. We'd need to replace the wire with something actually present in sizeable quantity on the moon. The main two elements are aluminium and silicon. Aluminium is commonly used for cheaper wiring so it'd be viable for many uses. Silicon or silicon based alloys could potentially be used for specialty cases but that's all relatively exotic material work for little gain outside of semiconductor fab level work. So you'd probably want aluminium.
Making aluminium for the mined alumina is pretty basic work (we do it all the time industrially on earth) but it requires absurd amounts of energy to make any substantial amount.
As for making the insulator, you could make glass or ceramic insulation from silica but it wouldn't be flexible at all and would be brittle. This is probably a nonstarter for any high power energy transfer due to vibration or sudden shocks/jumps in the wire. You could however make mineral insulated metal sheathed cables using magnesium oxide/magnesia (makes up about 10% of the lunar surface). This would probably be the best solution. And other than the conductor (aluminium or copper), it actually isn't all that hard.
So yes it's possible but we probably wouldn't do it for even a large project unless we were actively intending on using it for mass manufacturing for other purposes and it'd require quite a bit of industrial capacity on the moon in the first place.
The moon is easier to get to with today’s technology, but this paper is talking about the 2080s or later. And the paper assumes that our spacefaring technology has significantly advanced. So either one should be equally reachable.
Doesn’t mars have significantly better local resources? What does the moon offer that mars doesn’t offer?
Travel time of 2-3 days instead of 3-12 months.
1. Are they going to build using materials from moon?
2. If they use materials from Earth, would it increase weight of moon?
3. Doesn’t that additional weight cause any problems to tides on earth?
For #2 and 3, no. Such a construction project, even using entirely materials transferred from Earth, would not meaningfully affect the relative mass of the Earth and Moon.
This is a bad measure of our spacefaring capabilities. It’s like ruling out the Berlin airlift because Boeing’s door plugs fall out.
The paper estimates construction using a lunar TBM. The time scale it provides, around the 2070s to 2080s, is well within our projections for what could be accomplished with even Starship, a platform that should be operational by the 2030s. (At $100mm per launch, a $5bn launch budget gives you 340 tons on the surface.)
The most speculative element, as it identifies, is not transport but remote drilling and power. That said, the author appears unaware of the degree to which we’re automating (and offsiting) mining on Earth. The idea that we won’t have remote TBMs within 50 years seems, to me, low.
Why? We’ve only ever had one demonstrated launch system that could get humans to and from the Moon, and it wasn’t private commercial.
Going back to the airlift example, we were probably the only country on the planet that could have pulled off that operation in the wake of WWII.
We kind of do have them? SpaceX and Rocket Lab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab
To be entirely honest I don't think we even have the technology to do this on earth. In space it's feasible but expensive and time consuming but on earth, under the ocean in particular we probably don't even have the technology yet to make that an option regardless of how absurd.
And at that point you might as well just tunnel under solid ground instead. It'd be far easier and at least potentially achievable. But that's exactly why TFA is proposing a lunar collider instead as it'd be cheaper and more feasible than one that is underground on earth.
Managing 0-1 atmosphere variation is very different than 1-400. The deep ocean (and deep crust you’d have to go through in spots if you want it to circle the Earth) are extremely hostile to humans.
The Moon is a natural vacuum. That presumably simplifies some design elements.
And as the paper mentions, the lunar night is naturally at superconducting temperatures: no cooling required.
The moon is also naturally covered in microabrasive, statically charged dust, that will happily annihilate any piece of equipment we put there, that is more complex than a lunar rover from the early 70s, in a matter of days.
Hold my beer.
The LHC cost around 4.75 bn (initial estimate) to construct. Let's be generous and add quite some buffer, to a solid 6bn.
The project has been in operation since 2010. Lets assume operational cost of 1bn a year, that brings up the total tally to 20bn. Let's add 10% just to be safe, so 22bn.
The US military expenditure is THIRTY-EIGHT-POINT-SIX (38.6) times that number. PER YEAR! Remind me again, what "substantive gains" were had, by pumping 850bn dollars into one countries military per year? Bear in mind that, despite all that, (the US essentially LOST the last larger war they were involved in)[0].
US military being a touchy subject? No problem, how about agriculture? The EU agricultural subsidies (CAP) pump over 60bn into farming each year. As for the results of all that money being spent, (weeell... )[1]
What about fossil fuels? Worldwide subsidies in these were (just shy of 130bn dollars )[2] (again, that's PER YEAR), and these things are destroying our habitat as we speak.
So please, explain to me how paying less than 25bn, over a 10 year period, to gain the ability to figure out how reality works, is a "massive expenditures", compared to other things society throws money at left right and center.
[0]: https://time.com/6090758/why-america-lost-afghanistan/
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/european-union-farm-subsidie...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies#Subsidie...
Isn’t this evidence of nukes being necessary?
Someone else’s nukes being insufficient. The last few years have shown nuclear powers are inviolable, to the point of causing allies of non-nuclear powers being violated by them drawing red lines in the violator’s defence.
You never quantified the LHC’s benefit. I could use your logic to justify spending billions on anything, whether confirming the existence of the Higgs or trying to find evidence of Biblical angels or whatever.
But again, I can use this to justify anything. Why this basic science?
No, you cannot. To use your above example, I very much doubt that anyone has a workable plan to prove the existence of biblical angels that they could formulate in enough reason and technical detail to begin construction on a multi-billion-dollar project.
People did, and do, have such plans for figuring out the reactions of elementary particles.
There is a difference between "science" and "anything".
> Why this basic science?
Because elementary particle physics pretty much explain how the basic building blocks of the universe, and the forces governing them, work, and thus provide the most essential framework to understand the natural world next to mathematics?
I'd say that's pretty important, and if we spend less than 30bn on that over a 10 year period, I'd call that a bargain, certainly compared to all the other crap society wastes money on.
As long as we have the dough to give trillions in handouts to billionaires so they can buy more yachts, private jets and islands, I'd say we can spare tuppence for the science that furthers our species understanding of the universe.
Correct, because it takes about 2 seconds to google it. [Here you go](0)
[0]: https://cerncourier.com/a/a-decade-in-lhc-publications/
With that said building colliders does have scope to reveal new physics and a project like this would almost certainly have a bunch of high-value spinoff technology outcomes.
It’s plausible we’ll get a very good thing for a fairly bad reason.