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China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

bbc.com

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Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#141

Post by stcredzero »

pjc50 wrote: post #43
richardknop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water possibly could be of great value in the future? Moon has plenty of drinking water. Maybe gold, not sure if there’s gold on the Moon?

Ah yes, the entirely viable project of moving water from a bone dry vacuum rock to a planet 2/3 covered by water. I'm not sure it would be viable to return gold from the moon even if the moon was made of solid gold.

Ah yes, the entirely viable project of moving water from a bone dry vacuum rock to a planet 2/3 covered by water.

Water as a space resource is primarily talked about for use in space.

I'm not sure it would be viable to return gold from the moon even if the moon was made of solid gold.

It turns out it's a lot cheaper to return stuff from the moon, than it costs to send it to the moon. This is especially true if the stuff is dead, and you don't mind subjecting it to 10's of thousands of g's and you can use electromagnetic accelerators running in free vacuum on the surface, instead of rockets.

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#142

Post by stcredzero »

rbanffy wrote: post #122
Symmetry wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you don't have caves you can just pile dirt on top of your habitats. Dirt is one potential export from a lunar settlement. Everywhere outside the Van Allen Belt needs radiation shielding and dirt doesn't mind being violently accelerated in a mass driver.

Dirt is abundant near every solid surface. Not sure it's a valuable commodity but regolith glass would be more interesting. I'm curious about the metallurgical processes we can do easily on the moon.

Making glass and aluminum should be relatively easy on the surface of the moon.

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#143

Post by phkahler »

charlesju wrote: post #101
worldsayshi wrote: post #2

To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Seems like the last step for truly becoming self sustaining. You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be.…

I think the tech that I'm most interested in for the purpose of colonizing other worlds will be 3D printing. In its current form it's no where close to good enough, but if we stretch our time horizon to hundred plus years I do think we can build 3D printers powerful enough to make everything we need to mine and sustain life on other worlds.

Let me know when your 3D printer can make it's own electronics. Also, mining equipment... I mean, wow. I suppose sintered metals might be possible but there's still the refining of raw materials. I guess my point is that the supply chain needed to build a 3D printer is probably enough to sustain things without the 3D printer.

That's not to say they wouldn't be useful. I really like being able to sketch out whatever bracket, holder, candy dish, etc that I want and print it. That would be very useful on a world without a huge economy providing every little thing you might want or need.

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#144

Post by simion314 »

KMag wrote: post #123
simion314 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that in the beginning you will have mostly scientific facilities , like telescopes on the dark side of the moon(you will need scientist, technicians and other stuff around this big telescopes). There could also be facilities for experiments that can't be done on Earth, like things that can grow better on low gravity, there may be materials/gases that are rare on Earth and we could grab from asteroids so hav…

> the dark side of the moon BTW, this isn't a real thing

What I meant by dark side is "The hidden side" since that side is always hidden from Earth (similar when I say your dark side i do not mean you have a side that is not in the light), I am aware some people may misunderstand this expresion, but "far side" is not as expressive since it is missing the part of "always hidden"

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

thebluehawk wrote: post #132
dragonwriter wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BTW, this isn't a real thing Yes, the dark side of the Moon is a real thing. It's the side that doesn't get Earth-lit nights.

That's an odd convoluted definition that I've never heard of before. I think the point the other poster was making is that "far side of the moon" is far more specific, accurate and useful term.

> That's an odd convoluted definition that I've never heard of before

It's a “definition” in the sense that it is a description semantically equivalent to what the phrase “dark side of the moon” has always referred to; it is not, however, a description of the etymology of the term, which derives instead from the long established use of “dark” to mean mysterious, hidden from knowledge, obscure, occult, etc.

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#146

Post by zaroth »

simion314 wrote: post #4
worldsayshi wrote: post #2

To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Seems like the last step for truly becoming self sustaining. You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be.…

But why should you have a 100% complete industry, a colony can trade with Earth like countries trade with each other, a colony could trade some rare resources and buy high tech stuff. The main obstacle a colony will have is the initial buildings/bunker with all the life support and safety tech, plus extra redundancy and a backup plan if something bad happens there or on Earth . If the colony would manage to generate…

Does Mars make a particularly good outpost for asteroid mining with its much lower gravity well, and the fact that if you fuck up and de-orbit an asteroid you’re not potentially destroying a large swath of populated land below?

There may be refining steps which you would want to do on the surface vs in orbit, and getting the raw ore down and refined product back up would be substantially cheaper on Mars.

Probably it wouldn’t be worth building a colony in the first place for just this economic benefit, but once you have the colony, you can exploit this advantage?

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#147

Post by RobLach »

A2017U1 wrote: post #130
stubish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe nothing worth shipping back to earth, but perhaps resources for shipping to orbit. Fuel, space ship components, or entire ships or satellites. If nothing else, there is real estate. Might not be worth much, but there is a lot of it.

> Maybe nothing worth shipping back to earth Helium 3 is certainly worth shipping even at a premium.

Unless there are widespread helium-3 fusion reactors, the demand for it is about $2000/liter for mostly scientific and imaging purposes. Even then it’s a sort of a niche driven price since when the US was willing to bother decaying tritium for it it was like $100 a liter.

Making a helium-3 fusion reactor is a tougher problem than mining on the moon. And even then making helium-3 on earth is cheaper than going to the moon to mine it.

Mining the moon for Helium-3 would be something someone would do once a colony is established, not a reason to establish one.

Probably the most lucrative thing to mine on the moon is water.

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#148

Post by TeMPOraL »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #136
TeMPOraL wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be more worried about this eventually happening the other way around. "Aw, Mom, why can't we go live on Earth with Dad?" "Now, Billy, you know your bones and muscles are used to lunar 0.16G, and won't support your body in full 1G. Your heart isn't strong enough for those conditions either." See also: Belters from The Expanse .

Yup, also Andy Weir's Artemis, and to a lesser degree Larry Niven's everyone-except-Jinxians.

Also the anime Planetes had touched this topic, AFAIR.

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#149

Post by mLuby »

thebluehawk wrote: post #132
dragonwriter wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BTW, this isn't a real thing Yes, the dark side of the Moon is a real thing. It's the side that doesn't get Earth-lit nights.

That's an odd convoluted definition that I've never heard of before. I think the point the other poster was making is that "far side of the moon" is far more specific, accurate and useful term.

In this case, silent side of the moon is more useful, since that's why it's so attractive to scientists.

Re: China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

#150

Post by auiya »

alex_duf wrote: post #28
cafebabbe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not even self-sustaining on Earth .

That's one of my arguments for space colonisation. In the process of colonising other bodies and planets we'll learn how to be more sustainable here. In other words we would use the promise of new resources and exciting new worlds to learn how to avoid destructing our own.

Unless one of the byproducts of space colonization is the retrieval of a super virus capable of wiping out large swaths of humans rather quickly, I don't feel the domestic paradigm will shift significantly enough.
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