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> preserve the planet in its pristine state For those that have jumped straight to the comments this isn’t the flavor of TFA: > The moon hosts several sites of extraordinary scientific importance (SESIs) to astronomy. > Only within the last 20 years have astronomers discovered locations on the moon where conditions are ideal for the study of the early universe. The far side of the moon, for example, is one of the mos…
"the installation of telescopes is possible at only three sites" The far side of the Moon is bigger than Russia. I have my doubts about such a categorical claim as "only three sites are suitable for telescopes". On Earth, we build observatories in mountainous terrain regularly.
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> > But because of the far side’s mountainous terrain, scientists say the installation of telescopes is possible at only three sites—and one in particular is rich in helium-3, which space mining companies have identified as a key element in quantum computers and fusion energy. A while ago, I saw a page that did the maths, and it worked out that the abundance of He3 was so low (at best 50 parts per billion), that even…
I always find that the reality of space exploration is so much more disappointing than my 1970s science fiction. When I was a kid I dreamed of farming on Ganymede and mining on Mars. The technology of today is AMAZING, but space is looking more and more barren.
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I think it actually might be the best spot because the far side of the moon is always positioned facing away from earth. Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that?
There's an orbit that's always dark to Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Earth A telescope in that orbit would never see earthlight, like one on the moon.
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Always facing away from Earth, but not always facing away from the sun. Not my field, so I don't know how important interference from solar RF is. If you're building on this scale, why not put two on opposite sides of, say, Deimos? The delta-v between there and LEO is less than the delta-v between the lunar surface and LEO: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...
Wow! TIL. At first I thought you must be reading the map wrong, but you're right. Landing on Deimos does indeed seem to require less delta-V than landing on our own moon, assuming that this map is correct. And that seems to hold even without aerobraking. 14917 ms-1 [Moon] v. 14520 ms-1 [Deimos], if I'm reading it right.
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Is it any more crazy than thinking that some corporation, country, or individual has a right to do something on the moon?
The moon is well outside anything one might define as anyone's jurisdiction, nobody has any rights or responsibilities there and disputes are resolved with who gets there first and has a big enough stick to keep others away. That's the reality.
And either nations take care of the offenders and form treaties, or it leads to war at the worst.
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- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick - most of the Moon is made up of the same stuff as the Earth's crust (silica, alumina, etc) and has very little value, compared to the energy needed to get it off the Moon - if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float…
>- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick I'm aware of how large the moon is. >- most of the Moon is made up of the same stuff as the Earth's crust (silica, alumina, etc) and has very little value, compared to the energy needed to get it off the Moon CURRENTLY has very little value. J…
Are you? Removing from the moon a cubic kilometre of solid rock per person would be a thing you'd notice in a side-by-side comparison, while being less than the optical illusion that makes it seem bigger when close to the horizon.
30 miles down is 2-3 times the Mohorovicic discontinuity between crust and mantle; 30 miles up you're above the ozone layer and the air is too thin to breathe. That's the quantity being discussed.
> >- if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float off into the universe", it just stays in orbit unless it is actively pushed, which would take an insane amount of energy
> That's the point... what exactly do you think is going to happen to earth in that scenario?
It stays right where it is: orbiting earth.
> >something like the entire world's electricity consumption for a billion years
> What was the entire world's electricity consumption 500 years ago?
Electricity is a red herring; consider all power of all kinds combined. 500 years ago, let's assume that meant just human muscles even though windmills and watermills existed and animal muscle was also used, just to maximise the difference.
The estimated world population in 1500 was around 0.43-0.50 billion; again, let's low-ball that to 430 million.
Human calorie use is about 2500/day; multiply by 430 million gets us 52.06 GW.
Today, we are at 20 TW, which is a factor of 384.17 greater.
The kinetic energy of the moon is about 10^27 J: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1%2F2+*+moon+mass+*+%28...
which suggests it would take about 1.5 million years at current power use rates: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9.74×10%5E26+joules+%2F...
or 4016 years if I assume another 384.17 increase in the rate of human power consumption: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.543×10%5E6+average+Gr...
Things which are actually likely to get us the kind of increases to our available power such that we might do this include "build a Dyson swarm", which I wouldn't rule out happening in my lifetime, but also doing that means we can do a thing called "star lifting", and we'd want to because the sun contains more interesting elements than all the planets combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
There was a similar theme in Kim Stanley Robinson's book Red Mars - a lot of the initial crew of colonists actually wanted to preserve the planet in its pristine state. I thought this was completely crazy. There are no ecosystems to protect, no endangered species, no green living things. Moving development from Earth into space should count as an overwhelming win for the environment.
> “We need to preserve the far side for exciting science that includes measuring magnetic fields associated with potentially habitable exoplanets and uncovering the mysteries of the unexplored Dark Ages of the early universe—using low radio frequency observations” Does that sound completely crazy? Like... the fact that they want to study it before private companies destroy it for their own benefit? > Moving developme…
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> “We need to preserve the far side for exciting science that includes measuring magnetic fields associated with potentially habitable exoplanets and uncovering the mysteries of the unexplored Dark Ages of the early universe—using low radio frequency observations” Does that sound completely crazy? Like... the fact that they want to study it before private companies destroy it for their own benefit? > Moving developme…
Nothing will "move". Think of it as "cp", not "mv".
While I understand their concerns, it seems a bit crazy to think you have any right to tell people what to do or not do on the moon.
>While I understand their concerns, it seems a bit crazy to think you have any right to tell people what to do or not do on the moon. Have you stopped to think what happens to the earth if the moon were just outright gone? Because that's ultimately what the debate is about. If anything valuable is found there, you can be assured someone will strip mine it until every last piece of value is removed, and the non-valuab…