121–130 of 189 posts
Just to be clear, the "vast stores" of water are only theoretical. There are no implications for Moon colonies. You are not going to try to extract water from glass beads. You would need to go through thousands of tons of regolith before extracting a single liter of water, and that's only if you have 100% efficiency, which you will not have. If we ever decide to have Moon colonies we'll have 3 big problems: we won't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reminder that the moon does not have a "dark side". This is a misnomer. 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.
AFAIK the "Dark Ages" are named like that because the Renaissance people thought they were enlightened, compared to the "barbaric people" who lived before them, not because we have less documents (although we do)
Even assuming the ice is pure water, wouldn't it be radioactive given that some molecule come from the sun and the moon is exposed to radiations with no protective atmosphere?
Being exposed to radiation does not make something radioactive. Radioactive particles settling on the thing is what usually causes things to become radioactive. We actually use radioactivity to sterilize food.
Just to be clear, the "vast stores" of water are only theoretical. There are no implications for Moon colonies. You are not going to try to extract water from glass beads. You would need to go through thousands of tons of regolith before extracting a single liter of water, and that's only if you have 100% efficiency, which you will not have. If we ever decide to have Moon colonies we'll have 3 big problems: we won't…
Just to be clear, the "vast stores" of water are only theoretical. There are no implications for Moon colonies. You are not going to try to extract water from glass beads. You would need to go through thousands of tons of regolith before extracting a single liter of water, and that's only if you have 100% efficiency, which you will not have. If we ever decide to have Moon colonies we'll have 3 big problems: we won't…
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parent was concerned about spoiling pristine regolith by footprints and tracks. 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).
You could conduct the heat via heat pipes into the crust. The lunar basalt has decent thermal conductivity. Using something like mercury or alcohols (which have a low freezing point, and have ok phase change temperatures), or something more exotic you should be pretty ok. Radiators are mostly useful off a surface that can act like a heat sink, especially one as cold as the moon.
Every such discovery reaffirms that the moon is a time machine. 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 lo…
Me too. But sometimes I read too many snarky HN comments and I forget.
We are very fortunate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is, many would like to live just as this tiny minority.
That can be changed far more easily than which planet we live on. 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
Just to be clear, the "vast stores" of water are only theoretical. There are no implications for Moon colonies. You are not going to try to extract water from glass beads. You would need to go through thousands of tons of regolith before extracting a single liter of water, and that's only if you have 100% efficiency, which you will not have. If we ever decide to have Moon colonies we'll have 3 big problems: we won't…
Your weight is the same in any element, maybe you meant your worth?