181–189 of 189 posts
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It's not entirely clear to me why you'd want to find asteroids on the moon rather than finding them in space, where the mass wouldn't hardly have to be lifted.
You can build a solar powered space elevator on the moon with existing materials .
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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.
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The machine that does this first has to leave Earth and land softly on the moon before it can start boosting stuff back. You can’t skip the first two steps.
Not quite. 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.
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You can build a solar powered space elevator on the moon with existing materials .
That seems unnecessary as the moon is a vacuum so it’s relatively easy to just to fire something from the surface well past lunar escape velocity.
While it’s never necessary, it will make sense at some point.
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That seems unnecessary as the moon is a vacuum so it’s relatively easy to just to fire something from the surface well past lunar escape velocity.
A space elevator is really an optimization in reducing fuel costs for upfront investment. Such a thing becomes attractive past a certain volume of launches. 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.
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The machine that does this first has to leave Earth and land softly on the moon before it can start boosting stuff back. You can’t skip the first two steps.
Not quite. 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.
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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.
That's a popular argument that falls apart when you look at the aggregate level of material wealth on this planet. Using GDP per capita as a passable proxy: current world GDP per capita is around $12k afaik, which is about where Mongolia and Indonesia are. Considering high level of inequality there (when you go there as a tourist, you're exposed to the wealthiest part of the society, and we're talking about the avera…
It’s entirely possible to start from today’s resources and build production far more efficiently if we produce rationally for use.
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That's a popular argument that falls apart when you look at the aggregate level of material wealth on this planet. Using GDP per capita as a passable proxy: current world GDP per capita is around $12k afaik, which is about where Mongolia and Indonesia are. Considering high level of inequality there (when you go there as a tourist, you're exposed to the wealthiest part of the society, and we're talking about the avera…
That would assume GDP is a measure of resources and production capacity as opposed to just vaguely correlated. It would also assume there is no way to reduce unnecessary production costs, like profits. 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...
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The surface has been slowly bombarded long after the moons creation. So surface mining could have a very different elemental mix than subsurface mining. ~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-com…
Impact sites of larger asteroids are also great targets for mining operations. For example there's some speculation about the gigantic impact crater on the far side of the moon containing a gigantic metal lump below the surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole%E2%80%93Aitken_basi... https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nasa-moon-mass-crater-met...