71–80 of 164 posts
Does anyone know where I can find a full write-up of this experiment? I want to replicate it here on Earth but I've been having a hard time finding the info. Documents in Chinese are fine, if you have them.
This is from the university that lead the experiment. A control experiment was done as well
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?
What happened here on earth in your imagined scenario where it's worth importing water from the moon? (and how did we survive that long enough for a market to develop?)
Refined aluminum was once scarcer than gold, and aluminum jewelry was extraordinarily expensive.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, becoming 100% self sufficient wouldn't be a reasonable short term goal but I can't imagine there being any product worth trading in the long term over such distance and given such cost for logistics?
He3 would be a very profitable export for the moon if we ever develop commercial fusion power on Earth
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/moonshin...
> Firstly, nobody's built a commercially successful fusion reactor yet. ITER plan to build a working test-bed; it's logical successor would be a working prototype first generation power reactor. There are huge obstacles to overcome, not least in developing neutron capture techniques and breeding D/T fuel. These are engineering problems (sorry, annoying paywall) and theoretically amenable to solution — but at a price of billions of euros and decades of work, and even then, it may turn out to be too costly to be a viable competitor for well-understood fourth generation fission technology and a mature waste disposal/fuel recycling chain. And that's before we look to a speculative second generation reactor, running on a different type of fuel, that — because of the higher Coulomb barrier between He nuclei — requires a far higher temperature (on the order of 500M to 1Bn degrees celsius, rather than the relatively chilly 100M degrees C required for D/T fusion).
> Given the average generation time for a new reactor technology of 20-30 years, and development costs on the order of $50Bn-100Bn per generation, we won't be even thinking about prototyping an He3 reactor until 2060 at the earliest.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As far as I know, Humans need lots of gravity to develop, so any settlement could not reproduce, at least until means to counteract the effects of microgravity are discovered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're not even self-sustaining on Earth .
We also have significantly more people on Earth though. If anything, more planets makes us more self sustainable in the future.
The project to put even a couple of people on the mars surface, let alone let a couple of hundred live there, is currently too demanding to even attempt. Only vague plans exist.
Does anyone know where I can find a full write-up of this experiment? I want to replicate it here on Earth but I've been having a hard time finding the info. Documents in Chinese are fine, if you have them.
http://news.cqu.edu.cn/newsv2/show-14-16860-1.html This is from the university that lead the experiment. A control experiment was done as well
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.…
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.…
And that pesky radiation slowly killing you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays...
One of the first mass products of a colony is likely to be Methane and simple hydrocarbons like ethylene which can be further used to produce polyethylene, an excelent shielding material that can reduce the radiation to earth levels if applied in thick blankets.