One one hand, that's really cool. ON the other, leave the moon alone?
by that logic our sun burns off a moon worth of mass in about a million years. thats the ultimate waste. I say convert it all into space habitats & dyson swarms.
Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
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Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#82The more we learn, the more hospitable the universe turns out to be.
Hard disagree. Finding 'water' trapped in glass beads isn't something useful to us. Converting that to potable or even just liquid water will take far more energy than taking that water out of Earth's gravity well using conventional rockets. The universe is still a harsh, bleak, unforgiving, inhospitable, irradiated wasteland of empty nothingness. Humans need very specific temperatures, air pressures, atmospheric com…
Are you safer and more comfortable in the universe than your ancestors were 1000 years ago?
How about 1,000,000 years ago?
How about 1,000,000,000?
Thought so.
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#83So “infinity pools” up there would be in a completely different league?
Considering the lack of an atmosphere, an infinity pool on the moon would be frozen during sundown, and sublimate away as soon as the sun reached it. Unless your 'completely different league' meant 'completely useless', then no.
#domelife
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#84Moonbase when?
For what exactly?
For expanding humanitys footprint to non-terrestrial areas. In a sustainable way. The only way to do that is learn bit by bit what works and what not. It's too complex problem to completely tackle by preplanning (unless we reach singularity first and we figure out it's actually possible to design robust life sustaining systems without prototyping).
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#85Moonbase when?
You can also extract a lot of h2o from what goes down the porcelain
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moon is about 1/4th the size of the Earth, or about as wide as the United States. The moon also significantly impacts our tides here on Earth. Now, the optimist in me would say there's no way little old humanity could manage to find a way to screw that up. The pessimist in me notes that in roughly a hundred years we've managed to push our planet to the brink of ecological disaster, so to answer your question: yes…
Ah well then pardon my snark - of course we humans are very determined when it comes to exploiting our environment but a crude look at the figures might set your mind at rest: Moon's mass - about 0.7x10^23 kgs Global annual iron ore output - about 2.5x10^12 kgs (per [1]) One over the other - 2.8x10^10 years So on the order of a billion years to remove one percent of it. And that's assuming we develop the same kind of…
Humans have a way of supply creating demand. And tech will evolve. Tell the chatbot you want a USS Enterprise kind of thing and use your free startup credits to fund it. Might be possible within next say 10k years? Much less than a hundred
billion.
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah well then pardon my snark - of course we humans are very determined when it comes to exploiting our environment but a crude look at the figures might set your mind at rest: Moon's mass - about 0.7x10^23 kgs Global annual iron ore output - about 2.5x10^12 kgs (per [1]) One over the other - 2.8x10^10 years So on the order of a billion years to remove one percent of it. And that's assuming we develop the same kind of…
meh.. automated mining to solar panel construction & using the metal+energy to make a mass driver in a fully closed loop system. Now you'll have a exponentially increasing mining and space habitat and/or dyson swarm construction platform. I'll bet we can shred the moon clean off in under a few 100k years.
How long to do Earth?
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#88Even 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?
Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#89Even 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?
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Re: Vast new stores of water reported on the moon
#90Even 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.