Can we put a self-sufficient colony on the moon?

…and, if so, how long would it take?

I’m not thinking of an effort that would require a 0.00001 problem rate, or would even be commercially-profitable with accepted risks. I’m thinking of a world-wide desperation attempt in which thousands or even millions die in the effort: the kind of thing we’d only do if we knew that our life on Earth was doomed, such as if there was a 500-km asteroid on a collision course with the Pacific.

Can we do it?

Of course, given enough time.

But since we’d only have weeks at most between knowing that an asteriod was going to wipe out all life on Earth and the actual event, probably not. The best bet in that circumstance would be attempting to create a number of extremely resiliant (Earthquake proof, etc) structures to contain small colonies here on Earth in the hopes that at least a few of them would be able to survive and eventually repopulate the Earth.

The main problem with the OP scenario, assuming an asteroid impact of that magnitude, would be the danger of ejecta impacting the surface of the moon and wiping out the colony. You’d be much better off attempting to send them to Mars.

In that case, given say a window of 90+ days, I would suppose that it would be theoretically possible to throw together a small fleet of rockets and send as much material toward Mars as possible. Work force, resources and the very idea of money being completely irrelevant in the face of the extinction of the Human Race.

Question - if the Earth were doomed (doomed!), how fast could we throw together a fleet of Orion ships? Project Orion (nuclear propulsion) - Wikipedia Basically, the idea is that you take a really big steel plate, build a big spaceship on top of it, and set off nukes beneath the steel plate. That sucker will move. Back in the early sixties, NASA thought this might be a realistic way to do interplanetary travel, but the whole Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and fear of fallout thing kiboshed the idea. But with The World About To End, both those issues would (one assumes) be moot. So - could we do that? If so, we could move a heck of a lot more men and material to Mars than with rockets.

A survival colony, involving another planetary body? Even one as close as the moon?

No way. It’s not close to being possible.

It would involve extremely tiny payloads (and I mean so tiny as to be absolutely useless) with enormous fuel requirements (and I mean really, really enormous fuel requirements).

It isn’t remotely close to being feasible, even with ten year’s notice.

The only solution (and you would probably still need more than ten year’s notice) would be a series of reasonably airtight, interconnected shelters that could support and maintain an artificial environment, including agriculture, for at least fifty years and provide the necessities for a population of at least 20,000 to be viable. This could probably be achieved by a large number of developed countries, so once Earth begins the healing process in the aftermath of the impact there would be plenty of survivors. After that we can resume having fun again.

As to who the chosen few might be in each country, Dr. Strangelove has already made a number of constructive suggestions that I would support wholeheartedly.

Unless you use the previously mentioned Orion nuclear pulse drive.

I dunno. It’s not anywhere near proven technology.

And there’s just something about strapping the “Last Hope of the Human Race” into something with a plan of setting of a continuous chain of nuclear weapons underneath it that I find somewhat…suicidally stupid.

One big problem I have is the idea stearing the damned things.

But then, you arrive at your target, explode a bunch more to slow down. You still need to soft land and I daresay you’re not going to do that with more nukes. It’s bad enough that your ship is going to be extremely radioactive and you’re not going to be able to keep it and strip it for resources. But you certainly don’t want to repeatedly nuke your landing site on the way down.

A “self-sufficient” Lunar colony would have to be an enclosed biosphere, with hydroponic plants providing all food and oxygen. We don’t know how to do that yet. Not an insoluble problem in principle – more research is needed. Of course, we might work out all the bugs in an Earth-based biosphere, set one up on the Moon, and then find out that plants grow very differently in 1/6-g, or in an environment with higher cosmic radiation than we’ve got down here.

I’m not sure that we’d have only a few weeks’ notice of a major collision. It’s quite possible that we’d plot a collision decades or even a century in advance. I suspect that a decade would be a minimum lead time for preparing and executing the transshipment to the moon, let alone setting things up once we got there.

Mind you, if we did have only a few weeks notice, we’d be doomed. Time to go out partying.

And how do you brake? :eek:

I think BrainGlutton’s hit the nail on the head here. Unless we had decades to centuries of warning, we wouldn’t be able to set up a self-sustaining ecosystem that could support human life inside the moon bases. The only way our current space station and near-future moon bases can survive is the continual shipment of additional supplies including oxygen and food from Earth - and that’s going to be the way human space exploration works for quite some time to come.

Robots do have some advantages, after all, but if a huge asteroid hits the Earth, no one’s going to cry for the loss of Bending Unit 22.

It’s possible that there are enclosed lava tubes on the moon - the Lunar Rilles are collapsed lava tubes, so it seems reasonable to assume that there are some uncollapsed ones hanging about.

If we could find them, and seal them, you could have an airtight, protected enclosure miles long. Now, if we can find enough ice on the moon, you could create oxygen and pressurize the tubes so they are breathable. If they are deep enough underground, they should be easy enough to keep warm. The subsurface temperature of the moon is about -4F, and rises very slowly with depth. So given natural heat sources of human activity in the tube and the excellent insulating ability of the lunar crust (and vacuum surrounding it), we might not have to use much energy at all to heat them - we might even have to cool them, given enough industrial activity.

These tubes have been stable for 3 billion years, and are probably never going to collapse. They’d make fine homes for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe even millions if they are extensive.

The real problem is likely to be the availability of various heavy metals and other chemicals that we need to survive indefinitely. The lunar regolith actually has a lot of minerals in it, including 100 ppm nitrogen (necessary to grow plants), but it would be very energy intensive to extract it. We’d need lots of nuclear power, I’m guessing.

In any event, none of this is going to happen in the next few decades. Maybe in 100 years or more. But it’s possible.

But we might as well start preparing now. Who can say when will be the next extinction-level-event asteroid collision? Maybe a hundred thousand years from now, maybe only a hundred years.

It would also be prudent to start researching ways to deflect an Earth-bound asteroid. Not destroy it, like in Armageddon and Deep Impact – if you blow up an asteroid you now have millions of fragments, all headed in the same direction, with the same aggregate mass as the whole asteroid, but even more likely to get into the atmosphere, block sunlight and cause devastating climate change that makes us (very briefly) nostalgic for global warming. No, what we need is a system to, say, set off controlled nuclear explosions on one flank of an asteroid and divert its course; and such a system needs to be in place, so we can launch our countermeasures even if we have only a few weeks’ warning that a dangerous stellar object is headed our way.

You probably wouldn’t need to land the ship - remember, you can carry pretty close to as much mass as you want, thanks to the Very Large Nukes driving the whole contraption. You can carry smaller rocket engines or ion drives for fine adjustment of your course to help you get the orbit you want (after using the main drive to shed most of your speed). You can also carry smaller rocket-powered landing craft to bring down the people and cargo. As for the dangers inherent to setting off Very Large Nukes underneath Very Nukeable People - well, no one said this plan was perfect. But the prototype testing they did back in the day with chemical explosives suggests that it should be doable, in theory. And if you’ve gotta get a lot of people and gear off the Earth, very very fast, that’s probably our least-bad option for getting it done.

As for Glee’s question - you brake by turning the ship around, and setting off more nukes. :smiley: How else would you do it?

IIRC, someone tried, and failed, to create a sealed, self-sufficient ecology on Earth.

So no, we couldn’t do it on the moon with only a few years notice.

Better to spend all those resources trying to divert or destroy the asteroid, and build lots of bunkers on earth. If only a few thousand people survive on earth, which may have happened before, the species can survive.

I think the failure of the Biosphere projects, while not entirely without good science, is not an indicator of our inability to do this. After all, if we had to really and truly make an artificial living area on the moon or Mars, we wouldn’t include.

Extensive hydroponics, yes. But would there be a need to bring a mangrove forest? A savannah grassland?

It would be interesting to see if it could be done from a realistic starting point, rather than trying to create a miniature world.

It is a national disgrace that we haven’t already.

Consider the obstacles, and how difficult and expensive it was just to land a few purely scientific/exploratory manned expeditions on the Moon (using technology which, sad to say, has not greatly improved in its fundamentals in the past 30 years).

Now consider how difficult it would be to get any government or industrial consortium to fund an even vaster project, with no clear prospect of any economic return (see this thread). “Racial survival” (see this thread), while it should be of equal importance to all of us, is too abstract a concept to get people to open their wallets.

Some people has grazed this point already but I will continue. Whenever you read about people’s ideas about setting up a colony either within the solar system, or even somewhere within another solar system, it is almost always about getting the stuff together and blasting off from earth. People pay lots of attention to getting off earth in the first place but little attention is paid to how the colony is supposed to function in such an extreme environment in the long-term. A single equipement failure, which will happen from time to time, will simply kill everyone.

Even though we have colonies in Antarctica, I seriously don’t that we could launch a new self-sustaining Antarctica community with two years notice. That means send them by rocket and then send a few supply rockets. After that, they are on their own – forever with no contact with any other humans or supplies. That is mere child’s play still on earth and yet it will fail because science fiction types don’t ever understand real-world logistics and the relative difficulty thereof.

Tangentially relevant GD thread.

I just thought of another, probably insurmountable problem.

We’d nuke ourselves to death fighting over who gets tickets to go.