I disagree. At it’s most basic, pretty much every country on earth is self sufficient. When did global trade start on a large scale? 50 years ago? 100? There were people everywhere 100 years ago.
For most it’s the most basic self sufficiency is food, clothing and shelter. In many parts of the US, I could live on food, water and a tee shirt and shorts. I don’t really need shelter in some parts of the world, and that would be arguably the most difficult to build and maintain forever on the moon. Food is available to hunt or grow here. Oxygen, falling out of the sky. Water, over there in the lake. None of these “head starts” are to be found on the moon or Mars.
I’ll concede forever is along time, but self sufficiency when one is starting from nothing is a tall, tall order.
But then, the technology available today wasn’t available 100 years ago…or even 50. We can grow food without soil, can produce oxygen and water, can produce clothing and shelter with the materials either on the moon or on mars. We’ve done it in fact, experimentally using a lunar regolith analogue. We’ve done it using analogues for the environment for mars as well. It’s not some impossible engineering problem requiring magic tech, it’s all stuff we have had the capabilities to do for over a decade in some cases…hell, some of it we’ve had the ability to do for a century. It’s chemistry and engineering. And lots and lots of money. That’s the real issue…no one has wanted, to date, to spend the mountains of money it would cost to even build a small moon colony (or even go back to the moon for more missions). But that will change once we start talking about exploiting resources in the solar system. The moon has potential to be useful in that as a possible staging ground, refueling center and perhaps manufacturing center to refine raw materials before sending them to the earth…or to orbiting stations or even extraction facilities. It might be better to send raw materials to orbit the moon for processing than the earth since if you fuck up the consequences of a large impact on the moon are less than the same thing on the earth.
I don’t know if we will ever put more than a permanent station on the moon. And the proximity to the earth means resupply is only a few days away (assuming your launch costs aren’t, um, astronomical, wrt regular supply to the moon), but we certainly could create a self sustaining colony there if we really wanted too. Basically, what you are saying in effect is we couldn’t do it anywhere except on the earth, and that, to me, is just wrong.
Yes it can, and it might make sense to do so in the future.
The colony would likely be a mostly underground facility with a few greenhouse like domes shielded from radiation and harmful rays. Livestock such as chickens and rabbits, combined with plants which can be grown underground with artificial light would make it suitable for small populations. Its only a 3 day trip.
Why should we do it? Escaping Earth’s gravity into space is still costly. However if you have a building base and launching pad, escaping gravity is much easier on the moon. The moon has a ton of helium-3, if converted into an easy to use fuel source, power or fuel would not be a problem.
Even after a global thermonuclear war, genetically engineered superplagues, runaway global warming, a dinosaur-killer asteroid strike, and the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption, all combined into one very uncomfortable Tuesday afternoon, the scorched surface of the Earth would still be a much easier and safer place to live than a space habitat.
If we ever set up a colony on the Moon or Mars, people there would have to live in sealed underground artificial biospheres, and only go outside wearing spacesuits.
It would be a lot easier to build sealed underground artificial biospheres here on Earth. Like, a lot easier. If you wanna live the rest of your life inside a hermetically sealed tube eating plants grown hydroponically under artificial light, you can do that today. There’s plenty of barren desert or tundra where you can set yourself up.
Let’s just suppose we found out their was a dangerous race of aliens out there. Ala the movie “Independence Day II”. Would it make sense then to have a moon defense station? I mean any alien invader would have to get past that first.
It would be easier…like a lot easier…for Europeans to stay in Europe. We don’t need to go across the oceans to some other continent when we have everything we need here.
But, you know, that’s not how it played out. There was shinny yellow metal at stake!
Additionally, you do realize that if we are going to build sealed, underground artificial biospheres on earth, you could build something similar in space, right? While going to space just for fun might not seem that appealing, there is all that resource stuff up there. That’s something often glossed over by the ‘but why would we want to leave earth??’ crowd. While it’s true, staying on earth is easier, I don’t think that this is going to be compelling once launch costs drop to a certain price point…not when we are looking at the vast fortunes to be made in the solar system. And not when there is really nothing physically stopping us from building large rotating habitats or underground facilities on moons or other worlds. Hell, just the chance for exploration alone is going to attract people.
Plus, there is always the just for fun aspect. People who like to climb Mt. Everest don’t really do it because it’s easy. Easy is staying in the backyard watching the leaves change color.
Or they could just attack from the side of the earth that the moon isn’t on. Right now the moon is directly over South Africa, so they could just attack Hawaii and not have to bother with a moon base at all.
Thought I’d link to this video by Issac Arthur that is on growing food in space or on colonies, since that’s come up in this thread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ENabNTQwNg
The Moon is a comparatively tiny body nearly a quarter of a million miles away from the Earth; it would be less a matter of having to “get past” the Moon than not making any effort to fly near it. And it is not as if we could have any realistic hope of somehow defending against and aggressive alien civilization with the technology and power to cross interstellar space; such a force wouldn’t even need to directly attack the Earth but could just bombard it from afar with redirected asteroids or send a stream of finely ground material into the atmosphere to block sunlight, and wait for the inevitable collapse.
The notion that the technology exists to “easily” create closed, self-sustaining habitats anywhere is belied by the fact that we’ve failed in efforts to do so even on Earth. In-situ resource utilization—turning raw materials into propellants, consumables, and organic materials suitable for raising food and animals—is in its infancy, and we have yet to so much as produce a single cup of water, manufacture a kilogram of rocket fuel, extract a liter of oxidizer, or synthesize a thimble-full of nitrates from any extraterrestrial source. “Lunar regolith analogue” is basically low-silicate sand, but the lunar dust encountered by astronauts is actually nothing like terrestrial soil even though the two worlds have the same aggregate composition; the environment of the Moon and the way lunar dust is generated is very unlike any natural surface material on Earth, and of course lacks any organic materials and volatile compounds necessary to support Earth vegetation.
Sure, but there was a proven economic model for colonization. One was to send some guys overseas in a boat. They find some guys living on another continent, and rob them, and bring the treasure back home. Another way was to do the same thing, only trade with the natives and bring the treasure back home. Another way was to do the same thing, only stay, and either force the natives to farm for you, or import slaves to farm for you, or if you were really dedicated you could farm yourself.
Even though no particular expedition was a guaranteed success, there were enough spectacular successes that adventurers from all over Europe decided to give it a try.
The thing is, the Americas were a lot like Europe. There was land, water, oxygen, a biosphere, and so on. So you could go over to the Americas and at least drink and breathe, although sometimes finding enough food was difficult, lots of early colonists starved to death.
But there are two problems with a Moon colony. One is that the Moon is a barren rock. The other is that the Moon is outside Earth’s gravity well. Even if the Moon was covered in plants and oxygen and water and gold and diamonds and buxom green-skinned Moon babes it would still not make any economic sense to colonize the Moon. I mean, we’d probably be sending dozens of Astronauts to the moon regularly, sure. But not because it was profitable, like the voyages to the Americas were profitable.
The early European exploration and even colonization weren’t profitable either. Hell, a case can be made that Spain’s economy actually did worse, long term, because of colonization. Also, you are leaping from the early exploration and colonial efforts to success when you are talking about a perspective moon colony having to be profitable on a short time frame. IF we were to colonize the moon it would be because of some need, be it economic, logistic or something else. We’d probably start with just a base…maybe a permanent facility used for exploration or study. That might lead to some benefit in having a larger facility. Like I said, it’s possible you could use it as a logistics center or a transshipment facility, or for manufacturing goods to be sent on from earth…or from earth outward. I don’t think this is likely, as I think orbital structures would be the way we’d go, with the moon being more for early stage exploitation or proof of concept, but we could.
Positing that, your other objections are just not on point. Certainly there isn’t any air or soil or water there. So what? There isn’t a lot more than ice and snow in many arctic environments, yet people still went there and were able to live there with technologies centuries or even longer ago. Today, our technology means we don’t necessarily need any of that stuff to survive…what we need is raw materials, science and energy. And lot’s and lots of money. The real sticking point is the cost. The real sticking point to European exploration of the new world was cost. It wasn’t feasible for Europeans to explore for the new world in 500 AD…or even 1000 AD. And it wouldn’t have been feasible for them to even consider colonization at those time periods. The technology wasn’t there, and the political stability and economies weren’t there either. Today, it’s not really feasible for us to consider a large scale colony on the moon or in orbit. There isn’t a real driving need for it, and the launch costs are still too high. But eventually there will come a price point where that won’t be the case…and once you COULD go forth to search out gold in them thar hills, someone (or probably lots of someones) will do that. And when they do you’ll have a requirement to support them, and also to support the exploitation of resources. I doubt we’ll be there in my lifetime, though I do expect several countries and private organizations to do a lot more manned exploration and testing of proof of concept stuff in space while I am still about.
Honestly I’m wondering if the dust isn’t, well, fixable. I mean it’s the same problem every time. Devices that don’t have exposed mechanisms or hinges aren’t going to fail. Obviously the mitigation strategies which were tried on earth weren’t in the same environment and they didn’t have real moon dust to test with.
I won’t say it’s “just” an engineering problem - but if you could somehow create a clean, dust free area on the lunar surface, dust from elsewhere won’t blow over, right?
You could create that area by concentrating sunlight to slag the dust on that section or spaying down glue or some other method that involves either melting the dust or putting an agent to stick to it.
And the lunar capsules were crowded, didn’t have any of the advanced mechanisms that might be able to clean an astronaut’s suit you could install in a bigger habitat, and they didn’t have a separate airlock chamber in the first place.
It’s fairly alarming how casually completely insane notions about farming on colonies would work. For instance, you’d never be stupid enough to try to plant crops in the regolith directly. I mean, sure, you can use it as a growth medium I suppose, but you’d be better off with large clumps/rocks rather than dust/soil. And you certainly wouldn’t be using it in the ground.
Read up on how Aquaponics works if you’re interested. In short, you use fish to provide the nitrates and other organic compounds, and use a cycle of flooding and draining to aerate the growth medium and facilitate aerobic bacteria breaking down the fish poop into plant food. You use very little water, very little land, and waste very few resources. Traditional agriculture is a bad idea on earth. What kind of idiot would try that in space???.
Now, initially it’d take a lot of imported organic material, but once you have good carbon circulation (Soldier Fly Larva, worms, other insects and biodigesters reprocessing food waste, for example) your REAL primary concern would be trace minerals. I’m not familiar enough with their concentrations on Luna to tell if it’d be a serious import issue or not, but people citing the lack of organic contents in the regolith are barking up the wrong tree.
I think once you get past the “Cool! We are on the moon!” stage, it loses its luster. Who would go on vacation to a place where you could never go outside except in a spacesuit, let alone live there?
Even if we spent multiple trillions of dollars to make the accommodations reasonable, it would be no different than a vacation in Vegas only you could never leave the casino/hotel.
Seriously? Terraforming is possible? With what level of technology, how far in the future? And screw the strictest meaning of “possible”, tell me how you think terraforming, say Mars, would be a realistic possibility (at some time in the pre-Heinlein future).
That depends on how you want to define global trade and in what context. My point was to counter XTs assertion that many nations aren’t self sufficient on earth without each other, which I disagreed with. Life is better with globalization. It isn’t life enabling though.
