Could moon be colonized?

Great Debates
41

Understand, I already said that it’s not what I think we would or should do. And it would cost an, um, astronomical amount. But possible? Certainly it’s possible. What level of technology? I suppose you could do it today, if you had access to a large percentage of the global GDP and the will to do it. And you had, oh, maybe a few thousand years. Realistically, you are probably looking at needing another couple hundred years of current technology growth before it becomes feasible.

How? Well, there are tons of different ideas. I think diverting a bunch of comets to smash into Mars as a first step would be the way to go. Then you use a combination of orbital mirrors to heat up poles. Then you build a butt load of CO2 generating factories to thicken the atmosphere. Once you get to a decent level of atmospheric pressure you would start to introduce genetically modified plants to start, slowly, to change the composition of the atmospheric gasses (or you don’t bother and just basically go for the pressures you are wanting such that folks would still have to wear special equipment when going outside but not a space suit).

You’d have to figure out how to deal with the lack of a rotating core and the subsequent radiation, but we are talking a thousand years or so down the road, so either some sort of large solar shield to at least take care of the stuff coming from the sun or some magical space tech to produce a planetary magnetic field.

So, maybe in a few thousand years you have a planet that has some rudimentary plant life, a thicker atmosphere that colonists can walk around in with a breathe mask and maybe some sort of protective gear when they are outside and liquid water on the surface. From what I recall, you could maintain something like that for a few million years before solar wind basically rips it back away…so, bit of time to figure those problems out later.

Basically, this is why transforming is probably not going to be a think. Instead, I see rotating habitats being more realistic. There you could have earth normal conditions AND protection from radiation and other nasty stuff…plus a hell of a lot more space than all of the surface of all of the planets combined if you build enough of them. They can also be moved, which you can, in theory do with planets too, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to move a planet than a space habitat.

ETA: Here is Issac Arthur’s take FWIW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikoNQNj9ZnU

42

While this is true, the reality is that all of that organic material as well as the infrastructure to use it would have to be hauled up from Earth to the Moon. This would be many hundreds or thousands of kilograms of material per person on top of any basic equipment to be able to extract basic resources, dig tunnels and seal habitat space, and otherwise support habitation. Even with really cheap (<$100/kg) rocket transportation from Earth, it just isn’t plausible to do so on a mass scale, notwithstanding the difficulties we’ve found in trying to create a sealed, self-contained environment for even just a few people on Earth for periods of a year or two.

On Earth, we’re provided with all of the basic resources for life–air, water, organic and mineral nutrients, habitable temperatures, protection from harmful solar and cosmic radiation–essentially for free, and there is an infrastructure for extracting and refining useful metals and energy-rich organic compounds like petroleum or natural gas which has been developed over hundreds of years. Literally none of that exists on the surface of the Moon, or indeed, anywhere else in the Solar System except on the Titan, which at least has hydrocarbon atmosphere and lakes (and may one day serve as a rich source of complex organic molecules for a space-faring civilization). The notion of a self-sufficient ‘colony’ producing all of the nutrients and organic compounds necessary for agriculture de novo, while not physically impossible, is so far beyond existing technology that to make any estimate of the difficulty or suggest that it could be done today with some theoretically unlimited budget and pool of technical talent is hopelessly quixotic and impracticable.

And there still remains the motivation for doing so; if such a ‘colony’ cannot be wholly self-sufficient without resources from Earth, it is not a reservoir for humanity; the ‘coolness’ factor of having a human presence in space tends to dull when the costs get into the US$100B range; and frankly, with the advances in robotic and machine intelligence technologies, the utility of human workers to perform manual labor in space, which they can only do for a few hours at a time after which they have to return to some kind of habitat (requiring all of these resources at enormous cost) to rest and replenish just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Any future space habitation for an extended duration is going to be proceeded by massive automation and robotics which will extract resources and construct the infrastructure for habitation, and the primary role of human crew in such a context is just to be able to oversee and direct any exploration or extraction without a communications delay from Earth. For people to actually live on the surface of the Moon or Mars would require fundamental modifications of the human form, which although also vastly beyond current technology is far more feasible than the megascale engineering project of ‘terraforming’ and stabilizing moons and planets to somehow provide Earth-like conditions.

We’ve had trade for thousands of years, but that was trade of exotic goods; spices, silk, artworks, et cetera, which generally contributed little to national economies. The global trade that we depend on today started with oceanic transportation and trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company and British East India Company, and only became a necessity in the post-WWII world where bulk transportation became so inexpensive it was cheaper to buy grain and ship it halfway around the world than to grow it indigenously. There is no inhabited place on Earth (except for far north outposts like Barrow, AK, in which it would not be possible to sustain an independent human presence. That there are nations with populations which have grown so large as to be dependent upon outside resources is a result of globalization (and the Green Revolution), not a cause of it.

The appeal to the Issac Arthur video series doesn’t really provide much credence as they are basically a survey of various science fiction concepts and ideas with some superficial rationalization as to how they might work. I’m not sure of Arthur’s background–I believe he claims to be a physicist although he often glosses over serious fundamental issues like thermodynamics with concepts–but he rarely goes into any technical detail or analysis and often just assures that some concept will be feasible with the advent of a technomagical technology like nanoscale robotics or inexpensive antimatter production. I like to noodle about indistinguishble-from-magic technologies myself, but I don’t mistake that for an assumption rather than a pre-ordaned solution to hand wave away any technical objections. A coworker was showing me one of his videos a few months ago and Arthur kept saying, “Once we have fu-shon…” so many times I started following it up with, “Super easy, barely an inconvenience,” which caused everybody else watching to crack up. The videos are kind of enjoyable, although they become repetitive once you’ve seen several of them, but they don’t really establish the validity of megascale engineering projects any more than the History Channel proves that “Ancient Aliens” existed.

Currently, in the efforts to send crewed missions into even Low Earth Orbit, ~95% of the cost involves protecting and providing habitation for crew, and the costs for long duration missions is even higher; to achieve comparable mission goals the ratio of costs between crewed and uncrewed missions is more than two orders of magnitude in difference (>100:1), notwithstanding the effect a medical emergency or failure of habitat systems has on mission reliability, and while we can abandon a probe or rover at the end or mission, or better yet, continue on their mission indefinitely until power or communications is disrupted, we have to return a human crew at great expense with virtually no mission benefit. The costs of sustaining a permanent human presence on the Moon or Mars would be enormous, even if we make optimistic assumptions about recycling of resources and self-sufficiency, and attempting to make the surface of Mars inhabitable would be a program of thousands of years using propulsion and environmental control technologies that do not presently exist even in nascent form. Modifying the surface of the Moon to be sufficiently Earthlike to support people is impossible just because the gravity of the Moon is insufficient to hold even a tenuous atmosphere beyond the ionized dust that floats around it. And ultimately, it makes more sense to construct habitats using space resources like water ice and silicates which can be spun to create Earth-like gravity internally, which is at least a technically plausible concept if still requiring access to energy and resources that are well beyond the current state of the art.

Stranger

43

I’m not appealing to Issac Arthur…I posted it to give his take. I gave mine. I’m frankly skeptical you have watched the videos, since you persist in claiming things about them that aren’t true. He is pretty careful to coach his videos in terms that don’t need magic tech. While he does mention fusion, he always prefaces it by saying we don’t need it to do many of the things he’s talking about…just that with fusion it becomes easier (note…easier doesn’t not equate to easy).

As usual you want to try and throw around your own supposed expertise by don’t really answer the question posed in the OP. Are you specifically saying that we could not colonize the moon in any way, shape or form? Are you specifically saying that we could not grow food on the moon? You seem to be implying that space habitats are possible (good of you), but on this specific question of the OP, what’s your bottom line answer? Not ‘is it feasible’ not ‘is it necessary’, not the strawman about it being easy…is it possible? Yes? No? Some other long winded explanation chalked full of high end engineering technobabble that doesn’t answer the question asked?

44

True colonization would entail being self-sufficient, so it would be very difficult on the moon because everything, including the room and infrastructure necessary for food and water would have to be contained in an airtight dome. On Mars, the possibility of terraforming the planet itself is real. There is zero possibility of terraforming a totally airless and waterless moon.

45

The point of colonization wasn’t to exploit and exterminate the natives. It was to take the resources from other places and bring them back home to use. Exploiting and exterminating the natives was just a means to that end.

Space may not have the natives but it does have lots of valuable resources. We should be out there taking them. Setting up a permanent presence on the moon is a good first step.

46

This is a retrospective view on colonization. We look back and figure that had been the plan because it’s what ended up happening (and those of us who live in places like the Americas or Australia are living in these former colonies).

But that wasn’t the plan at the time. The European governments that were founding colonies did not set out with the goal of creating what would eventually be separate independent nations. Their expectation was that the colonies would always be dependent on the mother country. Self-sufficiency was not part of the plan; it just happened as the colonies developed.

So we could start space colonies with the original colonial plan in mind. They might always remain economically dependent on Earth for some resources. That’s not a problem if they can provide us with resources we want in exchange.

Or perhaps history will repeat itself and space colonies will develop to the point where they are not dependent on Earth. That’s not a problem either. European countries still trade with former colonial countries like Australia, Brazil, and the United States even though they are now independent of Europe.

47

I have, in fact, watched a number of the Arthur videos, though I have to admit that after watching a couple dozen I tend to tune out when he starts going through a litany of possible technologies without delving into any detail about them. To be fair, a ~30 minute video is not enough time to go into a detailed technical discussion about how antimatter production and the problems of storing the material would work, but when the video just glosses over the problem a claim that by the time it is viable to produce it all of the other problems will be resolved it doesn’t really offer much to go on. Similarly, Arthur often pontificates about megascale projects and structures with virtually no consideration for the scale of energy production required or the infrastructure necessary to support it other than either mentioning automation, nanoengineering, or virtually limitless material resource extraction as a blanket solution. The videos are entertaining, especially if you are widely read in ‘hard’ science fiction because you can pick out the sources for many of the concepts he presents, but they aren’t proof of the feasibility of anything.

I have no claim on being an expert on the future of science and space technology, but I have worked on a few studies for various proposed space projects and applications including adjunct studies to the NASA Mars Design Reference Mission (DRM) 4.0 and 5.0, as well as a study on future space communications infrastructure and various proposed launch systems or parts thereof. From those, I’ve learned that the high level concepts and estimates of cost, schedule, and effort are inevitably optimistic, often by an order of magnitude, once you start delving into the details of what it would take to develop, build, test, and operate such systems or missions.

Even with much less grandiose projects using mature technologies, actually turning them into a viable mission which can remain anywhere on schedule and cost can be an enormous technical challenge. A survey of the Mars Science Laboratory (‘Curiosity’) in The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job by The Planetary Society Senior Editor and “Planetary Evangelist” Emily Lakdawalla goes into fascinating detail of the technical problems and budgetary management issues of putting a large rover on the surface of Mars, which is small potatoes compared to even the most limited crewed mission.

It would be possible, at great expense, to maintain a small outpost on the Moon. I won’t hazard a specific estimate of cost but it would definitely be in the multi-hundred billion dollar range even for just a handful of crew. For comparison, the cost of the ISS exceeds US$150B, and that is a station in Low Earth Orbit with a maximum crew of six people with regular resupply flights. Even assuming a significant decrease in the cost of transportation a lunar outpost would require far more infrastructure than the ISS to construct a habitat, and the fact that the surface of the Moon is facing away from the Sun for half of its 27.3 day orbit means that you’d either have to bring energy storage for that period or forego solar power for some other source of power; presumably a compact nuclear fission reactor which would have to be transported and emplaced with some means to cool it that does not require atmospheric convection. It might be feasible to grow crops using hydroponics and animals with aquaculture systems but essentially all materials and resources for that would have to come from Earth, which again is on the order of thousands of kilograms per person just to establish the capability. (Yes, we have found ice water in the polar regions, but it is in thin skims of ice condensed into a substrate of lunar regolith; extracting and transporting it with sufficient volume to be useful would be its own major and expensive effort.) An ongoing, self-sustaining colony on the Moon using existing technology is not practicable regardless of cost, notwithstanding the likely physiological problems that long term colonists would experience.

I apologize for the “long winded explanation chalked[sic] full of high end engineering technobabble,” but it is my proclivity and occupational inclination to delve into the details of a topic rather than to just assess the feasibility based on whether or not I would like it to be valid. I would like terraforming of moons and planets and human space exploration to be viable and straightforward because I think it would be cool to view the rings of Saturn or walk on the surface of Europa, but the reality is that when we get into the details or learn something about human physiology in the space environment it almost always turns out to be more difficult and challenging than expected.

Stranger

48

Please note, I’m using this quote but I’m not actually picking on you in particular. There’s a consistent thread of people not doing basic research into colonization and then arguing that it’s impossible. Rocket fuel? Why the blue blazes would we need rocket fuel? What kind of idiot uses rocket fuel to escape a gravity well?

We’re talking about a massive endeavor costing potentially trillions of dollars. We’d be insanely stupid not to build even a basic launch loop (a small one comes in at about $30 billion using today’s tech) with a small portion of that cost. $100/kg? Try $3/kg (Wikipedia gives these numbers, if you’re curious). That’s two orders of magnitude less, but still a hefty price I’ll admit. But we wouldn’t be using rocket fuel like some crazy chinese inventor trying to make a rocket chair over a thousand years ago. That’s just silly. We’ve developed much better ideas since then. Still, you can feel free to casually dismiss anyone who even mentions rocketry - which is a stunningly high number of people in this thread.

49

This is really the issue. Right now, total ISS costs are about 10 billion a year (that will go down the longer it is in orbit, but it’s still in that range.) I work for a large Division I university with an enrollment of 33 thousand that has a budget of about a billion a year. For the cost of the ISS, we could build 10 free universities employing roughly 80 thousand people and 20 thousand professors half of which would be researchers educating 330 thousand students absolutely free of charge. Now maybe the ISS has given us scientific breakthroughs equal to 10 thousand researchers working for nearly 20 years, but I personally doubt it. Since the ISS has gone up, we have graduated about 80 thousand students. So that’s 800 thousand students we could have educated for the same cost as the ISS. Is it really giving us a million student’s worth of value? A moon base would cost at least as much and likely much more and what exactly is the benefit? A fictional starting point for mining asteroids? Come on. I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but I like fantasy too and you don’t see me walking around in armor.

It’s a vanity project. The work they are doing can be done more cheaply and efficiently with robots. Putting people in space is no different than a city buying a new football stadium or holding an elaborate Olympics opening ceremony. It’s not a surprise that the people that are most talking about a moon base are the same nations that feel they need to prove themselves on the world stage or maintain their dominance on it. I can think of better things to do with limited budgets than penis waving and Space Force parades and that’s what will ultimately scuttle any moon base in the near future.

50

By “launch loop” I assume you mean Keith Lofstrom’s proposal of an electromagnetic launcher. I’m not sure where the cost estimate of US$30B comes from by from a materials standpoint alone such a structure would probably exceed that cost, notwithstanding the inherent difficulties of constructing a structure 80 km in height, the energy required to operate such as system, or stabilizing it against dynamic loads. It is not the worst concept for a non-rocket space launch system I’ve seen but it is vastly beyond current engineering and material science experience. Building one ‘today’ (e.g. within the foreseeable future of ten or twenty years) is not really feasible, although with advances in material technology and the ability to automate the assembly and maintenance, particularly at altitude where it would be virtually impossible for human workers to service it, it may become more viable.

Any realistic space habitation is going to require using resources extracted from sources in space; fortunately, there are plenty of those even if they will take time and energy to reach, and the development of technologies and an infrastructure to extract and process into useable materials. The 'Fifties era concept of human asteroid miners is implausible at best; it will require automation of virtually all labor and handling effort with a minimal human presence until achieving a threshold of being able to provide resources to build and sustain suitable habitats for a significant population. But building and sustaining ‘colonies’ using resources from Earth is a non-starter for a wide array of reasons.

Stranger

51

Here’s wikipedia’s quote, and it does have its references.

It sounds like you don’t understand how it operates. Why would a human worker need to be at any altitude above ground level to service it? You can turn the accelerators off and the loop gently settles onto the ground. You generally build these things over oceans or unoccupied strips of land (and the US has plenty, it’s not like the loop is very wide).

Its primary component is also just a steel or ferromagnetic chain. It doesn’t require any exotic materials at all. No carbine nanotubes, no high temperature super conductors (they’d help but aren’t required), nothing we can’t already make. None of it is even that energetic in the grand scheme of things. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get thwacked by that chain if it broke, or be in the same neighborhood even, but it’s not as scary as it seems.

Here’s a fun video on the topic: Launch Loops - YouTube

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In my admittedly non-professional opinion, any significant development of space is going to require elevators.

53

Elevators suck*. Fountains are better**. Launch loops are king***.

*Space Elevators suck because they have far too many constraints. Material constraints, in that they require materials with tensile strengths we cannot produce, and geographic constraints because stable geosynchronous orbits aren’t placed very well for most of the countries that would want to build or utilize such a structure.

**Space fountains solve a lot of the issues with space elevators, but are really expensive and require extremely sophisticated engineering relative to the alternative options.

***Launch loops solve all of the above issues with gusto. Also, in the case of a catastrophic failure, launch loops render the least damage to themselves and their surrounding area. Not so much with space fountains and Space elevators wreck just about everything (they also loose a giant rock perilously close to our planet).

54

Great, another Isaac Arthur video. Well, you guys are consistent, at least. I did watch the video (I skipped a few minutes ahead to where he actually started talking about the launch loop concept), and I counted a dozen different problems, chief among them are the speed of the rotor (technically within material strength but even the slightest variation in speed from end to end would result in a buildup of shear stresses that would quickly destroy the rotor), the power required for “active support” that would generate a massive amount of waste heat, dynamic loads on such a thin structure with so many low frequency modes, and just the implausibility of building a 2000 km long, 5 cm diameter hollow tube capable of maintaining vacuum. All of this is beyond any existing or demonstrated technology, and the idea that we could build and operate such a system in the near future is not realistic.

I also had a chuckle at his mention of “explosive bolts” as a means to disassemble the structure in the case of a catastrophic failure at altitude; of ordnance devices we haven’t use explosive bolts on launch or space vehicles in decades because of the extremely high shock impulse and debris they produce. We use fracturing separation nuts that retain debris, Marmon/v-band clamps with ordnance-powered mechanical bolt cutters, and other non-ordnance devices that produce a lower shock impulse and less debris, or fracturing and severing charges to cut through structure on launch vehicles when debris is not such a concern. I’m sure he meant more generally to refer to ordnance separation devices like linear shaped charge, but it does highlight how much Arthur glosses over his ignorance of the actual technical details. Referring to “explosive bolts” as a separation mechanism is like a software engineer highlighting his experience with FLOW-MATIC.

Regardless, the point remains that a self-sufficient colony or space habitat is going to have to be able to use space-based resources rather than send bulk materials for structure and habitation from Earth. If if the $3/kg to orbit estimate were not hopelessly optimistic, sending material to the Moon or Mars to support a population is not viable for a sizable population, and does nothing to address the issue of actually being able to grow food or extract material resources for a population to support a self-sufficient colony, much less terraform a planet or moon.

Stranger

55

Again, I’m skeptical. And you didn’t really address what I said, just pontificated about how silly it is. Like I said, if you actually watch the videos you’ll notice that he specifically tries to avoid requiring magic tech (something you specifically have claimed he does all the time…sort of a disconnect) or even future tech like fusion. You can continue this dance, but I actually do follow this channel (among others) have have for years, and your portrayal in several regards is a bit of a disconnect from what it is. I do agree that he doesn’t really go into things that are feasible…but that’s by design. It’s a futurist channel after all talking about mega-projects that really are not feasible from many perspectives.

See? That wasn’t so hard. You actually answered the question the OP was asking. I agree with some of this, namely that it’s not practical at this time (I think you underestimate the amount of potential water ice as well as in situ extraction). I disagree with your conclusion that a self sustaining colony is not practical ‘regardless of the cost’, but the rub is that nothing is ever ‘regardless of the cost’. You are speculating on long term physiological problems, as we don’t really know the effects of lower gravity or the issue with lunar dust (or several other potential issues) will be, but it’s a valid point and, well, we don’t know. And won’t until we actually try.

Oh, I don’t mind. Often I enjoy when you go into technical detail. It’s one of the strengths you have as one of the boards better posters. However, you sometimes try and use your technical expertise and techno-speak walls of text as a bludgeon to beat down debate on a subject by fiat…you said it, here is a wall of text proving I’m right, so end of discussion! You also tend to use strawmen (I note in your latest post you said ‘you guys’ to being ‘consistent’ in reference to someone else posting a link to Issac’s site :p).

I get that you are trying to keep it real. I’m good with that, overall. But while your view is the mainstream for many NASA PHD scientist types it’s not the view of everyone. And not everyone who disagrees with your view is a starry eyed clueless idiot with no science or engineering background. NASA’s view has prevailed…we are doing baby steps since failure is always an option, and frankly NASA can’t afford to push things and have more failures wrt manned flight than they already do. Perhaps that’s the smart bet. We shall see, as other nations (and private companies) start to look to the moon and beyond. If it really is impossible or impractical to set up a manned base there then you and NASA will be right. If not then other countries will jump ahead, perhaps because they are willing to take more risks.

56

‘Colonization’ of either the Moon or Mars has to happen organically and evolve from real needs and real profits, or it will never happen at all. We are not going to plan and pay for a ‘colony’ as some kind of national project. It would be far too expensive with no commensurate reward.

No, what has to happen is that we need to find things to do in either place that make it economically profitable to go there. That will drive investment and R&D which will eventually solve problems and bring down costs and enhance capabilities.

This is why the Moon is a much better choice for initial exploration than Mars, if what you are looking for is some kind of economy that can sustain continued human presence and expansion.
It’s faster to get to, easier to land on and take off from, and it is riddled with pre-formed habitats - some likely large enough to house major cities if we wanted to.

The moon is close enough to run tele-operated vehicles, opening the door to automated mining and extraction. The lunar regolith is over 40% oxygen. There are abundances of other useful materials like iron, silicon, calcium, aluminum, hydrogen, titanium, etc. All of these things are abundant on Earth as well, naturally, but having them on the moon means that if we do discover some economically valuable activity to do there, we will have the capability to build new things on the moon without having to ship resources from elsewhere.

Also, new research in just the past few years makes the moon a lot more exciting than it used to be. Our post-Apollo picture of the moon was of an essentially dry, airless rock with little to offer anyone and which would need to have basically everything humans need brought to the surface by rocket. However, everything we’ve found from the LROC, GRAIL, LADEE, Chandrayaan and Kuyuga missions has made the moon far more interesting. First we found millions of tons of water ice on the moon (confirmed very recently). Second, we have found evidence that the moon’s interior was/is wet, which not only suggests other volatiles like Nitrogen may be present under the surface, but that the story of the Moon’s creation (and therefore the Earth’s) has some big holes in it. So there is still lots of science to be done on the Moon.

And the story of lunar volatiles is not over - we have detected outgassing on the moon from various places which indicate there could easily be large pockets of volatiles inside the moon.

The GRAIL mission discovered that the lunar crust is about 12% void space. Some of those spaces could be pressurized, some could have liquid or frozen water in them. We just don’t know. We thought we understood the moon well, but it’s turning out to be a lot more interesting than that.

The water situation gets even better, as we’ve discovered that water is constantly being produced on the moon through interaction of the solar wind with the lunar regolith. That water was thought to be released and bounce around the exosphere until it is either dissociated or lands in a cold trap. But now it looks like it might be binding in the regolith in the form of hydroxyl compounds or even water molecules.

Lava tubes aren’t just ‘caves’ that people could live in like moles. They’re more like the size of space colonies - hundreds to thousands of meters wide, and possibly hundreds of kilometers long. Hollow lava domes would be stable up to five kilometers in diameter and over a kilometer high. That’s a ‘cave’ where you would feel like you are outdoors. You could be agoraphobic standing in the middle of that. If we could pressurize it with an atmosphere, you’d have enough space to grow crops, raise animals, and house a million people.

One of the sites that’s most likely for an early lunar exploration base is the Aristarchus Plateau. This plateau is a piece of the old lunar crust pushed up by the force of the impact that created Mare Imbrium. Lava flows from Imbrium then surrounded it, making it look like an island in an ocean almost.

Aristarchus is interesting because there is a hell of a lot of different geology there. Many different rock and mineral types are present, some unidentified. It is covered in pyroclastic materials ejected from ancient volcanic activity that would be especially easy to harvest compared to hard sheet lunar basalts. Aristarchus has been the site of numerous observed ‘outgassing’ events by astronomers on Earth, and also measured by Apollo 15 and the Lunar Prospector mission. It’s also one of the richest regions on the moon for rilles and other volcanic features, which means a likely site for enclosed lava tubes and possible volatile pockets that could be mined.

You can imagine a company going there and finding something valuable, kicking off a race by other companies to also get there and stake claims on other valuable sites.

The path to a potential permanent future in space isn’t a big government project, it’s something more akin to a gold rush. If we can find something worth rushing for. If not, we may get lucky to have a scientific outpost of a few people, and maybe some tourist facility with a few dozsen people coming and going. And that’s about it.

I think it’s more likely that in 50 years there is more human activity in the asteroid belt or the moon or both than there is on Mars.

57

Have you read about the latest, latest, as of this year breakthroughs by OpenAIand Deepmind? Both have fairly new machine learning algorithms (like everything they are complex combinations of existing algorithms but blow the doors off the previous formula in performance, like how Calculus is based on Algebra) that control robots better than anything before. OpenAI is now experimenting with physical robotic hands and it’s finally beginning to work.

What I’m saying is, the tech track to me seems fairly obvious. Before we start building these vast space endeavors, our civilization needs a vastly deeper and more automated industrial base to support them. The reason why “150 billion” is expensive is our GDP is only 18 trillion. And the reason it cost so much to make a station in low earth orbit is partly the R&D and bureaucracy, and partly because repetitive tasks like building the rocket components that were thrown away had to be done by humans.

We could solve this problem not by making rockets reusable (this only goes so far) but by using machine intelligence good enough to do every step of the process of building rockets autonomously. With greater than human reliability and skill.

And building the robots that do the rocket building autonomously. And the mining machines that collected the minerals to make all this stuff. From deep mines too unsafe for humans (heat, dangerous gases, frequent tunnel collapses) or from underwater. And so on up and down the industrial chain.

What’s different now is this kind of goal directed automation gives you a robot that can recover from faults because the algorithms cause it to take actions that clear them. Even if the fault has never happened before. And it won’t have to be hand programmed or optimized for every motion.

What I’m really saying is the task of colonizing the Moon…well, building rotating habitats for humans in lunar orbit…is not something we can do directly today with today’s technology. But the underlying problem is nothing as hard as you seem to feel it is. We currently utilize a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the available physical resources just in the accessible upper crust of the planet we inhabit. If we could tap more of these resources, previously daunting problems become trivial.

58

If you assume, like I do based upon a straightforward extrapolation of economic and technology trends, that self replicating machinery (not using nanotechnology, just factories like we have now without the workers) is right around the corner, then the Moon is a perfect candidate.

Specifically, if you want to start large-scale mining or deploying solar panels or building more factories, you have to get land and mining rights. Someone owns every scrap of land on earth, so you have to pay for them. Any waste gases you produce have to be trapped and dealt with.

You can’t strip mine vast 10 kilometer deep holes - earth’s gravity and weather and water all get in your way. Also, people who own the land or the country you dug the hole in are going to complain.

So if you simply assume that AI capabilities are about 10-20 years from being capable of driving such fully automated plants, with only modest human effort required to set up each automated station, you realize that the next problem (besides mass unemployment) is a resource shortage. Just a few generations of doubling and you’d have more industrial machinery hungry for resources than you have available places on Earth that someone will allow you to mine without expensive permits and environmental studies and bribes and so on.

The Moon is 1/6 of the mass of the earth, and almost all solid. You could keep strip mining and launching to orbit both finished products and waste mining tailings until you have consumed the entire Moon.

What would you do with these kind of resources?

Just to name a few obvious near term goals :

a. Orbital habitats for the middle and upper classes (with exponential growth the prices would start to plummet to something the middle class could afford)
b. Automated bioscience labs. With enough robotic test cells on a big enough scale, combined with AI models, working out how to manipulate biology so that the upper, and later middle class members of society can have their aging halted and reversed is feasible.
c. All sorts of exotic particle experiments.
d. Antimatter production (and testing) for starships
e. Nanomachinery development (you probably need a vast amount of lower level macroscale equipment to finish the construction on a complete self replicating nanofactory)

59

Well, I’m not sure about all of those things, because I don’t think the future is that predictable.

Humans have managed to live in some pretty inhospitable places when there was profit to be had. North Sea oil platforms, for example. I wonder what would happen if a new Moon treaty gave mineral and gas rights in blocks to anyone who discovers and begins to exploit those resources, and someone discovered, say, a nitrogen pocket big enough to pressurize a lava tube? The future value of that would be incalculable, and you could never ship that much nitrogen from the Earth. So if one day someone wants to grow crops on the moon or have large structures of any sort with breathable atmospheres, that nitrogen would be worth many, many billions of dollars. Potentially. But speculators gotta speculate. Show them there’s a real potential profit to be had, and I think you’d be amazed at how fast space would become developed and be routine. The key is that it has to be a profitable thing to do. IF it isn’t, it will always remain the realm of governments and eccentric billionaires and satellite consumers.

Look how clever we were at figuring out how to move oil around the world. A litre of gasoline is cheaper than a litre of bottled water, and yet that gasoline may have been pumped out of the ground as oil in the middle east, shipped across an ocean, run through a pipeline to a refinery, put on a train to a local depot, then trucked to the gas station. And they’ve made that so efficient that they can make big profits selling you a litre of it for around a buck.

There are a lot of advantages to lunar manufacturing. For example, because there is nothing to disturb the terrain, open mining can be done at a much slower pace. You could have something that looks like a combine crawling along under solar power, scraping up pyroclastic sand, forming it into brick molds and zapping it with microwave energy to sinter it. In the process it releases bound oxygen and water, which is collected. The bricks are dropped out the back like hay bales. Then another machine comes along behind and collects the bricks and takes them to a CNC structure builder, which essentially builds igloo structures, or roads, or whatever. These things could operate very slowly. If you could figure out a good heat sink, you could store the waste heat of the working period, then let it radiate during the dark period to help keep batteries warm while the machine waits for another light period to start working again.

The thing is, if you can build an AI good enough to traverse lunar terrain, and make the things reliable enough, you’ve basically got a slow moving mine that operates continuously for just capital and maintenance costs. Or maybe we’ll invent something completely new once we have a specific problem and really start studying it hard.

60

Stumbled across a Sci-Am blog post that informs us there is not enough CO[sub]2[/sub] on Mars (in rocks and ice) to establish, at best, a one-tenth atmosphere atmosphere if you could releases all of it. You could probably make it out of other stuff (might take some effort), but you also have to build the giant polyethylene bag to keep the precious gas from being driven off by the solar wind.