Could moon be colonized?

Mars and the moon are very different beasts. Still, I don’t know if full teraformation of mars, or the construction of on-planet habitation units, is preferable to statites and O’Niel-cylinders either in terms of required tech, difficulty, energy, longevity or habitability. A blue/green mars is a lovely idea, but I think we’re better off building orbital/lagrange habitats.

Edit: the moon, however, would make for an excellent staging point. Very low gravity very near to earth. For shipping between stellar bodies to and from the earth neighborhood, it’s essentially ideal. It can also serve as a source of fuel until other habitats are built further out. I’m not sure if any NEOs have a decent supply of either He-3 or substantial hydrogren.

Which still in no way justifies permanent habitation by wetware. It could be fully automated, with occasional inspections by actual fogbreathing engineers.

If you staff a space colony with people, you need to insure that it can support itself for a long time between visits from Earth. A Lunar colony should probably have at least a year margin, preferably more than two. Further out, any human colonies on Mars or Callisto or Titan need to be able to persist for decades without hearing from Earth.

Oh, come on, what do you think the solar wind is?

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I’m not sure if any NEOs have a decent supply of … substantial hydrogen.
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The solar wind is pretty insubstantial, unless you know of a way to collect it. That’s a serious question, by the way- if we could collect the solar wind there would be plenty of water available on the Moon as well- the rocks are full of oxygen, so water could be plentiful if there were a way to import solar hydrogen.

This wouldn’t be the end of our troubles on the Moon, though, since it is low in carbon and nitrogen too- in fact it is deficient in three out of the four main life-building elements. Taken as a whole, the Solar System has plentiful resources - but they are often far away from where you want them most.

Practice. The sun will extinguish itself in a few billion years. Clearly way beyond our lifetimes. But if humanity doesn’t wipe itself out in that period, we will need to have moved on.

Getting to Mars involves challenges like surviving for years in a high radiation environment, surviving for years in microgravity, and so forth.

Also, I fervently hope that Mars has some life on it, and I don’t think rovers are capable of exploring Mars thoroughly enough to find life. I read a report that the rovers can use their treads to dig six inches, which is probably not sufficient to find life, if there’s any to be found. I’m always disappointed at the schedules too - today the rover is going to check that one rock over there. A scientific team would make far more progress than a rover, and could do things like use a shovel to dig more than six inches, or build a digging machine that can go far deeper. A scientific team would be more mobile; perhaps it could take a long trip to one of the poles and see if there’s any frozen Martian tadpoles or something deep in the polar ice.

(The usual response is not to use astronauts, but “robots”, but until we’ve built Terminators or Cylons, we don’t have robots with the needed capabilities.)

Thread.

It will never be economically worthwhile, at least not in ways that seem apparent today.

I feel like we need to plant a flag on some off-world habitat, just for humanity’s bragging rights. But maybe saving our money for Europa is a bigger payoff.

Water IS plentiful on the moon. Much more so than we thought, for the specific reason that the hydrogen from the solar wind combines with the oxygen in the regolith and makes water molecules and hydroxyl compounds. We thought that the water molecules just bounced around on the surface until they dissociate or land in a cold trap, but recent results show that water is pretty much everywhere.

Water Might be Widespread on the Moon

So the moon has plenty of water, and likely enough phosphorous and other materials needed to sustain a human presence - with the sole possible exception of nitrogen. We need nitrogen in large quantities if we want to pressurize lava tubes or grow crops. But nitrogen has been detected in outgassing events, opening the possibility that there may be substantial sources of it underground. If we could find large pockets of nitrogen, we would have all the materials needed for large scale human presense on the moon.

Widespread =/= abundant. The Earth has abundant water, and would be covered to a depth of two kilometres if it were distributed evenly. We would be lucky if there is enough obtainable water on the Moon to cover it to an average depth of two centimetres. Mind you, this would probably be enough to support a reasonable population, maybe a few million- but if you want to support more, you’d have to import water.

Umm, can I ask how you are arriving at these assumptions?

a. The Moon is a chunk of the Earth. You would expect for there to be a lot of the elements that make water buried in there somewhere

b. How much water do you think human habitats need? You obviously can recycle every last drop, only loosing infinitesimal amounts through accidents and airlocks. And you could probably build special airlocks that lose almost nothing. Each human would need a few liters of genetically engineered algae to support their nutritional needs, growing at all time, and there’s the water in a human themselves. At any given time, a comfortable humidity level inside requires a bit of water per cubic meter of internal space. And yes, showering and washing takes water, but you could essentially recycle that using machinery right behind the wall for the shower/washer so that you need just a few gallons that you are constantly reusing.

We should have had drones exploring/prospecting the Moon for nearly 10 years by now. Some people might even pay to control a Moon drone from Earth for 20 minutes at a time.

Building an infrastructure on the Moon from lunar material would make more sense than shipping it from Earth.

You know what would be funny is to watch drone fights on the Moon controlled from earth because the delay is so high that they wouldn’t be responsive at all to the other player’s actions.

The story of water on the moon is not over. It is entirely possible that there are significant water assets we have yet to discover. As it is, the estimate of water ice at the poles ranges from several hundred million tons to several billion tons. That is a LOT of water. A million tons of water would fill a cube 100 meters per side. That’s as long and twice as wide as a football field, and the height of a 30 story building.

There are at least hundreds to thousands of such volumes of water just in the shadowed areas of the polar craters. Water also exists at 50ppm in the regolith, with some areas enriched to at least three times that, and with even higher concentrations in volcanic beads in places like the Aristarchus plateau. In addition, We have recently found that volcanic rocks all over the moon appear to have formed in wet conditions, suggesting that the mantle has or had a significant water component.

We recently discovered a deep lake on Mars, and we disvovered similar pockets on Ganymede. The moon may also have underground water and other volatiles.

But even the amount we know is there would support a significant population indefinitely.

Import water from Saturn.

Put thrusters on icebergs orbiting Saturn and push them into lower orbits around the Sun. It could probably be totally automated and easier than writing software for self-driving cars.

By the time we’ve used up billions of tons of water on the moon, going elsewhere for more should be a solved problem. No need to go to Saturn - Ceres probably has more water than we need, sitting right at the surface.