[QUOTE=levdrakon]
or environmentalists yelling at you for spoiling the land.
[/QUOTE]
You don’t think environmentalists aren’t going to take up the cause of protecting whatever planet humans colonize? While it is a work of fiction, I think that Robinsons’ Mars trilogy gets that aspect correct.
I do not think it possible to colonize the moon 9and have the colony be self-sufficient). the Arizon “Biosphere” project taught us that maintaining a biosphere environment is very difficult-and mainatining the proper level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, is next to impossible. So the lunar colony is a pipe dream. It would be far easier to make the Gobi or sahara desrt habitable, than to think about colonizing the moon.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I do not think it possible to colonize the moon 9and have the colony be self-sufficient). the Arizon “Biosphere” project taught us that maintaining a biosphere environment is very difficult-and mainatining the proper level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, is next to impossible. So the lunar colony is a pipe dream.
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Technology marches on. Today’s “pipe dream” is next decade’s government project. And a hobby the decade after that. Also; we know for a fact that it is possible to make a self sustaining ecology, because we live in one.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
It would be far easier to make the Gobi or sahara desrt habitable, than to think about colonizing the moon.
[/QUOTE]
What makes you think we couldn’t make them habitable with enough effort ? We probably will too, and colonize the Moon.
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
Dude. Without previewing the other responses, there’s only one real answer to this.
Rocket jetpacks.
[/QUOTE]
Where’s our rocket packs?
Then there is low-g sex.
Somebody’s got to say it: Because we like the moon.
[QUOTE=pinkfreud]
For people with certain kinds of health problems, there might be advantages to the lower gravity of the moon.
[/QUOTE]
And living in lower gravity would just be FUN! You could bounce around and do all kinds of acrobatic moves that you can’t on Earth. I suspect I might be less tired at the end of the day, too.
[QUOTE=Musicat]
Well, I’d like to visit the moon
On a rocket ship high in the air
Yes, I’d like to visit the moon
But I don’t think I’d like to live there.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I do not think it possible to colonize the moon 9and have the colony be self-sufficient). the Arizon “Biosphere” project taught us that maintaining a biosphere environment is very difficult-and mainatining the proper level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, is next to impossible. So the lunar colony is a pipe dream. It would be far easier to make the Gobi or sahara desrt habitable, than to think about colonizing the moon.
[/QUOTE]
I think you’ll find that if we keep Pauly Shore off the moon we’d have none of the problems of which you speak.
Musicat and Cervaise beat me to it.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I do not think it possible to colonize the moon 9and have the colony be self-sufficient). the Arizon “Biosphere” project taught us that maintaining a biosphere environment is very difficult-and mainatining the proper level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, is next to impossible. So the lunar colony is a pipe dream. It would be far easier to make the Gobi or sahara desrt habitable, than to think about colonizing the moon.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, Biosphere 2 taught us that bad engineering and bad science equal a bad environment.
I think Neil Armstrong summed it up best:
Who wouldn’t?
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
It would be far easier to make the Gobi or sahara desrt habitable, than to think about colonizing the moon.
[/QUOTE]
Yup. You want to live on the moon? Go live in the middle of Antartica, or on top of Mount Everest, or in a diving bell a couple of miles offshore. There’s lots of wide open space in all those places if you’re feeling too cramped by contemporary living.
The new world wasn’t explored and colonized for the Glory of Adventure. It was done, virtually start to finish, by people trying to make a buck. (With the occasional group of malcontents hiding out from The Man thrown in.) There’s no economic incentive to colonize the Moon. And unless the entire Earth winds up controlled by a single totalitarian state there will always be someplace easier for refugees to flee to.
Life in a moonbase would be nasty – cramped, smelly, boring and incredibly dangerous. The romance of “Wow, I’m on the Moon” would wear off after a few months and then you’d be stuck in a barren, hostile environment with nothing to occupy your time but back-breaking work. The only way you can get people to put up with crap like that in the long term is for there to be some outrageous payoff at the end (“We found El Dorado, yay!”) or threaten them with torture or death (“Hmm. Joseph Smith just got shot to death by an angry mob … time to move on!”)
[QUOTE=adam yax]
You don’t think environmentalists aren’t going to take up the cause of protecting whatever planet humans colonize? While it is a work of fiction, I think that Robinsons’ Mars trilogy gets that aspect correct.
[/QUOTE]
Sure environmentalists will bitch. They’ll also lose, because the only thing that will truly satisfy the environmentalists is if humans stop having babies until our population has dropped back to 2000 BC levels, we give up our modern conveniences and go back to living at one with the forest. But if you tell people they can’t have babies or move into a new housing development you’ll lose.
People are okay with trying to save the rain forest and keeping the ocean reasonably clean, but there are limits. Either we find new land area elsewhere, or we take more land area here on Earth. We pave over the rain forests, the deserts and fill the oceans with floating cities.
It’s an easy choice for me. Heck, even if we found ancient, primitive microbes living deep under the moon’s or Mars’ surface, I’d still say colonize it because I’d much rather preserve Earth’s bio-diversity. Actually, establishing zoological preserves off-planet may become the only way to preserve Earth’s bio-diversity.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I do not think it possible to colonize the moon 9and have the colony be self-sufficient). the Arizon “Biosphere” project taught us that maintaining a biosphere environment is very difficult-and mainatining the proper level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, is next to impossible. So the lunar colony is a pipe dream. It would be far easier to make the Gobi or sahara desrt habitable, than to think about colonizing the moon.
[/QUOTE]
Biosphere taught us some important lessons and I wouldn’t consider it a failure at all. Probably the most important lesson was that creating a completely self-contained, self-maintaining perfectly balanced micro-ecology is pretty difficult. In fact, it may be impossible.
But so what? A moon colony isn’t limited to the strict rules of Biosphere. If you need more oxygen, just pump in more oxygen. Too much carbon dioxide, vent it or scrub it out of the air.
Biosphere had problems with their air because they weren’t allowed outside assistance when things went out of balance and some of their problems are unique to Earth anyway. The concrete they used wasn’t properly cured. We learned the importance of that. They dumped all their organic compost into the ground right at the start. Bad idea. Rain got on the outside of the glass, mixed with dirt & dust and started growing algae and cut their light levels. Not a problem in space. That, combined with a cloudy, darker winter along with its shorter days meant the plants which were supposed to produce their oxygen and use up carbon dioxide didn’t get to do their job. Some plants flourished while others died off and they couldn’t be replaced.
All these problems are easily avoided and/or fixable in space or on the moon.
Oh, and native ants got in through a crack. That’s definitely not a problem in space.
Those people who say that there are plenty of less hostile environments here on earth (deserts, the Antarctic, undersea, etc.) are quite right. You don’t have to worry about getting air, water and basic resources. And you have the advantage of gravity. On top of which, carting peoople al the way up to the moon is a rotten way to waste that energy, if your goal is to ease overcrowding. The transportation costs are rificulously high, unless you want to accept large losses (something they probably did in transporting convicts via sailing ship, and certainly did with slaves).
The moon will be inhabited – if it ever is – for the uniqwue advantages it offers, the prime one being a nice stable spot on top of our gravity well.
By the way, another problem with Biosphere was its complicated system of “lungs” required to accommodate the expansion of the air when it got heated by the sun every day. If you have a lunar colony that’s largely underground, that’s not likely to be an issue.
Right up until the point where your bones and muscles attrophy and you die. Humans are not meant to live in 1/6th (Moon) or 3/8th (Mars) Earths gravity.
And that’s the major problem with all these terraforming dreams. Gravity. While you might be able to, in theory, alter the atmosphere of Venus, the Moon, Mars and some of the Jovian moons, you can’t, even in theory, alter a planets gravity without A) making it more massive and B) screwing up it’s orbit. And humans just can’t live long-term in that low of gravity.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I do not think it possible to colonize the moon 9and have the colony be self-sufficient). the Arizon “Biosphere” project taught us that maintaining a biosphere environment is very difficult-and mainatining the proper level of oxygen, carbon dioxide, is next to impossible. So the lunar colony is a pipe dream. It would be far easier to make the Gobi or sahara desrt habitable, than to think about colonizing the moon.
[/QUOTE]
And that’s the other basic flaw. If your technology has advanced to the point where we could terraform another planet, it would be easier and cheaper to just fix this one.
Historically, most colonial expansion is economic. Which means if you wanted to colonize…say…Mars, and it was actually terraformed, you would still need some economic incentive to do so. There would have to be some resource there that was so valuable, people were willing to travel a million miles to get it. You would also need a cheap enough and fast enough way to get there so that it was, in fact, economic.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
And you have the advantage of gravity.
[/QUOTE]
The advantage of gravity? What advantages does Earth’s gravity field have over that of the moon’s aside from holding an atmosphere? As far as I can tell everything would be more efficient in a lower gravity field. Certainly machinery of all sorts would be lighter and cheaper. Friction would be lower.
Cite?
As far as I know, we have no real data about how humans would do living in reduced gravity. We don’t do very well in no gravity, but 1/6 or 3/8 might be plenty to keep us from withering away.
[QUOTE=msmith537]
And that’s the other basic flaw. If your technology has advanced to the point where we could terraform another planet, it would be easier and cheaper to just fix this one.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think anyone’s talking about terraforming. We’re talking about enclosed habitats. Something more like large domes and/or large underground greenhouse type places using artificial sunlight or sunlight piped in via some sort of light tube.
Your point about the long-term effects of low gravity is a valid one. I could see the moon as a large land area for producing food, with people being allowed to live there for maybe only a year at a time. Perhaps older people with a medical certificate saying they’ve only got five-ten years left would be allowed to permanently retire there and enjoy the increased mobility and not having to worry about long-term effects.
Eventually rotating, orbiting space colonies are probably the way to go in terms of permanent Earth-normal gravity environments anyone can safely and permanently settle.
As for the economic incentive to do so, have you priced a decent family sized condo overlooking Central Park in Manhattan lately? Or looked into buying a condo on a luxury cruise ship? What if housing planet-wide gets even more expensive than that? Assuming we get something like space elevators going and the price of moving people and material does become a viable alternative I can see large numbers of people opting for space.
Would I live on the moon? Let me put it this way: I live in West Texas.
It depends on what you’re trying to do. But you take tremendous use of gravity without realizing it. Gravity keeps this in place. You don’t have to secure large masses to prevent them from moving around. You don’t have to secure small masses to keep them in place. In a zero-G environment you have to think where everything is going to go and how to keep it there. Skylab astronauts frequently found their small things collecting on the collecting air filter because the air currents drew them that way. They also found that they had pains in their midsections from the motion of sitting down. In gravitym, you basically let gravity pull you down. In zero G you essentially do a standing sit-up.
You unconsciously use gravity all the time, and life in a zero-G environment is vastly different. It’s true that you wouldn’t have the same problemsd in low gravity, but there would still be problems and differences.
I’d like to live in zero-G as well, and take advantage of the differences it offers. But don’t let it blind you to the fact that zero-g and low g have their problems, as well. If you start doing large-scale construction, or agriculture, or whatever in zero- or low-g , you’ll find out those problems soon enough.