Why would anyone want to live on the moon?

[Fish]

@guizot

Okay, but then when someone with a bigger 1920s-Style-Death-Ray than me can knock me over the head and steal all my valuable moon dust, what can I do?

Hey, remember the great vanishing American West? Yeah, some people really dig that kind of lawless frontier spirit. I don’t, but the OP wasn’t “why would you want to live on the moon?”.

[levdrakon]

@guizot

So I’m going to get rich selling golf balls, because the first thing they’ll build on the moon will be a golf course.

I think the point was that while the physicists are off doing their physicisty things and the engineers are off doing their engineery things all the assorted doctors are off doing their doctory things everyone might appreciate someone who can make a really good pot of hydroponic and low-gravity crawdad-farmed Cajun gumbo. Or something.

I assume even with a sizable moon-base it’ll still be awhile before we have robots doing everything for us. Someone still needs to keep an eye on the kids, for instance.

I imagine a time when the cost of transporting goods to and from space is affordable, but the cost of services still means it’s worthwhile to have a good old fashioned barber around.

[guizot]

@Fish

Hey, remember the great vanishing American West? Yeah, some people really dig that kind of lawless frontier spirit. I don’t, but the OP wasn’t “why would you want to live on the moon?”.

I was focusing on all that valuable moon dust. (Or even the helium I could take back to earth in my back pack.)

Anyway, there’s a lot of mythology (due to Hollywood, mostly) of the “lawless frontier.” What I mean is that there are laws and then there are laws.
As to the OP…

@OP

Would YOU want to live on the moon, or another planet, forever, or some obiting vessel?

the “why” being implied.

I haven’t given up on the idea completely. I’m still thinking about that harsh mistress Lynn brought up. (Let alone her husband.)

NOT Lynn’s husband. The harsh mistress’s husband. )

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@appleciders

Helium-3 (two protons and a neutron) is incredibly valuable on Earth for use in nuclear fusion reactions. It’s believed that the far side of the moon has large amounts of He-3 embedded in the regolith from the solar wind. A couple pieces from the Helium-3 Wikipedia article:

Rephrase as:“Helium-3 would be incredibly valuable on Earth for use in nuclear fusion reactions if we had the capability to create and sustain such reactions.” The problem here is that we don’t have controlled, sustaintainable nuclear fusion of any kind, nor is there an expectation that we will inside of the next twenty years. (Controlled, power-generating nuclear fusion has been “twenty years away” for approximately the last fifty years.)

Also, the aneutronic D-[sup]3[/sup]He reaction requires about an order of magnitude higher energies (and corresponding temperatures) to function. Since we can’t even sustain the energies required for the more prosaic D-T fusion, it’s a bit of a strech to say that we need to be mining [sup]3[/sup]He. My guess is that we’ll have to live with the neutron-producing D-T fusion for a long time after we figure out how to do it at all. In any case, [sup]3[/sup]He is out there for the taking in the solar wind. It would probably be more effective to collect it from space with automated helium-trapping “fishnets” than to try to mine it from the regolith and send it back to Earth.

Stranger