Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
In the case of musk and his billionaire friends, they just want to escape the consequences of their actions and become above the law. Basically they want to be a king, with no laws restraining them.
It’s also a good distraction, doubt they actually think people will live on the moon or Mars
Someone else pointed out that you could set off every nuke that has ever existed and the earth would still be more hospitable than mars
To repeat myself a little, it’s all a distraction from making things better here, like the bezoes quote about getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system, and it’s like dude, you might have 100 Einsteins pissing in bottles in your warehouse right now but they can’t afford school or groceries or rent
I read that as getting 10,000 Epsteins by expanding in the solar system …
Why not both
10,000 Epsteins vs. 10,000 Einsteins
Who would win?
Einsteins figure out how to give killer massages.
Or in the words of Stephen Jay Gould,
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
The Moon and Mars are not a distraction. It’s been a Nasa goal for a long time to go to Mars. Politics has stopped us from doing it for a very long time. We’re lucky we got to put probes around it and rovers on the ground.
There’s a difference between musk and bezo talking about Mars, the moon and space, and nasa talking about it.
getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
Interstellar is just a movie, mate. There is no such planet, time passes at the same rate everywhere - ie the caesium standard.
Time dilation is a thing, but as far as I’m aware it’s not possible to travel someplace, pass any greater amount of time, and then return as though less time had passed - that’s time travel. It’s theoretically impossible, at least with current technology and understanding of relativity. Great movie though.
Edit: downvote if you don’t understand that time dilation isn’t magic, and you can’t travel back through time.
As far as we know, traveling through time backwards is impossible.
Traveling through time forwards is very much possible though - in fact we are doing exactly that right now!
I explicitly said ‘return back as though less time had passed’ - i.e. backwards time travel - was theoretically impossible.
I never claimed travel forward though time was not.
It’s not about returning back in time - it’s just one place would travel forward slower than another place.
You’re telling me what I was talking about? Returning back in time is exactly the comment I was responding to.
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
This goal is impossible for the reasons I explained.
I didn’t get the idea from the movie, I’m talking about how time passes differently depending on the pull of gravity; and that’s why I kind of alluded to this being theoretical at best. I don’t actually think it’s feasible to find an enormous planet just to have time pass more quickly.
The problem is that your return to Earth would slowly move you back down the dilation losing the gains.
You can take two routes to a restaurant. One is very short but curvy and has a slow speed limit. The other is a really long straight shot with high speed. You can think of your scenario as such a case where even though the straight path is longer, it takes the same “time” to get to the restaurant.
You would be taking the faster, longer route while Earth takes the windy slow route but as you arrived back you would still be in sync.
Edit to add: Spacetime is a single thing which is why the above behavior the case.
That’s not how time dilation works. Astronauts that have spent significant time on the ISS have experienced — however marginally — less time than their identical twins on Earth.
Yep, and as I said, the return trip with all the rapidly evolved super-geniuses would be the impossible part of the plan.
You can’t travel someplace else - experience say 100 years, and then travel back to your place of departure and have had only 20 years passed. That’s fundamentally impossible.
have had only 20 years passed
Have had only 20 years pass in the local frame of reference, not the frame of the evolved super geniuses. Thus everybody on earth gets to enjoy the benefits, if there are any.
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Moon days are 250F, but it’s a dry heat.
The rich don’t need to live there. The just need to get there ASAP. If they can’t live… oh well.
I just wished they got the fuck on with it and left earth already, so we can turn off their radio coms and start fixing things
I mean everyone makes a choice everyday to listen to their shit.
Not really. I have never voluntarily listened anything about musk. Good example, this thread lol.
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They basically wish they could be Adrian Veidt
The moon is a great starting point to explore the rest of the solar system, doubly so if we found water on it.
I’ll quote JFK (probably more Ted Sorensen) on this one « we don’t do this things because they are easy but because they are hard […] »
And to provide a material reason to explore the solar system, if we can mine the asteroid belt, resource scarcity will be a thing of the past. A single 1-mile diameter asteroid can contain $20 trillion in metals.
This is why the billionaires are staging their own space race. Whoever can mine the asteroid belt first owns the world. It’s also why privatizing space exploration is such a terrible idea and why we must have a global socialist revolution before anyone reaches the belt.
Another reason privatization would be a disaster: there’s very little difference between hauling an asteroid back to Earth’s orbit and hauling one to collide with the planet. The latter is actually much easier due to not needing to slow down at the end.
I wonder how many decades or centuries it’ll take before the first megalomaniac demands a ransom to not drop a giant rock on Earth or another colony.
Once intrasolar travel becomes common, kinetic kill vehicles will be an omnipresent threat. Asteroid mining operations will need to have the kind of strict licensing and mandated observation that nuclear weapon decommissioning sites have today.
Hopefully if were at the point of being able to haul massive asteroids back to earth, we also have the technology to intercept it and move it, or destroy it, and we have that capability ready on demand.
Hopefully, but we’re not a very forward-thinking species. More likely we’d only give haulers just enough fuel to make gravity-assisted trips (which are only possible when orbits match up optimally) because it’s cheaper that way, making on-demand interception unlikely.
Destruction doesn’t always work either. If it’s struck close to Earth most of the fragments will still hit, and even if they’re too small to survive reentry they will still dump tons of heat energy into the atmosphere.
Physics is a harsh mistress.
I wonder how much heat energy fragments would actually dump and if it would be statistically significant. Somebody do the math!
I couldn’t find any hard values, but Wikipedia does have a chart displaying the energy asteroids of various sizes would release if they exploded before hitting the ground, as well as the total kinetic energy they’d have upon hitting atmosphere. All that energy would still have to go somewhere even if it’s fragmented.
I also found that a single 50 meter fragment is enough to destroy an entire city and surrounding metropolitan area, so even if the heat isn’t an issue you’d still have to somehow ensure zero large fragments survive interception.
Oh no I don’t think we would. Once an asteroid is earth bound and past its apoapsis there is very little you can do (even with near infinite propulsion) to make it not collide with the earth.
Destroying it turns one big problem into a billion small problems with the same velocity and trajectory, which is also a no win scenario.
That’s a huge reason I believe, hope, that we will never do that. A more efficient and less catastrophic approach is to do some level of refining out at the source and only send back together refined, pure minerals.
…. Although I realize the irony of advocating for sending, say a rod of pure tungsten, back to earth
And more realistically, I have a hard time believing that will ever be cheaper to bring to earth than to mine locally. While there maybe a handful of elements worth it, more realistically you are mining for use in space
doesnt seem like it was thier goal, its mostly space tourism.
I mean, space tourism is much easier than astroid mining but much of the tech needed for space tourism will also be needed for astroid mining. It’s literally a technological leap requiring resources at the scale of the entirety of humanity just to make space tourism viable, so they go with the loffty but achievable goal before the goal that’s currently complete sci-fi
Space tourism is something that can happen now for the ultra-rich, and would be an interesting medium term goal to make that reachable by more people. If we pursued that, we could see yearly progress
Asteroid mining is still far in the future, and we need to take our first baby steps of getting established in space
… And we need to make sure we beat the Russians. Space travel is to a large extend an arms race.
So I can’t speak to the actual motivation for the moon, but can for one reason for at-least-temporary human habitation there. Solar system exploration (and, inevitably resource extraction.
When you launch rockets from Earth, a vast majority of the fuel you start with is burnt off just getting to orbit, out of the deepest part of our gravity well. If you want to go anywhere else in our solar system, you’re severely limited to what’s left. The moon’s gravity is low enough that it could work as a refuelling station. Provided we find enough water there and set up solar hydrolysis stations there and build the infrastructure to get it up to orbiting ships. All that will take people to set up, and possibly to manage long term.
iirc it also has a lot of fusion fuel in the form of Helium-3
Couldn’t we just have an orbiting refueling station though? Seems to me like it would be even more efficient.
It may be possible to harvest fuel on the moon itself. Also the amount of work to keep that in orbit, etc, the moon may be more promising.
The perfect solution would be an orbital station with a space elevator. An 36’000 km elevator is kinda difficult to build and maintain safely though. Without cheaply carrying resources up there, its utility is limited (sure can slowly put things up there, but it’s very inefficient).
What Moon has going on is Helium-3, which can be an amazing energy source by itself.
The problem is: is there any evidence for water on the moon?
And even if there is something on the moon, from which fuel can be manufactured, you still have to get the fuel production components there (which includes launching those from Earth). And then anything you launched from the moon originally came from Earth, so now you’re launching it twice.
And that’s the problem: anything that you wanna launch from the moon will have to, almost in its entirety, have to be launched from Earth originally before it can be launched from the moon. So what’s the point?
It would be different if our moon were rich in resources and could be transformed into some sort of manufacturing base for all sorts of goods and fuels, etc., but it isn’t.
The moon, uniquely, has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, meaning the solar wind may have deposited large quantities of Helium-3 in the lunar dust over millions or billions of years. Helium-3 is possibly a viable fuel for fusion energy production at an industrial scale. Current reactors fust Hydrogen-2 with Hydrogen-3. Hydrogen-2 is abundant but Hydrogen-3 is exceedingly rare. If I remember correctly, there are only on the order of 10 kilograms of it currently available on Earth. Helium-3 is possibly a good substitute for Hydrogen-3 in fusion reactions.
Fusion reactions already produce net positive energy in laboratory settings, although it will be some time before this scientific net positive can be turned into an engineering net positive, and even more time still until it becomes an economic net positive.
is there any evidence for water on the moon?
Yes. We know there’s water there and how much accessible water is there.
And it’s plenty for some exploratory uses, but not enough to make an economy extracting fuel from there. So yeah, that entire thing is bullshit, while the idea of using the water there in a way that doesn’t go away may or may not be.
I’d separate this into two different things - what is good for humanity and what is good for billionaires like Musk.
For humanity, venturing out into the solar system will advance science, and also help drive technological advancement which does have benefits for society as a whole. The space race in the 20th century did advance technology, and much of the modern technology we take for granted has routes in the space race.
But also humanity needs to move away from our current capitalistic system and that is very much driven by scarcity. The resource wealth in the solar system is mind bogglingly vast and if we can tap into even a portion of it, it could allow us to change how we as a species live. It would initially be driven by capitalism for sure, but when you have effectively infinite resources for a civilization, that changes everything we do.
Also for the long term survival of our species we need to be looking outwards. Earth is vulnerable - one asteroid strike and out species could be wiped out. Even if only a small number of people were to head out into the stars, it would help guarantee a long term future and resilience for our species.
I think one big mistake people make is that what happens on earth is a zero-sum game: i.e. for some to win, it must be at the cost of others. That is wrong and is a result of our terribly broken economic system. But we can both colonize the moon and mars AND fix the problems on Earth. And it may do good for our species to look up to the stars and have a bigger shared goal than just existing on this rock and acquiring wealth.
In terms of why the moon & mars. The moon is essential as a staging post for future expansion, as it’s very expensive resource and energy wise to launch from Earths gravity well, but much cheaper to build at the moon and launce from there without the added step & complexity in design for launching off Earths surface. Mars meanwhile is the most viable candidate at present for a self sustaining colony long term (with a couple of moons of Jupiter and Saturn other options, and possibly venus as a long stretch).
Meanwhile, Musk is a deranged billionaire idiot. He is nothing more than a investor gambler; other people are doing the hard work making things happen while he is a public face of various companies. He really is peripheral to this, even if he does push the topic into the public consciousness. Don’t conflate the idea of expanding into the solar system with that idiot. The idea precedes him and will run long beyond his life and any influence he has. He is just a narcissistic loud mouth with money.
The idea precedes him and will run long beyond his life and any influence he has. He is just a narcissistic loud mouth with money.
200 years from now the average school history book will have a single photo of a Falcon-9 booster landing on earth and a couple of sentencds doscroving it as the very first demonstration of reusable rocket boosters and that will be all he amounts to in the long run. Space nerds might know his name in the same way that railway nerds know of Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other railroad barrons of the 19th century, but railway nerds also remember these railroad barons of the 19th century as the robber barons they were. Honestly, it’s not the worst fate that the relentless passage of time can give to a person
NASA spending has historically created more in return than is spent. It’s somewhat expensive (essentially a rounding error next to military spending though), but the science done gives a good return on investment. This isn’t just like on moon rocks or whatever, but developing technology that the missions need. Things like thermally reflective lightweight fabric, or a ton of other things. The science done on the Moon is worth a lot on its own, but it’s also not the only thing we’re getting out of it.
However, what are billionaires getting out of it? Hopefully it’s just the opportunity to profit from the contracts and not something more nefarious. We all know it is though eventually.
That’s just funding research with extra steps.
Science on the aggregate gives excellent return on investment. Unfortunately politicians want an extravagant excuse for funding it, but it would be much more efficient not to do the gimmicks, just do the science and not allow public sentiment to dictate what’s viable.
it would be much more efficient not to do the gimmicks, just do the science and not allow public sentiment to dictate what’s viable.
Probably, but sometimes having to meet real world challenges leads you down pathways that wouldn’t otherwise have been considered.
Sure. Let those goals be useful and reachable, not some narcissist’s fantasy about colonizing a dead planet.
Musk aside, colonizing Mars is absolutely achievable, and could be very useful. Having one point where humans exist is limiting, and creates a potential for one point of failure. Spreading out gives us many more opportunities for doing interesting things, and it also prevents Earth being wiped out (probably by us, but potentially something else) meaning the end of humanity.
I think you’re letting your hatred of billionaires make you hate everything they’re associated with, which isn’t correct or good. Make an actual argument for it being bad, not just saying billionaires support it.
There are about a hundred things that are more readily achiveable and useful than going to Mars or even the Moon. We have a climate crisis here on Earth, we’re facing severe challenges in agriculture, and almost a billion people live in abject poverty.
On that last point: what do you think unlocks more scientific potential - funneling trillions into research for a colony on the Moon, or making sure hundreds of millions of children get food, water, medicine and an education? My bet is on the latter, by a loooooooong fucking margin. You’ve got your Mozarts and Einsteins wasting away in squalor, and that’s just a bad use of our potential. Morality doesn’t even have to enter the equation.
I’m not hung up on the disgusting billionaires. They’re not the only narcissists around.
That’s a false dichotomy. We could very easily as a species support a space colony AND provide for the welfare of everybody if we collectively wanted to. One does not preclude the other, nor make it any more difficult to accomplish.
Start. By. Feeding. Children.
Then you can have as many space colonies as you want.
There are about a hundred things that are more readily achiveable and useful than going to Mars or even the Moon.
Luckily we’re doing billions of other things. We aren’t doing Luna/Mars missions and nothing else.
not some narcissist’s fantasy about colonizing a dead planet.
Fuck Elon. Humanity’s dream of colonising space existed long before he was even conceived.
It’s still a moronic goal to focus on at this point in our evolution. We’re trying to run before knowing how to walk.
Why so? Honestly, there’s nothing about our current tech level that makes it impossible. It’s solely an engineering project and required political will.
I don’t think we need to gatekeep funding research. You shouldn’t have to do it with no goal in mind for it to be good. The fact of the matter is its funding research and making people excited to fund research. That’s a huge win.
I didn’t say we can’t have goals. I just don’t think that going to Mars is a good goal, and I think that the argument that we need a stupid goal to achieve good science is, well, stupid.
Why do you think it’s not a good goal?
Do you think research into the origins of the universe is good (regardless of space technology)? What about the origins of life? what about the origins of Earth, life on Earth, and Humanity?
Do you think it’s good to increase our understanding and capability of supporting life on other planets?
Do you think it’d be a good idea to spread Humanity to multiple places (everyone living in one city or spread out, or everyone on one planet or spread out, are the same circumstances but a different scale)?
Do you think it’s a good idea to increase our capabilities to deal with potential asteroid threats?
If you answered yes to any of these, Mars is a fine goal, or Luna. This isn’t even mentioning stuff like farming technologies without soil that would be needed on Mars/Luna but also very useful on Earth. Also things like electricity generation (solar, wind, nuclear, and others we may not even consider yet) that need to be thought about in different ways that will inevitably lead to advancements.
Constraint is the mother of creativity, or however that saying goes. Creating problems to solve can frequently create solutions that just looking blindly without constraints would never find. Going to another body is a great way to impose these restraints.
The Moon and Mars are not interchangeable. They’re vastly different. The Moon is in Earth’s orbit. That’s why we went to the Moon in 1959 and haven’t even tried to go to Mars in 2026.
All interesting research can be done on Earth, the Moon or space telescopes. Mars is not interesting except for taking samples, and robots can do that.
Mars does not help with developing farming technologies without soil. You’re thinking of low-gravity environments I take it?
You’re describing Mars being a barren wasteland as a good challenge to try to solve. Fuck that. Start by solving the challenges we have on Earth. Show me you can fix a broken arm before insisting that you’re going to do brain surgery. Hence why you should terraform the Sahara before talking about building a civilization on a dusty hellscape that is a six month journey away from everything we need to live.
The Moon and Mars are not interchangeable. They’re vastly different. The Moon is in Earth’s orbit. That’s why we went to the Moon in 1959 and haven’t even tried to go to Mars in 2026.
All interesting research can be done on Earth, the Moon or space telescopes. Mars is not interesting except for taking samples, and robots can do that.
Obviously Luna and Mars aren’t interchangeable! They’re very different. However, you both agree they’re different, but also think there’s nothing that can’t be done exclusively there? What?
Mars does not help with developing farming technologies without soil. You’re thinking of low-gravity environments I take it?
No. I mean growing food without soil. There is no soil on Mars. We either need to make it (which is useful to learn how), or we need to do without, such as with aquaponics and aeroponics. These all would still help life on Earth too (they already do).
You’re describing Mars being a barren wasteland as a good challenge to try to solve. Fuck that. Start by solving the challenges we have on Earth. Show me you can fix a broken arm before insisting that you’re going to do brain surgery. Hence why you should terraform the Sahara before talking about building a civilization on a dusty hellscape that is a six month journey away from everything we need to live.
Why can’t we do both? I hate the idea we have to only do one thing. That’s not how this works. Developing technology to live on Luna and Mars would help us tackle the issues on Earth. It also doesn’t exclude focusing on Earth. We are currently terraforming the Sahara. Since we are working on that, do you agree we are now fine to work on other things?
You are severely underestimating the effort that it takes to send people to Mars, unless you want them to expire there quickly. So yes, sending people to Mars really does compete with other efforts. Therefore we have to weigh the utility of such an undertaking against its benefits. It is true that sometimes “crazy” projects like this does reveal findings that you weren’t actively looking for. But that is the best argument for this crazy idea - that maybe it will turn up something unexpectedly cool! And I don’t see why we would divert a significant amount of resources to something like that when we have so many other fields that desperately need attention, where we know that we will find good and useful stuff without endangering the lives of people.
You mentioned soil research as one avenue for why going to Mars might help. Why do we need Mars to practice growing food without soil? What is it about Mars that provides a significant advantage for that type of research? None, you say? Then I say, let’s do it on Earth or in orbit.
I am also confused as why you keep referring to Earth’s moon as “Luna”. In my experience that’s mostly practiced when we’re comparing solar systems to each other, and in that context the Earth would be named “Tellus”. Although I think it’s rare to call them anything except “Earth” and “the Moon” in practice, at least it was when I did my physics degree.
-1. The moon has HUGE reserves of Helium 3. Earth has almost none and is quickly running out. This is due to the fact that much of those reserves come from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field deflects that. https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface
-2. It’s fairly easy to launch rockets from the lunar surface, and comparatively easy to launch things to the Moon vs. Directly from Earth to Deep space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWhqNmJiufc
-3a. The moon blocks much of the radio chatter from Earth (on it’s far side) meaning radio telemetry and astronomy have a MUCH easier time doing research
-b. By using such methods in concert with Terrestrial installations/telescopes, it makes for a FINE “natural” interferometer for literal logarithmic fractions of the price over Conventional Lagrange point based systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_interferometer
-4. The moon is ideal for biological “life boating” (google the “Svalbard Seed Bank” to get what I’m talking about)
-5. Earth’s gravity can sometimes skew the results of VERY sensitive nuclear particle experiments. A particle collider on the moon might lead to exciting discoveries in quantum physics. Also such colliders require lots of liquid helium for cooling. (see point 1) The moon gets INCREDIBLY cold on it’s night side, which saves on energy costs to boot, and night on the moon lasts for 2 weeks.
-6. The Lunar crusts’ composition is almost identical to Earth’s which means it probably has huge reserves of lithium, gold, platinum, titanium, and palladium. The fact that it gets seeded by meteorites frequently also increases these odds.
(edit) Added some sources
What’s up with particle physics? Is there a real possibility that we’ve just gone as far as we can go and are back where the greeks were, having philosophical debates about unfalsifiable theories?
hehe
yeah man we solved particle physics and now we wanna know what’s inside the quarks and electrons
we’re falsifying everything about dark matter so far and then we’re back to plucking the 11th dimension cosmic guitar
To your point 5, one of the biggest problem in space is cooling heat producing systems. There are 3 ways of heat transfer:
- Conduction - through contact of heat conducting systems like metals.
- Convection - through movement of heat transfer fluids like water or air.
- Radiation - through infrared radiation.
In space there is only radiative method available which is very inefficient. The moon getting cold on the dark side is due to it lacking atmosphere to hold the heat. One of the reason convection method of heat transfer not available.
Particle collider uses liquid helium to keep superconducting magnets on. Also to cool the collider.
Cooling would absolutely not work on moon. Low gravity may give different results of particle experiment and might be helpful.
Cooling would absolutely not work on moon.
Why not? You’ve got the entire moon as a heat sink.
The ground on moon doesn’t work as a heat sink just like on earth. It can however act as an insulator.
Are you saying we can’t use the ground as a heat sink on earth? You’re aware this is a perfectly routine technology in use in a lot of places?
also a heat source. It hits 250F. Belief in moon bases and mining is inversely proportional to STEM education. This is Elmo’s base of Stans.
We are supposed to carry about human endeavors in temperature extreme 2X earth where there is no possible human activity.
Much more practical to start mining the poles of the Earth.
The dark side of the moon hits 250F? Wtf you going on about?
The sunny side hits 250°F
Yes, but I’m responding to a comment that was discussing cooling on the dark side.
we’re already in space bro
In space there is only radiative method available
But on the moon you’d also have conductive, and be able to connect directly to a massive heat sink
This, but you can also build a traditional heat sink (panels) and let the fact that it’s very cold do the work for you. Yes, it would be radiative and that’s slow, but again, two weeks of night. You’d have the time for it to hit optimal temps.
I was referring to that being a supplemental benefit. LiHe cooling would still be the main method, just that having that extra radiative “boost” would help do so with increased efficiency/speed. (even if it’s a small boost)
uhh. dude, that’s a source?
the ESA link is in no way proof that there’s significant helium 3 reserves on the moon.
“The Apollo programme’s own geologist, Harrison Schmidt, has repeatedly made the argument for Helium-3 mining, whilst Gerald Kulcinski at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is another leading proponent.” ---- this in no way asserts that there’s actually significant amounts of helium 3 recoverable from moon mining, it’s simply stating it’s worth looking into, worth exploring.
we have no idea how much helium 3 has been deposited by solar wind onto the moon’s surface; it could be HUGE. it could be a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percentage. We won’t know until we go look.
Please, when you post links that are supposed to buttress your argument, post something that actually supports what you’re proposing. your premise:
The moon has HUGE reserves of Helium 3
in no way is supported by that link.
If the ESA (AKA Actual Scientists) thinks it’s worth our time, and you are still not convinced then I literally don’t know what to tell you. Lunar regolith is lose, and lunar crust is generally porous. The moon lacks a magnetosphere and so absorbs the solar wind rather than deflecting it. The Solar wind is mostly charges particles but it’s also filled with Hydrogen fusion byproducts which is mostly HELIUM.
Science is not 100% observable facts, but also a good chunk of it is learning to INFER THINGS FROM AVAILABLE DATA SETS.
INFER THINGS FROM AVAILABLE DATA SETS.
what fuckin data sets? is there a link to actual data on that page?
you should have better standards. here are some articles that may support your premise beyond speculation:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70021905
https://fti.neep.wisc.edu/fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/wcsar9204-1.pdf
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/2175.pdf
here’s a good overview of the actual mining process proposed:
https://space-mining.com/a-closer-look-at-helium-3/
I hate, genuinely despise linking to reddit but here’s a fairly sane discussion on the proposed mining processes and how maybe actually mining isn’t the best extraction option -
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/pmbquj/we_cant_mine_for_he3_on_the_moon_but_we_can/
when people ask for evidence, don’t get tired and cranky like a little baby, put in some time actually searching. who knows, you might be right!
. The moon has HUGE reserves of Helium 3. Earth has almost none and is quickly running out. This is due to the fact that much of those reserves come from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field deflects that.
start with speculation and work your way up. we assume it does, but this has not been proven. please, if I’m wrong, let me know.
Added a source :)
I replied to your original post, that link is not supporting your premise at all.
Earth has almost none and is quickly running out.
Earth has 40 billion cubic metres, that we know of. We won’t run out if we don’t waste it on stupid shit like toy balloons.
There is enough material wealth in the asteroid belt to create a sustainable post-scarcity civilization. We could move out, and turn this little blue-green planet into a fucking nature preserve.
Settlements on multiple worlds within the solar system offer protection against risks that might otherwise end with the extinction of Homo Sapiens.
For the ultra rich - moving off world to escape the collapse of the biosphere is ridiculous.
Easier to “settle” the deserts of Utah of the Australian Outback than Mars - plenty of O2 and no worries about ambient radiation, but a very similar environment…
no biosphere < broken one, there is no escape
The idealistic answer: Science! Lots of things to learn by establishing humanity’s first extraterrestrial presence on our closest celestial neighbor.
The realistic answer: Capitalism. Lots of money to be made in mining the moon.
There really isn’t that much money to be made mining the moon, though. Not considering how much it would cost to get a mining operation there.
Mining on the moon leads to mining asteroids.
Asteroids are not a great source of minerals. They are far less dense than planets and moons, and most of what they are made of isn’t super rare or valuable.
In the extremely long term, off-earth mining will probably be a good idea. But for the next 100 years or so at least, it’ll be way cheaper to mine on Earth.
Most hojillionaires want to do stuff in space so they can avoid government oversight and regulation.
The startup costs would be immense, but the cost of getting that material home wouldn’t be as much as you might think given the lower gravity on the moon. The moon’s gravity is low enough you can basically shove all of that material into a rail gun fired at about the right orbit with earth, have it escape the moon’s gravity and get captured by the earths gravity (this sounds dangerous until you remember how much energy is needed to negate the gravity of both the moon and the earth, plus the Earth’s atmosphere. Besides, it works in Kerbal space program!) , then you just need enough delta-v on board for menouvers and to deorbit your freighters. Basically imagine throwing shipping crates of ores in the general direction of earth which get caught by the Earth’s gravity then orbit and drop down at a designated site, and that’s the promise of moon mining!
Mining the moon to send materials to Earth would not be economical in the slightest because the Moon has nothing Earth doesn’t. Sure, space launches from the Moon would be way easier and cheaper than from Earth (once you make the massive investment of time and money to build the space launch facilities on the Moon). But if you’re talking about shipping materials to Earth from the Moon, either you need to send your freighters back from Earth to the Moon (expensive), or you make the freighters on the Moon and disassemble them on Earth, counting them as part of the haul. All that for iron, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, and titanium, stuff we can get on Earth easily enough.
The only possible economic argument for Moon mining is for a self-sustaining lunar settlement able to source space launch materials locally instead of getting them from an expensive rocket from Earth. That way, you can use the Moon as a jumping-off point to the rest of the solar system and beyond. That’s a great idea for space exploration in the long term for sure. But it’s a very long term plan and won’t be economically feasible for a century at least.
One could make the argument that mining Earth is contributing to planetary pollution and generally fucking up our ecosystem. That’s true for sure. I’m pretty sure implementing clean mining practices would be more economical than the cost of lunar mining (and that’s not even accounting for the pollution caused by the freighters’ reentry).
There are resources on the moon. Like helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone, it floats up to the upper layers of the atmosphere and some atoms will eventually get knocked into space and leave Earth’s gravity. Also some scientific experiments require low gravity. Currently they are doing them on the ISS or in a reduced-gravity aircraft. In a moon base you can do a lot more science with more people.
Also some people that are researching lab grown organs think that in order to grow an entire organ that it has to be done in low gravity. So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
But without all the helium the earth will fall down.
Wake up, sheeple! The government is trying to bring down the moon!
he extration does nor make sense. He-3 extraction might.
If organs can’t grow in Earth gravity then what the fuck am I
You didn’t build your full grown adult organs cell by cell in a vat. Like if they ever able to make organs they are more like constructing them cell by cell then growing them naturally. Growing them would be probably too slow anyway. Not everyone can wait 15 years for a new heart.
They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat
A fleshy fucking marvel, bitch
An organ that can type?
So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
Read: thousands of billionaires at a time
helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone
so we fill kids balloons with it.
Born to late to explore the world
Born to early for space organs
Why even try
The moon could be like an orbital gas station which is much easier to land and launch from compared to Earth (no atmosphere, less gravity). Building a buffer on the moon would make it considerably easier to ship mass to other planets. I don’t really see a way we build a Mars base without having succeeded on the Moon first.
This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can’t do on Earth?
The sad answer is there isn’t really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, extremely limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you’ll have some iron mines and some Applebee’s and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire … but you still won’t have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
Because exploration is in the human DNA. We seek to push out further, see and learn about new places, and further our understanding. Your question is like asking “why did explorers sail ships across the Atlantic when they had a perfectly good continent already?” At first, the new world was just “Europe but worse”, or the various islands of the Pacific were just “Asia but worse” - humans have always felt the need to explore and see what’s around every corner.
Sure, the Moon and Mars may be boring compared to all the sights on earth, but space exploration starts somewhere. Just like sailing the ocean, you start with learning how to build a boat that can cross a lake or river; you don’t start by building an ocean liner.
European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.
We don’t need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.
While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
You have deeply disappointed Admiral Zheng He. This may cost you your head.
And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.
And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.
You’re a member of a species that owes its entire existence to exploration and expansion. We expanded from one biome in a tiny corner of Africa to a species of billions dominating an entire planet. We explored every corner of it and adapted to every possible biome. We learned how to live everywhere from isolate islands to endless deserts to polar wastes. We’re the ultimate explorer and colonizing species.
I cannot comprehend how a human being can look at that and then respond with the most bone-headed take imaginable, “we don’t have exploration in our genes.”
China engaged in all sorts of colonization. How do you think they ended up with Taiwan? India engaged in colonization in Sri Lanka and other areas. You’re just ignorant of history.
I cannot comprehend
I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don’t understand why people disagree with you.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
If people had had your attitude, humanity would still be huddled in one tiny corner of Eastern Africa, never having advanced past hunter-gathering. “Why go to that new empty valley over the mountains? First you have to get over the mountains. Then once you get there, there’s nobody there. You’ll be all alone. It will be just like our current home, but worse.”
If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum…
Sure, same thing.
People didn’t leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.
There’s no food on Mars, or the Moon.
Human expansion on Earth did require just the kind of investments you’re imagining. You’re just not using your imagination.
You couldn’t just immediately enter a new valley and start eating whatever you found there. Some things might be edible, but many could kill you. You encountered entirely different biomes than what your culture was adapted for, and you encountered new species that may or may not be habitable.
I imagine most expansion on Earth happened a lot like space colonization will happen in the future. When traveling to a new area, it probably started with exploratory expeditions. Small groups would go over the mountains and explore. Maybe they would bring back a few kinds of food to try. Maybe there they would find a few species they were already familiar with. (Similar to how there will be some resources we can use right from the get-go on Mars.) Later more regular expeditions would go, maybe once a year a group from the tribe would cross the mountains to gather some rare food type or animal skin. Over time, as people spent more time in the new biome, they did the hard work of figuring out what was edible. They did that hard painful work. And in time, they learned enough of about the plants and animals in the area to be able to safely gather enough food to sustain a population. It took generations. It was a learning process. A lot of people died in the process.
The thing you need to not forget about Mars is that we are no longer hunter gatherers. It doesn’t matter if we won’t find a garden of food on Mars, waiting for us to eat. We’re an advanced industrial civilization. We don’t gather food; we grow and manufacture it. What matters is not if there is food on Mars, but if there are the raw materials to support our food factories. Sure, settling Mars will require a lot more resources than hunter-gatherers than our ancestors needed when colonizing the next valley. But we also have a hell of a lot more resources and technology at our disposal than those ancestors did.
Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?
Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.
Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.
Just a thought
The problem is that you will never reach a point where you feel it’s worth expanding off of Earth. There will never be a point where things are perfect and all our problems here are solved. In fact, if we ever do reach that point, we probably shouldn’t expand out that point, as that means we’ve probably become a species of entirely self-obsessed narcissists that believes we are perfect.
Self-criticism is healthy. But you shouldn’t allow it to hold back your own life or your whole species.
I think you just have far to little faith in your fellow human beings. Thankfully history isn’t moved forward by naysayers. For every inventor that transformed the world, there were a hundred jealous naysayers that said it shouldn’t or couldn’t be done.
Just a thought.
It is only a “problem” if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.
I don’t. There isn’t anything up there that we can’t get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.
If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we’ll never be bored staying here.
Exon Mobile on the moon. As long as they have some snacks I think it would do well!
Epstein planet
Long term, the reason to expand into space is to expand into space. The point of going to Mars is not to make money. The point is to find a way for people to live there.
Let go of your sci fi visions of the future. Space colonization does not look like humans getting on a rocket ship on Earth’s surface, blasting off between stars, and landing on a second Eden around another star, a world where you can take your helmet off, breathe the local air, eat the food, and drink the water. What we’ve learned from our exoplanet studies is that the cosmos has exercised infinite creativity in generating new Hells, worlds uninhabitable and lethal to us in ways we never even dreamed of.
Real space colonization is going to take a whole lot of engineering and building. Mars is actually quite habitable compared to the vast majority of worlds in the universe. If you have some basic self-replicating machines, making Mars habitable is quite doable. Cover as much of the surface as you want in vast greenhouses. Live under domes potentially spanning the entire world. Long term, Mars has great potential for human settlement.
As for why? Well I would say it’s a moral responsibility. We know if we stay on just one planet, just one star, then it’s only a matter of time before some natural or artificial disaster wipes us out, and possibly the rest of life along with it. Earth has the type of biosphere you probably have to scour multiples galaxies to find one of comparable complexity. That’s a jewel worth protecting.
We tend to be too hard on ourselves as as species, viewing ourselves as some sort of cancer on the world. At the same time, we are the only hope for life on this planet to survive past a certain point. We are the children of Gaia. It’s our duty and moral obligation to spread life as far and wide as possible. Life itself has intrinsic value. And it’s our job to spread it.
Some exobiologists have also suggested that even if we settle habitable worlds with active biospheres, there is so much research needed to ensure biocompatibility that anyone settling there would be quarantined for the first century or two in order to suss out any long-term pathogen or other nasty. And that if one is found, those settlers would be SOL without an effective cure.
Science doesn’t really happen if we continually ask “Why do this?” Science happens when we ask “Why not do this?”
If we want to be a galactic civilization, we must first learn to live on worlds otherwise uninhabitable. The engineering challenges we must overcome to make that happen will give us the knowledge and experience we need to make it possible to expand past our solar system. This is a very long term advancent, and what we do today is what our offspring will do with ease.
Other than political roadblocks, the final roadblock to galactic expansion is FTL travel. We have theories on how to make it possible, but we are limited to the engineering and knowledge of our time now. Far future generations will be the ones to discover if and how to make it possible, but they need the foundational knowledge and experience of how to live in space.
Realistically, the Moon would likely carry a mix of science, mining, and power installations.
Science - You can set up a large telescope on the far side of the Moon which won’t have an atmosphere to compete with. There are some concepts which would use existing craters to keep the cost low.
Mining - It is possible for there to be rare earth minerals on the Moon. There is also Helium-3 in the regolith. A country may choose to have a colony on the Moon address terrestrial shortages.
Power - The Moon makes an excellent site to collect solar power. That power could possibly be beamed/reflected to Earth, used to refine high electrical demand materials, or be a site for compute.
As this gets built out, the Moon will likely become a manufacturing hub, especially for missions beyond the Earth-Moon gravity well due to lower launch costs.
Right now we’re all kinda eggs in one basket. Earth is one good cataclysm from wiping out humanity.
But we’re not just going to sort out spreading to other planets without baby steps.
The ISS was the first step. We need a large enough permanent base to see whether agriculture and 100% recycling can work. They still need supplies from earth for now, but long term, can we make it work? how big does a settlement need to be?
cheaper access to space:
The moon is an interesting prospect. It’s significantly further up the gravity well. We might be able to launch small probes via a rail gun, then use ion engines. No atmosphere to fight.
Radio Astronomy:
Anything not aimed at earth could be super sensitive.
Fuel:
we might be able to farm oxygen and hydrogen from water/minerals. and make a depo.
The first step to keep eggs in multiple baskets is to start with the cataclysmic greenhouse effect in the first basket.
Wanna colonize space? It’s a centuries long undertaking, and you should start from a stable foundation. Especially considering, any long term habitation is gonna be fostering an ecosystem from scratch, so you kinda really wanna model that on a stable ecosystem.
Not concerned with escaping greenhouse by going to space, if we don’t sort that we’ll kill off the space fairing generations before they live. The two things are ultimately important for different reasons. Yeah, we need to stop fucking the world up, no getting off world won’t make that any better. What colonizing will help is medical (imperfect virus) cataclysm, super volcano eruption or foreign body hitting the earth.
The eggs in a basket argument is just unhealthy existential dread at a planetary scale. Keeping humanity alive by grasping at uninhabitable rocks and poor simulacrums of Earth is like keeping an octogenarian alive with more and more invasive treatments.
The patient was born to walk in nature and enjoy food and sunsets; humanity evolved specifically to flourish on our blue marble with its delicate biosphere. Is it ethical to keep the patient alive with life support when they can’t walk or eat? Is it ethical to keep humanity alive in bubbles with pale imitations of earth on lifeless rocks?
We should accept that all things end and be more honest about these discussions. Humanity is no longer in its optimistic youth. We’ve matured to the natural limits of our species (and beyond them in some aspects), ask what we can do with the finite time and resources we have and not just where we can grow next.
The eggs in a basket argument is just unhealthy existential dread at a planetary scale. Keeping humanity alive by grasping at uninhabitable rocks and poor simulacrums of Earth is like keeping an octogenarian alive with more and more invasive treatments.
Yeah because an asteroid could NEVER hit the earth and wipe is out.
The patient was born to walk in nature and enjoy food and sunsets; humanity evolved specifically to flourish on our blue marble with its delicate biosphere. Is it ethical to keep the patient alive with life support when they can’t walk or eat? Is it ethical to keep humanity alive in bubbles with pale imitations of earth on lifeless rocks?
Nobody was born to do anything. It’s what they could achieve in existing. If they go to the outer reached, they go to the outer reaches, you have no say in that. Your moral opinion will not matter.
We should accept that all things end and be more honest about these discussions. Humanity is no longer in its optimistic youth. We’ve matured to the natural limits of our species (and beyond them in some aspects), ask what we can do with the finite time and resources we have and not just where we can grow next.
You can accept them over in your corner, and stuff-you telling me to be more honest while you’re trying to control society and keep doomsaying.
Yeah because an asteroid could NEVER hit the earth and wipe is out.
I could have a heart attack or stroke and die tomorrow. So what? There’s probably extensive measures I could take to mitigate that (constant biometric monitoring, spending all my money on a personal physician entourage, strict diet and fitness regimen, etc…). Each of those extremes has a cumulative negative effect on my lived quality of life. Is it worth living in a state of paranoia to eek an extra decade out of life?
It’s what they could achieve in existing.
What achievement is building a colony of chemically sedated and artificially sustained peons on Mars at 1000x the cost of sustaining them on earth? Why is that a loftier and more noble goal than using those resources on, say, 1000 years of cultural/artistic development?
control society and keep doomsaying
Apparently looking at the raw truth of entropy and ecology is doomsaying. That’s just physics my dude, do a little soul searching and come to terms with mortality.
As for controlling society, you’re right: let’s not talk about the absurd cost of our options for space colonization and how little benefit the human race gains from it. There’s no way to control our actions, just close your eyes and imagine star trek utopias while we burn Earth’s limited fuel reserves throwing metal at Mars.
Nice trolling, blocked
