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?
-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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Realistically, building stuff. If you want to build large radiotelescooe or space observatory you can’t launch it in one piece.
Other use case would be to run refueling and launch station, given there’s a water ice on the moon, it makes possible to convert it into hydrogen + oxygen and refuel landing vehicles to launch them on a far missions
Cetain machining can be acehieved in low or no gravity as well much more easily than on earth.
Not sure if “certain machining” is good enough to warrant the insane transport costs
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!
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
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.
lot of big ‘ifs’ involved: re: the moon specifically -
if we can find water, we can make fuel and oxygen, instead of lifting both out of earth’s gravity well. this could unlock a gigantic generation of probe exploration for much cheaper launch costs. and perhaps even human habitation, and later, human travel to mars etc.
mars - I don’t see any good reasons to rush humans to mars, it would be a stunt at best. the distances involved and the amount of resources they’d have to schlep are daunting with current technologies.
so maybe a reason to start robotic exploration of the moon, specifically lunar lava tubes for potential habitation and shaded craters where water ice might be recoverable.
none of it should take our priority off of stopping climate collapse tho. let’s keep the only space ship we’ve got habitable first.
Google: Tescreal, Freedom Citys, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc. Basically there are several projects where they try to do unregulated research. Main idea seems to be to “survive” the end of our civilisation by living in Space or in the deep sea, enhance themselves (eg neuralink) , create General Artificial intelligence etc. Thiels Palantir is thought as defense mechanism by surveilling everyone. It all sounds like a big conspiracy theory, unfortunately it is not. Musk being responsible for Dodge, deregulating the US Governement was exactly one of these things. It was never about saving money. This is all a big rabit hole and you will get in a very bad mood readinfg about it.
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.
the colonies have a right to exist without OZ interference.
UESA has no governance over the colonies and must respect their sovereign will for independence.
Ask investors for more money
Next question
Epstein planet
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.
Don’t worry. We’re making Earth pretty uninhabitable these days. We’ll get there without ever leaving the planet.
Unfortunately also true, and more likely than the Star Trek optimism answer.
It is a really good “proving ground” for longer term human habitation of something like a settlement on a foreign body, without being so far away that some kind of rescue is basically impossible should something go wrong.
Also, going from Earth > Moon > Mars, or where ever, is probably less complex from a total at one time payload perspective than trying to move everything you would need for that longer term destination all at once.
Plus as you alluded to, you can’t really put a price on the political good will that comes from doing something like that. The Moon is a cheaper way to get that good will and some experience from point one as a starting point.
The rest of creation: we have a perfect blue marble to live on in a void of deadly nothing. Humams: challenge accepted!
The logical answer would be send robots. But, let’s face it. They’ll probably keep cloning and killing some poor bastard with fake implanted memory to do their bidding in a perpetual cycle.
I don’t think the logical answer is ‘robots’. Humans are cheap and always have been, and it’s easy to make more. That’s the basis of human civilization for 500,000+ years. Expand, strip resources, and expand more. As we destroy this planet, we either find somewhere else to do the same, or perish as a species. Could you go the other way and limit resource exploitation, limit consumerism, limit unfettered reproduction? Sure. But that’s not happening.
