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China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
- worldsayshi 8y agoTo me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Seems like the last step for truly becoming self sustaining. You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be. Would guess that electronics would be one of the last things you'd learn to make yourself.
- baybal2 8y agoSmallest scale fabs can fit the whole cycle in one building: wafer production, CMP, gases facility, front-end, back-end and etching/deposition/doping lines. Some 180nm level fabs are like that, and rely on equipment unification in between back-end/front-end/etch/deposition/doping lines. Big questions: 1. How to make wafers in low/no gravity? Without convection, you can't purify silicon. May be you will rely on an entirely chemical process to grow a crystal? 2. Expensive gases will have to be recycled, not neutralised and disposed. 3. How will you do wet etch in zero/low gravity? Will you go plasma only?
- cperciva 8y agoIf you want gravity, you use centrifuges. Not really a problem.
- daeken 8y agoAnd this gives you the benefit of applying exactly the force you want. I'm no materials scientist, but I imagine this could allow for some potential gains in efficiency/quality/whatever.
- rusk 8y agois this kind of simulated gravity sufficient for the convection processes described?
- mnw21cam 8y agoI think Einstein might have something to say about that one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle
- jerf 8y agoLinear acceleration is equivalent to gravity. Spinning is not; it introduces the Coriolis psuedo-force or however you prefer to look at it, which allows it to be distinguished from gravity.
- mnw21cam 8y agoI concede the point, but counter with the fact that completely flat gravitational fields are implausible, so you could technically distinguish between linear acceleration (which has the same acceleration everywhere) and acceleration due to gravity (which doesn't, and hence generates a tide). The effect on a stationary point sized object is equivalent in all three cases. When your object moves then the spinning artificial gravity can be distinguished. When your object is no longer point sized then both gravity and spinning fake gravity can be distinguished from linear acceleration fake gravity.
- jerf 8y agoI concede you have out-pedantic'd me. :)
- rusk 8y agoNot sure how this supports or refutes GP claim ... EDIT I mean - we’re talking about convection right? Which I understand to involve circulation of air currents ... does your link have anything on this topic? I guess with a large enough centrifuge there might be no difference but it was unclear whether what was being referred to was large habitable centrifuges or the type more commonly found in labs ...
- baybal2 8y ago> Not really a problem. Your gravity vector will have to be uniform, otherwise your crustal will turned curved. Your centrifuge will have to be either very large, or you will have to find out how to do that without convetion
- simion314 8y agoBut why should you have a 100% complete industry, a colony can trade with Earth like countries trade with each other, a colony could trade some rare resources and buy high tech stuff. The main obstacle a colony will have is the initial buildings/bunker with all the life support and safety tech, plus extra redundancy and a backup plan if something bad happens there or on Earth . If the colony would manage to generate enough oxygen,food, water and energy for itself that is the important first step. Next step would probably be producing the heavy parts they need for expansions like metal or similar solid materials for walls and machinery, the lighter parts could be sent from Earth.
- worldsayshi 8y agoSure, becoming 100% self sufficient wouldn't be a reasonable short term goal but I can't imagine there being any product worth trading in the long term over such distance and given such cost for logistics?
- wefarrell 8y agoTourism will probably be the first private industry.
- stubish 8y agoMaybe nothing worth shipping back to earth, but perhaps resources for shipping to orbit. Fuel, space ship components, or entire ships or satellites. If nothing else, there is real estate. Might not be worth much, but there is a lot of it.
- cafebabbe 8y agoWe're not even self-sustaining on Earth.
- worldsayshi 8y agoFair point. Perhaps forcing us to be on Mars can teach us something about sustainability here on earth. Here's hoping.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoWe already have sustainability on Earth; it's just that it's expensive. There's no new science or knowledge required, just a lot more investment. But, profit margins.
- Balero 8y agoScience and knowledge can help make it cheaper, make those profit margins look better, and have it happen more.
- Aardwolf 8y agoWe also have significantly more people on Earth though. If anything, more planets makes us more self sustainable in the future.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoNot likely; the population will grow, becoming interplanetary just means we'll have more places to grow. It won't move the problem, not unless there's more emigration than population growth, and you can already see how that works on earth.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoMost experts say the Human population will peak at some point. The project to put even a couple of people on the mars surface, let alone let a couple of hundred live there, is currently too demanding to even attempt. Only vague plans exist.
- wklauss 8y ago> You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. It's not as much as you'd think, specially if you can survive on the first couple of decades with regular shipments from earth, mostly for very advanced materials and electronics. A lot of manufacturing capacity in our society is redundant and focused on non-essential items. In addition, some manufacturing processes are complex because of the scale of our society but could be made simpler for a small colony, especially if you are not worried about details or finishing quality and approach it from a more utilitarian perspective.
- adrianN 8y agoI think you underestimate how complicated even simple machines are. Making lubricated ball bearings for example requires high quality steel, precision manufacturing and chemistry that is not trivial if you don't have access to oil.
- hamilyon2 8y agoYes, that is how we do it now. But what if you only need 3000 ball bearings a month, would other process be more feasible, since the fact it is not economical at scale can be ignored?
- adrianN 8y agoYou still need high quality source materials and low mechanical tolerances even if you make them by hand. You obviously don't want to recreate planet-spanning supply lines, but even getting good steel from ore is highly nontrivial.
- k9s9 8y agoReplicators. Feels like no one watches Star Trek anymore. Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho.
- krapp 8y ago>Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho. No, they didn't. They came up with transporters to save money not having effects shots of ships taking off and landing, and replicators are basically the same, a prop meant to save a bit of money while looking "futuristic". Replicators and transporters violate physics (thermodynamics, the uncertainty principle, E=MC^2) and cannot exist as depicted in Star Trek. They spent zero time working out the science because they're television writers, not scientists. The best you could do in the real world is 3D printers and fabbers. But directly converting energy into complex physical structures in a way that isn't insanely less efficient than physical manufacturing or agriculture? No.
- kowdermeister 8y agoWhat would 3D printers look like in 100 years?
- bluedino 8y agoPolymimetic alloys
- k9s9 8y agoOh Geez! I work in Industrial Automation. I have had a front row seat to the gains made over the last 20 years that nobody ever predicted. I give factory tours regularly and most people with decades of experience have their minds blown at the efficiency gains in industrial processes. It has nothing to do with violating physics. Its just about being part of hyper-connected systems where incremental change, is happening in a thousand different places along the entire assembly line that add up to huge gains that nobody can imagine individually. Are we going to see things materializing at button press in an instant? No. But we are going to get damn close.
- pjc50 8y agoNASA have been looking at this almost since the Kennedy speech. e.g. (1989) https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19890018248.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/198900... "Lunar production of solar cells" (Contains some handy tables of relative abundance of substances at the end. Oxygen is really plentiful, it's just attached to all that silicon and iron.)
- setquk 8y agoAnd that pesky radiation slowly killing you.
- yholio 8y agoThe unshielded radiation dose for a round trip Mars expedition with 18 months spent on the surface is roughly equivalent to the life time dose allowed for a worker in the nuclear industry. The risks are completely negligible compared to the 50% or so chances of not making it back to Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays#Human_health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays... One of the first mass products of a colony is likely to be Methane and simple hydrocarbons like ethylene which can be further used to produce polyethylene, an excelent shielding material that can reduce the radiation to earth levels if applied in thick blankets.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoMany concepts for permanent settlements on Mars or the moon envision tunneling under the surface to achieve radiation shielding. Of course it would help to develop better treatments for radiation exposure.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y ago>I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be. Would guess that electronics would be one of the last things you'd learn to make yourself. If I recall correctly the number quoted from E. Musk on an early Mars colonization presentation was 2 cargo ships per full colonist ship. But that's only for being water/air/food/energy self-sustained. The assumption is that large shipments of high-tech products will continue for a while. Maybe something like solar panels/basic air turbines can be produced on the spot provided with either the raw material or mining equipment. The same probably goes at least for simple electronics( like e.g. various sensors for monitoring the colony), lots of appliances can be made in a crude way( think stoves, furnaces, maybe fridges?).
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- charlesju 8y agoI think the tech that I'm most interested in for the purpose of colonizing other worlds will be 3D printing. In its current form it's no where close to good enough, but if we stretch our time horizon to hundred plus years I do think we can build 3D printers powerful enough to make everything we need to mine and sustain life on other worlds.
- phkahler 8y agoLet me know when your 3D printer can make it's own electronics. Also, mining equipment... I mean, wow. I suppose sintered metals might be possible but there's still the refining of raw materials. I guess my point is that the supply chain needed to build a 3D printer is probably enough to sustain things without the 3D printer. That's not to say they wouldn't be useful. I really like being able to sketch out whatever bracket, holder, candy dish, etc that I want and print it. That would be very useful on a world without a huge economy providing every little thing you might want or need.
- MichaelMoser123 8y agoShielding off radiation is hard too, on Earth you gave an atmosphere and a magnetosphere. On the Moon or Mars its much harder to do the shield effectively
- rbanffy 8y agoThere are some caves on the moon that provide shielding and, probably, water since they have perpetual shadow inside them. They can be very attractive places to build future colonies.
- Symmetry 8y agoAnd if you don't have caves you can just pile dirt on top of your habitats. Dirt is one potential export from a lunar settlement. Everywhere outside the Van Allen Belt needs radiation shielding and dirt doesn't mind being violently accelerated in a mass driver.
- rbanffy 8y agoDirt is abundant near every solid surface. Not sure it's a valuable commodity but regolith glass would be more interesting. I'm curious about the metallurgical processes we can do easily on the moon.
- stcredzero 8y agoMaking glass and aluminum should be relatively easy on the surface of the moon.
- drstins_n 8y agoMars is a better space body for a colony. I suggest reading "A case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin.
- Novashi 8y agoI think we’ll see robust shipping routes before completely self-sustaining colonies. To the point where missing 2-3 shipments isn’t a huge deal.
- stcredzero 8y agoTo me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Zubrin's estimate of this in The Case For Mars is a half million people. That's an estimate for the minimum size of the population which can support the knowledge base required to make everything to sustain a modern industrialized civilization. You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. It's been demonstrated that a single person can build up the infrastructure of an 1800's colonial village all by himself, up to and including a blacksmith's shop. That guy from Turtle Island Preserve could do it, dropped into a forest with a single knife. There's a YouTuber who does all that sort of stuff without the knife to begin with. It will be harder to do such bootstrapping on Mars, of course. I'm not sure that the half million estimate above included chip fabs. I somehow doubt it.
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- nazri1 8y agoOne small sprout for a seed, one giant leap for dim sum!
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- nyc111 8y ago> The plants are in a sealed container on board the lander. For a moment I thought they were in the open... Since they are enclosed is there a reason why they should not sprout? The gravity is less but that should not make a difference.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago> The gravity is less but that should not make a difference. That's the theory, indeed, and this experiment proves it - science!
- _rpd 8y agoInterestingly, low gravity changes the way plants express their genes ... Organ-specific remodeling of the Arabidopsis transcriptome in response to spaceflight https://bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2229-13-112 https://bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471...
- duchenne 8y agoThe temperature might be an issue. The moon surface 106°C during the day, -183°C during the night. Also, the sun is brighter in space than an Earth under the atmosphere. The long days and nights lasting 12 Earth days each might also be problematic.
- nyc111 8y agoStill, it would have been interesting to see what happens to the seed on the surface of the moon. Maybe a cactus used to desert sun could adapt to the harsh conditions on the moon.
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- pjc50 8y agoSo according to NASA https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19860010460.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/198600... plants cannot grow in a hard vaccum, but they require only a very little oxygen pressure to grow. Depressurisation is somewhat survivable: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927953-500-vacuum-of-space-no-match-for-the-mighty-radish/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927953-500-vacuum-o... but dehydration starts to happen. Vaccum is a very effective dessicant.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoHasn't plant growth been happening for a few years in space? Like the salad they grew and ate in ISS. Is this such big news because it's an ongoing step in living in space or am I missing something. Not trying to take away from the achievement but just curious why this is such a big story. I'd thought there would be more news focus on the dark side of the moon updates or astronomy potential of being there type thing.
- SuperGent 8y agoI assume it's because its the first plant grown 'on' the moon.
- growlist 8y agoI suspect if the US had done it, it would be plastered everywhere.
- Ivoirians 8y agoWhat I heard is that we have data on plant growth on Earth (1G) and on the ISS (0G), but not at reduced gravity like on the Moon (.17G).
- bayesian_horse 8y agoIt would be easier to produce the .17G on the ISS (with a centrifuge) than putting these seeds on the moon.
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- andygates 8y agoThat's so not the case (mostly for reasons of size) that the Germans are flying Eucropis as a separate mission right now. It will do spin-simulated lunar and mars g.
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- kevmo 8y agoIt is incredibly disappointing to me that the USA didn't do this decades ago. The USA basically won the space race... then decided to chill out for 50 years. I understand that perhaps we did not want to continue to fund NASA at such a high rate, but NASA budgets still could have focused on this. Space is the next frontier of humanity's existence. A moon base is a logical, achievable next step in man's space exploration. The technology developed and lessons learned would have broad implications far beyond simply "We have a base on the moon." Newt Gingrich talked about this idea in his 2012 campaign for president. Despite being a fountain of bad ideas in general, the press seized upon this particular issue as a primary source for mockery of Newt. This is not to belittle any of the other work NASA has done, much of which is also extremely important. Space research is not a zero-sum game. But a moon base is a concrete, achievable (and still awe-inspiring!) goal that both the scientific and political classes could coalesce around. I hope to see it during my lifetime.
- MichaelApproved 8y ago> The USA basically won the space race... then decided to chill out for 50 years. The USA military got what it needed under the cover of a civilian space race. The US didn't chill after that. It put even more money into rockets but those were funded through the military for ICBMs.
- pluma 8y agoSending things to (actual) space is expensive. Drones are a lot cheaper than orbital weapons and easier to justify than WMDs. There's not much profit in sending things beyond Earth orbit as Earth is where all the strategic targets are. So other than satellites there's not much to do in space from a military-industrial point of view.
- dotancohen 8y agoThere is no friction in space, so things can move much faster and stay there longer. Sending a drone to shitistan at 7.8 KM/second is impossible to do in Earth's atmosphere with today's technology. Likewise for keeping an object airborne for more than a few tens of hours. In space, things can move quickly and stay up there for quite some time. See also the high Delta-V experimental craft, such as the X-37, which allow an asset to be in space for extended periods of time but also to adjust their orbit for short-notice action (presumably reconnaissance) at a specific location.
- samblr 8y ago>> The organisms inside have a supply of air, water and nutrients to help them grow. Challenge is with respect to maintaining temperature which swing wildly between -173C and 100C or more.
- auiya 8y agoAnd, you know, cosmic radiation.
- vectorEQ 8y agoall i read was: And it's worth reiterating that there are already nearly 100 bags of human waste on the Moon left behind by the Apollo astronauts and thought.... what a won-der-ful world :D
- dear 8y agoThat can be used to fertilize the sprout!
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoDoes anyone know where I can find a full write-up of this experiment? I want to replicate it here on Earth but I've been having a hard time finding the info. Documents in Chinese are fine, if you have them.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoIt doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. If you can grow plants in pressurized compartments in micro-gravity it should work on the moon, also. It would have been another thing if they used parts of moon soil and the like. And this wasn't the first time biological material has grown on the moon. The American astronauts brought plenty of growing biological material with them, too.
- Symmetry 8y agoThe issue is that we have an incredible dearth of knowledge about the effects of low gravity compared to either normal gravity or microgravity. If the ISS centrifuge had actually flow the situation might be different but when considering settlement of either the Moon or Mars we desperately need more information about how low gravity affects biological systems. From the Apollo missions we do know that humans can survive for three days on the Moon, but given that humans can survive for months in orbit this isn't a surprise. But what are the effects on animal gestation? On plant growth? As far as I'm aware there weren't any plants on any of the Apollo missions, though I believe they did experiments with lunar regolith on Earth.
- modzu 8y agowait its not growing in a sample of regolith? i thought that was the point of the experiment (gravity experiments with plants have been done on ISS, no?)
- andygates 8y agoNo, the point is growing in lunar gravity. Things get confused and need training by light in microgravity. We really don't know what they do in lunar g; "it just works" is a great result. Boring but useful.
- anewguy9000 8y agothanks, that makes sense, and experiments with lunar soil could (have?) been done on earth
- tempodox 8y agoThe Moon better get ready for Chinese Despotism™. I wonder whether Moon dust will be jailed, tortured and executed for lack of optimism about the Great Beloved Chairman's ability to let a thousand flowers bloom in the vacuum.
- jloughry 8y agoFrom The Martian by Andy Weir: "They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially 'colonized' it. So technically, I colonized Mars."
- CodeSheikh 8y agoIs it a misleading article since every thing happened in a contained simulated environment and NOT on the Moon? "The plants are in a sealed container on board the lander. The crops will try to form a mini biosphere - an artificial, self-sustaining environment." Only takeaway I can think of is the growth possible in a low-gravity environment
- piercebot 8y agoWhy cotton?