3 ms·

> equivalent to at least 240,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools For scale, the Earth has enough water to fill ~532 trillion pools.

antepodius 6y ago
I wonder what the most efficient way to move bulk amounts of water out of earth's gravity well would be? It's probably mostly like any bulk freight lifted to orbit/escape: you could pump it up space elevators, assuming you could get around the problems of making those; An orbital ring is more physically plausible but has a much higher initial outlay. Maybe you could accelerate a stream of it accurately enough that the resulting hail of ice would reach, say, an earth-moon l3/4 point slow enough to be continuously captured and processed.
- hinkley 6y ago
  One of the first futurists I read had a bunch of suggestions. The most interesting was combining earth hydrogen with lunar oxygen freed up by reduction operations on moon regolith. More pedestrian was having ships sell their surplus fuel to a transfer station in orbit. If your mission is completely nominal, you will have reaction mass that you no longer need. Better to leave it for the next guy. I'm not sure how you do that in a failsafe way, though. A burst line or a stuck valve could ruin everybody's day. It might require aux tanks that can be removed. For longer missions that might be worth the complexity.
- mncharity 6y ago
  A LEO-altitude-to-GEO space elevator has been proposed as possible with near-current tech... so perhaps a railgun pop-up to catch an elevator?
- unchocked 6y ago
  No need to do that - Ceres is a water world and you can haul it into cislunar space from there.
achow 6y ago
Another perspective: USA uses 322 billion gallons of water everyday. [1] 240,000 swimming pool contains 120 billion gallons. USA would survive approx 8 Hrs on the moon. [1] https://medium.com/ensia/america-uses-322-billion-gallons-of-water-each-day-heres-where-it-goes-35cba911da48 https://medium.com/ensia/america-uses-322-billion-gallons-of... [Edit: Corrected. Thanks SamBam]
- SamBam 6y ago
  I think you swapped the numerator and the denominator. If the US uses more water than is on the moon every day, how would it survive 2.5 days? (There's also some conversion problems because the article took the amount of water on the moon and estimated a number of swimming pools, and you've taken the number of swimming pools and estimated the amount of water. From the article, the moon has 600 billion kg of water, or 159 billion gallons.)
pvaldes 6y ago
If there is any amount of water, It could be life or life remains trapped on it. Maybe not based in cells, but other forms like viruses... Hum. Is a really intriguing discovery. Maybe supporting the panspermia theory. Maybe leading to one of the biggest discoveries in our recent history. Maybe they could find several types of ice, if they came from different comets. I hope that we could analyze this water before to burn it as fuel.

antepodius 6y ago

I wonder what the most efficient way to move bulk amounts of water out of earth's gravity well would be? It's probably mostly like any bulk freight lifted to orbit/escape: you could pump it up space elevators, assuming you could get around the problems of making those; An orbital ring is more physically plausible but has a much higher initial outlay. Maybe you could accelerate a stream of it accurately enough that the resulting hail of ice would reach, say, an earth-moon l3/4 point slow enough to be continuously captured and processed.

hinkley 6y ago
One of the first futurists I read had a bunch of suggestions. The most interesting was combining earth hydrogen with lunar oxygen freed up by reduction operations on moon regolith. More pedestrian was having ships sell their surplus fuel to a transfer station in orbit. If your mission is completely nominal, you will have reaction mass that you no longer need. Better to leave it for the next guy. I'm not sure how you do that in a failsafe way, though. A burst line or a stuck valve could ruin everybody's day. It might require aux tanks that can be removed. For longer missions that might be worth the complexity.
mncharity 6y ago
A LEO-altitude-to-GEO space elevator has been proposed as possible with near-current tech... so perhaps a railgun pop-up to catch an elevator?
unchocked 6y ago
No need to do that - Ceres is a water world and you can haul it into cislunar space from there.

achow 6y ago

Another perspective: USA uses 322 billion gallons of water everyday. [1] 240,000 swimming pool contains 120 billion gallons. USA would survive approx 8 Hrs on the moon. [1] https://medium.com/ensia/america-uses-322-billion-gallons-of-water-each-day-heres-where-it-goes-35cba911da48 https://medium.com/ensia/america-uses-322-billion-gallons-of... [Edit: Corrected. Thanks SamBam]

SamBam 6y ago
I think you swapped the numerator and the denominator. If the US uses more water than is on the moon every day, how would it survive 2.5 days? (There's also some conversion problems because the article took the amount of water on the moon and estimated a number of swimming pools, and you've taken the number of swimming pools and estimated the amount of water. From the article, the moon has 600 billion kg of water, or 159 billion gallons.)

pvaldes 6y ago

If there is any amount of water, It could be life or life remains trapped on it. Maybe not based in cells, but other forms like viruses... Hum. Is a really intriguing discovery. Maybe supporting the panspermia theory. Maybe leading to one of the biggest discoveries in our recent history. Maybe they could find several types of ice, if they came from different comets. I hope that we could analyze this water before to burn it as fuel.