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Moon’s top layer has enough oxygen to sustain 8B people for 100k years
- throwaway81523 5y agoDang, a little late now but can you change "8B" to "8 billion"? I at first read it as "88 people", i.e. a small outpost rather than a civilization, and was like "who cares". Heh.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoGood to know. There is also some water on the moon - and some hydrogen we could use to make water. Now we just need to deal with the temperature ranging from -173,+127 and then we can build a nice moon base.
- rbanffy 5y agoThat's what caves are for. As long as you are not exposed to the Sun, you're fine.
- varelaz 5y agoTechnically moon has enough oxygen to sustain 8B for indefinite time, while you have energy to convert it. If you're going to use oxygen from rocks, why not use it from CO2 that we produce
- 29athrowaway 5y agoWhich is what is done by life support modules in space stations no?
- varelaz 5y agoAFAIK on space stations right now CO2 is just removed, oxygen is restored from water, but I could be wrong.
- kogus 5y agoBetter watch out for Lord Helmet and Spaceball One... (sorry, I couldn't help myself)
- WheelsAtLarge 5y agoOk, but my first question is,"Who is crazy enough to want to live there?" Our first goal is to make sure a base outside earth is never needed.
- t0mas88 5y agoOK, but they're talking about all the oxygen molecules that are in metals. And then digging 10 meters deep for the whole moon, assuming 100% can be extracted and get to the clickbaity number in the title. Does anyone know how this compares to earth? And what amount of energy is needed to practically make some human usable oxygen?
- roenxi 5y agoIt is an interesting thought. Note that sand - often silicon dioxide - contains a lot of oxygen.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoAnd water - composing 71% of the earth - is two hydrogen, one oxygen atom. That's just the atoms of water itself, on top of that, a lot of oxygen is dissolved in the water itself. tl;dr the earth has plenty of oxygen, it's not really a problem. Other gases are though.
- jacquesm 5y ago> Does anyone know how this compares to earth? The Earth doesn't need this because it has a breathable atmosphere, but you can just look at the oceans and ballpark figure that to about 8/10ths of their mass (the oceans, not the planet). Mars would be a better comparison to the moon.
- 5y ago
- mcdonje 5y agoGreat article. "Artemis" by Andy Weir revolves around a moon base that makes its own oxygen this way. Fun read.
- mkl 5y agoThis is assuming the oxygen is used once then somehow eliminated. In practice that exhaled oxygen, as CO2, would probably be absorbed by plants, e.g. food crops, and recycled into O2. Also, smelting aluminium takes a lot of power. The Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter [1] uses 13% of New Zealand's electricity to separate the aluminium and oxygen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelter
- Joeri 5y agoOn the plus side for power, on the moon solar panels can operate at maximum efficiency all day every day. Build a network that spans the circumference and you get a reliable power grid.
- CamelCaseName 5y agoI was curious, so I looked it up. Circumference of the moon: 10,921km Longest power transmission line: 2,543km (Belo Monte-Rio de Janeiro transmission line, Brazil) So it sounds quite feasible actually
- Reason077 5y ago> "So it sounds quite feasible actually" But even more so near the poles, where there's no need to build transmission lines around the entire circumference to access constant sunlight. Prime real estate for moonbases!
- simonh 5y agoThe tradeoff there is that due to the angle of incidence, for a given area of the moon's surface you get a lot less energy. That means angling your panels vertically and spreading them out very widely to capture the same energy as you would at the equator. Or build a huge solar panel wall as high as you can that rotates.
- 5y ago
- wcoenen 5y agoFrom the article: > You might be familiar with this if you know about electrolysis. On Earth this process is commonly used in manufacturing, such as to produce aluminium. An electrical current is passed through a liquid form of aluminium oxide (commonly called alumina) via electrodes, to separate the aluminium from the oxygen. In this case, the oxygen is produced as a byproduct. This is currently not the industrial reality. Aluminum is typically produced via the Hall–Héroult process which involves a carbon source and emits CO2. (Alternative processes which only emit oxygen are possible, but presumably those are more expensive.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_proc...
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoOne of the first and most immediate challenges for any Moon or Mars base is an excess of CO2. It won't cause lunar warming. But it will still be a problem and require significant energy and other resources. It's likely that it will either be impossible or prohibitively expensive to keep CO2 levels at normal Earth standards. See also: the ISS which operates with much higher atmospheric CO2 levels (up to 5000ppm) than would be considered healthy on earth (up to 1000ppm).
- navaati 5y agoWow, I pity the poor astronauts that have to do science inna state of dizziness !
- xyzzy_plugh 5y agoInteresting, I didn't know this about ISS. I've fought a tiring battle to get my CO2 levels below 500ppm consistently, and it's night and day compared to the 800-1200ppm I used to measure. Can't even imagine what 5000ppm is like!
- nolroz 5y agoHave you felt benefits from getting your levels lower? What steps did you take? Do you have a sensor you recommend?
- dbcooper 5y agoThere is no carbon on the moon. Try sustaining anything without that element.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoIf you want to bring 8B people on the moon, you may as well transport some carbon. The Apollo took 51hrs to get there, unmanned missions took 4-5 days
- jacquesm 5y agoIf you are bringing 8B people to the moon you are transporting some carbon. And O2, and H2, and a bunch of calcium and various spore elements such as some iron and manganese, etc.
- vermilingua 5y agoI don't think disassembling colonists is going to be a very popular way to source carbon. /s
- jacquesm 5y agoUnless they live forever this will solve itself. At a guess most of the carbon and water that you are consuming has been re-cycled a couple of times already, and I'm pretty sure that at least some of that was part of a human configuration at some point in its past.
- Kichererbsen 5y agopretty sure sooner or later you're going to have to figure out what to do with defunct colonists anyway and disassembling them is not the worst option...
- ccozan 5y agoSoylent green all the way!
- lmilcin 5y agoSounds like a plot of Artemis by Andy Weir. They are literally scraping top layer and smelting it for aluminium with oxygen as a side product.
- tokai 5y agoIts not like its a new concept. There is literally thousands of articles, from the last millennia, about oxygen mining and production on the moon. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mining+moon+oxygen&hl=da&as_sdt=7%2C39&as_ylo=&as_yhi=2000 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mining+moon+oxygen&hl=d...
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- fghorow 5y agoGeophysicist here. "Sillicates." (Emphasis on the "ates".) Oxygen is an integral part of most rock-forming minerals. 'Nuff said.
- temptemptemp111 5y agoHilarious that you people are so brainwashed. Not enough drag to influence the orbit that doesn't show even 1% of the "dark side" ever... But enough to sustain life... Funny how these "discoveries" (falsifications) never need to be on the orbit math for satellites ISS et all... Fake!
- Someone 5y agoThe moon’s area is about 38 million km², so that would be ‘only’ about 200 persons/km². That’s less then I would have guessed (cities can have tens of thousands of people/km²), but still way over the current world average (excluding water areas) of about 15/km².
- atonse 5y agoBut how about the other important element in our atmosphere that we breathe: nitrogen? Among others. Cuz if it’s just pure oxygen I’m pretty sure that’s not safe.
- kadoban 5y agoYou can breathe pure oxygen without issue if it is at lower pressure. I don't know of any other gasses that are actually needed.
- hutzlibu 5y agoAlso the nitrogen would not get used up by humans. Only for growing plants, we would have to bring some or extract it somehow?
- kadoban 5y agoYeah I guess we'd have to bring it as fertilizer. I tried to look up if nitrogen exists on the Moon, seems like it basically does not. I didn't realize how rare carbon is there either. We'd need to bring a _lot_ of things it seems.
- G3rn0ti 5y agoOxygen is actually pretty inert i.e. non-reactive and therefore safe to breathe in pure form (as aquatic divers do, I believe). The reason for that is most of atmospheric oxygen is composed of "triplet oxygen" referring to its outer shell electron configuration being rather stable. For reactions to occur triplet oxygen first needs to be activated and converted into "singlet oxygen" being rather aggressive chemically. This is a "kinetic" barrier that renders gaseous oxygen pretty harmless. This is also the reason why organic matter on earth does not spontaneously catch fire although CO2 + H2O is always energetically more favorable than every CXHXOX composition.
- rbanffy 5y agoThe best thing is that when you extract oxygen from aluminium, iron, and magnesium oxides is that you get oxygen AND materials to build your spacecraft. All in a place where you can take off much easier than from Earth. The Moon is the most valuable real estate between Venus and Mars.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI saw a Scott Manley clip earlier about a newish rocket company that was building a launcher using rotational energy (flinging rockets towards space, their idea being that they can do away with the first stage of a rocket entirely). I wonder if a device like that would be able to launch a payload from the moon back to earth without needing fuel (besides maybe small maneuvers / course corrections).
- rbanffy 5y agoThis is a bit more flexible than a rail (which can only throw payloads on a single direction), but the Earth is always more or less on the same place in the sky from the Moon, so a rail /linear induction motor is probably the simplest way to do it. No need to have moving parts and, if the rail is long enough, the acceleration can be quite mild. For safety, I'd not build it aimed directly at Earth, but require some trajectory corrections not to miss the planet. Otherwise it's just a weapon.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"Otherwise it's just a weapon. " Everything that is in space and big enough and can be roughly guided, can be a devastating weapon. Which is why I love the idea of peaceful space exploration and am not so happy about the latest developements to arm the space again.
- rbanffy 5y ago> Everything that is in space and big enough and can be roughly guided When it's guided, you may be able to see it coming, see the jets for changing trajectory, and it can evade an impactor designed to turn it into a lot of smaller pieces that will burn up in the atmosphere. If it's just a rock covered in F22 paint it'll be a lot harder to see before it hits.
- nashashmi 5y agoThe air mixture of earth has only 20% oxygen. This helps in keeping fires to a minimum.
- baybal2 5y agoOxygen is one of the most omnipresent elements. Getting nitrogen, and hydrogen is a much bigger issue.
- xwdv 5y agoEven if we can sustain many individuals on the Moon it would likely be permanent for them as the long term physiology of such humans would be affected by the low gravity there.
- baby-yoda 5y agosomewhat tangential - as a kid I loved science fiction and stories about the next great frontier. it was fascinating, the possibility of limitless exploration and new problems to solve. perhaps my perspective has been skewed over time (or this concept was lost on my naivety at the time) but now it feels like interstellar colonization is more about an escape hatch for the inevitable end of civilization on earth. we'll destroy (intentionally or not) what we have here, set up shop somewhere else and start the process all over again?
- fennecfoxen 5y agoUnlikely. If we have the technology to render dead worlds habitable we have the technology to render even a post-apocalyptic Earth habitable: a fraction of the difficulty, and you save a lot on rockets.
- doodlebugging 5y agoI hope I never see the day when a casual glance at a full moon reveals a large dust cloud from active moon mining obscuring part of the details that I've become familiar with over my lifetime. I'm not sure the moon needs those type of scars. Maybe they'll find a way to use an N99 filter dome over their operations. The progress of man seems so naturally tuned towards destructive outcomes. We bounce from one fucked up scenario to another, each one an attempt to put a band-aid on a gaping wound left by our failure to consider how our technological progress seems to leave us with ever more urgent issues to address to insure our own survival and that of our descendants. Maybe we're the virus that is learning how to defeat the planet's immune system and ultimately kill it.
- colanderman 5y agoI don't know why people are having such a visceral negative reaction to your post. The near face of the Moon has been since the dawn of humanity the single natural formation visible to and enjoyed by every (sighted) human who has ever existed. Preserving it for future humans seems not only natural, but imperative.
- wombatpm 5y agoFine, put everything on the farside.
- colanderman 5y agoSounds good to me.
- politician 5y agoAbsolutely! Let’s make sure to have enough machinery on the Moon to repair impacts from meteorites, too!
- colanderman 5y agoYour needless sarcasm belies the fact that you either missed or are ignoring that the OP's concern was about large persistent dust clouds obscuring major features. Not pockmarks. You've been here ten years, so I would think you're familiar with HN guidelines [1], but please remember: > Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Sunspark 5y agoThe future: The moon as prison planet. At the top of the gravity well, only the most hardened convicts arrive to serve out their sentences in this new Oz. Put to hard labour mining resources, ceaselessly administered and regulated by the state automatons. Almost all sentences to the moon are one-way.
- xibo9 5y ago"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein?
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- amildie 5y agoUnless they're mining straight up bitcoin there is absolutely no way that maintaining a prison facility on the moon would be profitable for the state.
- Sunspark 5y agoThere's a lot of valuable Helium-3 on the lunar surface. It's very impractical today to contemplate using it, but if materials science ever advanced enough that we could construct a space elevator, it might be feasible to do exactly that because 1 ton of Helium-3 can apparently generate 1.5x the energy of a Tsar Bomba.
- GordonS 5y agoI'm reading Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation just now, and Zagreus is used as a kind of penal colony, with global corporations having their own clandestine security forces that rendition anyone that opposes them.
- akomtu 5y agoYou might be interested to know that in occultism, Moon is sometimes referred to as "the eighth sphere" for reasons you've just described.
- scott_joe 5y agoI realize it's an issue for my grandchildren's great grandchildren, but does anyone wonder if future generations will look up at the moon and wonder what their ancestors saw because it's been defaced (moon pun) by mining?
- Reason077 5y agoIt would also make a great advertising billboard! Imagine looking up at the night sky from anywhere on earth and seeing a giant, glowing Apple or McDonald’s logo carved into the moon’s surface!
- selimthegrim 5y agoWay to trigger the Moon Man memories.
- fiftyfifty 5y agoYou ever wonder what Manhattan used to look like before New York City was built or San Francisco Bay? We’ve leveled mountains mining coal and covered deserts and seas with oil rigs. Unfortunately this is not a new problem for humans.
- c22 5y agoThe cool thing about the moon is you can start by mining the dark side and leave no visible impact for quite some time.
- gcanyon 5y agoPretty sure it takes less energy to split CO2 than it does to split aluminum oxide. So recycling after the first extraction would make more sense.
- acd 5y agoSo you do concentrated solar sintering of the moon rocks and extract the oxygen?
- yc-kraln 5y agoThe moon has no magentic field. There is no protection from cosmic rays, not enough gravity to keep an atmosphere, not for nothing that there is currently no known life there. Life needs more than oxygen. Why do we keep positioning the Moon as some sort of life boat for when we muck up Earth past the point of survivability?
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoI am grateful I still get to seen an unaltered moon.
- umvi 5y agoWould colonizing the moon and making it have an atmosphere with plants and such make it super dim at night? I imagine the lunar surface covered with plants would not reflect light nearly as well.
- bondolo 5y agoWhy would you want to live there? I can imagine the moon being a place for mining, industrial operations and as a staging base for outer system missions. But a place to live? No, sorry, if a place fails the test that Antarctica is more hospitable and commodious I can't imagine people living there without a specific purpose. And, just like Antarctica, the high cost of keeping people alive there is going to always (OK for at least the next couple of thousand years) limit the practical population.
- nerpderp82 5y agoLets all move to the moon in as a space palace and give the earth 50k years to recover. We can come down and vacation and do restoration work.
- Chris2048 5y agoThe qualifier "for 100k years" Is a little silly. Since the oxygen is in the form of oxides that need splitting, there's no reason the CO^2 can't be recycled in the same way. So a small amount of oxygen can be recycled indefinitely, if you have the energy to do so. Food is the same. Both require small amount of material to sustain humans, and recycle indefinitely via solar energy. The difficulty comes from sourcing building/construction materials, i.e. metals via moon-mining.
- jjk166 5y agoThe real concern is not oxygen but nitrogen. Humans can't live in a pure oxygen environment at standard atmospheric pressure for long periods of time, we suffer oxygen toxicity. Even at reduced pressures, a pure oxygen environment is incredibly dangerous due to the risk of combustion (see Apollo 1 fire). Typically for spacecraft a reduced pressure atmosphere with 60% oxygen, 40% helium is used, which is great for a space station holding a half a dozen people. But if we're talking large colonies, that's a lot of helium. Of course nitrogen can be used instead, as it is what we breathe on Earth, but neither nitrogen nor helium, nor any other element which forms an inert gas is abundant on the moon. While nitrogen is abundant on Earth and other bodies in the solar system (Venus' atmosphere for example has 3 times as much nitrogen by mass as Earth), it would have to be imported for a lunar colony. Perhaps an ammonia-rich comet could be mined to provide a source with a low delta-V to the moon; but it's still a lot more of a hassle than mining regolith.
- Taniwha 5y agoDoes rather gloss over the how aluminium is extracted from Alumina (they use a sacrificial carbon anode, the usual byproduct is ~1kG of CO2 for every 1kG of Al produced)