6 ms·

There is no carbon on the moon. Try sustaining anything without that element.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
If 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    I don't think disassembling colonists is going to be a very popular way to source carbon. /s
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Unless 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 ago
      pretty 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 ago
        Soylent green all the way!
        jacquesm 5y ago
        No, not really, more like closed eco-systems end up recycling everything, including bodies. Planet Earth is one such eco-system.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Depends on what kind of colonists, tbh. Half the books I've read about lunar colonies would probably disagree. :D
      - ant6n 5y ago
        "Eat the inners!" ?
mkl 5y ago
If we had the ability to transport large numbers of people to the moon and set up civilisation, we'd probably also have the ability to bring a minable carbon-rich comet or two into lunar orbit or smash them into the surface.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  If you have that ability, you can also smash a comet into any city on Earth.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    Yea so we’ll have to just not do that
    - stevespang 5y ago
      No worries, the "dictatorships for life" in China and Russia will figure a way to weaponize comets and meteorites . . .
  - jerf 5y ago
    There is no way around that. If you sit down and seriously wargame what a space civilization looks like, in real space with no Star Trek shields, you get some interesting results. One of the results that is really hard to avoid is that if there is a large-scale space civilization around, using the entire solar system... planets aren't really militarily defensible. Without some sort of technology like shields or something that don't seem plausible, they're just sitting ducks. Following along from there, that tends to mean that the planet-bound are going to try to be very highly controlling of the space civilization for as long as possible. They'll be torn between the high levels of wealth the space civilization is sending back down, which will rapidly become completely necessary to sustain their life style, and the fact that every ship in space is a deadly weapon. If you can get to the asteroid belt in a reasonable period of time, you can accelerate from there at a rate that is going to be uninterceptable by the time it gets to Earth. There's a reason why there's a lot of sci-fi about the space settlers fighting Earth for independence. It's not a terribly difficult analysis to see that as a highly likely outcome. I've only sketched it here. (As another for-instance... it becomes highly advantageous for Earth to do everything in its power to make darned sure those space colonies can't survive independently, up to and including full intelligence penetration to kill any research attempt to come up with alternate sources for hydrocarbons or nitrogen or complex manufacturing. But the economics and politics inexorably push towards doing more stuff in space for those in space, because it's a lot cheaper than the shipping costs, and as the space-bound get more wealthy and more numerous, eventually they can start smuggling equipment and find places to extract these resources even so....)
hulitu 5y ago
We can export CO2 from earth.
- robjan 5y ago
  Earth still needs the carbon, just preferably not so much in the air.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    The ocean floor is the final end game for surface carbon. Unless we dig it up and send it to the moon!
tzs 5y ago
There was some evidence in 2020 that there may be more carbon than we thought on the moon [1]. I don't know if there have been further developments on this. [1] https://phys.org/news/2020-05-carbon-emissions-moon-theory-birth.html https://phys.org/news/2020-05-carbon-emissions-moon-theory-b...

If 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 ago
If 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 ago
  I don't think disassembling colonists is going to be a very popular way to source carbon. /s
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Unless 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 ago
    pretty 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 ago
      Soylent green all the way!
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        No, not really, more like closed eco-systems end up recycling everything, including bodies. Planet Earth is one such eco-system.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Depends on what kind of colonists, tbh. Half the books I've read about lunar colonies would probably disagree. :D
    - ant6n 5y ago
      "Eat the inners!" ?

mkl 5y ago

If we had the ability to transport large numbers of people to the moon and set up civilisation, we'd probably also have the ability to bring a minable carbon-rich comet or two into lunar orbit or smash them into the surface.

BurningFrog 5y ago
If you have that ability, you can also smash a comet into any city on Earth.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Yea so we’ll have to just not do that
  - stevespang 5y ago
    No worries, the "dictatorships for life" in China and Russia will figure a way to weaponize comets and meteorites . . .
- jerf 5y ago
  There is no way around that. If you sit down and seriously wargame what a space civilization looks like, in real space with no Star Trek shields, you get some interesting results. One of the results that is really hard to avoid is that if there is a large-scale space civilization around, using the entire solar system... planets aren't really militarily defensible. Without some sort of technology like shields or something that don't seem plausible, they're just sitting ducks. Following along from there, that tends to mean that the planet-bound are going to try to be very highly controlling of the space civilization for as long as possible. They'll be torn between the high levels of wealth the space civilization is sending back down, which will rapidly become completely necessary to sustain their life style, and the fact that every ship in space is a deadly weapon. If you can get to the asteroid belt in a reasonable period of time, you can accelerate from there at a rate that is going to be uninterceptable by the time it gets to Earth. There's a reason why there's a lot of sci-fi about the space settlers fighting Earth for independence. It's not a terribly difficult analysis to see that as a highly likely outcome. I've only sketched it here. (As another for-instance... it becomes highly advantageous for Earth to do everything in its power to make darned sure those space colonies can't survive independently, up to and including full intelligence penetration to kill any research attempt to come up with alternate sources for hydrocarbons or nitrogen or complex manufacturing. But the economics and politics inexorably push towards doing more stuff in space for those in space, because it's a lot cheaper than the shipping costs, and as the space-bound get more wealthy and more numerous, eventually they can start smuggling equipment and find places to extract these resources even so....)

hulitu 5y ago

We can export CO2 from earth.

robjan 5y ago
Earth still needs the carbon, just preferably not so much in the air.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  The ocean floor is the final end game for surface carbon. Unless we dig it up and send it to the moon!

tzs 5y ago

There was some evidence in 2020 that there may be more carbon than we thought on the moon [1]. I don't know if there have been further developments on this. [1] https://phys.org/news/2020-05-carbon-emissions-moon-theory-birth.html https://phys.org/news/2020-05-carbon-emissions-moon-theory-b...