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There's basically zero carbon on the moon. A ton of it on Mars though (lots of CO2 ice). Our moon is something like 45% silica on the surface. That is a fuckto

by px43 4y ago

There's basically zero carbon on the moon. A ton of it on Mars though (lots of CO2 ice). Our moon is something like 45% silica on the surface. That is a fuckton of silicon. Step one is definitely making a solar panel factory, and then using that power to smelt aluminum, iron, titanium, etc. It seems to me that the moon would make for a good floating semiconductor fab, and eventually, data center. It would be great for making large structures for spacecraft, since the materials are right, and the lower gravity makes it much cheaper to get the parts into space. It doesn't make sense for a ton of people to live there, since we would have to bring all of our own carbon, which is kind of important for biological life.

jbattle 4y ago
Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly onerous. It looks like the average person exhales about 2 pounds of carbon per day, so that's a very rough baseline in terms of carbon needs. Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?
- px43 4y ago
  ~~Yeah, I think carbon recycling can be pretty good. They've been doing it on submarines for a while.~~ (edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing, the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary about this) At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be done, but any moon colony will basically always be dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can eventually be. It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon, assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live there.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Seems like carbon capture and export to the moon is a business that is just short of a billionaire to implement it.
  - idlewords 4y ago
    Submarines don't recycle carbon; they capture CO2 and vent it.
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      Mostly because they don't need to retain it though, a sub doesn't need to reprocess the CO2 into C and O2 but the process can be done. The process is largely the same instead of ejecting it as a waste product continue to break it down into useful products like injecting it into a Sabatier process.
      - idlewords 4y ago
        The Sabatier reactor on the space station broke after processing about a thousand liters of water because deodorant and astronaut urine poisoned the catalyst beds. Everything is easy to do in theory. Recycling carbon in practice is very, very hard if you don't have plants to help you.
      - shagie 4y ago
        Hypothetically... after you have separated the carbon from the oxygen (discounting the human waste which has a significantly more amount of carbon)... what would you do with it as part of a recycling process in a submarine?
        rtkwe 4y ago
        In current tech not much comes to mine. Maybe it could be reprocessed into dry graphite lubricant but there's not much need for raw carbon or principally carbon materials in a submarine. That's another reason it just gets tossed there's just not a real use for it. On a hypothetical extraplanetary colony though it's a pretty important material just to keep people alive.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  I’m pretty sure NASA has been reusing carbon on human spacecraft since at least the Apollo program.
  - idlewords 4y ago
    That is not the case; carbon (as CO2) was captured by disposable LiOH cartridges through the end of the Shuttle program. On the ISS, it's captured on zeolite beds and vented into space. Except for a few small-scale plant experiments, no space program has demonstrated carbon capture and re-use.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      Ah I see, thank you! I figured someone would know better than me on this.
johnwalkr 4y ago
There’s at least a couple of bags of Apollo-era poo on the moon.
rtkwe 4y ago
There was a decent trillogy from Ian McDonald that featured a massive solar furnace that slowly circumnavigated the moon to keep in direct sun light that produced the metal for the colonies across the moon.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  It would need to move at about 15 km/h at the equator, and slower at other latitudes. That's surprisingly reasonable.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    In the story I believe they had built rails for it too to run on or at least hardened and sintered regolith courses to drive through. It's a surprisingly reasonable pace for even a huge structure to have access to prime solar energy continuously. The series it called Luna if you're interested, the social structure is a bit out there but I enjoyed them.
- shagie 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(short_story... > The story follows Trish, the sole survivor of a terrible crash landing on the Moon. After regaining her senses, she contacts Earth and learns that it will be thirty days before a rescue mission can reach her. In the meantime, she depends on a wing-like solar panel to provide power to her suit's recycling facilities, and lunar night is approaching. https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1.htm
comex 4y ago
With a 2.5 second ping time from the Earth to Moon, data centers seem to me like a limited proposition. Sure, there are some use cases that could tolerate it, but many that can’t, and even where tolerating it is technically possible, it’s annoying enough (e.g. it’s hard to use SSH with that kind of latency) that there’d need to be significant cost savings for anyone to use it. But the cost would depend not just on the cost of raw materials but also the enormous cost of creating the fabs. On Earth that can be amortized with equally enormous production volume; that might be harder on the Moon…
- riffic 4y ago
  it'd be a nice but expensive storage location though.
  - beakergordon 4y ago
    If the goal was isolation from natural disasters and the like, then why not just build it in a facility like Yucca Mountain?
    - junipertea 4y ago
      Maybe bragging rights. My dog photo collection can survive societal collapse.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        why would yucca mt be susceptible to societal collapse?
  - sp332 4y ago
    It's only expensive until the self-replicating drones get into the exabytes/day range.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
colechristensen 4y ago
>That is a fuckton of silicon. Not really, silicon is abundant everywhere with rocks. Most rocks anywhere are going to be about half silicon, not that this is exactly true everywhere but nobody is ever going to wonder where they’re going to be getting their silicon.
- Vikerchu 4y ago
  The problem is that you need to get the silica out of the rock or ship to the moon And you need to power the refinery and something to to heat it with and co2 airlock and on and on.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Oh no the point I’m trying to make is just that any rocky planet or moon or whatever is going to be like 10-50% silicon right on the surface. It is more or less as abundant as is possible to imagine anywhere we can land.
Tuna-Fish 4y ago
> There's basically zero carbon on the moon. That's a big citation needed. There is very little carbon on the sites that we have studied, but they were all fairly similar equatorial locations. CO2 is heavy enough that it doesn't immediately escape moon, when some is delivered (for example by a meteorite), it will bounce around for a while. If, during that time, it hits a really cold surface, it will freeze and stay there. Such cold surfaces are available in abundance at permanently shadowed craters at the poles, and also inside lava tubes. We have gone a long way since we thought that moon was dry and lacked carbon. These days, most of the people studying it are fairly confident that every single permanently cold crater holds a glacier, composed of mixed ices, mostly water, CO2 and methane. The only element needed for people that we still think that the Moon has a shortage of is nitrogen.
- gene-h 4y ago
  Lava tubes have been measured to be quite warm[0]. This study concludes that "Neither [regolith or PSRs can provide] a abundant long-term supply of carbon to support a sustainable human presence on the Moon"[1] Although permanently shadowed craters are not very well understood. [0]https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL099710 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL09... [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13521.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13521.pdf
  - Vikerchu 4y ago
    Doesn't moon dust give you giga cancer? Well i guess its a cave...
    - shagie 4y ago
      The cave is to reduce the need for cosmic ray and micrometeoroid shelter (it's easier to build in a balloon in a cave than it is to build on the surface and fortify it). Moon dust is toxic and jagged ( https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/The_toxic_side_of_the_Moon https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex... and https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-brain.html https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-brain.... ). > In several lab tests, a single scoop of replica moon dust proved toxic enough to kill up to 90 percent of the lung and brain cells exposed to it.
superkuh 4y ago
Also basically zero accessible nitrogen.
jacquesm 4y ago
> There's basically zero carbon on the moon. I can see the end of certain rituals on account of that little fact.

by px43 4y ago

jbattle 4y ago

Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be infinitely recycled, that doesn't seem wildly onerous. It looks like the average person exhales about 2 pounds of carbon per day, so that's a very rough baseline in terms of carbon needs. Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?

px43 4y ago
~~Yeah, I think carbon recycling can be pretty good. They've been doing it on submarines for a while.~~ (edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing, the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary about this) At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be done, but any moon colony will basically always be dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can eventually be. It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon, assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live there.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Seems like carbon capture and export to the moon is a business that is just short of a billionaire to implement it.
- idlewords 4y ago
  Submarines don't recycle carbon; they capture CO2 and vent it.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    Mostly because they don't need to retain it though, a sub doesn't need to reprocess the CO2 into C and O2 but the process can be done. The process is largely the same instead of ejecting it as a waste product continue to break it down into useful products like injecting it into a Sabatier process.
    - idlewords 4y ago
      The Sabatier reactor on the space station broke after processing about a thousand liters of water because deodorant and astronaut urine poisoned the catalyst beds. Everything is easy to do in theory. Recycling carbon in practice is very, very hard if you don't have plants to help you.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Hypothetically... after you have separated the carbon from the oxygen (discounting the human waste which has a significantly more amount of carbon)... what would you do with it as part of a recycling process in a submarine?
      - rtkwe 4y ago
        In current tech not much comes to mine. Maybe it could be reprocessed into dry graphite lubricant but there's not much need for raw carbon or principally carbon materials in a submarine. That's another reason it just gets tossed there's just not a real use for it. On a hypothetical extraplanetary colony though it's a pretty important material just to keep people alive.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I’m pretty sure NASA has been reusing carbon on human spacecraft since at least the Apollo program.
- idlewords 4y ago
  That is not the case; carbon (as CO2) was captured by disposable LiOH cartridges through the end of the Shuttle program. On the ISS, it's captured on zeolite beds and vented into space. Except for a few small-scale plant experiments, no space program has demonstrated carbon capture and re-use.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Ah I see, thank you! I figured someone would know better than me on this.

johnwalkr 4y ago

There’s at least a couple of bags of Apollo-era poo on the moon.

rtkwe 4y ago

There was a decent trillogy from Ian McDonald that featured a massive solar furnace that slowly circumnavigated the moon to keep in direct sun light that produced the metal for the colonies across the moon.

LarryMullins 4y ago
It would need to move at about 15 km/h at the equator, and slower at other latitudes. That's surprisingly reasonable.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  In the story I believe they had built rails for it too to run on or at least hardened and sintered regolith courses to drive through. It's a surprisingly reasonable pace for even a huge structure to have access to prime solar energy continuously. The series it called Luna if you're interested, the social structure is a bit out there but I enjoyed them.
shagie 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(short_story... > The story follows Trish, the sole survivor of a terrible crash landing on the Moon. After regaining her senses, she contacts Earth and learns that it will be thirty days before a rescue mission can reach her. In the meantime, she depends on a wing-like solar panel to provide power to her suit's recycling facilities, and lunar night is approaching. https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1.htm

comex 4y ago

With a 2.5 second ping time from the Earth to Moon, data centers seem to me like a limited proposition. Sure, there are some use cases that could tolerate it, but many that can’t, and even where tolerating it is technically possible, it’s annoying enough (e.g. it’s hard to use SSH with that kind of latency) that there’d need to be significant cost savings for anyone to use it. But the cost would depend not just on the cost of raw materials but also the enormous cost of creating the fabs. On Earth that can be amortized with equally enormous production volume; that might be harder on the Moon…

riffic 4y ago
it'd be a nice but expensive storage location though.
- beakergordon 4y ago
  If the goal was isolation from natural disasters and the like, then why not just build it in a facility like Yucca Mountain?
  - junipertea 4y ago
    Maybe bragging rights. My dog photo collection can survive societal collapse.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      why would yucca mt be susceptible to societal collapse?
- sp332 4y ago
  It's only expensive until the self-replicating drones get into the exabytes/day range.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

colechristensen 4y ago

>That is a fuckton of silicon. Not really, silicon is abundant everywhere with rocks. Most rocks anywhere are going to be about half silicon, not that this is exactly true everywhere but nobody is ever going to wonder where they’re going to be getting their silicon.

Vikerchu 4y ago
The problem is that you need to get the silica out of the rock or ship to the moon And you need to power the refinery and something to to heat it with and co2 airlock and on and on.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Oh no the point I’m trying to make is just that any rocky planet or moon or whatever is going to be like 10-50% silicon right on the surface. It is more or less as abundant as is possible to imagine anywhere we can land.

Tuna-Fish 4y ago

> There's basically zero carbon on the moon. That's a big citation needed. There is very little carbon on the sites that we have studied, but they were all fairly similar equatorial locations. CO2 is heavy enough that it doesn't immediately escape moon, when some is delivered (for example by a meteorite), it will bounce around for a while. If, during that time, it hits a really cold surface, it will freeze and stay there. Such cold surfaces are available in abundance at permanently shadowed craters at the poles, and also inside lava tubes. We have gone a long way since we thought that moon was dry and lacked carbon. These days, most of the people studying it are fairly confident that every single permanently cold crater holds a glacier, composed of mixed ices, mostly water, CO2 and methane. The only element needed for people that we still think that the Moon has a shortage of is nitrogen.

gene-h 4y ago
Lava tubes have been measured to be quite warm[0]. This study concludes that "Neither [regolith or PSRs can provide] a abundant long-term supply of carbon to support a sustainable human presence on the Moon"[1] Although permanently shadowed craters are not very well understood. [0]https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL099710 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL09... [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13521.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13521.pdf
- Vikerchu 4y ago
  Doesn't moon dust give you giga cancer? Well i guess its a cave...
  - shagie 4y ago
    The cave is to reduce the need for cosmic ray and micrometeoroid shelter (it's easier to build in a balloon in a cave than it is to build on the surface and fortify it). Moon dust is toxic and jagged ( https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/The_toxic_side_of_the_Moon https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex... and https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-brain.html https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-brain.... ). > In several lab tests, a single scoop of replica moon dust proved toxic enough to kill up to 90 percent of the lung and brain cells exposed to it.

superkuh 4y ago

Also basically zero accessible nitrogen.

jacquesm 4y ago

> There's basically zero carbon on the moon. I can see the end of certain rituals on account of that little fact.