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The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing st

The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing strip.

kjkjadksj 5mo ago
I don’t know why we are wasting all this money making it habitable for humans when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades. Manned missions made sense when we didn’t have these compute and robotic abilities we have today. Now, they are undue risk and cost and offer no real functionality but some misplaced national pride perhaps.
- hparadiz 5mo ago
  Because it's better for Earth's biosphere to mine things like lithium on the moon rather than polluting our biosphere. The North and South pole of the moon also serves as an excellent staging ground to put solar energy collectors that can then transmit continuous concentrated power to Earth. The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous. On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about. On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly. So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible. We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
  - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
    You can do all that with a robot. Putting humans in the mix makes no sense. Costly and risky.
- godshatter 5mo ago
  One more very minor step towards making the human race meteor-proof.
  - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
    Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.
    - godshatter 5mo ago
      I kind of have a soft spot for the human race, I think it's worth the extra effort to try, at least.
    - hgoel 5mo ago
      We use technology to do many things we are not biologically capable of. If we can use technology to remotely explore inhospitable environments, we can also use technology to wrap ourselves in a hospitable environment.
      - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
        Why though? Patriotism? Stupid. Reminds me of Don’t Look Up how they needed a hero to die on the rocket.
        s1artibartfast 5mo ago
        speciesism.
- NetMageSCW 5mo ago
  Talk to me about the Mars rover that was unable to digna small hole to sample.
  - taneq 5mo ago
    “There was that time that a robot failed, therefore robots cannot succeed” isn’t the slam dunk that you seem to think it is.
    - hparadiz 5mo ago
      Wanna explain to me why a robot never took this photo? https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
      - ben_w 5mo ago
        That exact photo is a beauty shot, for PR value rather than any scientific value. Here's a long list of photos of Earth, a few were taken by humans, most were taken by robotic probes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Earth_from_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Ea...
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades One of those strides has been in characterising just how magnificent the human eye, mind and hand are at picking weird shit out of a background.
  - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
    Have you seen what you can do with just openCV? The world changed fast quite recently.
    - ben_w 5mo ago
      The better question is not what you can do with computer vision, but what you can't do. That said, I see a lot of synergy opportunities for humanoid robots on the surface controlled remotely by humans wearing VR gear.
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> landing strip Why are landing strips the big unlock? Blast effects? Tiny landing legs?
- hparadiz 5mo ago
  You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%. Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
  - mr_toad 5mo ago
    > you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. Makes me wonder if you could accelerate to orbital velocity using something like a maglev train and not have to worry about rockets at all.
    - chainingsolid 5mo ago
      You would have to do at least a circulization burn no matter the budget spent on maglev.
    - hparadiz 5mo ago
      You can do that but it would require a track that is tens of kilometers long along with a magnetic levitation technology. My suggestion is something we can do right now with a basic landing strip. But yes a meglev is the end game. Needs to reach 8,570 km/h for moon orbital velocity.
    - shigawire 5mo ago
      That is the idea behind "mass drivers" on the moon I believe. Maybe that search term helps.
ben_w 5mo ago
Mega city? It "only" takes about 8 million metric tons of aluminium to put a conductive aluminium loop of 1Ω resistance around the moon's equator*, solving all the energy problems that the poles are usually supposed to solve. While this is way more than we can do any time soon**, that's the kind of mass you'd need to get up there to build the infrastructure for a colony of just high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of people, which is well short of "mega city". * https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28circumference+of+the+moon+*+resistance+aluminium%29%2F1Ω%29*%28circumference+of+the+moon%29*%28density+aluminium%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28circumference+of+... ** Last I looked, SpaceX's website was listing 100 million USD per ton to the moon; your guess is as good as mine if or when they'll deliver anything close to the price Musk suggests for serious colonisation efforts

The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing strip.

kjkjadksj 5mo ago

I don’t know why we are wasting all this money making it habitable for humans when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades. Manned missions made sense when we didn’t have these compute and robotic abilities we have today. Now, they are undue risk and cost and offer no real functionality but some misplaced national pride perhaps.

hparadiz 5mo ago
Because it's better for Earth's biosphere to mine things like lithium on the moon rather than polluting our biosphere. The North and South pole of the moon also serves as an excellent staging ground to put solar energy collectors that can then transmit continuous concentrated power to Earth. The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous. On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about. On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly. So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible. We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
- kjkjadksj 5mo ago
  You can do all that with a robot. Putting humans in the mix makes no sense. Costly and risky.
godshatter 5mo ago
One more very minor step towards making the human race meteor-proof.
- kjkjadksj 5mo ago
  Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.
  - godshatter 5mo ago
    I kind of have a soft spot for the human race, I think it's worth the extra effort to try, at least.
  - hgoel 5mo ago
    We use technology to do many things we are not biologically capable of. If we can use technology to remotely explore inhospitable environments, we can also use technology to wrap ourselves in a hospitable environment.
    - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
      Why though? Patriotism? Stupid. Reminds me of Don’t Look Up how they needed a hero to die on the rocket.
      - s1artibartfast 5mo ago
        speciesism.
NetMageSCW 5mo ago
Talk to me about the Mars rover that was unable to digna small hole to sample.
- taneq 5mo ago
  “There was that time that a robot failed, therefore robots cannot succeed” isn’t the slam dunk that you seem to think it is.
  - hparadiz 5mo ago
    Wanna explain to me why a robot never took this photo? https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
    - ben_w 5mo ago
      That exact photo is a beauty shot, for PR value rather than any scientific value. Here's a long list of photos of Earth, a few were taken by humans, most were taken by robotic probes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Earth_from_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Ea...
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades One of those strides has been in characterising just how magnificent the human eye, mind and hand are at picking weird shit out of a background.
- kjkjadksj 5mo ago
  Have you seen what you can do with just openCV? The world changed fast quite recently.
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    The better question is not what you can do with computer vision, but what you can't do. That said, I see a lot of synergy opportunities for humanoid robots on the surface controlled remotely by humans wearing VR gear.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

> landing strip Why are landing strips the big unlock? Blast effects? Tiny landing legs?

hparadiz 5mo ago
You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%. Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
- mr_toad 5mo ago
  > you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. Makes me wonder if you could accelerate to orbital velocity using something like a maglev train and not have to worry about rockets at all.
  - chainingsolid 5mo ago
    You would have to do at least a circulization burn no matter the budget spent on maglev.
  - hparadiz 5mo ago
    You can do that but it would require a track that is tens of kilometers long along with a magnetic levitation technology. My suggestion is something we can do right now with a basic landing strip. But yes a meglev is the end game. Needs to reach 8,570 km/h for moon orbital velocity.
  - shigawire 5mo ago
    That is the idea behind "mass drivers" on the moon I believe. Maybe that search term helps.

ben_w 5mo ago

Mega city? It "only" takes about 8 million metric tons of aluminium to put a conductive aluminium loop of 1Ω resistance around the moon's equator*, solving all the energy problems that the poles are usually supposed to solve. While this is way more than we can do any time soon**, that's the kind of mass you'd need to get up there to build the infrastructure for a colony of just high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of people, which is well short of "mega city". * https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28circumference+of+the+moon+*+resistance+aluminium%29%2F1Ω%29*%28circumference+of+the+moon%29*%28density+aluminium%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28circumference+of+... ** Last I looked, SpaceX's website was listing 100 million USD per ton to the moon; your guess is as good as mine if or when they'll deliver anything close to the price Musk suggests for serious colonisation efforts