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This is the classic fallacy of imagining a future problem with current technology. By the time we have "one-million-person cities" on the moon, synthesizing wa
by heaney-555 2mo ago
This is the classic fallacy of imagining a future problem with current technology.
By the time we have "one-million-person cities" on the moon, synthesizing water or hauling it from icy asteroids will not be a problem.
- m4rtink 2mo agoWe could never send a Morse signal to the Moon or Mars - the aerial mast necessary for that would be reaching out of the atmosphere and you would need to burn amount of coal equivalent Mt Everest to power it! (Paraphrasing a bit but I do remember reading such an article, where they explained how it was nonsense to send interplanetary messages with their long wave omnidirectional antennas and inefficient early radios, including the immense amounts of coal that would have to be burned to run the steam machines powering the dynamos. In the end we had a solar powered lander sending images back from Mars in 1997, using a couple wats.)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- yellowapple 2mo agoThe lack of water is related to the lack of hydrogen; you'd need to find a hydrogen source to synthesize water. Lots of oxygen in moon rocks, though, so in addition to directly importing icy asteroids, importing hydrocarbon-rich asteroids would also help (with the added bonus of carbon also being something scarce on the Moon).