9 ms·

Can we colonize the moon?

72 points by cpeterso 11y ago

mholt 11y ago
> Harvesting the vast amounts of water on the Moon – the equivalent of the Great Salt Lake in Utah – could make the project commercially viable. I didn't know this. But anyway, I live by the Great Salt Lake, and it's more like the Great Salt Puddle. Would that amount of water really sustain a colony? I suppose the base would have the most efficient water facilities ever invented, but still, it wouldn't last for long unless the water was recycled forever. (I see, later, they refer to finding such ice as 'prospecting for gold' - I'm optimistic about our future in space, but this water situation is tricky. Ship it up there, maybe?)
- greglindahl 11y ago
  Water is useful as fuel (LOX and liquid hydrogen or methane), as reaction mass, and as radiation shielding when you're flying around. Colonies will recycle their water. The ISS already partly recycles its water.
- onion2k 11y ago
  Water is heavy. A SpaceX Falcon-heavy has a maximum capacity of 21,200kg to transfer orbit - that's not going to go very far in a colony even if it's all water. Shipping it up there is really not an option. Unless you have a space elevator...
  - nomailing 11y ago
    Would it make sense to harvest asteroids for water and bring it to the moon? I am thinking about just one spaceship which could go back and forth between some asteroid and a moon orbit. It shoots the water down to the moon, so that it does not even have to touch-down and take-off again. How much energy would be needed for such a mission? Probably it would be a very complex mission to get right, but once it is established you might have water for free on the moon.
    - monk_e_boy 11y ago
      I think the watery icy asteroids are a long way away. They also have a huge amount of kinetic energy, so they are hard to catch and move.
    - tdy721 11y ago
      No! Colonizing the Moon only makes sense if the water is there. If we're going to harvest water from asteroids, we should colonize them instead.
    - userulluipeste 11y ago
      Besides what tdy721 and monk_e_boy said, water would be tricky to be had in our near-space neighborhood for two reasons. First, Earth, being a real planet, cleaned its surroundings of most of free-roaming objects. Besides the (domesticated) moon, there aren't that many wild objects around to look for. Second, water has a relatively low boiling point and on the Earth's distance from the Sun there is a lot of solar energy to melt the asteroid ice and boil away (like what we see happening on comets) before we can extract it, and then having difficulties with its handling after we have it due to very same reason.
  - pliny 11y ago
    >A SpaceX Falcon-heavy has a maximum capacity of 21,200kg to transfer orbit - that's not going to go very far in a colony even if it's all water Well, can't you recycle ~100% of it? So you really only need to ship the maximum amount of water that will be in use at any one point.
    - onion2k 11y ago
      Think of the food production alone - assuming a colony of a few thousand people, that would mean you'd need to be growing hundreds of tonnes of food at any given moment - most of which would consist of water you've brought with you (for example, a cabbage is 93% water). Of course that could largely be recycled, but even if you can get to 99% recycling you'll still need a rocketload of water very regularly to replace the water you lose or that's polluted beyond recycling. It really doesn't make sense to take water with you. Just colonise somewhere that already has it.
- tdy721 11y ago
  Shipping water to space or the Moon goes against the very core of this idea. There is water on the Moon, check out the Lunar Prospector mission for more information. That water is extremely useful, even for an entirely robotic solution because it is rocket fuel. The low gravity makes it an incredible asset. If we can get to it, the cheapest access to water and fuel in low earth orbit will come from the Moon. Sending water & fuel to the ISS from the Moon is cheaper than sending it from Earth if you take a long enough view.
  - tdy721 11y ago
    I'd also like to point out that nuclear propulsion (Nuclear Thermal Rockets, proven tech) is a viable option for Moon and Space craft. The Moon's surface is already being blasted with solar radiation from solar wind and flares. Just imagine how useful some Moon uranium would be!
qrendel 11y ago
A similar proposal from a while back was one on "Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry," essentially concluding we could have a robust space industry with an industrial output 1,000,000x that of US GDP within about four decades - for as little as 12 metric tons landed on the moon to kickstart the process. The proposal relied heavily on automated systems and coming advances in robotics, but ignored other likely improvements such as atomic-scale manufacturing. Other than perhaps sheer disbelief I'm not sure why there hasn't been more interest in it. [1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-space-industry-solar-system-civilization/ http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap... [2] Paper - http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Preprint_Affordable-bootstrapping-of-space-industry-and-solar-system-civilization.pdf http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...
- Animats 11y ago
  From that paper: " A 1980 summer study at the NASA Ames Research Center (Freitas and Gilbreath 1980) showed that self-reproducing machines are theoretically possible." I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that.
  - qrendel 11y ago
    The proposal in the paper is at least somewhat different: it wouldn't become fully self-sufficient until the later stages of about a seven stage process. The earlier stages just involve unmanned robots controlled from Earth, beginning with around 17th century technology and moving towards autonomy with each successive generation. I definitely see your point, but this isn't quite the same as proposing a lunar colony of self-reproducing robots within the next few years (besides, robotics have come a long way since then).
  - ethbro 11y ago
    > I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that. To be fair, I'm not entirely fond of the idea of self-reproducing machines in New Mexico either. ;)
thwarted 11y ago
There's a great speculative scifi book called "Welcome to Moonbase" (Ben Bova, 1987)[0] that is written as an employee manual for people relocating to an established moon colony. There are sections on the history of the moonbase, the economy, the social aspects, living and working on the moon. It's a fantastic paleofuture read, and is one of the books that kindled my love for sci-fi and space exploration as a kid. It's fiction, but does make it seem like living on the moon is something achievable within our lifetimes and could serve to answer the question "can we colonize the moon?". [0] http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Moonbase-Ben-Bova/dp/0345328590 http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Moonbase-Ben-Bova/dp/034532859...
- enra 11y ago
  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is also one great scifi classic Although more later stage living on the moon and revolution. http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress/dp/0312863551 http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress/dp/03128635...
  - jawilson2 11y ago
    One of my favorites.
  - k__ 11y ago
    I liked his books about the moon colony :) Best thing was that they went flying, like we went biking here on earth. It really got me longing to live there.
  - fho 11y ago
    I read that book twice. Once with the german title "Der Mond is eine herbe Geliebte" (direct translation), then years later a friend recommended the book "Revolte auf Luna" ("Riot on Luna"). I got half way through the book before I realized that I was reading the exact same book. Great story nevertheless.
shoo 11y ago
"Colonize" isn't the right word. Living on another planet doesn't make any sense for us. Perhaps it makes sense to put a very small number of people on the moon for purely scientific or commercial reasons - but it might make more commercial sense to instead use robots and sidestep the hassle of maintaining real live humans up there. Charles Stross wrote about this a few years ago [1]: > Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ... > The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps. [...] > When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
- adrianN 11y ago
  Living on another planet makes sense for us if we ever plan to survive an extinction level event on Earth. Keeping humanity alive if Earth is FUBAR is something robots can't do until they merge with us.
frozenport 11y ago
Will a commercial enterprise see people as a needless expense that hurts their bottom line? Why cant robots mine the moon withiut us?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
blumkvist 11y ago
Uuuh... I thought the gravity on the moon will deform human skeletons, as they are "made" for human gravity, so that makes living anywhere that has different g impossible. Is that not true?
- leni536 11y ago
  Then maybe in the long run they would need to build a base that rotates rapidly and simulates a gravity of g at the perimeter by centrifugal force.
  - rogeryu 11y ago
    Which will only work in space, not on a planet. That will simply require too much energy, and it will be too complex to build.
  - mrfusion 11y ago
    Or more simply just wear weights distributed across your clothes?
    - leni536 11y ago
      Well maybe that works against the bone structure changes. On the other hand gravity (or the lack of it) has other effects too on the human body[1]. One needs to use body forces to compensate the lack of gravity. Contact forces won't help here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body#Fluid_redistribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_h...
- userulluipeste 11y ago
  "that makes living anywhere that has different g impossible. Is that not true?" Yes, unfortunately. Currently almost all but the gravity can be taken care of by artificial means. The closest extraterrestrial destination for humans is now the planet Venus.
- nkoren 11y ago
  No, it's not "true". It's "unknown". To date, there have been no studies of how human (or any other) physiology holds up in low-gravity environments. There have been a lot of studies showing that zero gravity[1] is reasonably unhealthy, but there is a lot of room between earth gravity and zero gravity. At what point does lower gravity become unhealthy? 90% earth gravity? 10% earth gravity? 1% earth gravity? Nobody knows; no research has been done. We need to get some experience with it. It doesn't seem reasonable to speculate that anything less than 100% earth gravity will be unhealthy. Gravity itself can be a significant and damaging stress on the body; a bit less gravity may actually improve health, not hurt it. For this reason, it's also not reasonable to speculate a linear slope between "healthy at 100% earth gravity" and "unhealthy at zero gravity". The slope is very likely non-linear, but nobody knows what it looks like. Some space medicine people I've talked to speculate that lower gravity is probably harmless, up to the point where fluids stop flowing downhill. Your body relies on gravity to redistribute fluids throughout your extremities; in zero-gravity, this no longer happens, and a lot of weird things start happening as a result. If this is the case, then lunar gravity (1/6th earth gravity) should be just fine to live in. But, again, we don't know, and all the zero-gravity experiments in the world won't tell us. Until we get some proper low-gravity experience, it's a big question-mark. 1: Technically, "micro-" gravity, since "zero-" doesn't exist in reality. But it's very, very, very micro -- like, 1/1000th earth gravity or less.
msvan 11y ago
I thought the Outer Space Treaty was meant to prevent things like these. Personally, I hope we'll leave behind all of our arbitrary notions of states once we leave earth. It's too late to remove the dividing lines on earth, but we still have a shot at idealism in space.
- richmarr 11y ago
  Interesting idea. It's too late to remove the dividing lines on earth Too late implies it was possible before but isn't now. Why's that?
- Symmetry 11y ago
  The Outer Space Treaty prevents people/governments from owning land outside of Earth but it gives organizations the right to keep others out of places they are currently using, which comes to much the same thing. Now, the Moon Treaty does what you want but that was never ratified by anybody with a serious space program.
fengwick3 11y ago
Wouldn't radiation and meteorites be a huge concern?
wkdown 11y ago
"We are so concerned with if we could, we didn't stop to consider if we should."

72 points by cpeterso 11y ago

mholt 11y ago

> Harvesting the vast amounts of water on the Moon – the equivalent of the Great Salt Lake in Utah – could make the project commercially viable. I didn't know this. But anyway, I live by the Great Salt Lake, and it's more like the Great Salt Puddle. Would that amount of water really sustain a colony? I suppose the base would have the most efficient water facilities ever invented, but still, it wouldn't last for long unless the water was recycled forever. (I see, later, they refer to finding such ice as 'prospecting for gold' - I'm optimistic about our future in space, but this water situation is tricky. Ship it up there, maybe?)

greglindahl 11y ago
Water is useful as fuel (LOX and liquid hydrogen or methane), as reaction mass, and as radiation shielding when you're flying around. Colonies will recycle their water. The ISS already partly recycles its water.
onion2k 11y ago
Water is heavy. A SpaceX Falcon-heavy has a maximum capacity of 21,200kg to transfer orbit - that's not going to go very far in a colony even if it's all water. Shipping it up there is really not an option. Unless you have a space elevator...
- nomailing 11y ago
  Would it make sense to harvest asteroids for water and bring it to the moon? I am thinking about just one spaceship which could go back and forth between some asteroid and a moon orbit. It shoots the water down to the moon, so that it does not even have to touch-down and take-off again. How much energy would be needed for such a mission? Probably it would be a very complex mission to get right, but once it is established you might have water for free on the moon.
  - monk_e_boy 11y ago
    I think the watery icy asteroids are a long way away. They also have a huge amount of kinetic energy, so they are hard to catch and move.
  - tdy721 11y ago
    No! Colonizing the Moon only makes sense if the water is there. If we're going to harvest water from asteroids, we should colonize them instead.
  - userulluipeste 11y ago
    Besides what tdy721 and monk_e_boy said, water would be tricky to be had in our near-space neighborhood for two reasons. First, Earth, being a real planet, cleaned its surroundings of most of free-roaming objects. Besides the (domesticated) moon, there aren't that many wild objects around to look for. Second, water has a relatively low boiling point and on the Earth's distance from the Sun there is a lot of solar energy to melt the asteroid ice and boil away (like what we see happening on comets) before we can extract it, and then having difficulties with its handling after we have it due to very same reason.
- pliny 11y ago
  >A SpaceX Falcon-heavy has a maximum capacity of 21,200kg to transfer orbit - that's not going to go very far in a colony even if it's all water Well, can't you recycle ~100% of it? So you really only need to ship the maximum amount of water that will be in use at any one point.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    Think of the food production alone - assuming a colony of a few thousand people, that would mean you'd need to be growing hundreds of tonnes of food at any given moment - most of which would consist of water you've brought with you (for example, a cabbage is 93% water). Of course that could largely be recycled, but even if you can get to 99% recycling you'll still need a rocketload of water very regularly to replace the water you lose or that's polluted beyond recycling. It really doesn't make sense to take water with you. Just colonise somewhere that already has it.
tdy721 11y ago
Shipping water to space or the Moon goes against the very core of this idea. There is water on the Moon, check out the Lunar Prospector mission for more information. That water is extremely useful, even for an entirely robotic solution because it is rocket fuel. The low gravity makes it an incredible asset. If we can get to it, the cheapest access to water and fuel in low earth orbit will come from the Moon. Sending water & fuel to the ISS from the Moon is cheaper than sending it from Earth if you take a long enough view.
- tdy721 11y ago
  I'd also like to point out that nuclear propulsion (Nuclear Thermal Rockets, proven tech) is a viable option for Moon and Space craft. The Moon's surface is already being blasted with solar radiation from solar wind and flares. Just imagine how useful some Moon uranium would be!

qrendel 11y ago

A similar proposal from a while back was one on "Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry," essentially concluding we could have a robust space industry with an industrial output 1,000,000x that of US GDP within about four decades - for as little as 12 metric tons landed on the moon to kickstart the process. The proposal relied heavily on automated systems and coming advances in robotics, but ignored other likely improvements such as atomic-scale manufacturing. Other than perhaps sheer disbelief I'm not sure why there hasn't been more interest in it. [1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-space-industry-solar-system-civilization/ http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap... [2] Paper - http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Preprint_Affordable-bootstrapping-of-space-industry-and-solar-system-civilization.pdf http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...

Animats 11y ago
From that paper: " A 1980 summer study at the NASA Ames Research Center (Freitas and Gilbreath 1980) showed that self-reproducing machines are theoretically possible." I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that.
- qrendel 11y ago
  The proposal in the paper is at least somewhat different: it wouldn't become fully self-sufficient until the later stages of about a seven stage process. The earlier stages just involve unmanned robots controlled from Earth, beginning with around 17th century technology and moving towards autonomy with each successive generation. I definitely see your point, but this isn't quite the same as proposing a lunar colony of self-reproducing robots within the next few years (besides, robotics have come a long way since then).
- ethbro 11y ago
  > I remember that crowd. They wanted to have self-reproducing machines on the moon by 2000. I asked, "how soon can you do it in New Mexico". They didn't like that. To be fair, I'm not entirely fond of the idea of self-reproducing machines in New Mexico either. ;)

thwarted 11y ago

There's a great speculative scifi book called "Welcome to Moonbase" (Ben Bova, 1987)[0] that is written as an employee manual for people relocating to an established moon colony. There are sections on the history of the moonbase, the economy, the social aspects, living and working on the moon. It's a fantastic paleofuture read, and is one of the books that kindled my love for sci-fi and space exploration as a kid. It's fiction, but does make it seem like living on the moon is something achievable within our lifetimes and could serve to answer the question "can we colonize the moon?". [0] http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Moonbase-Ben-Bova/dp/0345328590 http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Moonbase-Ben-Bova/dp/034532859...

enra 11y ago
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is also one great scifi classic Although more later stage living on the moon and revolution. http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress/dp/0312863551 http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress/dp/03128635...
- jawilson2 11y ago
  One of my favorites.
- k__ 11y ago
  I liked his books about the moon colony :) Best thing was that they went flying, like we went biking here on earth. It really got me longing to live there.
- fho 11y ago
  I read that book twice. Once with the german title "Der Mond is eine herbe Geliebte" (direct translation), then years later a friend recommended the book "Revolte auf Luna" ("Riot on Luna"). I got half way through the book before I realized that I was reading the exact same book. Great story nevertheless.

shoo 11y ago

"Colonize" isn't the right word. Living on another planet doesn't make any sense for us. Perhaps it makes sense to put a very small number of people on the moon for purely scientific or commercial reasons - but it might make more commercial sense to instead use robots and sidestep the hassle of maintaining real live humans up there. Charles Stross wrote about this a few years ago [1]: > Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ... > The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps. [...] > When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

adrianN 11y ago
Living on another planet makes sense for us if we ever plan to survive an extinction level event on Earth. Keeping humanity alive if Earth is FUBAR is something robots can't do until they merge with us.

frozenport 11y ago

Will a commercial enterprise see people as a needless expense that hurts their bottom line? Why cant robots mine the moon withiut us?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

blumkvist 11y ago

Uuuh... I thought the gravity on the moon will deform human skeletons, as they are "made" for human gravity, so that makes living anywhere that has different g impossible. Is that not true?

leni536 11y ago
Then maybe in the long run they would need to build a base that rotates rapidly and simulates a gravity of g at the perimeter by centrifugal force.
- rogeryu 11y ago
  Which will only work in space, not on a planet. That will simply require too much energy, and it will be too complex to build.
- mrfusion 11y ago
  Or more simply just wear weights distributed across your clothes?
  - leni536 11y ago
    Well maybe that works against the bone structure changes. On the other hand gravity (or the lack of it) has other effects too on the human body[1]. One needs to use body forces to compensate the lack of gravity. Contact forces won't help here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body#Fluid_redistribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_h...
userulluipeste 11y ago
"that makes living anywhere that has different g impossible. Is that not true?" Yes, unfortunately. Currently almost all but the gravity can be taken care of by artificial means. The closest extraterrestrial destination for humans is now the planet Venus.
nkoren 11y ago
No, it's not "true". It's "unknown". To date, there have been no studies of how human (or any other) physiology holds up in low-gravity environments. There have been a lot of studies showing that zero gravity[1] is reasonably unhealthy, but there is a lot of room between earth gravity and zero gravity. At what point does lower gravity become unhealthy? 90% earth gravity? 10% earth gravity? 1% earth gravity? Nobody knows; no research has been done. We need to get some experience with it. It doesn't seem reasonable to speculate that anything less than 100% earth gravity will be unhealthy. Gravity itself can be a significant and damaging stress on the body; a bit less gravity may actually improve health, not hurt it. For this reason, it's also not reasonable to speculate a linear slope between "healthy at 100% earth gravity" and "unhealthy at zero gravity". The slope is very likely non-linear, but nobody knows what it looks like. Some space medicine people I've talked to speculate that lower gravity is probably harmless, up to the point where fluids stop flowing downhill. Your body relies on gravity to redistribute fluids throughout your extremities; in zero-gravity, this no longer happens, and a lot of weird things start happening as a result. If this is the case, then lunar gravity (1/6th earth gravity) should be just fine to live in. But, again, we don't know, and all the zero-gravity experiments in the world won't tell us. Until we get some proper low-gravity experience, it's a big question-mark. 1: Technically, "micro-" gravity, since "zero-" doesn't exist in reality. But it's very, very, very micro -- like, 1/1000th earth gravity or less.

msvan 11y ago

I thought the Outer Space Treaty was meant to prevent things like these. Personally, I hope we'll leave behind all of our arbitrary notions of states once we leave earth. It's too late to remove the dividing lines on earth, but we still have a shot at idealism in space.

richmarr 11y ago
Interesting idea. It's too late to remove the dividing lines on earth Too late implies it was possible before but isn't now. Why's that?
Symmetry 11y ago
The Outer Space Treaty prevents people/governments from owning land outside of Earth but it gives organizations the right to keep others out of places they are currently using, which comes to much the same thing. Now, the Moon Treaty does what you want but that was never ratified by anybody with a serious space program.

fengwick3 11y ago

Wouldn't radiation and meteorites be a huge concern?

wkdown 11y ago

"We are so concerned with if we could, we didn't stop to consider if we should."