More Water than Ever Found on the Moon

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2104483,00.html

by switz • 15 years ago

112 42 15 years ago

Beautiful, now let's establish a permanent human presence there and Mars as well.

avgarrison2• 15 years ago

I thought that R. Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, really had a compelling argument against space travel in the short term. There's nothing more ridiculous than sending biological life into space. Let's shed some of our biological baggage, merge a little more with technology, and then work on sending a much more versatile and durable human v3.0 into space.

martinkallstrom2• 15 years ago

Sounds like a case of featuritis brewing. It's very easy to get caught in an evil cycle of rising expectations that move the actual launch further and further away. Let's ship an MVP first, launching early and often.

itcmcgrath• 15 years ago

I dub human v3.0 'Borg'.

I like the more agile approach. Release early, iterate often.

burgerbrain3• 15 years ago

Eh. Wetware is cheap (hell, it makes more of itself even when we don't want it too), and does a fair job of mending itself. Hardware is expensive, though it has the advantage of being easier to power and is lighter.

I think if you recognize the advantages and disadvantages of both you could effectively use either of them. Of course doing that might not be considered "humane" by our current standards.

I think the real hope is waiting for hardware to master the "fixing itself" problem (preferably by conquering replication, which would also largely fix the expense problem). Little need to drag along the wetware at that point though.

bdunbar6• 15 years ago

Kurzweil is a smart guy, but he's wrong on this point.

Space is just a place.

Taking a real long-term view, it's no more ridiculous to live in the Moon, or Mars, than it was for early man to move out of Africa and settle Europe, Australia, the Himalayas, California.

Every place man has lived has been radically different from an African savannah. We get along by adapting, improvising, inventing, using technology.

This is not to discount the hazards, dangers, and exceptionally different environment found outside our atmosphere.

But it's time for a real, actual Space Age. We'll make it up as we go along, same as we always have.

Kilimanjaro• 15 years ago

If we could plant the seeds of civilization on the moon in the next 100 years, that would be a fantastic advancement on conquering mars next and then the universe.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

From the submitted article's last paragraph: "None of this makes the moon a wellspring, and it would have a long way to go before it became a remotely hospitable place." The remainder of that paragraph speculates away the logical consequences of that sentence. Overall, the key fact about permanently shaded areas of the Moon, the places with the most water (and not much at that), is that they are extraordinarily cold. Figuring out ways to mine and extract the frozen water in such dark and cold conditions might be a lot more expensive and technically difficult than simply bringing along water from home.

pstuart2• 15 years ago

Sounds like a job for Thorium Man!

http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternativ...

eru3• 15 years ago

Isn't there lots of Thorium, and other fissionable and fusible material on the moon?

burgerbrain3• 15 years ago

Well, that dark problem at least seems pretty easy to solve at least.

bdunbar6• 15 years ago

Figuring out ways to mine and extract the frozen water in such dark and cold conditions might be a lot more expensive and technically difficult than simply bringing along water from home.

Best guess [1] for cost to lift a kilo/liter to orbit is $20,000 per.

Have to be real expensive to mine water to make it more expensive than shipping the stuff from the Pacific.

[1] It is surprisingly hard to tease out data on this value: government accounting is partly to blame. Also: FedEx does not (yet) list their rates for 'delivery to LEO'

bh42222• 15 years ago

Is that $20,000 for the cost from the earth to the moon?

Because I would guess you could escape moon gravity and fall towards earth for a lot less than $20,000 per liter.

And large chunks of ice, hurled from the moon, would just melt in our atmosphere. Which is OK if you don't care to deliver water to anyone in particular and just want more of it on earth. You know, in case global warming doesn't raise sea levels enough.

Just send solar powered robots at in initial cost of $20,000 per kilo to mine the ice, and have them hurl it at earth for a lot less than $20,000 per liter.

jxcole2• 15 years ago

It's kind of hard to put a simple number on that (of course, you could have done tons of research to support this, I'm not sure). But it turns out one of the ordinary byproducts of ordinary rockets is water, which is why all space food is dehydrated. This means that if you sent a rocket with nothing on it at all (zero payload) it would arrive at the moon with water.

Of course I don't know how much and it is still likely to be ridiculously expensive.

scott_s3• 15 years ago

I don't think that the 2012 cost of transferring water from Earth is relevant. If we're in the position of having colonies on the moon, then I assume that our technology and techniques will have improved to the point that transferring anything from the Earth to moon will be significantly less. Otherwise, we wouldn't have colonies on the moon.

This, of course, assumes colonies on the moon. Personally, I doubt we will ever have them. But if we do, I think it's also reasonable to assume that the cost will have been lowered significantly.

ncavig• 15 years ago

Please indulge my ignorance... Maybe a chemist or someone better versed can answer; are we close, or is it plausible to construct a star trek like replicator to rearrange atoms to form new substances such as water?

dangrossman• 15 years ago

It's complete science fiction at this point and there are scientists that argue it will stay that way forever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate_...

But who knows. Maybe when society is so advanced that we have infinite power from controlled fusion, extremely accurate and high powered lasers and magnetic field generators, and quantum computers, we'll be able to build a box that moves around individual atoms to construct something.

eru3• 15 years ago

You can form water from recombining oxygen and hydrogen. Or from material that contain oxygen and hydrogen.

Making water out of anything else, is possible in molecular quantities at an exorbitant price using a particle accelerator (or so). So in practice, impossible.

A Star Trek Replicator, even one that doesn't transmute different elements into each other and just re-arranges them, is a long way off. The best current design we have is called an ecosystem and uses plants, fungi, animals, other life forms and sun light.

Symmetry• 15 years ago

To mostly mirror what eru said, we can easily combine hydrogen and oxygen just by burning them together.

You can also extract amounts of oxygen and hydrogen from more complex substances and turn them into water through the magic of that science we know as Chemistry. You should expect that this will generally take a bunch of energy, though.

Nanotechnology has the potential to let us construct much more complicated sorts of chemical structures. It would be really neat, but wouldn't really change how much energy it takes to separate water out of other materials, and would probably be a lot less energy efficient than standard industrial methods.

orillian• 15 years ago

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/lamp/milestones.html

for a slightly better read than the Times page. Bigger picture too!

dctoedt• 15 years ago

Brings to mind Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress [1] --- the entire plot turned on the prospect of lunar "society" running out of water because it used the water to grow grain and then exported the grain "downhill" to Earth.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

ramblerman• 15 years ago

could you drink it? Bottled moon water, with extra asteroid minerals.

More Water than Ever Found on the Moon

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