Land is in short supply and life expectancy rates are climbing dramatically and will continue to do so with upcoming advances in biotechnologies and pharmaceuticals. Its time to discuss how we can expand and the moon is the closest. My first idea is simple, a biodome like structure planted permanently on the moon. We could even crash the iss into it for it if we really wanted but that was built so fast with international support i'm sure a moon base could be developed in ten or so years. Now a wacky idea I had for colonizing the moon involved melting both ice caps completely and turning the water vapor into breathable atmosphere. The goal of this is to extend the atmosphere of the Earth so far it wraps around the moon, what I believe is the only way to get the moon to hold a full atmosphere. I'm unsure of the distance to atmospheric expansion ratio but just thought we could also lower the sea level using some of the oceans to supplement this project and extend it enough. What are your ideas for the moon?
Gawdzilla Sama
121.92-meter mutant fire-breathing lizard-thingy
New Botany Bay.
Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
Are you serious?
It will be quite impossible to extend to the atmosphere of the Earth so much that the Moon would have the same atmosphere as does the Earth. And besides, even if such a thing could be done, then there would be so much parasitic drag on the Moon that it would crash into the Earth in very short order.
If you are serious, then I think that you need to more carefully evaluate your ideas for Moon colonization.
Halfcentaur
Philosopher
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If gravity holds the atmosphere around the earth, then extending that gravity to the moon doesn't sound healthy.
steve s
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The only way you're going to make a dent in the population density of earth is to ferry billions of people to the moon, which is impossible for the foreseeable future. Just sending a few dozen or few hundred ain't gonna do it.
Squeezing a billion people into the ISS is going to be difficult.
If the earth's atmosphere were 250,000 miles thick, the atmospheric pressure at the earth's surface would be staggering. Congrats, you just made the earth uninhabitable for all the people who were left behind.
Steve S
Lamuella
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There's a lot to talk about here, but let me start with this:
I think you are underestimating how far away the moon is. Depending on where it is in its orbit, the moon is between 362,000 and 405,000 kilometres away from the Earth. To put that in perspective, that's about 30 times the diameter of the Earth. An atmosphere that extended from the Earth to where the moon is at its closest point would have a volume of 198 septillion(198,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) cubic metres. Even adding the mass of the oceans and the ice caps to that of the air, that would be a pretty low pressure atmosphere to stretch all the way out there. How do you propose keeping it in place?
I think you are underestimating how far away the moon is. Depending on where it is in its orbit, the moon is between 362,000 and 405,000 kilometres away from the Earth. To put that in perspective, that's about 30 times the diameter of the Earth. An atmosphere that extended from the Earth to where the moon is at its closest point would have a volume of 198 septillion(198,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) cubic metres. Even adding the mass of the oceans and the ice caps to that of the air, that would be a pretty low pressure atmosphere to stretch all the way out there. How do you propose keeping it in place?
Jack by the hedge
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Imagine placing an apple and a grape on a billiard table about 5 feet apart. The apple is the earth and the grape is the moon. The earth's atmosphere is represented by the skin on the apple. You propose to expand the apple skin to enclose the grape...
I have an alternative proposal: Build habitats for excess population on uninhabitable parts of earth instead. Deserts, for example, or even the sea floor. It would be stupidly expensive, but not anything like as expensive as the moon.
Alternatively, sit back and watch the birthrate dropping.
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Beelzebuddy
Penultimate Amazing
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WE LIKE THE MOON, 'cause it is close to us.
I've actually spent multiple minutes trying and failing to come up with a sufficiently witty glib response, but I can't. Jestblaze has shot straight past simply being wrong into what is this I don't even territory. Congratulations, sir.
Since the OP does ask us what our plans would be, would anyone mind a hijack into a hard science fiction lunar colonization discussion? We've got a fair population of posters with solid engineering backgrounds and hard-ons for space, so it needn't stray too far from plausible.
I suppose the most vital need of any moon base would be power. What with it being in space and all and efficient fusion still not possible, solar should work well enough. Does the moon have correct resources to manufacture some form of solar cell locally?
I've actually spent multiple minutes trying and failing to come up with a sufficiently witty glib response, but I can't. Jestblaze has shot straight past simply being wrong into what is this I don't even territory. Congratulations, sir.
Since the OP does ask us what our plans would be, would anyone mind a hijack into a hard science fiction lunar colonization discussion? We've got a fair population of posters with solid engineering backgrounds and hard-ons for space, so it needn't stray too far from plausible.
I suppose the most vital need of any moon base would be power. What with it being in space and all and efficient fusion still not possible, solar should work well enough. Does the moon have correct resources to manufacture some form of solar cell locally?
RobRoy
Not A Mormon
What kind of land are you talking about being in short supply? There are literally millions of acres of undeveloped and underdeveloped land in the US alone. How to best develop the land is an open question with lots of interesting answers.
There are two very basic issues with developing a sustainable lunar colony: materials and water. Lifting any kind of material into space is extremely expensive. IIRC, the current cost is around $10,000 per pound. Lifting enough material to build a biodome for a sustainable colony would be, under current costs, outrageously expensive. Private industry, spurred on by entrepreneurs and some government subsidized programs, is attempting to overcome these issues, and bring the cost of moving basic materials down to a reasonable level, but we’re not there yet.
Water is the other problem. Back in 2009 NASA said they had found a “significant” amount. But their definition and a lunar colony’s is vastly different. I believe they found a few gallons frozen on the moon, which was impressive given that there was debate over any water being present. Water would be key to developing and maintaining a lunar colony.
This doesn’t even bring into question the issues of heat, food, maintenance, etc. None of this even begins to address the effects of sustained low-gravity on the human body, which generally causes bone-loss and other fun problems, all of which have to be solved in order to make colonization practical.
I think that goes a bit beyond “wacky”. I don’t want to offend you, but deliberately melting the polar ice caps would cause a loss of coastal lands on such a vast scale (not to mention property and weather concerns) that it would be counter-productive. Current rising seas are causing all kinds of issues all on their own. The deliberate melting of polar caps would be nothing short of catastrophic. Not to mention extending the Earth’s atmosphere by a quarter-million miles seems nothing short of impossible. Our atmosphere, for all practical purposes, is only about 75 miles.
You’d have better luck building a Dyson sphere than extending the Earth’s atmosphere enough to encompass the moon.
Continued encouragement of private industry to bear the burden of developing technologies that reduce the cost of lifting materials into space. Continued development of genetic crops specifically geared to production in low-gravity with high yields. Increased development in sustainable energy technology. It would also help if there was financial impetus to colonize beyond the Earth. Enough incentive in that direction would spur growth, even if it wasn't initially a sustainable lunar colony.
sts60
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You say we need to expand due to land and popluation pressures. That means moving people off the Earth in numbers large enough to relieve that pressure.
But you can't make room on Earth by moving people off-planet. You simply can't, and I say that as an avid enthusiast of manned space exploration.
The costs to simply lift a signficant portion of Earth's population into space, even if they did nothing other than die immediately*, would be staggering. And that's not even getting them into orbit, let alone to the Moon.
My first idea is simple, a biodome like structure planted permanently on the moon.
OK. You want to relieve the pressure on room and resources on Earth, so let's say you need room for even a tenth of the population - very roughly on the order of a billion people.
All the wealth ever accumulated by human civilization, even if you counted it every time any of it changed hands, would not suffice to lift accommodations for that many people to the Moon, let alone to build or operate same.
You may also want to ponder that the real Biodome struggled mightily to keep a handful of people reasonably healthy for, what, a couple of years - and that was with significant resupply.
We could even crash the iss into it for it if we really wanted
Why do you want to destroy ("crash") the ISS?
Let's assume you meant "move and land the ISS on the Moon". That would almost certainly destroy it, and in any case it's completely unsuited for use on the Moon even if you could somehow land it there intact - which in itself would be absurdly expensive.
And pointless, too. The ISS accommodates a handful of people and itself requires regular resupply.
but that was built so fast with international support
No. The ISS took decades to build, going through numerous start-overs in its design, and the international partners darn near came to blows over design and funding decisions.
i'm sure a moon base could be developed in ten or so years.
Probably. It would accommodate a small number of people and would require regular resupply for the forseeable future. That does good for science and resource exploitation purposes, but does nothing to solve the problem you mention.
Now a wacky idea I had for colonizing the moon involved melting both ice caps completely and turning the water vapor into breathable atmosphere.
Congratulations; you've just relieved some of the population pressure by drowning hundreds of millions of people in coastal areas. When you melt the ice caps, you get water, not direct conversion to vapor.
Even if you did, it's water vapor, not atmosphere. It may be good for your skin, but your lungs can't use it. To electrolyze the oxygen out would require, yes, a staggering amount of energy, making your resource problem far worse, and none of it would make a difference anyway.
The goal of this is to extend the atmosphere of the Earth so far it wraps around the moon,
That is impossible.
But let's suppose it was. Congratulations; you've solved your problem completely by killing everyone on Earth under, literally, crushingly high pressure. I hope the folks on the Moon base stocked up on Doritos before this scheme is implemented.
what I believe is the only way to get the moon to hold a full atmosphere.
The Moon won't hold an atmosphere; it will just leak away. If you had basically unlmited power and money, you could probably figure out a way to liberate enough oxygen and nitrogen from the Moon itself to generate and replenish some sort of thin atmosphere. But that is not even remotely realistic, just conceivable.
I'm unsure of the distance to atmospheric expansion ratio but just thought we could also lower the sea level using some of the oceans to supplement this project and extend it enough.
Well, there's also the little problem that if you somehow extended the Earth's atmosphere to the Moon, drag would quickly cause it to spiral in and smash into the Earth. The people on Earth wouldn't mind because you'd already suffocated and crushed them, but the folks on your lunar outpost - well, they wouldn't mind the impact either as they would have been incinerated by drag heating on the way in.
What are your ideas for the moon?
Explore it, settle it gradually, use its resources. Just don't expect it to act as a safety valve for land and population pressures. The same for Mars, etc., but even more so.
* See "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth.
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paiute
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Are you kidding? Here is all the land you could ever want and it is just in the continental US. Multiply by Canada, Mongolia, etc.:
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=39.031986,-115.686035&spn=3.212855,4.938354&t=h&z=8&vpsrc=6
It isn't land we lack. It is water and topsoil, and it would be much much cheaper to find those on earth than find them on the moon.
The Moon is 300,000 km away from the Earth. What sort of object has an atmosphere that "extends" to 300,000km? It's what we'd call an M-star. The reason its atmosphere is so big is that its core is being heated by hydrogen fusion and is a million-degree plasma at high pressure. Is that what you had in mind for the Earth-Moon system?
You wanted a "room temperature" atmosphere 300,000 km across? Sorry, utterly impossible. If you keep dumping (cold) gas onto the Earth, we could swell up to about Jupiter-size (70,000km) and stay there. Note that Jupiter's probably-rocky core, with 70,000km of atmosphere on top of it, is not the least bit habitable.
Adding more mass to a Jupiter-like object, as it so happens, makes it denser, not larger. If it gets too dense in this way, its only choices are "begin stellar fusion" or "collapse into white dwarf". There is no "swell up to 300,000 km while remaining cold" option.
So: fun idea, but you have the planetary science basically wrong. I would agree with the posters who think you have the economics/demographics/geography wrong too (there is not now and probably never will be a "relieve overcrowding" motivation for colonizing the Moon) and the aerospace engineering also (we don't have the technology to seal up a self-sustaining food/water/oxygen cycle in Arizona, much less in a harsh vacuum. The largest rocket ever built---which no longer exists---was able to deliver less than one shipping container's worth of mass to the Moon.)
You wanted a "room temperature" atmosphere 300,000 km across? Sorry, utterly impossible. If you keep dumping (cold) gas onto the Earth, we could swell up to about Jupiter-size (70,000km) and stay there. Note that Jupiter's probably-rocky core, with 70,000km of atmosphere on top of it, is not the least bit habitable.
Adding more mass to a Jupiter-like object, as it so happens, makes it denser, not larger. If it gets too dense in this way, its only choices are "begin stellar fusion" or "collapse into white dwarf". There is no "swell up to 300,000 km while remaining cold" option.
So: fun idea, but you have the planetary science basically wrong. I would agree with the posters who think you have the economics/demographics/geography wrong too (there is not now and probably never will be a "relieve overcrowding" motivation for colonizing the Moon) and the aerospace engineering also (we don't have the technology to seal up a self-sustaining food/water/oxygen cycle in Arizona, much less in a harsh vacuum. The largest rocket ever built---which no longer exists---was able to deliver less than one shipping container's worth of mass to the Moon.)
HopDavid
Thinker
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India's lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 detected what seem to be sheets of ice at least two meters thick. See Nasa Radar finds ice deposits at Moon's North Pole.
The October 2010 issue of Science looked at LCROSS ejecta. It evidently contains 5.5% water as well as nitrogen and carbon compounds:
N 6.6000%
CO 5.7000%
H2O 5.5000%
Zn 3.1000%
V 2.4000%
Ca 1.6000%
Au 1.6000%
Mn 1.3000%
Hg 1.2000%
Co 1.0000%
H2S 0.9213%
Fe 0.5000%
Mg 0.4000%
NH3 0.3317%
Cl 0.2000%
SO2 0.1755%
C2H4 0.1716%
CO2 0.1194%
C 0.0900%
Sc 0.0900%
CH3OH 0.0853%
S 0.0600%
B 0.0400%
P 0.0400%
CH4 0.0366%
O 0.0200%
Si 0.0200%
As 0.0200%
Al 0.0090%
OH 0.0017%
Cainkane1
Philosopher
You could colonize the moon easier than Mars. The moon has a lot of frozen water and its closer to earth than mars. Like Mars youd have to live most of your life indoors except on rare occassions when you suit up.
HopDavid
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Admirable enthusiasm but you need to do some homework. None of your schemes are viable.
There are some plausible lunar plans:
Spudis and Lavoie's plan
Bill Stone's Plan
ULA's plan
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
This, for great justice.
Brian-M
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Not true. There are vast stretches of land that are virtually uninhabited. True, some of this is desert, frozen wasteland or marginally habitable, but land is plentiful.
According to Wikipedia, world life expectancy has risen from 65 years to 70 years over the past two decades.
This seems dramatic, but I suspect that much of the change is due to a reduction of infant mortality in third world countries. But I don't see how life expectancy is relevant to anything. Population density is what you should be looking at.
Deserts and ocean floors are even closer. If we were to build biodomes for human habitation, it'd be much more feasible to build them here.
According to NASA, the ISS has a habitable Volume of 13,696 cubic feet (388 cubic meters). By my estimation, that's about the same as a two story suburban house. Nowhere enough room to house a workforce building a bio-dome on the moon.
The first module of the ISS was launched in 1998. Assembly is expected to be completed sometime this year. 14 years to build is hardly "fast".
Now consider that the moon is literally a thousand times the distance from us than the ISS, construction of a moon base will be a lot more difficult.
That is a wacky idea. This would take far more than the entire energy consumption of the entire world to do. And the result would be a very explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Let's hope that nobody lights a match.
Not enough ice and water on earth to pull this trick off. Plus, gravity weakens with distance. Long before the atmosphere reached the moon, the gravity would be so weak, the solar wind would blow the extra atmosphere into the depths of space.
Plus, even if you succeeded, the atmosphere around the moon would be far too thin for water (of blood inside humans) to remain liquid. And the friction of passing through the atmosphere would cause the moon to crash into the earth.
[Sorry, no time to read through the whole thread before posting, I gotta go.]
RobRoy
Not A Mormon
