" If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.." - Abraham Lincoln
“ The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to - prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms..” - Samuel Adams
Imagine any of the missions to bring waste to the moon fails. The spacecraft exploded before getting to escape velocity and now we have a container of radioactive waste orbiting the planet until it burns up or crashes, scattering nuclear decay products in the atmosphere and at the crash site into the groundwater.
Something like that just seems very not worth it for all the risk associated and the other things we can do to address energy. Hell, I'd prefer keeping nuclear waste terrestrial rather than hauling tons of it into space. Not to mention all the associated rocket fuel costs to get all that mass to the moon in the first place. You're better off keeping that sort of energy production close to where you'd get the raw materials for fuel anyways.
Because it makes no sense. Putting a pound of material into space is extremely expensive and if you are about to do that.....why the hell do you put it in the moon? Why don't you just send it to Andromeda and let it wander for millions of year? You have already spent the money to get it out of the planet's orbit.
Good point. The costs and risks would certainly need to be taken into consideration.
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If you are living on the moon, guess what: you are already being exposed to a lot more radiation than you are on the earth.
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Very good point. That would be a great option.
" If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.." - Abraham Lincoln
“ The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to - prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms..” - Samuel Adams
The problem is there is more than just oxygen and temperature etc stopping things like that. The most we can do as it stands is transport food to these places because neither have a viable magnetosphere. Mars has 1 solid crust unlike Earth which is one of the reasons life as we know it developed on earth. We are soooooo far from being able to actually find a way to do that to Mars and the moon is actually far less of an option as it wasn't going to have one to begin with. Growing crops while taking the full brunt of the sun's rays is probably not going to happen or if it does there will be a consequence.
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Seriously people seem to think that it's an oxygen issue. The earth's molten core and plates are one of the biggest reasons life as we know it is on earth. It's not just atmosphere but also magnetosphere. The sun would be a huge problem on both of those places.
But none of those long-term issues would prevent us from being able to colonize them. We can grow crops behind shields. We can build habitats underground to block radiation (until such time as we can build sturdier/thicker habitats above ground).
The issues you bring up are problems for terraforming, not colonization. All the issues you bring up are, imo, both valid and entirely unassailable with our current tech.
I mean how far underground and how strong and what type of shields. The cost/benefit might not really add up. I've been REALLY disillusioned by the astronomy classes I've taken because honestly our solar system isn't really that viable outside of earth. Realistically speaking it's far better to fix this planet and control the human population. This girl at work was very upset when I said that Covid is something that needed to happen and it killing old people while sad is somewhat necessary. Human population is the route of all the planet's problems and we need to really take a page from China as far as limiting birth rates to 1-2 per couple. Viruses and natural disasters are going to keep happening in the meantime and spreading to Mars or the moon isn't going to rectify that much less there is no viable way to even reach the potentially habitable planets we've found. It would take something like the ship in Pandorum or a generational ship. So between that and the moon and Mars being not really a viable option, fix earth should be a priority.
Then there's the billion year countdown to die out or leave before the sun engulfs the earth. Moving to Mars might be a better option then.
While we're speculating pn implausible/unlikely points...might as well take a page from 2010 A Space Odyssey and find a way to ignite the planet Jupiter into a full blown Sun.
microgravity can't replicate low gravity in much the same way earth gravity can't replicate micro gravity or low gravity. There's tremendous benefit in establishing an outpost, even if just for manufacturing, metalforging, and mining of lighter materials that are rare on earth (such as H3, which is amazing in the medical industry, and is a good fuel for fusion power planets... when we actually figure out how to keep them sustained for long periods of time without using more power than they generate to keep them going)
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"lets build a rocket so big we need to mine out a solar system of all the metal it has just to send a pound of radioactive material to a nearby galaxy"
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think you forgot about solar and cosmic radiation bud. Also, coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, ironically enough
Last edited by plz delete account; 2020-10-03 at 11:42 PM.
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This polo required one extra variant - colonization of both planets is not possible. You just need to imagine how many resources are needed to implement this idea which has no benefit at all. As for me, it is better to take care of the Earth and solve the problems that can destroy it.
tbh neither.
imo at current stage of humankind developement we shouldnt waste even a single cent on planetary travel / settlements in space
we have way to much to do to improve humankind living conditions on earth .
untill we get technology allowing use real terraforming of unhabitable planets like mars we shouldnt waste time , resources and money on it.
Lag caused by distance would only matter for real-time updates. Eventually they would create a system where there are copies of all mainstream servers on both planets. So for example if the Moon or Mars had permanent settlements there would be local servers for Wikipedia and World of Warcraft and they might only synchronize them with updates once per week.
I suppose you could technically play an MMORPG from the moon without a local server but since everything takes an extra second it would end up being pretty clunky.
Last edited by PC2; 2020-11-17 at 06:19 PM.