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The Economic Development of the Moon
MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Smith, the author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, recently published a polemic in the British newspaper The Guardian, entitled Plundering the Moon, that argued against the economic development of the Moon. Apparently the idea of mining Helium 3, an isotope found on the Moon but not on the Earth (at least in nature) disturbs Mr. Smith from an environmentalist standpoint. An examination of the issue makes one wonder why."
If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?
Sigs cause cancer.
I think neglecting the potential for cheese mining is the real crime here.
As I think of it. I think most people think of clean air and water and an ecosystem as an environment. Not a bunch of dead dust in a vacuum.
It seems that many in the "environmental" movement just want nothing to change from its "natural" state, even where there is no nature.
If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?
Given our current level of technology, if I looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, I would be filled with a sense of wonder about the ingenuity of aliens, and with forbidding and dread that the Earth would be next.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If we mine the moon, then we'll become dependent on its resources. When it finally explodes (as moons are notorious for doing), our glorious space empire will fall.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
In the movie the main character is having an interesting journey through time until he hit a 'bump' at August 26th 2037, where he finds a Moon mining operation has disrupted the lunar orbit. As a result, the Moon is breaking apart and showering Earth with massive chunks of rock. His presence outside of a shelter leads to an attempt by two military personnel to arrest him, but after they draw his attention to the shattered Moon and give him a brief explanation behind its present state, there is a scuffle and he escapes. He makes it into the time machine just as the city is being destroyed, but is knocked out and fails to witness the destruction of human civilization. But that was just a movie (and a book) of course.
Are we to avoid mining the moon because it will harm the native lifeforms? Oh yeah, there aren't any.
Do we need to invent the word "rock-hugger"?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
If you let the helium out, it will stop floating up in the sky. Guess where it will fall.
Screw volcanoes; some people say the dinosaurs died because they had no space program. Maybe they died because they did have one, and made the same type of arrogant mistake.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Where in the world did you get the idea that there is little
visible life in the Grand Canyon?
http://digital-desert.com/grand-canyon/wildlife.html
The moon is a great big dead rock. Moving the pieces of that
rock around won't affect anything in the slightest. Sure, we'll
probably preserve the Apollo sites, and maybe a few particularly
picturesque spots, but the rest of it is a future mining site.
He doesn't even give a reason why the environmental movement might want to stop mining the Moon. Maybe he thinks environmentalism is about "pretty Nature, don't hurt her", rather than survival and legacy, but he doesn't even say so.
The only argument his protest makes about mining the Moon is in favor: mining the He-3 would reduce the need to damage the Earth producing energy here.
There might be an argument for science preserving the layout of the Lunar surface for study (eg, the record of impact angles and composition which accumulate billions of years of astrophysical history), but there are technical solutions to that problem, and he doesn't even mention them (except some handwaving about lacking "science" in our goals).
That is the kind of taking "environmentalism's" name in vain that gives legitimate environmentalism a bad name.
--
make install -not war
This is a very harmful idea. A certain amount of environmentalism makes sense; disrupting ecosystems can have harmful repercussions, as can running out of non-renewable resources, etc.
But this idea of preserving the lunar environment seems to me to be based on the idea that objects are better left untouched by humanity. That things should be left untouched, even when it is detrimental to humanity, and no worse than neutral to our ecosystem. This is the type of nonsense that, in the extreme, calls for humanity to let itself go extinct, so as to stop our plundering of the Earth.
Nothing in nature is a value, without something living that gives it that worth.
Lets mine the far side of the moon, where it won't be seen by those on earth.
Seriously - if it was an argument about contributing to space junk (which can be a hazard to life and limb), or an argument about leaving nascent life (like, say, on Europa or Titan) alone to develop, play... I can grok those arguments.
But the ones presented? ...it's the friggin' Moon! There ain't jack shit for life or biomass there! The only non-commercial value it currently has offhand are the Apollo landing sites (for historical value), and that's it!
IMHO, tear that bastard up if it generates commerce, gives us extra space to live, acts as an astronomical platform, and more importantly, if it takes humankind that much closer to becoming a space-faring race. It's not like we'll reduce its mass enough to really worry about instability (at least not within the next billion years or so), and it's (IMHO) free and open for the taking - belonging (nor should it ever belong) to no earth-bound nation.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I am an very environmentally-conscious person: walking, biking or transit, no car. Vegan. Local, preferably organic produce. Buy used goods where-ever possible, make do or repair rather than buying. I give that as background, so that it's clear I'm not a typical consumer that thinks my personal desires outweigh impact to the environment.
That that said, I must ask: what environment? The moon is a lifeless, barren hunk of rock. All that has ever occurred in its history, is being pummeled by countless meteors to create a scarred and pulverized surface. There is no environment to protect, only dust and rocks. And as pristine and spartan beauty that may be, there's simply no one to admire it.
Right now, the universe appears devoid of life, except on our tiny blue rock, and it's always in danger of being snuffed out by one stray asteroid. Getting humanity up into space is the best thing we can do, for us, and for the Earth. Where we go, we will bring life with us. We will create new environments on any planets we settle. We are the seed by which Earth's life can spread throughout the galaxy.
Seeing lights glittering back at us from human settlements during a new moon shouldn't be viewed as a desecration of something worth saving, but the growth of new life where there was none before.
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi
In order to get to the point that we could make an entire solar system a boondoggle, we'll have to get out of ours first. That means tapping energy and resources available in the solar system, whether the process is pretty or not.
It's all getting destroyed by the sun in a few billion years, anyway.
Just look at all the beautiful He3. Isn't it beautiful? Aren't you glad your daddy stopped them from plundering the Moon of all of it so that we can almost enjoy this unspoiled view of it through the completely polluted atmosphere of Earth because we never got that clean energy source from up there?
Yeah, right! There are some real clowns in the world, and the guy against this qualifies as two of them when weighted in the average of clown foolishness.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The rebuttal is based on the fallacy that without life environmental protection has no merit. If an environment is devoid of life it is still an environment. The land itself is worthy of protection. It's something Australia's aborigines have been pointing out for years, that their land has intrinsic value. Most of the rest of Australia has taken the moon mining viewpoint and desecrated the land in the name of development.
From a purely selfish human point of view there might also come a day when people want to visit that untouched environment.
We already have a source of clean limitless power: solar. But anyone can generate it! On the other hand, the distribution of energy harvested from the moon would be a tightly controlled affair. Very lucrative.
I don't think environmentalism is the important issue here. I'm more interested in what impact the economic development of the moon will have on international relations.
Whose moon is it? Of course we have treaties, but when a company starts mining up there, you can bet the profits aren't going to be distributed very widely. Besides the ethical implications of this, how are other states going to react to an American or Chinese company mining a resource that used to be considered off-limits and belonging to all, until it was convenient for that to no longer be the case? Is this just a case of first come, first serve capitalism? There are more things at stake here than just environmentalism.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Which still doesn't solve the main problem. We don't have Helium 3 fusion yet. And we aren't likely to for years. We'll probably have flying cars and Duke Nukem Forever first.
We haven't even gotten the easiest fusion reactions working yet to the point where they will generate a net gain of electricity.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Not to mention that you are free labor, and food to boot.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Just because one (or a few) environmentalist has a (to us) wacky view, doesn't mean he represents the whole of environmentalists. The only reason you'd imply this is if you had an agenda, and the author of the linked article clearly does.
A lot of us are anxious to see some major commercial application of space (see the recent discussion on space-based solar power, too), but I'm afraid helium-3 mining on the moon is not a feasible one.
First of all, Helium-3 already exists in smaller amounts on earth. It makes up about 0.00138% of the helium on the earth, as opposed to 0.00138% of helium on the moon. More importantly, it can also be synthesized by deuterium fusion or by tritium decay, although current production is only a few kilograms per year. However, one of the first generation fusion fuels is deuterium, so it's very likely that first generation technology could eventually be used to make fuel for second generation fusion plants.
Second, obviously, we have not achieved practical hydrogen fusion yet, much less helium fusion, which is harder. The current ITER timeline estimates the first commercial hydrogen fusion plants will come online around 2040-2050. Helium fusion, if we decide it's worth the effort to develop, will come later.
Third, you have to move a lot of dirt to get a useful amount of He-3. Estimates are the US alone would need at least 15-20 tons per year for our current electrical generation. At the quoted 0.01 ppm on the moon, that means you need to process 2 billion tons (approx 670 million cubic meters) of regolith every year. In comparison, the giant Three Gorges Dam in China required excavating only 134 million cubic meters of material over a period of 10 years, using thousands of workers and who knows how many tons of heavy equipment.
Additionally, processing the regolith for the helium requires first boiling out all of the gasses by heating the excavated dirt several hundred degrees, then separating the minute fraction of He-3 from all the "waste" gasses. It will be very energy intensive. By my very rough math, every cubic meter of moon you excavate requires on order of 100 kW-hours of heat, so a year's worth of digging would take 47 billion kW-hours. This is about 4% of our current electrical usage, which hints at the scale of the power production facilities that would have to be built on the moon to facilitate this mining...over 5,000 MW of capacity not counting digging and gas segregation energy needs.
Now you're making me feel like junk food. :(
Quack, quack.
We could, for example, implement a Moon use tax, and all people on Earth would be getting an equal share from use of each square mile of Moon's surface, payable by Moon mining companies to the governments and then distributed as people of each country want. That tax would be small, compared to the costs involved in Moon mining and sales of resulting goods.
Oops...yes, that should have been 0.035% of the helium on the moon is He-3 and 0.000138% of helium on earth is He-3. Not only did I copy the same number down twice, I misplaced a decimal point.
As I understand it, the difference is because most of the He-3 on the earth is primordial...from the earth's formation. He-3 from the sun also strikes the earth, but is quickly lost again from the upper atmosphere. On the moon, there is primordial He-3 plus new stuff from the sun that gets trapped in the rock since there is effectively no atmosphere to slow it down before encountering the surface.
The dilution of He-3 on earth is also increased due to radioactive decay producing alpha particles (He-4).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The "Helium 3 on the moon" people have it backwards. As someone else pointed out, you have to mine a lot of dirt to get any useful amount of the stuff. On the other hand, deuterium is available at moderate prices. Heavy water costs about $300/Kg. If we ever get fusion to work as a power source (a big if, after half a century of failure), deuterium fusion will work first.
There's some grumbling about deuterium fusion producing radioactive waste products, but it's nowhere near as messy as fission. You get some tritium (which is a useful material; among other things, it decays into ... Helium-3!) and the reactor components may become radioactive, but the isotopes are relatively short-lived; decades, not millennia, of decay time are required. The concrete and steel has already cooled off for many older decommissioned reactors.
Helium-3 fusion is potentially cleaner, though. If we ever get fusion to work, it's the fuel of choice for getting off the earth with fusion power, because you could dump the reaction products into the atmosphere without causing fallout.
So forget about mining the moon to power Earth. Dumb idea. Think about mining helium on Earth to power launch vehicles.
We've notice you studying the moon with a certain high powered telescope.
This telescope has enabled you to see things that you are not authorized to observe, and thus it puts you in violation of certain top secret Homeland Security directives. This incurs certain... penalties, which we may have to discuss with you later.
Now, on the other hand, Mr. Anderson, we're willing to wipe your slate clean... if you tell us who sent you this telescope...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
He can have fun with that when his jets' range gets decreased by around 40%* (or the useful payload is decreased by 40% because of the extra fuel required for the same range) because of the difference in energy content between ethanol (which is already partially oxidized) and Jet-A. There's a good reason why we use petrochemicals as vehicle fuel, and it's not simply because at one time they were less expensive.
Mass and volume energy density are important characteristics of fuel... and petrochemicals win that battle by quite a fair margin to all other fuels that are safe enough to be used in common vehicles.
* according to this, petrodiesel (which is close to Jet-A) has energy content of 43.3MJ/kg, and ethanol only has 26.7 MJ/kg (using the LHV; the results are slightly different, though the trend the same, using HHV). That's a substantial difference, and mass is extremely important when it comes to aircraft fuel.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Ethanol is a horrid fuel, especially when made from corn
Corn is a horrible source for ethanol, I oppose corn for ethnaol. A better is sugarcane, but even better for making ethanol is Switchgrass. Ah, perhaps I should of finished your post before replying as I see you say sugar cane and switchgrass are better.
I don't know if Branson is concentrating on ethanol or biofuels in general. Unlike ethanol biodiesel can be made from more sources. When Rudolph Diesel designed his engine he designed it to run on vegetable oil, when he showed the engine during the World Expo in Paris he used peanut oil but he also demonstrated running it with hemp oil. And biodiesel can be made from used cooking oil, instead of used oil being a waste biodiesel could be made from it. Wllie Nelson started, invested in, a plant making biodiesel and formed Willie Nelson Biodiesel. In the 1930s Henry Ford designed and build a vehicle on his Iron Mountain Estate using a hemp, aka marijuana, based fuel.
Actually this was part of the reason hemp was made illegal via the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. Prior to the passage of the act scientific research showed hemp was an excellent industrial plant. Besides fuel hemp was good for making plastics and paper. MIT published a study showing an acre of hemp could produce more fiber for paper than an acre of forest. The use of hemp for fuel interfered with Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Using hemp for paper meant William Hearst's, a big California newspaper publisher who owned thousands of acres of forest, would see a loss in clear cutting forest for paper pulp. Then in the mid '30s Du Pont received a patent on making plastics from petroleum, so again hemp was seen as another threat. Andrew Mellon, a major funder of Du Pont, had his nephew-in-law Harry J Anslinger appointed as the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics where they were able to push to have hemp made illegal.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Years back, I worked at a moderately-sized gas station (16 pumps, and not near any major highways), and it was normal to sell ~10,000 gallons of fuel per day. There was a McDonald's nearby on the same road, and I don't ever remember seeing a tanker truck come by daily to being them new cooking oil.
How much does a typical fast-food joint use per week, and how much biodiesel could be produced from it? How much of that biodiesel would be wasted in the process of collecting that fuel, processing it, and redistributing it? Or do you expect McDonald's to start making biodiesel on-site and retailing it directly to customers? Fuel dispensing pumps are federally-regulated and a typical example can easily cost ~$10,000 alone--not even including the storage tanks, installation and other related equipment.
The "free biodiesel from cooking oil" line strikes me as kind of like saying "if you had an electric car, you could put solar panels on the roof and get FREE ELECTRICITY!!!".... which is true, technically--but the amount of electricity you can get from the area of a typical car's rooftop is not going to be that significant compared to what the car will end up using, considering the expenses involved with buying the necessary solar cells.
I would think a better idea for using old cooking oil might be to use it at the point of production--burn it for heat at the restaurant directly. This would utilize the energy in it, and still avoid the problems of the glycerol produced by making biofuel with it, as well as the extraneous transportation/distribution losses.
~
As much as I like the idea, there are very serious obstacles to the concept of He3 fusion, besides the obvious issue of finding He3. Remember that the advantage of the D+He3->p+He4 reaction is that it does not produce neutrons. Well, even this isn't absolutely true because Tritium is also produced in the process and interacts with D to produce neutrons.
1) At first aneutronic fusion looks good, because the vessel doesn't have to withstand the dreadful 14MeV neutrons of "standard" D+T fusion reactions (which is a very serious issue for a potential future reactor). On the other hand, neutrons have the advantage that they penetrate the metals, so that the energy gets actually deposited in the volume of the metal surrounding the plasma. In D+He3 fusion, the wall surface has to be able to handle all the energy and as of today, there are no materials able to withstand such a thermal load, not by a long shot.
2) The cross section of the D+He3 reaction peaks at fuel temperatures much higher than the D+T reaction. This means that the ions will have to be much hotter (about 100keV, IIRC). Heating the fuel at these temperatures wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the plasma is going to radiate like crazy, through bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation essentially. Calculations indicate that it's actually gonna immediately radiate all of its energy, a phenomenon known as thermal collapse.
There are other objections as well, but quite frankly, these two are nasty enough to keep looking at D+T for the moment, even though it's less clean and comes with problems of its own.
"Reefer Madness" was a bunch of lies made to induce fear in people. For instance it makes marijuana smokers as being driven to violence, however there is no scientific data to support this. Actually what science evidence there is show it has the opposite affect, it calms people so they only want to relax. That's why the Soviet Union made it illegal, they couldn't afford people who only wanted to hang out.
(it's now in the public domain-Yay!)
Another movie, also in the public domain, on hemp is the movie "Hemp For Victory" which the US government made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the WWII war effort. The current president Bush's dad, former president Bush Sr may have had his life saved by hemp. Bush Sr was in a plane that was shot down in the Pacific by the Japanese and he bailed out, the cords from the parachute he used may of had been made from hemp. Hemp was used for ropes as well as cords. Something surprised me when I looked at the Archives page, it has "Reefer Madness" as the fourth, last, movie listed. I've got the link bookmarked, bookmarked it several years ago at least, and never saw "Reefer Madness" listed before. Maybe because it's now in the public domain.
They admit to 'blowing it out of proportion' to get the public's attention to this new menace being brought across the border by Mexicans,
I can see it now, Thomas Jefferson would of been rolling in his grave when the movie came out. TJ was a farmer who grew hemp on his farm, as many other of the USA's Founding Fathers did. Oh, I see you mention George Washington, yeap he grew it. TJ once wrote that there should be a law requiring farmers to grow hemp, but as he knew such a law would deny farmers their rights he never proposed such a law.
Bach to the point, hemp would be a good addition to the biofuel solution. Easy to grow, prolific, and high yield if cultivated.
Yeap, it is and would be good for that.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There was a McDonald's nearby on the same road, and I don't ever remember seeing a tanker truck come by daily to being them new cooking oil.
Any given restaurant doesn't go through that much oil but a lot of used oil ends up in the waste stream. I worked in some fast food joins and the only thing I had ever heard used oil being used for was adding it to slop to feed pigs. Most of it ends up being dumped though, it's a waste. However it can be combined with raw oil to make biodiesel. That way there's no waste, well not nearly as much. It's not hard to make biodiesel either, basically mix lye and vegetable oil together letting them react for a while, then there will be a separation of liquids. A top film of glycerol, will separate from the biodiesel. And the glycerol doesn't have to be wasted either, it can be used to make body soap.
How much does a typical fast-food joint use per week, and how much biodiesel could be produced from it? How much of that biodiesel would be wasted in the process of collecting that fuel, processing it, and redistributing it?
However it's done, and for whatever reason, used oil still has to be picked up or collected. Even if it means it's put into the dumpster. It has to be disposed of somehow. One of the places I worked at had some steel barrels in back the oil would be dumped into. Weekly then, or whatever, a truck would come by to pick up the oil. For someone to use used vegetable oil to make biodiesel all that would be required is a tank truck to drive to the restaurants where the oil can be emptied or pumped into the tank. Go from the processing plant to restaurant 1 to restaurant 2 then to restaurant 3 before going back to the plant. If the oil were to end up in the waste stream then the restaurant has to pay for disposal, however a biodiesel maker can offer to pickup the used oil cheaper, for free, or pay them depending on the economics.
FalconShould there be a Law?