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NASA Says Moon Has More Water Than Great Lakes
jerryjamesstone writes "The US Great Lakes have some competition: the moon. Yes, that old thing in the sky may hold more than all of the water contained in the Great Lakes, according to a NASA-funded study. From the article: 'Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, along with other scientists across the nation, determined that the water was likely present very early in the moon's formation history as hot magma started to cool and crystallize. This finding means water is native to the moon.'"
There ARE whales?
how many libraries of congress would one unit of great lakes flood?
Whereas the lakes are, well, lakes... the moon is a sort of kinda planet. Planets tend to be bigger than lakes, and therefore I call this cheating.
Obviously, there are planets that are also a giant lake... the earth itself for example is quite wet. But those lakes we shall call oceans. So, oceans can compete with planets, but lakes can't. Ok?
-- wait, that's no moon!
In all seriousity, I thought they would have discovered this when they la-
Oh wait, that's right, they never did.
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
How much is that in terms of the size of a more standard unit of measurement ?
And here I thought the great lakes were in Canada as well.
I'm sorry, the "US" Great Lakes? Did you guys annex them or something? Did you forget you actually SHARE 4 out of 5 of those lakes? You know what one of them is called? LAKE ONTARIO!
Well Armstrong playing golf has to be outdone somehow.
Something else they found, but wasn't mentioned in the article: a frozen, damaged wellhead at the bottom of the lake and a large plume of oil suspended in it. No ideas yet as to how that got there.
The stuff on Earth is cheaper to get to (for now)
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE
"NASA-funded scientists estimate from recent research that the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon’s interior could exceed the amount of water in the Great Lakes here on Earth. "
I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing. Transporting anything from the moon to the earth is so expensive that it likely isn't worth mining. And you have the initial cost of establishing a mining outpost on the moon which, although probably mostly robotic, would still require some amount of human intervention. Either way, it would require such a hideously large initial investment that it's not likely to happen any time in the future.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
This is child's play. The bigger news is that apparently the US owns the entire Great Lakes.
Good, let the desert southwest get their water from the moon!
Water is precious to humans. Would it be strange to think it might be precious to other intelligent life out in space? I'm just saying "what ifs" but it sounds like it would make a neat video game or movie. Aliens invade Earth, the moon, and any nearby planet/moon that may have water and humans must fight them off because as we expand our need for it will be greater. I'd play that..
How many libraries of congress of water is that?
Never again will we be stumped by atheists when they ask where did all the water go after the flood. We can now tell them that it went to the moon, and scientists have proved it.
How much Wisconsin does the moon have?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Earth to the moon is really flippin' expensive, to be sure.
Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry. I'm not saying it's a solved problem, but it's a much, much easier one.
Then again, I've read too much Heinlein. *grin*
if only there was some way to "make stuff" with the "minerals" that were "mined" there. so we wouldnt have to fly lots of stuff there.
Then again, I've read too much Heinlein. *grin*
Compare the last five minutes of the Apollo 11 landing with the lunar landing sequence in Rocketship Galileo. They had similar dramas. If anything Heinlein's crew handled operations better, while Armstrong got himself into a mess by working too much of Aldrins job.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Volume of the Great Lakes ~22.5 *10^3 km^3 Volume of the Moon ~21.9 *10^9 km^3 So, the Moon contains even more than one teaspoon of water in 5 tonnes of rock.
"Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry. I'm not saying it's a solved problem, but it's a much, much easier one."
You clearly don't know how this actually works. You can't just go straight down to earth, you have to aim quite precisely to make sure that you don't completely burn up. You also have to not land in the middle of times square or in the middle of an incredibly dangerous part of the ocean. Hauling a container (which I guess you think is really easy to build) full of some minerals (probably quite heavy due to size of container and density of anything worth mining) in the middle of 40 foot waves is a suicide mission.
Of course, you still have to get this magic container up to the moon. The heavier it is, the more expensive it is. And as for "giving it a kick", well, you have to transport the boot up there too. Then you have to assemble, test, power, and use this boot. How do you expect to do that cheaply?
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
About a quart, if you measure on Tuesdays
I did read the fine article and saw no mention of any lakes, let alone Earth's Great Lakes. Where did that come from or did subby take some liberties when composing this ... umm ... composition?
I herd you like lakes
If you want to assemble that stuff locally, do you know how large the factories we use to build our tools are? You'd still have to ferry hundreds of tons of gear there and that's expensive.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Give things a kick, they come down on their own
Hmmm... i've always thought the moon would be much more useful if it was down here on Earth. How much of a kick do you think we would need to accomplish that?
(and where would we put it?)
(and where would we put it?)
Pump the water out of the Pacific Ocean?
I always wondered about this.
The moon is essentially "dead", right? No seismic activity to speak of (other then from gravitational forces), no molten core (am I right?) and is pretty much a large rock.
Wouldn't all of the heavy metals, during the course of the moon's existence, have gravitated towards the core leaving the core with a high concentration of heavy metals that would be relatively easy to mine? Big, deep holes drilled straight down to the good stuff?
Power all the tech needed with solar, crack the water for breathable O2 and usable hydrogen?
> How much of a kick do you think we would need to accomplish that?
Just handle a vatch to send a rock to the dark side?
The article does not mention anywhere that the amount of water on is more than the great lakes system.
Firstly, the water is in the form of hydroxyl and the mineral apartite (article didn't go into more detail). Secondly, TFA states the amount of water is under 5ppm. Yes, parts per million. I can't see how anyone could arrive at the great lakes value unless they took the volume of the moon and took 5ppm of that, which is ridiculous.
Firstly, the moon's not a uniform material. Secondly, to get anywhere close to this amount of water, you'd need to mine and refine the majority of the moon. It's like saying we have 300 quintillion gallons of water on earth while neglecting to mention that 97% of it is salt water and some more of it in the ice caps.
The real takeaway from the article is that the previously estimated amount of water was 1 ppb and now it's around 5 ppm.
who are actually going to go to the moon will be pleased. I guess we can still look down on others in smug superiority after we convinced ourselves going back wasn't the best investment of our money. Too bad it was Bush who proposed us going there again
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
He doesn't expect to do it cheaply - he specifically said getting everything up there (which would presumably include people to make the whole building and returning stuff to earth problem simpler - but by no means simple) would be expensive, but that the return journey would not be as expensive (even though it would be logistically very complicated). Assuming you could drop it reliably in a part of the ocean where you could retrieve it, maybe the simple solution would be to embed whatever you're mining in chunks of moon rock and use them as your container. Either way it's a pipe dream right now but that doesn't invalidate the usefulness of the research for the future (we'll never solve the problems of going there and getting stuff back if we don't first establish the reasons for going there).
If you want to assemble that stuff locally, do you know how large the factories we use to build our tools are? You'd still have to ferry hundreds of tons of gear there and that's expensive.
Just a question of energy availability (and some time... and some human presence) to actually build those factories straight there.
Probably dropping some small Rickovers will cost less for a starter - the kind flown to the McMurdo station some time ago.
I guess I read too much Kim Stanley Robinson
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Transporting anything from the moon to the earth is so expensive that it likely isn't worth mining.
Building/launching from moon some space factories (or whatever needed) to mine the asteroids would be an investment that will pay for sure.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
[...] or at least give it to our plants, ehh?
There's no indication of whether it has electrolytes. That's what plants crave.
So there you go.
Oh, and they found out that there are Amazon women up there who skate on that ice.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I have to admit, the moon is a harsh mistress. Especially if she is comming down on you like a ton of bricks...
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
That's because cheese contains water!
One of the prevailing moon origin ideas is that it's the result of a massive object impacting Earth. That could certainly go a long way toward explaining the presence of water in lunar material.
Of course it would be extremely costly to consolidate any meaningful quantity of lunar water. Imagine the task of extracting a kilogram of extremely fine gold dust that has been dispersed semi-homogeneously throughout 1000 cubic yards of sand.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
same person. NASA was saving money.
rewriting history since 2109
I think the Great Lake Swimmers were on to this a long time ago with their song See You On the Moon.
You'd probably want to filter first(lunar regolith isn't, to the best of my knowledge, chemically much scarier than garden-variety sand; but no weathering= thousands and thousands of tiny sharp edges= silicosis ahoy!); but that would probably be about the extent of the difficulty.
More problematic would be collecting the stuff. "More water than the Great Lakes" sounds like a lot, and is, compared to "parched airless rock"; but per square kilometer it isn't very much at all. Unless the distribution is highly uneven, lunar water extraction would be an arduous process of digging through vast quantities of highly abrasive grit and micrometeorite slag, separating out a material that will just sublime and head for space unless contained. Even in 1/6th earth gravity, that isn't going to be gigantic amounts of fun.
I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing.
Similarly, there's no point in having babies, going to work, reading a book, sleeping in a house, eating dinner, watching movies, or putting up wallpaper.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
More importantly: Can you go sailing on it? Swim in it? Fish salmon, trout, and invasive asian carp from it? Ride a scooter along hundreds and hundreds of miles of it?
If not, I'll stay here in Michigan, the Great Lakes State.
We're Bi-peninsular and Proud.
Yes! Michigan!
(This message has been a public service announcement, brought to you in cooperation with the Michigan tourism office and my summer travel plans.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Space Elevator. Now.
Yea, it will require a large initial investment, but then moving stuff in and out of Earth's gravity well becomes really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that asteroid mining operations may become feasible.
I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already. Some lucky country on the equator could be in for some boom times!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Railgun, fire crap at the earth like a weapon. if you aim right it'll impact right where you want it.
Side effect... makes a great weapon to lord over the other countries.
"nukes? HAHAHAHAHA!" WE'll simply fire rocks at your puny country until it's a part of the ocean, and THEN comeand mine the rocks we used to make you go away."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can't remember the name of the story as it's been years since I read it, but Isaac Asimov wrote a story about a moon colony and political upheaval; some anti-moon demagogues decided to kill the moon program by denying the colonists water and forcing them to come home. They got political support by somehow convincing people that the earth itself would run out of water. The colonists rebelled and went to (iirc) Saturn to bring water back.
It was a good story, too bad it's now pretty meaningless thanks to these findings. That's the danger with science fiction, it gets out of date way too quickly; one new discovery or invention and bam; the story no longer works.
Free Martian Whores!
We could park it in the oil leak, beats using golf balls and shredded car tyres!
now _that's_ thinking!
The border cuts four of the five lakes more or less in half.
Space Elevator. Now. .... I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already.
Dammit, I can't believe this keeps coming up. Because it DOES NOT EXIST! It's a science fiction fantasy. Will never work without massive leaps in technology that no one knows even how to approach solving. Might as well research magic at this point.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Even lots of metric tons. But still you would be filtering water all your life to get some reasonable amount. Isn't that what we are looking at here?
Perhaps you should look at a map sometime.
Lake Michigan, the second largest of the lakes by volume (and third by surface area) belongs entirely to the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_lakes#Bathymetry
Lake Superior, the largest of the lakes by any measure has a surface area almost 2/3 attributed to the United States, 53,700 km^2 of the 82,400 km^2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Superior
I could not find splits for Huron, Ontario, or Erie. However, Ontario and Erie, from a map, appear to be about 50/50, and Huron appears to favor Canada slightly. Regardless, between the United States' posession of Superior and Michigan alone, it contains 111,700 km^2 of the total 208,610km^2 of all the lakes surface area. Therefore, saying that the lakes are "predominately Canadian" is just flat wrong.
Cheers.
If you stretched all this water out into a football field length river that was a football field length deep, that river would be about 30 million football fields long.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But seriously, if you want anyone to get interested in the moon, you need to find out how much light sweet crude is up there.
Well since there has never been life on the moon, in the equivalent of our Mesozoic or Paleozoic timeframes, there would be none at all.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I believe the point is that the presence of materials on the moon is that they would be available for use in space missions using the moon as a jumping off point. Basically, the materials would not need to be launched from earth saving the energy otherwise required to get them to the level of lunar orbit.
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, after all.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Space elevator on Earth will likely never be possible without some huge unforeseen leap in materials science, this is true. However a space elevator on the moon to get manufactured materials into lunar orbit for a trip down hill may be.
A launch loop would be more feasible, according to this.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
It's far less difficult than you imagine.
The worst part would be mining for raw materials. You would need some heavy machinery. Luckily, you can send lighter machinery that grabs and processes materials for the heavier machines that, in turn, can grab more materials to be used to build more of them. You will have to send parts from Earth, but they would be comparatively small.
As for sending containers (obviously manufactured on the Moon) all you need is a big magnetic rail. Given no atmospheric resistance, it's not hard to reach the 2 Km/second escape velocity. Energy is abundant too - as are materials for building solar panels. And since the Moon is tidally locked, you can easily accelerate those payloads to a very precise point in the Earth atmosphere.
With that kind structure in place, human occupation would be easy.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
There could be Uranium though... I wonder if people would object to a nuclear power station on the moon, sending energy to Earth via microwave... gets rid of the waste problem! (though the moon isn't geostationary, of course..)
Space Elevator. Now. .... I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already.
Dammit, I can't believe this keeps coming up. Because it DOES NOT EXIST! It's a science fiction fantasy. Will never work without massive leaps in technology that no one knows even how to approach solving. Might as well research magic at this point.
That's an unfair characterization. The technological hurdles are large but they are well-understood. There's an excellent 2002 report by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/521Edwards.pdf which discusses the technical problems in great detail. The primary issues preventing a space elevator are related to the tensile strength of the ribbon/line. Carbon nanotubes are in theory strong enough, but they need to be able to be manufactured at a much larger scale, with higher quality (especially in regards to average tube length) and need to be placed in a reliable matrix. The reason that it looks like there isn't much space elevator research is really because there's very little that would need to be researched that specifically about space elevators. The primary issue is carbon nanotube research and that's happening now at a quick pace because carbon nanotubes have lots of different applications. The technologies necessary for a space elevator are already being developed for other applications.
They said the same thing about putting a man on the moon. And we've been exploiting the innovation developed from that endeavor for the a half-century. The technology won't exist until you decide to do it and be willing to pay for it. And the largest technological hurdle associated with the space elevator is efficient power transmission to the lift. Otherwise, its not so bad.
Gravity makes a siphon work, not air pressure.
You make it sound like some of us haven't started researching that already also.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Yeah, it gives me a case of the facepalm every time I see it as well. GSO is 42,164 km away, ala wikipedia. Call it 4.2x10^7 meters. The only material close to being possible to use for a cable are carbon nanotubes. Lets make a thread of a carbon nanotube cable, which does not exist in lengths more than like 30 cm at the moment, with a diameter of 1mm. That is an area of 3x10^-6 m^2, and results in a volume of about 132 cubic meters. This is over 50% more than the shuttle can hold.
Assuming we could go get an asteroid, a very, very large asteroid, and put it into GSO without either skipping it off the atmosphere or turning a city into a crater, we're left with the issue that we can't get a tiny, continuous cable into orbit with any current technology. The shuttle comes in 50% too small, and doesn't get to GSO, even Falcon 9 only has cargo volume of 14m^3 to GTO!
The next option is to somehow attach 1x10^9 30 cm sections of nanotube together, in a way that doesn't weaken them. That doesn't exist. We'd also have to be able to do this in space, since we can't realistically get a continuous cable up there.
So the only things stopping a space elevator are:
1) 1x10^9 carbon nanotube units short of reaching GSO
2) No way currently to move a large asteroid into GSO safely, nor many nations willing to let someone try for fear of an extinction event.
3) No way to get a continuous cable into GSO, despite the problems of #1
4) No known way to stick 1x10^9 chunks of carbon nanotube together effectively, preserving their high tensile strength. In space.
5) Current climber technology is shooting for 1km. That's only 42,163 km short of GSO.
6) Coincidently, the earth's circumference is about 40,000 km. Have we ever built ANYTHING on the scale of the earth's circumference? Have we ever tried to stress-test a cable of more than a km or two?
Sure, we could shoot for a continuous, 0.1 mm diameter cable, and that might fit on Falcon 9 and be possible to bring to GSO. But again, we're left with the problem with the asteroid, the climber, and stress-testing and QCing a cable that we can't build in a billionth of that length at a time, longer than the circumference of the earth. Or we somehow come up with a way to bond nanotubes together in a way that preserves their tensile strength, in space, with the ability to test and QC the work, and we're only left with the asteroid and climber issues....
Magic is unlikely to be better to research, but not by a lot...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Way too expensive to dig up and extract. This is mostly a result of academic interest.
So, the moon has more than HALF the water in the Great Lakes? The US only owns half of those bodies of water, the other half belonging to another sovereign nation (which is technically bigger).
Please don't dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothin' new to say.
How would they withstand high winds from the likes of thunderstorms, hurricanes/typhoons, and so on?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You wouldn't need smelting at least ... just someone willing to catch molten rock after reentry.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
You clearly don't know how this actually works. You can't just go straight down to earth, you have to aim quite precisely to make sure that you don't completely burn up.
Ok, given present technology-which is 40 years evolved from when we went to the Moon the first time-it is quite possible to design an automated (or remote control) vehicle to return "packages" from the moon to the Earth safely and securely. If, and when, we reach the point of doing colonization and mining of the Moon there will be significantly better technology and safeguards for transporting materials back to Earth. Let's also not forget that items could easily be "parked" in high-Earth orbit and retrieved, or otherwise processed from more permanent space stations in orbit around the Earth. Oh, and you don't think there will be supply missions and/or factories on the Moon to "assemble, test, power, and use" what is needed to return materials to Earth?
I do understand your pessimism given the current state of NASA and the world's space technology programs, but to dismiss the idea as unfeasible due to current limitations is just lunacy. The Earth was flat until about the 16th century. The sound barrier could not be broken until the 1940s/50s. So, you're entitled to your opinion, but we *WILL* colonize and mine the Moon. Not only is it manifest destiny, but it will be necessary to support our existence as a species. The Earth has a limited amount of resources and space, and human population continues to grow at an alarming rate. Who knows what innovation or complete economic change will come to give us the ability (or necessity) to colonize and mine the Moon, Mars, asteroid belt, Titan, etc. If we are to survive as a species, we must go out there. Poo-poo the idea all you want. It will happen. It must happen. But, there will always be the nay sayers, and more power to them. They will be dead and gone once it does happen.
That's covered in the report.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You clearly haven't read enough Heinlein -- that last line was a reference an already-proposed set of solutions to the challenges you mention (including shipping down lighter, higher-value finished goods rather than heavier raw materials... though the specific choice may be a stretch). Quite a lot of folks in this thread picked it up correctly.
Sure, the solutions in question are speculative -- but so is everything else about this discussion.
When do we get to deposit sharks with head mount lasers in that body of water?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
So, are you saying I need to RTFA? OH NOES! That is not the /. way! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Might as well research magic at this point.
Any sufficiently advanced technology ...
Actually his solution is crap. As been shown.
You might want to get you mouth off Heinlein's cock and think a bit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Space elevator will be this Century's flying car.
The technology needed is 100 year away, and no one as dealt with the issue of what happens when it comes down. and sooner or later it will come down.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This has been worked out. Here's one scenario:
You start with spools of tapered ribbon perhaps 1cm wide and 10 microns or so thick on average (more in the middle, less at the ends) and 100 000 km long. The ribbon is made of 90+% carbon nanotubes a few meters long plus a little bit of matrix to keep them in place. They're held together mainly by van der Waals forces between the fibres. This is about 10 m^3 of ribbon, which a Falcon 9 Heavy or Ariane 5 or similar can launch into GTO with enough room and mass to spare for an apogee motor.
Now you unroll the ribbon in both directions, slowly and carefully until one end hits the ground and the other end sticks 60 000 km beyond GSO. Tie down the ground end.
Might be worth doing three or four of these and having the ribbons in parallel.
Now you start sending crawlers up the ribbon, carrying spools of carbon nanotube fibre which they unroll at the edge of the ribbon, or between two of the ribbons and bond in place. Initially the crawlers might need to be quite small because of the limited strength of the cable, but a 100 000 km fibre at this thickness is only 30kg or so.
Probably you actually give the cable a somewhat more complex structure with multiple sub-cables and cross-braces, so it can survive meteorite strikes.
The used crawlers end up at the top of the cable as an anchor mass.
After a few years of work, you have a cable roughly as wide and thick as a piece of a letter paper (but very very much longer and stronger) up which you can operate crawlers in the 1 ton mass range and you're in business.
Lots of engineering challenges, most notably the nanotubes, but no obvious impossibilities.
...Assuming you could drop it reliably in a part of the ocean where you could retrieve it, maybe the simple solution would be to embed whatever you're mining in chunks of moon rock and use them as your container...
The accuracy part of shipping materials to Earth is not that difficult. Artillery pieces can achieve 1 part in 1000 accuracy in the atmosphere. A raw material launcher would be some sort of magnetic accelerator which should be more precisely controllable, and also has the advantage of shooting in a vacuum. This level of accuracy would permit dropping the containers into a 400 km box on Earth. But we already have GPS equipped artillery projectiles with 10 m accuracy regardless of range. Equipping a container with a GPS and a thruster that imparts 4 m/sec delta-vee during the ~100 hour drop is not technically challenging.
The entry and collection on Earth is also not too hard. A choosing a typical meteorite-like entry would trace a short steep path through the atmosphere with deceleration forces of ~100 gees. The container as a whole needs to be strong enough to withstand these forces, but a solid mass of "lunar cement" like material for example would need no special entry shield/container. If made as a blunt body, it would lose all of its cosmic velocity and just become a multi-ton rock falling to Earth. Dropping into the middle of a desert would make collection easy.
The cost of transport from the Earth to the Moon is so high that only trivial amounts of shipping container mass can be brought from Earth. The real problem will be keeping this weight fraction down. The GPS unit weight is trivial, but the thruster and the magnetic/conducting material against which accelerator acts is a real challenge.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
and no one as dealt with the issue of what happens when it comes down. and sooner or later it will come down.
You mean the expense of replacing it?
The go-to post on 'dangers' of a collapse is here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They said the same thing about putting a man on the moon.
No. For the moon they had to make new materials and advance technology. For a space elevator they need to break the laws of physics.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
This has been worked out.
In someones imagination. Not so that its feasible.
Now you unroll the ribbon in both directions
Ever try this with even a ball of string on a spool? Physical impossibility.
Tie down the ground end.
Yet another simple statement that is logistically impossible. You are trying to unroll something from orbit and lower it down to a precise point. This is impossible from the top of a building let alone from orbit!
Lots of engineering challenges, most notably the nanotubes, but no obvious impossibilities.
I'm an engineer. Lots of impossibilities wrapped up in simple but unrealistic concepts.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Humm, so other than the fact that we're still an order of magnitude from "a few meters long", we don't have any such matrix yet, nor do we have proof that it would provide the same tensile strength as solid carbon nanotubes, and we don't have the crawlers, nor the beginning anchor mass, which is generally determined to have to be large, like an asteroid or something, since it would cost too much to send an appropriate anchor into orbit, it's possible?
I'd seriously wager that we're closer to being able to genetically modify pigs to fly than to overcome those "engineering challenges". Other than what I pointed out above, that a very, very thin ribbon would be needed for us to be able to get it into orbit, nothing you've mentioned is possible now, nor will be possible for many decades, and perhaps never.
You've completely ignored perhaps the biggest issue, which is that we've never automated the construction of AND THE TESTING OF a structure longer than the circumference of the earth. Do you seriously think anyone will go for putting a structure like this into orbit without a pretty serious guarantee that it will work?
Seriously...when, in the next 30, 50 years someone makes an earth-based, real-size mockup of this, complete with the automated construction, QC, and load testing of a ribbon longer than the circumference of the earth, wake me up in my nursing home. Because then we'll only be 10-30 years away from being able to deploy this in orbit.
"no obvious impossibilities" is true, of course. There are no obvious impossibilities in building a colony ship with a thousand people and sending it to orbit Europa, either. We can build structures in orbit, we can fly through space, we can build biodomes that sort-of-work. What's the chance of that happening? About the same as a space elevator, for a lot of the same reasons. The only difference is that a space elevator would be financially more rewarding.
Lots of things are possible should the "engineering challenges" be overcome. A space elevator happens to fall firmly into the camp of "lacking 95% of the engineering needed to overcome those challenges".
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
1. Paper is nearly a CO2-neutral renewable fuel. How many LOC must one burn to provide the necessary energy to lift one GreatLakesMass of high-pressure steam to a Lagrange orbit?
2. What part of this energy can be reclaimed in turbines as that mass falls from Lagrange to the lunar surface?
3. As the water level drops, real estate developers will buy and sell new "waterfront" many times. What surcharge per-acre will support the purchase of a replacement LOC?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Of course, you still have to get this magic container up to the moon.
Here's a crazy idea--why don't you build this magical container on the moon? Then you don't have to transport it from Earth.
One of the huge advantages of processing ore on the Moon is that you don't have to worry quite so much about oxidation of the minerals during the refining process. All you really need is a big mirror that collects energy from the Sun and if you really want to be efficient, some method of collecting the oxygen from the refining process (mainly to have the oxygen for other purposes, not to use it in the refining process). One of the larges problems with refining metals on the Earth is trying to get the metal into an environment where it doesn't oxidize before you can turn it into something useful.
In fact, I would dare say that many of the smelters would likely first be used for oxygen production well before the metal is going to be used, with the metal being treated as a "waste product" at least at the beginning of resource consumption and production on the surface of the Moon. At that point, all you really need is a good lathe and other basic machining tools, and almost anything else you would want to have built on the Moon could be made right there from materials found on the Moon.
The critical element isn't necessarily metals (Iron works out rather well, in fact), but rather volatile elements like Hydrogen and Nitrogen. With the basic elements of life, CHON, you have the basics for establishing life on the Moon. The rest is trying to find an economic reason to justify the cost of shipping all of the infrastructure into place, and how impatient those who are putting the equipment and personnel on the Moon want to wait before they get a return on their investment.
I envision that labor shortages are going to be the most significant problem on the Moon, which is what will ultimately be driving the automation of the equipment up there, not really that we can't get people up there to get things done. There will also be a use for skill technicians, particularly machinists and "skilled trades" of almost every kind (except perhaps carpentry).
Two specific issues:
unrolling: this one really is easy, you fold the cable in half in the middle (not too tighly, so you don't kink it) and then roll it up. Now both ends are at the outside of the roll. I think my garden strimmer does this. You have to guide them in the appropriate directions for the first few tens of meters. After that tidal forces are your friend.
terminal guidance is an interesting problem, but you can have a few kg of whatever you like attached to the end of the cable to help. Outside the atmosphere maybe an ion rocket or something of that nature would be appropriate. In the atmosphere, jets or propellers powered remotely with a laser. You can do the swap from a sounding rocket or something of that kind.
Read my post. No anchor mass at all, and construction is done on the ground. This is not Fountains of Paradise and you do not get a huge great beanstalk and trains getting you to orbit in a few hours, but you do get ton lots of cargo to orbit in a few weeks for next-to-no operating costs.
Making the nanotubes is the hardest part. While we don't have a specific matrix, we do know a lot about composite materials and the matrix doesn't have to do much. Testing the ribbon will be tricky, but it can be built in (say) 100km sections, so long as they are joined together carefully and it doesn't have to be especially automated.
I'm not expecting this in ten years, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it in twenty.
There have been cultures on the Earth where the amount of time required for an ordinary person to work in order to sustain basic living requirements was actually quite low.... on the order of an hour or two a day. There certainly were even for these cultures periods of time that everybody was expected to put in long hours during critical seasons and events that happened, but this tended to be the exception to the rule rather than the rule. What did these people do during the other hours of the day? Create art, make babies, teach lessons to the next generation, and have fun enjoying life. See Plains Indians (native American tribal groups) and Pacific Islanders (Polynesians) for examples of cultures like this.
On the other hand, Tennessee Ernie Ford made famous a song about the life of an ordinary coal miner, where in fact they ended up owing more money at the end of the day simply by working than they had at the beginning of the day.... typically working a 12-16 hour shift at least six or seven days a week. I'd certainly say that going to work is not necessarily the point of doing stuff like this, and it turns out that "advanced civilization" tends to dump hard work even more upon ordinary folks.
There is much more to life, and there certainly are folks who wouldn't mind going to the Moon or elsewhere in the Universe for a whole bunch of reasons... including just to get away from people like their mother's-in-law or to get a fresh start on life (being in a location far enough away that extradition doesn't really make sense). Yeah, I can see a whole bunch of reasons for people going to the Moon, and not all of them are glamorous either.
You're right and wrong. Siphons work because the pressure at the end of the tube is greater than the surrounding pressure in the receiving container.
You're wrong because it's definitely caused by pressure.
You're right because gravity causes pressure.
Psst...we're keeping Toledo. signed, Buckeye ;)
Since the moon was originally part of hte earth, the moons composition is pretty much exactly that of the earths crust.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Yards... kilograms... argh. At least you're making an attempt to catch up to the 20th century :)
mediocrity rules, man
I tried to re-read your post. I still don't see how it's in any way feasible in 20 years. Without an anchor mass, you need waaaay more ribbon to provide enough centripetal force (putting it beyond GSO) to keep it taught. The whole reason that carbon nanotubes are looked at for this is that they are extremely low density. If you want to haul 50 tons to orbit, you're going to need a lot of climbers at the end, or you're going to have them way past GSO to provide the counterbalance.
Regardless, "built in 100km sections" should probably be restated to read, "built out of fairy wings". Carbon nanotubes have like a 30 cm record length last I checked. Can you name anything, anything at all that we've made in 100km sections? Even our transoceanic fiber only gets laid in 40km sections. Now we're talking about robots doing this, climbing a ribbon, through the atmosphere to space, from storms to vacuum, hard radiation, and debris.
I'm sorry, but every time someone mentions "space elevator", there are 95 things that are currently impossible to do for ever 5 that we can do. Hell, a Launch Loop is an order of magnitude more feasible, and nobody has even considered laying the groundwork for one.
We don't have:
More than 30cm of continuous carbon nanotubes
A way to join them
Any experience building anything of this scale
Any experience having a ROBOT build anything even 5 orders of magnitude smaller than this. (We don't even use robots to build bridges, sky scrapers, and power lines. You're seriously telling me that in 20 years, we'll have robots able to climb to space? Really?)
Any experience designing a robot to work flawlessly in the range of environments encountered for weeks or months at a time.
Any expertise using these particular materials in construction.
What happens when a climber dies half-way up for some reason? Do you send another one up to pitch it off the cable? When a cosmic ray trips a bit in it, and it lets go of the cable, what then? When a hunk of space junk punches a hole through the cable, does it stay up? Can the climbers get past that part?
A space elevator belongs in the same realm as phasers set to stun, colonies on other plants, and universal constructors. All are "technologically possible", and none are likely in the next 50-100 years.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry
That better be a 1000km/s kick, if you really expect it to fall to earth. Otherwise it's gonna end up orbiting the Earth or the Moon.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
No, he was exactly right. He said, "not air pressure". It's not air pressure.
It's the hydrostatic pressure of the liquid being siphoned, which as you understand, is a result of gravity. A siphon would work just as well in a vacuum (both ends at vacuum, of course).
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry.
I think the phrase you're looking for is not 'gravity well' but 'aerobraking'. If I understand Newton correctly, it costs exactly as much delta-v to go 'down' a well as to go 'up'. But if you happen to have a planet with atmosphere at the bottom of the well, you can cheat away some of the downwell cost by doing a highly elliptical transfer and then using friction from that nice thick atmosphere to get really hot and use that to get slow enough to fall below suborbital speed - otherwise you'd spin around, loop back out on your ellipse and just sit there going ping, pong, ping, pong across the solar system like a tetherball.
Iif I understand correctly, that is.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Siphons don't work in vacuum, and they don't work if the distance between the two containers is greater than 10 meters (one atm of pressure at sea level). You can transfer liquid between two containers in a vacuum, but its a completely different principle, not nearly as efficient (molecular cohesion) and places additional requirements on the materials of the tube.
You wouldn't need smelting at least ... just someone willing to catch molten rock after reentry.
Hey, China has enough people...
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
We could park it in the oil leak, beats using golf balls and shredded car tyres!
Judging by your spelling of tires, I'm guessing you work for BP.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Yards... kilograms... argh. At least you're making an attempt to catch up to the 20th century :)
Is Europe pulling the African-American approach on South Park and coming up with a new type of measurement beause everyone else is using it now? :)
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
If you hadn't been around here for a while, I wouldn't be responding at all. Since you have, though...
I'm a software engineer, not an aerospace engineer -- as is almost everyone else in this community. Speaking of community, the "shared cultural heritage" here includes more than a little hard science fiction. The whole point of my last line was to make it clear I was playing off that shared cultural heritage, as opposed to being serious. To "think a bit", as you put it, I'd have to acquire a whole new specialty -- not just a shallow understanding, lest I know just enough to nay-say ideas, but not enough to figure out which of those problems could be approached as engineering difficulties and resolved.
In short -- start figuring out when people are being playful, and consider playing along. The least you could do, though, is to stop making an ass out of yourself.
You can make anything sound easy but the fact remains it cannot be done.
You might as well be saying 'flying is easy, all you do is push off the ground and dont fall'. It sounds easy but its a physical and practical impossibility just like the space elevator.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I don't have a problem with Space Elevators myself, other than it is something that is going to be in the next century or much later. It isn't a technology that we are going to be effectively going to use... at least here on the Earth.
Mars makes much more sense for a something like this as it has lower gravity, hence it doesn't require nearly the same tensile strength and other problems facing the technology. There may even be other bodies like Ceres or elsewhere that may even have a better practical implementation of the concept well before you ever see it being built on the Earth.
Mind you, as you have stated here, the technology has applications in other fields and there is some benefit to simply thinking along those lines. Still, I wouldn't get your hopes up too high and I certainly would not like to see other launch technologies dismissed in hopes that this one solution is going to work out.
How would they withstand high winds from the likes of thunderstorms, hurricanes/typhoons, and so on?
Tropospheric problems such as weather is the least of the problems facing this technology. A far more serious problem is dealing with the ionosphere, which would literally erode the cable causing its failure after a fairly short period of time. If it can handle the tension necessary for getting to a geosynchronous orbit from the Earth's surface, weather problems can easily be dealt with as a trivial engineering problem on the side.
I'd seriously wager that we're closer to being able to genetically modify pigs to fly than to overcome those "engineering challenges".
I've got to figure out a way to work this into a sig. Seriously, I nearly died laughing at this statement.
BTW I think you are spot on here and this is something easy to group with solar power satellites (another "future technology" based on wishful thinking and scam artists). There may be some materials science breakthroughs in the future to get this stuff to happen, and the practical side of it has been worked out in terms of raw physics (i.e. it isn't something like a FTL drive) but I think it is something that is just beyond our basic capabilities at the moment.
Making pigs fly, while certainly an amazing accomplishment and worthy of a Nobel prize if somebody actually can combine avian and mammalian DNA, is something I think more likely to happen and doesn't require nearly the extensive research before it can become practical. A bit more understanding of genomic sequences is going to have to happen before that becomes practical. Here is a good question: Do you think the Nobel committee would take a nomination seriously that actually accomplished this task?
We'll obviously have to agree to differ, but when I saw this plan, which basically requires a couple of heavy rocket launches and some careful unrolling, rather than the Clarke plan with asteroid capture and automated factories making the elevator cable in space, I began to believe that (a) making the nanotubes really was the only possibly unsolvable problem left and (b) that I might live to see one.
Nope, we just decided that instead of using a mismash collection of 5000+ year old sexagesimal systems we could do everything with some nice easy powers of 10. :) But then, I guess it suits America to be imperial.
mediocrity rules, man
Just HOW are you going to hover - not orbit, but HOVER - in order to stay in the exact same spot over the Earth's surface, 1/2 way to synchronous? That's what I'd like to know. I think you're back to magic again.
You won't have a worforce problem - just remote-control everything. You also won't need to send all the infrastructure, only the parts that cannot be built there, like motors and the most basic equipment that gets you started.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Actually I know quite a bit about orbital mechanics. You start IN GSO. The cable is 100 000 km long, more than twice the distance from sea level to GSO (which is why you don't need a counterweight). As for unrolling, after about 10m tidal forces keep everything nicely aligned for you. Probably lots of issues with oscillation and stability to worry about, but they are second order.
You won't have a worforce problem - just remote-control everything.
Such a "remote control" environment simply doesn't exist anywhere... and try as you might you are going to need somebody to get up there to kick things loose and get stuff working. I'll admit there may be considerable automation, but it doesn't solve all of the problems even if the only personnel are going to be repair and service technicians rather than somebody manually moving ore with a spade into push cart of some kind.
Robots have worked for space exploration so far because there is some low-hanging fruit that can easily be grabbed by such devices. It is a hideously expensive endeavor to conduct robotic missions of the type that have explored the Solar System so far, and they are also painfully slow.
Even for Spirit and Opportunity, two "robots" that have been incredibly productive, one skilled geologist spending a couple days on Mars will be able to duplicate or even surpass the science and even raw discoveries than those two robots have accomplished since they landed there. A team of geologists working on Mars would be able to uncover some of that harder to access stuff that wouldn't even be considered until somebody is physically there.
Ditto for the Moon, and particularly for building factories that do anything useful there. Yes, a very simply "factory" might be built on the Moon to so some very menial kind of task and producing something like say a "brick" that could be used for other construction on the Moon, but you aren't going to get any kind of complex industrial process going without at least having some people up there to get it going. That requires infrastructure and people... where there will be a chronic shortage of even skilled people.
Besides, I think something is lost when you completely remove humanity from the equation. There are other intangible benefits by having people "on the Moon" besides being slaves to build stuff, even if it will be the factories and such that could provide the economic rationale for them to be there in the first place.
Mars seems more likely than Ceres. Ceres has such a low escape velocity that it isn't clear that one gains much from having a space elevator there. While you are correct that it would be easier to do on Mars that would require massive infrastructure there which we don't seem near to having at all.
Ask one of the experts at BP :D
Such RC environments do exist today - most of deep-sea operation is conducted through remote-controlled devices, as is a lot of combat-zone flying. The Moon is close enough for remote-control (2.5 second feedback delay) and vacuum with robot with arms on wheels is a much more friendly environment than deep water with floating rig or a light airplane.
The Moon is even close enough for you to send another robot to kick stuff when the first one gets stuck.
Complex manufacturing will not happen on the Moon until there is some need for it, but having simple automated factories for cooking soil to grab volatiles (oxygen, water), to make rocket fuel (splitting water into LOx/LH2) and RC robots for digging construction sites and for assembling stuff sent from Earth would be very useful. If the volatile extraction facilities also make elements (tubular metal structures and sheets) for construction, all the better.
Having a stockpile of materials would be great when the time comes to establish permanent human occupation. It's not about removing humans from space exploration - remote control is severely limited by the speed of light and is not an option for anything beyond Moon orbit (although one could assemble space station components with robots before the structure is occupied by humans - that could remote control the robots from inside the habitat), but to make it easier to put humans on-scene later.
All of it seems quite doable and most of it has been done in the past. The Russians had a moon rover that was remote controlled from Earth.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
While I would agree that there are simple remote vehicle that can perform "remote sensing" and do some minor manipulation, there does not yet exist anything that can do complex manufacturing... and certainly not something that could be replaced at much cheaper cost on the surface of the Moon simply by sending somebody up there to do whatever it is that needs to be done.
It is also a matter of economics, but it should be important to note that the remote vehicles you are mentioning also exist in environments that people simply can't get to at all, or at least not without great difficulty. The remote vehicles on the Moon that you mention here didn't really function for all that long, and in fact made mistakes that having a human on the Moon would have been easily resolved and dealt with.
There is also this little pesky thing that you have to deal with in terms of anything in space: the speed of light. Until you can find some way for superluminal communication it is going to be increasingly more difficult to get much of anything to be done as you get further from the Earth. Communications to the Moon is at least a full second of delay in one direction (2 seconds before you get any sort of response), and that means you have to be very slow to get anything accomplished and have a whole team involved in planning even the most minor and trivial tasks. Remote manipulation of robots is nothing at all like running a R/C automobile in your backyard... and even that is hardly an easy thing to operate with any sort of real precision.
I'll also point out that the program managers of the various NASA projects that actually use robots are on record to support manned space exploration, knowing full well the capabilities of remote manipulation on an intimate level and having no direct benefit to encouraging manned spaceflight. I will state here that a single astronaut (well trained) can perform more science and do a much better job simply by being there than would ever be possible by using remote vehicles. But that isn't all....
My objection was that you can't point to a single fabrication facility that is completely automated including performing maintenance that exists anywhere on this planet. Yes, I am aware of manufacturing facilities that a human never touches the product until after it gets into a retail setting.... but you can't possibly point to a lack of technicians or people who are intimately involved in keeping that facility in operation. Such factories don't exist, and I don't see how you can possibly get such a facility built remotely on the Moon without having at least some people up there helping with getting everything put together. There may be a role for remote vehicles operated on the Earth, but it won't be completely without human intervention. That is my main point.