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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's because cheese contains water!
It's not called the dark side because it's dark. It's "dark" because that side never faces Earth. Thus, during a solar eclipse the "dark" side is completely illuminated by the sun.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
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
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.
Somehow I don't think the Earth-Bound States of America will suffer from not getting its hands on the water that could theoretically be extracted by laboriously pulverizing the entire volume of the moon. Since - as the article points out - the EBSA already has that same amount of water, already in drinkable form, lapping at its shoreline from Minnesota to New York. We'll manage.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
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
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).
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.
Yards... kilograms... argh. At least you're making an attempt to catch up to the 20th century :)
mediocrity rules, man
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.
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.