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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?
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.
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*
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 largest lake entirely within Canada is the Great Bear Lake. None of the Great Lakes are entirely in Canada, so none of them count. The deepest lake in Canada is Lake Manitou, which has an island inside it, and in that island there is a lake. That makes it the largest lake that's in an island that's in a lake in the world."
Though, I would expect people living next door to the US to be used to its "US is the world" attitude by now.
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.
Preposterous, but now I'm curious! (Caution: I've only had one cup of coffee so far this morning, so please check my math!)
Depth of covering the moon with the contents of the Great Lakes, just once:
So, approximately 0.6 meters (just under 2 feet)!
If we use BooksInLoC of Great Lakes, that works out to:
So, to answer the original question: 17,400 Km (or approx. 10,800 miles) deep!
P.S. This was a fun exercise... I knew the Great Lakes were "big", and I knew the Moon was "big", but to think the Great Lakes alone could cover the entire Moon to a depth of about 2 feet... Just. Plain. Wow!
Extra Credit Question: If the moon were entirely covered by the water from the Great Lakes, how much brighter would it make a Full Moon seem on earth? Bonus: how bright is that compared to the Sun at noon?
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/
The surface area of an ellipsoid (in this case, the moon) expands as it's diameter increases. Therefore, your math is off by more than a little bit.
According to Wikipedia, the moon has a mean radius of 1,737.10km and has a volume of 2.1958E10 km^3.
From your calculations, the great lakes have a volume of 22,560 km^3. Therefore, the volume of the great lakes times the number of books in the library of congress is 6.5424E11 km^3.
If we add this volume to the volume of the moon, the volume of our new moon is 6.76198E11 km^3. Assuming the new moon takes on a spherical shape, we can get the new radius of the moon by using the formula for the volume of a sphere, V=4/3r^3. Therefore, we deduce that the new radius is 7,974.65km.
Further assuming that the moon as it exists now settles in the center of this new waterworld relatively undisturbed, with it's mean radius remaining at 1,737.10km, we can calculate the mean depth of the water on the moon as 6237.55km.
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.
Football fields doesn't even bother me as much. At least it's a specifically known number (100 yards - and yes I'm going with the American/gridiron definition of football because we seem to be the only ones who measure in football fields :)) that is small enough to wrap your head around.
Great lakes? Ok, I know they're pretty big, but I don't know if there's hundreds of thousands of gallons, millions, billions, trillions, or even more gallons of water in those things. I just have no sense of it. Same with "Libraries of Congress". I have no clue how many books they have. I know it's a lot, but I don't know how many. Biggest library I ever saw was our college library; it was 5 stories which compared to our little ~6000 sqft county library back home seemed ENORMOUS, but other students constantly expressed how small and sucky our library was so maybe even that is small potatoes in comparison.
People seem to be attached to using stupid units though. Kinda like that relative who insists in telling you distances in units of time rather than length.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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