When On the Moon and Mars, Move Underground

astroengine writes "Recent observations of the lunar and martian surface are turning up multiple discoveries of 'skylights' — collapsed roofs of hollow rilles or lava tubes. These holes into ready-made underground bunkers could provide ideal shelter for future manned bases on the two worlds. Firstly, they would provide shelter from the barrage of micrometeorites, solar x-rays and deep space cosmic rays. Secondly, they'd help protect our burgeoning colonists from the extreme swings in surface temperature (on the moon, temperatures vary by 500 degrees F, but inside these lava tubes, the environment remains at a fairly constant -35 degrees). Thirdly, the sci-fi notion of underground space cities could become a reality."

Comments

radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[cats-paw]

it's not obvious to me how you can have a habitat in space without being underground.

I guess you could just build thick-walled structures of some sort, but going underground seems like it's probably slightly easier.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fiannaFailMan]

It's the traveling to Mars that makes me wonder how we're going to keep people shielded from radiation en route. I've seen the proposals and they look doable, but they'll significantly add to the complexity of the mission.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[bsDaemon]

Would it not be an option to send robotic construction workers to the site ahead of time to begin construction of the shelter? Or, send two separate ships, one that just has cargo on board? That way, the ship that carries the people would need to carry less, and therefor the weight that would be allocated to kit could be allocated to slightly thicker walls. But, in typical Slashdot fashion, I'm just putting forth something that seems reasonable, substituting what I believe to be common sense for the engineering degree that I don't have.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh! You just travel at night!

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Biggest issue I can see is the whole "meeting up again, millions of miles from nowhere". It's always a pain, doubly so if the mother-in-law is involved.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[JoeMerchant]

So, if we get that far, we'll be lunar cave men.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[vlm]

Use the same giant freighter network for heavy bulk material and humans (admittedly overlap for some of us)

Ship the heavy non-living stuff via Hohmann transfer orbit or the incredibly slow ITN. Its incredibly heavy so at a low delta-V it'll take awhile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network

On the other hand, occasionally you have an extremely lightweight payload of human beings. Send them at very high acceleration on a much faster hyperbolic (far above escape velocity) transfer orbit.

The other option is the radiation protective scale height of the atmosphere isn't as much as you think. Forcing everyone into the hot tub during a solar flare is actually not as impractical as some might think. You're going to need all that water anyway, so building concentric hollow sphere tanks is not all that unrealistic.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[smaddox]

I'm more worried about how any human civilization would survive more than a year without constant resupplying from Earth. Biosphere2 was a complete disaster, and it showed us how much we have to learn before we can successfully colonize another planet.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

What a brilliant idea! Only send people when the 11 year solar cycle is at its least activity! Wait, that is what you meant by "night", right?

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fahrbot-bot]

Forcing everyone into the hot tub during a solar flare is actually not as impractical as some might think.

There was a situation like that depicted on Defying Gravity, episode 8, "Love, Honor, Obey" where during a solar flare the crew took refuge in a room surrounded by the water tanks and polyurethane insulation.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Ragzouken]

Would it work to travel there during a lunar eclipse?

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I think living underground, at least initially, is a given. In the moon, I suspect it'll take more than a cave with bare, exposed rock, though. If they cave is fairly shallow, we are susceptible to the effects of geological quakes due to surface impacts. I think we would still need a shell of some kind, surrounding the living space, which itself would be contained with a thick layer of insulating substance capable of absorbing minor kinetic vibration.

Personally, I'd like to see a project to hollow the moon out, turn it into a wee dyson sphere. With a good bit of rotational spin, we'd gain a hell of a lot of habitable surface area.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Late Adopter]

On the other hand, occasionally you have an extremely lightweight payload of human beings. Send them at very high acceleration on a much faster hyperbolic (far above escape velocity) transfer orbit.

Is it really feasible to send humans faster than Hohmann with current tech? Last I heard it wasn't... which makes radiation (and perhaps worse, isolation!) a legit problem.

Similarly I was under the impression that it wasn't necessarily attenuation from atmospheric mass that provided cosmic radiation shielding, but rather the magnetosphere, which is something not easily duplicatable on an interplanetary craft.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

Don't mention that POS thing masquarading as a scifi TV series, not without warning unsuspecting people.

Also, it would be a good idea to mention "BBC Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets" (avoid the castrated US version), which is monumentally better (why, why do I even compare them?) and of which "defying gravity" is a direct rip-off, just made extremelly poorly.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[John Hasler]

> Similarly I was under the impression that it wasn't necessarily attenuation
> from atmospheric mass that provided cosmic radiation shielding, but rather
> the magnetosphere...

The atmosphere stops the cosmic rays, which are far too energetic to be bothered by the magnetic field. The latter stops the solar wind which would otherwise erode the atmosphere, though it would stop them quite readily while it lasted.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously asking that question?

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[SpaceLifeForm]

it's not obvious to me how you can have a habitat in space without being underground.

It's been done before. It's called Earth.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[32771]

I'm wondering whether there are any drilling robots that could just go there and drill the required tunnels and caverns. I have always been wondering whether water is a required ingredient for any drilling operation. But lately I heard that it is mainly meant for cooling and to prevent silicosis in miners. This should be true for small drilling equipment if you want to do any blasting, i.e. where the transport of dirt out of the hole is not the issue. But more modern mines are build without much blasting I heard, I would be glad to find some example.

I didn't go down the natural route because I think that this won't be good enough in the long term. Even if natural caverns are used some drilling will have to be done. So the question remains - How to drill in a lunar environment.

I'm also wondering whether the lower gravity causes softer minerals to form.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[m.ducharme]

Does the Pope shit in the woods?

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Beardo the Bearded]

Red Mars did it.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the problem with biosphere II was that it did not have a very deep biodiversity pool.

Specifically, it tried to use larger (easier to control) plant and animal species. IIRC, it did not include very many insect forms, bacterial, algal, or fungal forms.

I also don't think they accounted for the action of inorganics (Minerals, plastics, metals, etc) on the air purity conditions. (Many minerals react with atmospheric gasses, plastics break down and release monomers and plastic resins, and metals are notorious for absorbing oxygen as part of their decay process.)

In short, their experiment was engineering oriented, instead of environmentally oriented. (as in, the environment inside the biosphere was not properly defined, and failed in much the same way that many "un-cultivatable" plants fail to be cultivated; their environmental needs are not met/cannot be met by their living conditions.)

I suspect that if they ditched the whole "Needs to look like a pretty, well manicured garden inside" design aesthetic, they could produce a functional biosphere. Toadstools, swamp ooze, irritating gnats, and all.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fahrbot-bot]

Sorry to offend. I haven't seen "Voyage to the Planets" (UK or US versions). The Wikipedia page describes a different motivation for their voyage than on Defying Gravity - the latter was more about inter-personal relationships (unfortunately described as Grey's Anatomy in space) and the alien objects on the various planets.

I actually liked the show. I don't understand people's vitriol against the various science liberties employed, like instant communication over distance or the artificial gravity, as many (most?) other popular Sci-Fi shows do the same (Star Trek, Firefly, Stargate, etc... - Don't get me started in SG-U.) In addition, the production quality (CG, music, etc) was very high for a weekly show. The half-mile long ship itself was designed with input from NASA and consideration of possible advancements and launch capabilities over the next 40 years.

Before passing complete judgment on DG, I would recommend watching all 13 episodes, not just the 8 aired. Perhaps I'm biased toward some of the character relationships and interactions as they reminded me of things in my own relationships and things I felt when my wife died of a brain tumor in 2006. I know the last scene of the last episode, Kiss, though sappy, was like my last kiss with my wife, except she didn't wake up afterward. I heard her last breath, felt her last heartbeat and kissed her goodbye.

There's more to good sci-fi than the science.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[GrumblyStuff]

In addition to the water and/or polyurethane protection, I've read about magnetic shielding. Both are doable but definitely have big problems either way.

The former two are heavy. I think the thickness was described in meters. For magnetic, the only way to have the ship compact enough yet could repel particles quick enough means incredible high magnetic fields. The crew would also be subject to this unless there was two systems in play (one to deflect, other to cancel out that one) which would raise power requirements, weight, etc. Also, this wouldn't provide protection from neutrons or other chargeless particles nor particles that would be attracted to the high magnetic field. I forget if it was better to deflect electrons or protons.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Sending robots ahead of time, assuming suitable robotics tech, might well be a very good idea. Even if it is just the heavy earthmoving/fusing/cementing, it'll beat having a bunch of puny humans sucking up the oxygen and waiting for it to happen.

For general supplies, though, it isn't clear that separating the humans from the (initial) supply shipment is logical. First, being on the same boat as all your supplies is handy if schedules should slip for some reason. Second, a fair few types of supplies can function as radiation shielding(water, for instance) in sufficient quantity, and, unlike thicker walls, are also quite useful when you get where you are going. Unless being able to take off from the Earth's surface all in one piece is a hard requirement, any ship to mars is likely to be a big, ungainly looking, clump of modules and things, assembled in orbit, with the humans surrounded by tightly packed supplies and just enough shell to keep the air in...

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

I watched all dg eps. I gave it a fair chance. It is still a monumental POS. You'd do yourself a favor watching Voyage to the Planets, to have the perspective of seeing how hugely dg frakked the concept.

There's tons more of (realistic!) emotion and interpersonal relationship "even" in BBC docudrama. Science liberties of such kind are much less excusable for a show which presents itself as being quite well-grounded in almost our times / our technology (nvm that I didn't mention the treatment of c). BBC has insanely better production quality, also CGI (that's telling, for something shot half a decade earlier). "The half-mile long ship itself" was one of direct ripoffs from the BBC decudrama (not really with an input from NASA, but from ESA), only modified to make it worse.

I'm sorry about your loss; however - being sensitive to such coincidence is not a good measure of show's quality.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[irving47]

Biosphere2 was a complete disaster,

Biosphere 2...? Wasn't the first one bad enough? Who in their right mind would star in a SEQUEL to a Pauly Shore movie?

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[stonewallred]

No, he means at night when the sun goes down. Another idea is have the ship use an umbrella and slather it with sunscreen.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[stonewallred]

Could have planted a bunch of pot plants. Fuckers are weeds, so they would grow, they produce both material for making paper, rope, etc and oil from the seeds, along with a nice end of life product that can be smoked, eaten or used in an alcohol based tincture for sublingual application.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

You bring up an important point: while launch tech is sexy(and, admittedly, not presently good enough for much, hence the desire for improvement) not dying the second you run out of canned food/water/air shipped direct from earth at a thousand bucks a kilo is ultimately the more serious problem.

There would be a lot to be said for doing the comparatively easy, comparatively cheap, comparatively extremely safe, and relatively quick, earth-based research on building sustainable small-scale environments. more than we do.

Since any attempt to colonize a planet that isn't already a near-earth paradise planet is doomed without airtight buildings, start with building those. Once you've mastered that, you can conduct all sorts of research for essentially peanuts, just by controlling the inputs to your airtight structure, and seeing how it goes(ie. impose an artificial comms delay equal to speed-of-light-delay for the planet you are simulating, provide only the supplies that could plausibly be brought on a ship of X size, provide "resupply" at intervals if desired, or not, if not. Erect a cheap warehouse over the whole operation and provide realistic lighting, to see if the agricultural attempts can take it, decide what "local resources" are available only for the cost of gathering/processing them, and so forth).

For the cost of a singe big, splashy, program that putzes around in earth orbit, you could be running dozens of concurrent experiments in extraterrestrial survival, just by putting up sealed buildings in places that are either inhospitable or just cheap, and exploring various approaches to survival; but with the bonus that, if an experiment fucks up, nobody dies horribly in the cold depths of space, that "supplies" just pay fedex shipping, rather than earth-to-mars shipping, and you don't have to spend ages waiting for results(hey, let's wait six months for our intrepid martian explorers to make planetfall, discover that some parameter was calculated wrong, asphyxiate, then wait another six months for the mission with that parameter tweaked to make it... That sounds like fun).

Plus, in addition to being fairly cheap, virtually every technology you would need to develop to build a working space colony on the ground likely has application to earth's less pleasant bits of real-estate, which makes funding easier to justify.

This is, of course, not a complete replacement for actual space stuff: we need robots out gathering data on what conditions are actually like if we are going to simulate them accurately, and simulating something like .3G or 1.6G on a 1G planet is going to be a touch tricky. And, of course, you ultimately do have to get there. However, you can do a lot of the groundwork research without ever leaving earth, and take advantage of fast turnaround times, trivial supply lines, low costs, and low risks.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[32771]

Let me answer my own post.

I found this thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine

also notice the nuclear version of it.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[stonewallred]

Interesting except how in the world would you produce light? While a dyson sphere has the sun, we would have to use artificial lights and we don't have any, that I know of, that would be capable of doing it, unless they were strung up on poles or mounted close to the ground, which would totally ruin the idea of a dyson sphere.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fahrbot-bot]

Thanks for the input; I'll try to see the BBC version of Voyage to the Planets. I suspect I'll still like Defying Gravity regardless. I try to appreciate shows in and of themselves rather than in comparison to other shows. I find the POS description a bit harsh, though people have said the same about Firefly. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even opinions of weak, or unconsidered justification - I'm just saying in general, not slighting you here.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Conditions on the moon would actually be pretty unenviable for heavy machinery. The low gravity would be a plus, allowing impressive feats of strength, and otherwise implausibly spindly construction(though remember that mass, and inertia, don't change. That one can be embarrassing). It's all downhill from there, though.

The lunar surface experiences no weathering, only meteorite and micrometerorite impacts, so it consists largely of fused globs and shards of glassy materials, as sharp as they day they formed. Without an atmosphere, static cling is a serious issue. Without much water(or the temperature envelope in which to use it) you can't just hose that stuff off. It worms its way into every crevice, and just grinds away. If you generate heat, conduction and convection work substantially less well than you would expect, since there is no atmosphere. The rock still conducts heat away from the work area; but any air-cooled machinery isn't exactly going to work very well...

I doubt that it is impossible; but it is a nasty pile of engineering challenges. Something like Mars, which is basically a desert that used to beat up and steal the lunch money of even the toughest earthly deserts might actually be much easier(despite being further away). They have actual weathering there, an atmosphere(albeit a rather thin one) for air-cooling, and a surface that isn't exclusively made of tiny shards of glass that just want to cling to you and grind away....

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[trout007]

A really neat feature of regolith is that you can melt it with microwaves to make structures. http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?title=Sintered_regolith

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth was a turnkey solution. Mars is fixer-upper.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[SEWilco]

Is it really feasible to send humans faster than Hohmann with current tech?

Orion drive. It's the only way to be sure your six-story-tall ship gets there quickly.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[catmistake]

Yes, but we must solve the danger of collapsing roofs first!

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

In this case, they invited the comparisons themselves by so directly basing large parts of the show on the earlier BBC docudrama miniseries. With lots of parts made worse, without any justification, in the process of mostly carrying them over (nvm horrible acting; and c limit to communication could be a great plot mechanism, adding nice suspense, etc,; it certainly was succesfully approached that way in the Voyage to the Planets, so I don't really buy "it can't be done on TV" - that was scriptwriters being lazy)

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[vlm]

Is it really feasible to send humans faster than Hohmann with current tech?

Current tech? sure. Current budgets? No. Maybe with a couple fewer wars, a couple fewer temporary big campaign donor bailouts...

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sexconker]

When an umbrella is used to block the sun, we call it a parasol. It is "para" (for) "sol" (the sun).

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sexconker]

You're thinking of Biodome, squirly.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[mlts]

What will be a big issue will be energy generation. A colony will be needing to recycle used air/water, find ways of making up lost oxygen and other atmospheric gases in order to expand to new rooms and expand the colony from something small, to something habitable for the rest of peoples' lives.

How will this be done? Probably nuclear fission and high capacity breeder reactors. Because they can't be water cooled, they will have to be designed from the ground up to be able to use as much heat as possible for energy, and radiate either into the ground, or into space any energy that it can't use.

Without a source of energy to keep everything going, there is no hope for a colony. It isn't like they can go grab some trees and stick them in a bonfire.

Ideally, fusion would be the best way of generating energy for a colony to last generations. Hydrogen is fairly easy to get (grab out in space, ship from Earth in water, etc.) In a decent tank, it stores indefinitely, and a little bit goes a long way.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the moon fire.. Oh wait..

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sconeu]

Another idea is have the ship use an umbrella
You mean like this?

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sconeu]

Do they make machines to interest tunnels as well? I mean, the tunnels must hate those machines when they're so boring. Always going on and on about themselves, and never asking the tunnel what it thinks!

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you can tell interesting stories with time-delayed communications systems does not preclude telling interesting stories with instantaneous communications systems.

In fact, I'd argue that rigidly forcing yourself into some pre-defined model of "reality" in what is inherently a fantasy setting is a good way to guarantee that you never get to the "interesting stories" part.

Also, if you want to talk about ripping off things, and inviting comparisons I'd suggest that the BBC ripped of 2001 pretty directly, and that VttP doesn't stand up to 2001 in many ways. Or, you know, we could just take each bit of entertainment on its own merits instead of deconstructing it until it loses all relevance and meaning.

Finally, I have to argue with "being sensitive to such coincidence is not a good measure of show's quality". That's just a lie. Someone else's sensitivities are not a good measure of your judgement of the show's quality. But they're certainly a good measure of that person's judgement of the show's quality, more or less by definition.

/ Grow up and accept that people can like things that you don't without being wrong or stupid

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

See: http://montalk.net/conspiracy/55/how-to-block-microwave-mind-programming-signals

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[vtcodger]

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, wouldn't it be cheaper and safer to live underground in (for example) New Jersey than on the moon or Mars? AFAICS, there is near infinite storage for dingbats who want to live and work in a hole in the ground in wastelands like the Sahara, Afghanistan, or Kansas. (In the latter two cases, it would probably be best not to let the religious fanatics on the surface know they have been colonized.)

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

Heh, if only they did tell interesting story...no, it was basically directly said in an interview / PR material that keeping the realities of communications out of it was just an easy escape from the complexity.

Iin the case of this series, the ratings (consistent in many networks throughout the world) show the case quite good. Liking dg can be certainly called a peculiarity. If I forced myself to anything it was being one of the very few who watched dg regularly till the end, quite far from "not getting to interesting story part" (if there was such in this case...well, OK, last ep had some small premise regarding possible plot twists, but they already shattered any potential there was again and again)

You know perfectly well that the suggestion of VttP ripping off 2001 in fashion anywhere similar to what dg did...simply doesn't fly. The latter took huge parts directly and admitted it.

The sensitivities in question had nothing to do with the basic premises of the show, its place, themes, underlying story, et al.; nothing out of its essence. They didn't even touch on the whole show, just one scene which could be, for all we know, a cheap effort to feed on related memories.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Grishnakh]

I don't understand people's vitriol against the various science liberties employed, like instant communication over distance or the artificial gravity, as many (most?) other popular Sci-Fi shows do the same (Star Trek, Firefly, Stargate, etc... - Don't get me started in SG-U.)

I disagree.

If a show/movie is depicting technology close to our own, then it should be consistent in that portrayal, and not show technology that is hundreds of years away or more.

What would you think of a TV show set 5 years in the future, but which shows cops carrying portable laser guns, while everything else is exactly the same? It'd be stupid, and everyone would say so. Several leaps in technology would be required to have handheld laser guns, the biggest of which would probably be batteries capable of storing far more energy than today's. If that did happen, many other things would change because of it; electric cars would become popular very very quickly, for instance.

Or how about a show set 10 years in the future, where everything's mostly the same, people still drive cars, but instead of taking planes to faraway locations, they use teleporters? Again, stupid.

It's the same deal with artificial gravity and FTL communications. The only difference is that they aren't quite as obvious to science-ignorant audiences as ray guns and teleporters. Artificial gravity and FTL communications might indeed be possible (we'll never know until we achieve them, as you can't prove a negative), but if technology evolves to the point where these technologies (particularly artificial gravity) are possible, then we'll also have much better propulsion technology, and many other things would be different.

These things work in Star Trek and Stargate because 1) in Star Trek, they're portraying a society far more advanced than ours, not only in time but in technology (partly because of contact with technologically-superior races like the Vulcans), so they have a lot of leeway in making up possible new technologies, and 2) in Stargate, even though it's set in present-day, it posits contact with races with much older civilizations and FAR more advanced than ours (especially the Asgard) with technologies we can currently only dream of, so again they have lots of leeway in making up stuff that's well beyond our current understanding of physics. Notice than in both these series, FTL propulsion is commonplace. Anyone advanced enough to have FTL propulsion will probably also have figured out artificial gravity along the way. Firefly is slightly less defensible because they don't have FTL propulsion, but they are hundreds (maybe thousands) of years in the future and have apparently figured out how to travel to another star system, as well as terraform many planets and moons, both things that are well beyond our technology, and their propulsion, while sub-FTL, is still far more advanced than our primitive chemical rockets.

If you want to see near-term space exploration shown realistically, rent a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Made way back in the late 60s, they got just about everything right: NO artificial gravity except by rotation, long communications delays, etc. The only things they got wrong were 1) the timeframe was way too optimistic (it's 9 years past 2001 and we're still nowhere near long-term manned missions, large rotating space stations, or moon bases; we slacked off starting in the 70s and we're getting lazier), and 2) the intelligence of the HAL9000 computer.

If they could depict all these things correctly in a movie made back in the 60s, before inexpensive CGI existed, there's simply no excuse for any movie or TV show to screw up future technology now.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Grishnakh]

Is it really feasible to send humans faster than Hohmann with current tech?

I'm not sure about humans, but most craft sent to the outer planets aren't sent with Hohmann at all, they're sent with gravitational-assist (slingshots). Hohmann transfer would take many decades to send craft to the outer planets, whereas Cassini is getting there much faster than that by slingshotting around Venus.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. Sadly enough, China is probably humanity's best bet for any serious space exploration in the future, as the USA goes the way of the Roman Empire.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Late Adopter]

Is it really feasible to send humans faster than Hohmann with current tech?

Apologies, I meant to imply "to Mars", which was what this thread started off talking about.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Grishnakh]

I don't think this is correct at all. From what I've read, industrial hemp and marijuana are two different plants; very closely related, but different (like ornamental oranges and Valencia oranges). Marijuana is good for its psychoactive properties if you're into that kind of thing, but the fibers it makes aren't very useful for anything. Industrial hemp, however, makes a very strong fiber that's great for paper, clothes, and rope, but its THC content is extremely low so smoking it won't do much for you.

It's like Thoroughbred horses vs. Clydesdales. Only an idiot would hook a Thoroughbred up to a plow (it'd probably break a leg), and only an idiot would try to race or jump a Clydesdale. But the two are very close genetically, and are the exact same species.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Whorhay]

I don't remember them having any artificial gravity. They did some hand waving early in the series that explained that the jumpsuits were manufactured with a special material in them that could be attracted to the floor plates when the power was turned on. You could replicate this with today's technology using electromagnets and clothing with metal fibers in it.

We may not have technology exactly like it but it wasn't artificial gravity, in fact no part of it was gravity at all.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[arcsimm]

I brought this up once in a class on science fiction, and after some discussion we came to the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson thought of *everything* you'd need to think of with interplanetary missions in the Mars trilogy.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fahrbot-bot]

I don't remember them having any artificial gravity.

You are correct. It was magnetic nano-fibers woven into the clothing. People still bitched about that as well. Some parts of the ship, like the crew quarters, rotated to provide centrifugal force / simulated gravity.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really feasible to send humans faster than Hohmann with current tech?

Orion drive. It's the only way to be sure your six-story-tall ship gets there quickly.

Theoretically, a few forms of electric propulsion (e.g. ion drives, Hall effect thrusters, VASMIR, etc...) could get a sizable crew to Mars in approximately three months (about a third of the time with chemical rockets with the ideal launch windows), given either very large solar arrays or nuclear reactors on the order of those powering modern naval ships. Furthermore, unlike the Orion drive, we've actually used some of these forms of solar powered electric propulsion in real space craft. :p

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[fahrbot-bot]

... there's simply no excuse for any movie or TV show to screw up future technology now.

Granted your thoughts on things, but remember, it's *fiction* and even good fiction often requires a suspension of disbelief. Besides, who's to say what advances will happen or when. People get too cranked up about the things you (and others) have complained about.

People bitched about horses and pistols on Firefly - which is set in 2517 according to Wikipedia - but I think they make sense even in that advanced world. Personally, I can't stand the "communication stones" on SG-U (FTL comms perhaps, FTL consciousness swapping, no - especially given the apparent power required to gate that far) because I see it as an internal inconsistency.

In any case, I let these things slide because they exist in the world of the story and I only complain when there's an internal problem or inconsistency within that world. I understand that some things are done simply for production reasons. The transporters on Star Trek were "invented" because using a shuttle was too time consuming story/production wise.

I do agree that *not* using FTL communication in DG would have offered some interesting plot and suspense opportunities, as was suggested in another post, but having them also provided some and allowed immediate involvement with the ground crew.

All my favorite shows: Farscape, Firefly, Dead Like Me and Defying Gravity have "problems" with respect to the real world and real-world science, but I think the stories and, more importantly, the characters are compelling and interesting none the less.

I've both read and seen "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Arthur C. Clarke is a SciFi God, but people thought he was "out there" in the 60's. Larry Niven tries to get the science correct too, but sometimes even his stories require a bit of a reach.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Grishnakh]

All my favorite shows: Farscape, Firefly, Dead Like Me and Defying Gravity have "problems" with respect to the real world and real-world science

What "problems" does Dead Like Me have? It's a show about grim reapers, something not even covered by science, but by religion, myth, and fantasy. It doesn't even remotely qualify as sci-fi. You might as well complain about physics problems in "Ghost".

I've both read and seen "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Arthur C. Clarke is a SciFi God, but people thought he was "out there" in the 60's.

How so? Obviously, the whole Monolith and Starchild thing was "out there", but the rest of it was very accurate, and probably would have been pretty close to reality if humans had kept up the momentum of technological development they had in the Space Race of the 50s and 60s. Again, the only problems I saw (other than the weird alien stuff on Jupiter at the end, and the Monolith) were 1) the optimistic timeframe (should have been called "2051" or "2101" instead, or maybe even "3001" the way things are going now), and 2) HAL was too advanced, we now know that our earlier predictions of AI were extremely optimistic. I could also add in that the scenes on the Moon didn't properly show the low-g environment, but obviously that's technically very difficult to do in a movie with 60s technology.

People in the 60s probably thought he was "out there" because his movie was actually realistic, unlike typical sci-fi of the time.

Personally, I can't stand the "communication stones" on SG-U (FTL comms perhaps, FTL consciousness swapping, no - especially given the apparent power required to gate that far) because I see it as an internal inconsistency.

I've never seen SG-U (hasn't the Stargate thing jumped the shark several times now?), but it's so far out there that it's kinda passed from sci-fi to fantasy. But yes, internal consistency is still important in my opinion, and should be avoided whenever possible. It's even more important, and obvious, if you're depicting something in the very near-term future, rather than something showing godlike aliens (or worse, aliens who really are gods, like the Ori, who might not be quite omnipotent, but are close enough for all intents and purposes).

The transporters on Star Trek were "invented" because using a shuttle was too time consuming story/production wise.

The transporters did seem to be a little too advanced given some of the other technologies, but again, we're talking about a story of a civilization with FTL drive, "subspace" FTL communications, energy weapons, etc. Not something that's supposed to be happening a decade or two in the future.

People bitched about horses and pistols on Firefly - which is set in 2517 according to Wikipedia - but I think they make sense even in that advanced world.

The reasoning there was that Firefly's main characters lived on the fringes of society. They did show in the series that energy weapons existed, they just weren't owned by the poor people that lived on the outer worlds. Notice that the guns that they did use used caseless ammunition, unlike modern weapons. Horses again were because the people were poor. Levitating vehicles were shown (like in the Serenity movie), but not everyone had access to them. Firefly was actually a little different in this respect, because most sci-fi tends to assume that everyone in a given society will have equal access to the latest technology of that society (or it just ignores the lower classes altogether).

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I figured we'd just use a larger version of the light of Eärendil that Frodo was given.
But seriously, perhaps my use of the word "Dyson" was inappropriate. Let's call it a plain old sphere, that is lit in the same was our potential caves might be lit? I was only trying to convey a similar notion (re : "wee") : a hollow moon has a a lot of usable surface area, in the same way a Dyson sphere would.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[lanceran]

Yeah, also go during full moon so you can actually see stuff in the moonlight.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Chris Gunn]

Would it not be an option to send robotic construction workers to the site ahead of time to begin construction of the shelter? Or, send two separate ships, one that just has cargo on board? That way, the ship that carries the people would need to carry less, and therefor the weight that would be allocated to kit could be allocated to slightly thicker walls. But, in typical Slashdot fashion, I'm just putting forth something that seems reasonable, substituting what I believe to be common sense for the engineering degree that I don't have.

This was NASA's plan. They wanted to have a lunar base prepared for astronauts. A cleared landing site, and oxygen production from lunar rock and soil.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/sep/HQ_05273_moon_dirt.html

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/may/HQ_05128_Centennial_Challenge.html

Also perhaps some base assembly, with the robotic capabilities of the ATHlete rover

http://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/systems/system.cfm?System=11

and the Robonaut

http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/default.asp

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Chris Gunn]

From what I remember, their main problem was lack of oxygen due to the concrete base oxidising. I.E: the air became stale. With older concrete, I don't know that it wouldn't have been significantly more successful.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use the ground as building material, constructing above ground shells involves moving less material than excavation (surface vs. volume). Material can also be moved horizontally across the surface (shallow strip mining) using much less energy than lifting material out of a created cavity. This can be mitigated somewhat by excavating into a raised feature (tunneling/mining) rather than digging an underground cavity, which would eventually have to be covered again anyway.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Great idea! Maybe the Moscow Institute for Biomedical Problems has some ideas about this.. oh wait..

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[lxs]

Yeah but parasol doesn't sound manly enough for rugged space explorers, and umbrella (meaning "little shadow" in Italian) does.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[OolimPhon]

Orion drive. It's the only way to be sure your six-story-tall ship gets there quickly.

Nuke it in orbit. It's the only way to be sure!

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot can happen in five years. If high capacity battery technology was discovered tomorrow, it would take a good ten years for the general populace to all be driving around in electric vehicles. It would be possible therefore to have police walking around with laser guns before the general populace were all driving around in fully electric cars (why though? Unless they had some kind of stun mode rather then just plain killing power, although the police could be a bit more brutal then :\ ).

As for teleporters in ten years time, why not? Why does teleport technology require other high tech stuff beyond what we can view as possible now?

Discoveries do not have to be in tandem with each other. Artificial gravity is not a requirement for advanced and/or ftl travel (and vice versa). Maybe a method for artificial gravity will be discovered in a few years time and then after 20 years or so, someone will go "what's going on here? Oo" while playing around with a artificial gravity generator and develop ftl propulsion from that.

For all we know, someone somewhere right at this very second is about to accidentally discover something that will accelerate our pace of scientific discovery a million fold. How can you say that tomorrow the world as we know it will change rapidly to the world dreamt of by a multitude of scifi authors?

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Mista2]

It's the comms lag that should actually enhance the feeling of isolation. Just a few hundred years ago, colonists in the new world had to wait months for new from the homeland, or had to spend entire decades simply travelling to vist parts of their far flung business empire. Even movies as far back as 2001: Space Odyessy got this right for crying out loud!

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

As for teleporters in ten years time, why not? Why does teleport technology require other high tech stuff beyond what we can view as possible now?

Because we don't even have the science for it, let alone the technology. Are you seriously under the impression that teleportation is only an engineering question now?

Maybe a method for artificial gravity will be discovered in a few years time

Before we have any hope of manipulating gravity, we'd need to know what it is and how it works. Then decades of theories on how gravity might be influenced, along with experiments that culminate into changing the weight of a hydrogen atom by 0.00001%, then decades of experiments to make it work on a macro scale, then decades of prototypes before the tech is mature.

There used to be a time when you could just come up with a scientific theory and then whip up something that tests and demostrates it in your lab out of mirrors and lenses. We no longer live it.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[shnull]

Yes, first thing that struck me when i played the first mission of the free nasa gama (the moonbase simulator) where you have to repair the oxygen supply system was that it wouldn't have been broken at all if they only dug in and constructed their base underground. But i guess you can't start out without having at least a base camp on the surface, unless they can build some mega digdugtransformerspacerobot that does it all before they arrive. But with the political bullshit they have to endure they'll probably be shooting firecrackers 5 years from now.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[RockDoctor]

I brought this up once in a class on science fiction, and after some discussion we came to the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson thought of *everything* you'd need to think of with interplanetary missions in the Mars trilogy.

Hmmm, smells dangerously like hubris to me ; I'd slip the old copper-plated boots and lightening-conductor hat on now. We know how the Gods react to hubristic humans.
The guy who said "expect the unexpected" was making a serious point, not a joke. You and you class mates may not have thought of anything that KSR hadn't already covered, but that probably only reflects that both you and KSR have no practical experience of interplanetary manned colonisation efforts. Nor does anyone else, it's true, but that doesn't do anything to increase your species' store of practical experience. That ruthless neo-Fascist Borg Rumsfeld only sounded stupid and funny in his speech about "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns", but he was actually trying to make a serious point about the nature of knowledge. Epistemology?

That said, I have a guilty confession to make : I've had a 2nd-hand copy of one of the Rainbow Mars (Red Mars perhaps? I'm not even sure of the title!) sitting on my "to read" shelf for at least 2 years now, as my second ever KSR novel, after "Icehenge". I'll have to shift the book to the bedside cabinet and bump it up the list.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[arcsimm]

More hyperbole than hubris, but it's honestly not that far off the mark. Solar flare while in transit? From dealing with radiation while in transit to the various forms of architecture a hostile environment like Mars would require (and a metal-rich environment like Phobos, too...), what an interplanetary war might look like and what might spark it, what kind of social issues and division might arise on an off-world colony, what low gravity might do to the human phenotype, etc., etc., etc... KSR might not have been right on all counts, but it's apparent that he at least gave most of them some thought.

Go read it! The worst that could happen is that you'll become terrified of space elevators. (Dun dun DUNN!)

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the moon first, mine the He3 and develop He3 fusion... then we can relativistically accelerate and decelerate at 1G to Mars.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[theGreater]

Orbital laser / microwave. Easy to drive on crude fused glass.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Ok, So i went and watched Voyage to the Planets because of this recommendation. Quite frankly, if you want a case against sending people, send robots instead, that was it. It was totally devoid of any detail other than vague statements like "difficult", and felt like the the director was just tring to relive the nostalgia of the moon landing all over again *at every god dam planet*. Even Pluto!

To top it all off, it was quite incorrect about many of the details "shown graphically" and with sweeping statements (like traveling through the asteroid belt being dangerous. Its 99.99999999999999% nothing, and the chances of hitting anything are far less that one of the crew deciding to go all Jack the Ripper on the rest.)

I miss the days when science TV had science in it rather than BS "drama" with a bunch of "keeping it real" (aka total losers) characters.

I was rooting for a CME to wipe the whole crew out so we could send the robotic probes instead. Maybe then we could get some science done.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[ooshna]

Damn it why does no one like Farscape sure it was nutty and the special effects were a little cheesy but you just can't beat Scorpius when it come to an intelligent bad ass antagonist. He is like mixing Hannibal Lector, Worf, and Ryan O'Reily (from Oz)

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

Well, it's not "science TV", it's a docudrama after all. The drama part means the mission plan took a hit - of course we wouldn't (hopefully) perform it like that, in an "inspirational" way & so it can be nicely shown in 2h; but that seems to be one of the primary points behind docudramas. And remember, much "science" stuff was omitted on purpose, because it would require too much speculation - that's why the Titan probe fails.

But it wasn't even about this part; more like, for a start, about basic production qualities. Acting and dialogs which aren't horrible; quite good actually. Even if some technology is too optimistic, there's really nothing ridiculous; the ship itself is quite good. Exploiting the surroundings (comms lag, 0g) instead of trying to ignore them. Visible care taken into creating effects / CGI. Simply put, not sucking across the spectrum; with quite pleasurable viewing experience. Even for somebody with a bit of physics background.

Yes, there were some faults - one could easily point out, for example, the "slingshot" around the Sun - which wouldn't really work exactly as described; or that getting off from Venus via such launch profile would be futile; or "wrong" look of exhaust gasses in many cases; way too visible, and in a wrong way, "aurora"; flying through clouds of Jupiter (way too deep), nvm how it had a common error of depicting the flow as subsonic; implausibility of putting such spacechip into ring gap within sensible fuel budget; unrealstic interactions with debris; the way of analysing samples; weird exercise with Pluto telescope...
(asteroid belt wasn't really one of them, IMHO; notice how they didn't depict it as some debris field - it was mostly empty, just with that one chance encounter (even if the surprise was improbable given the size of twins) & most of the situation due to some error)

But, at the same time, so many things done good. DG otoh...just most likely took away, for a long time I'm afraid, the possibility of a series in such scenery.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

And yet, their clothing didn't act at all in a way suggesting big forces (nvm distributed in a bit weird way, as far as weight goes) They and their surroundings didn't work in a way suggesting huge magnetic fields present (look at MRI rooms...); fields with which there wouldn't be that much of a need for a radiation bunker (certainly no need for such races to it)

It wasn't magnetic nano-fibers woven into the clothing; it was an excuse for not redesigning the ship a bit more to have larger rotating section (BTW some parts which "rotated" a bit occasionally, the storage, did so completelly pointlessly) and avoidance of exploration on how to do 0g more often (but still decently rare), and within the limitations of TV production.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[TheTurtlesMoves]

You make all good points. The production quality was good. The acting and the actors where decent. The dialog didn't sux.

But really, do we have to have a "drama" where the crew basically pack a sad with the mission profile that they knew about before the even left. Thats what i mean when they depict these missions. They make a really strong case why sending soft, squishy, radiation intolerant, vacuum adverse and emotional humans is dumb.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

I'm not sure if supposed "momentum of technological development they had in the Space Race of the 50s and 60s" was actually ever present; in a way which would quickly lead, in few short decades, to the state of affairs in 2001. More of a natural consequence of few technologies becoming usable, allowing for all those quick impressive achievements...but without much potential to scale as was imagined.

It's like with those aircraft from "our" times, imagined at the end of XIX century. Not realising the practical boundaries + carrying over experiences from some other field which just came to fruition... (and we can even build them - take Harrier, remove wings and canopy)

BTW, simulating visibly lower g, even for a movie stage, would be fairly easy via harnesses, etc. I suspect hardly anybody properly realised how different humans move then. Alternatively - it could be explained by parts of clothing & specesuits having integrated weights of depleted uranium ;) (it's not like they would mind much, in a world of 2001, such small addition to launch mass)

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

FTL comms is plenty inconsistent - it means time travel, at least for information. Which would make most of their problems null & void; and indeed give quite different, quite interesting world.

Real comms would also allow immediate involvement with the ground crew...for a time. The delays getting longer, conversations weirder, finally resulting in misunderstandings or wrongly received intentions when trying to hold onto "conversation mode" of communication - would be quite interesting to show such progressing isolation, which could strenghten any possible mess with the Beta; and be even quite fitting with the idea of melodramatic soap, manufacturing relationship issues, among very isolated group of people. Still wouldn't excuse emo music breaks, though.

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

In practise it sort of was - hardly anything actually acted in a way implied by their explanation; and no signs of procedures typical where powerful magnetic fields are present, in places where we can and do find such strong ones handy - look how MRI rooms function (what was that deal with the wrench?)

Re:radiation and solar flares a serious problem

[sznupi]

Hey, maybe that was also the point, showing why people are ill-suited here and there; plus: teleoperating robots over many months/years, the way it will at most look like usually (when it comes to human presence), wouldn't look very inspiring. And hey, the whole thing was mostly highlights from a period of time spanning almost a decade ;p

As long as it can be done sustainably, it will happen; not like those grand tours of course - but for some reason, people seem to not want to hear about sending human to some destination and..."leaving" them there; even though that's the way we colonized the Earth

At the same time they conveyed quite a bit of knowledge (and from time to time links to BBC science subpage), even if some things were out there (adding to previously mentioned - how after IO she would be dead in max few days, probably within hours (maybe minutes...) if she actually felt effects of radiation in such way; even high levels that we can't really feel are deadly; plus trash trajectories)

However if, for some reason, we were to make such a voyage...then it was a decent depiction of it. Some of it was even obviously tongue in cheek, for example part with loosing first step / words... (again @unsuitability of humans perhaps?) and nice enough to watch to not put off people, maybe, from such idead (dg might have done so...) It even had a cliffhanger which, while blatantly obvious & cheap...was at least cute; in the sense "not merely irritating"

Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to live underground on earth.

Re:Why bother?

[ElectricTurtle]

By all means, let us keep all our eggs in one basket and just wait patiently for some extinction event. That worked out well for the other 99% of life on earth over geologic time.

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

Thing is, for "some" (assuming random, among many scenarios possible) extinction event, it's still most likely much more efficient to live underground, on Earth; saving orders of magnitude more people in the process, on comparable resources. At least when talking about foreseeable future (talking beyond that is a bit pointless anyway)

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly why I live in my parent's basement!

Re:Why bother?

[ElectricTurtle]

Creating an independent extraterrestrial colony is a mammoth task, but it would be resilient to all possible extinction events below a level affecting more than one planet of the solar system. Any single planet solution is ultimately vulnerable to anything up to and including planetary events. When the entire species is at stake, cost-benefit analysis needs to be a bit broader in scope to match.

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

it would be resilient to all possible extinction events below a level affecting more than one planet of the solar system

And that's a very narrow strip of scenarios (again, we're talking about foreseeable future; in a long time we might be "post-human" for all we know). Most impact events / flares / etc. are more efficient to prevent or...survive in the lithosphere of this planet. In between there's the level of orbits-disturbing or big-fraking-solar-flare-causing visitor from outside the system, which is very rare judging by the number of old multiple star systems (direct planetary impact is orders of magnitude less likely than that), though it might affect two different planets in a different way (orbit, not flare). And beyond - things from gamma ray bursts to false vacuum collapse, where another planet doesn't matter.

Yes, it might be worthwile; very, very rarely. So that won't be the reason to colonise, ever. Taking into account such threats is way beyond the scope of humanity; look how we do know... It'll just be the old "the biggest threat to life is another life."

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

extinction event on earth in the next 100 years means the extinction of mankind as well. there is no way we could become self sustaining on moon or mars before then, and even then at an enormous cost. are eggs are in 1 basket whether we like it or not. gravity wells suck, as does living outside the terran biosphere.

Re:Why bother?

[gmuslera]

The problem is that for some won't be enough. And sometimes just developing the technology for making that possible could have side consequences that could pay all the effort.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to your other parent?

Re:Why bother?

[ElectricTurtle]

Betting on rarity really works well when it comes to levees and hurricanes, building design parameters and earthquakes, etc. I mean, sure, lots of people have died when the really rare events eventually happened, but I'm sure that means that going forward rare things won't actually happen anymore.~

While I think that humanity could survive another event on the level of the Chicxulub impact, I don't think that a larger event is survivable. There are also problems unique to humanity as an increasingly capable technological civilization, including problems that may not even be foreseen. Aside from potential anthropogenic biological and technological threats, there are also hypothetical threats from the outside, with the nasty possible combination of RKVs with the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Re:Why bother?

[bmajik]

The best reason to try this on the moon is that there is nowhere on Earth where the people on the surface wouldn't presume to own what was underneath the surface.

The best way to avoid wars and to keep people happy is to let folks who must "Agree to disagree" choose to not be neighbors.

We're out of places for free people to live on Earth's land masses. Everything on Earth's surface is owned and controlled by somebody at this point -- somebody who has no problem killing you if you don't do what they like.

Where is a free-minded man to live? Where is the next frontier? The sea-steading folks are working on a promising option, but that merely moves the goal posts out a bit farther, but doesn't solve the problem.

Space-steading is the long term answer. Getting a functional permanant society on the moon is step 1. Anything that makes that easier is worth looking at.

Re:Why bother?

[drooling-dog]

By all means, let us keep all our eggs in one basket and just wait patiently for some extinction event.

Well, that does have the advantage of being practical, at the very least. If we choose, we can deal with most terrestrial "extinction event" threats a good deal more cheaply - by multiple orders of magnitude, probably - than by sending a substantial number of our population to a distant and hostile "habitat". There aren't many (any?) such events you can think of that would result in a less survivable environment than we'd encounter on any reachable extraterrestrial planet.

Of course, in that case our infants won't be arriving at distant worlds with super powers (absent kryptonite), but you only get what you pay for after all...

Re:Why bother?

[aynoknman]

By all means, let us keep all our eggs in one basket and just wait patiently for some extinction event.

It would seem that neither patience nor waiting is necessary. Along with much of the rest of the animal kingdom, we seem in the middle of an extinction event, viz. the rise of Homo Sapiens.

The question of finding another basket or moving our eggs into it is non-trivial. Consider the immense and largely unexplored ecosystem in a square metre of soil outside your door. Try duplicating that in a lunar or Martian context. You can only conceive of it with a huge amount of hand waving. To carry it out, the hand has to be holding a magic wand.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

He lives in my grandparents' basement.

Re:Why bother?

[John Hasler]

> Consider the immense and largely unexplored ecosystem in a square metre of
> soil outside your door. Try duplicating that in a lunar or Martian context.

No need to duplicate it. It's portable.

Re:Why bother?

[natehoy]

... and once it becomes practical on a scale that would support enough people to get out there, eventually some jackass would control it who will kill you if you don't do what he/she likes. Doesn't matter how large the space we can reach is, if you get there someone with more resources is going to want to control you.

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

The point is exactly that whatever humanity does, it won't be due to avoiding very rare variants of extinction events (except crash-projects of course, but we're not talking about those). So beside the point in arguing for action, really.
BTW, ignoring such wide-encompassing worries probably was a beneficial trait, helping survival; still might be. In the face of other life, other groups of people. Let's assume there was some group foreseeing some distant inescapable disaster - well, they would be just subdued by groups focusing on "now and here" (or, "this season"). Ultimatelly the latter would carry on, even if with heavy losses (people are quick to breed when conditions are decent anyway); leaving still distant past to their deities and improvising when shit hits the fan.

That's how we still are.

Spreading throughout the system won't help much against RKVs, too.

Re:Why bother?

[twistedsymphony]

I'm curious... if we send pioneers to another planet, and somehow manage to make it livable/cover it with vegetation/create an earth-like atmosphere...

Will people still care about the environment?
Will they care more because we poured our blood and sweat into it?
or will they care less because even if we bomb the place back into a baron wasteland we're just back where we started?


How would doing that on another planet effect people's respect of the environment on earth?

Re:Why bother?

[ElectricTurtle]

That sort of defeatism is not what brought our species out of the trees in the first place. Further, it is patently false.

Consider the immense and largely unexplored ecosystem in a square metre of soil outside your door.

Actually, if I were to bother with such mundanity, I would find that a) all life forms in that space are already named and cataloged; the life cycles observed, recorded and analyzed; their interrelationships studied, etc. b) all substances in that space would similarly be named and categorized; the processes which lead to their presence, ratios, and distribution studied, documented and analyzed and c) all of this would be tied together with larger volumes of knowledge and study about effects exterior to that space.

Immense and largely unexplored my ass. I might add further that the bulk of the useful information about terrestrial ecosystems has been gathered in the last two centuries, with information density and relative utility only increasing with time. In other words, it is demonstrable that as humanity advances it understands more things more quickly. Extraterrestrial environments could be understood in a fraction of the time, not only because of the nature of science and human understanding, but because such systems are doubtless more simple without innumerable teemings of life complicating things everywhere.

Re:Why bother?

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, but the neighbors are a pain in the ass.

Re:Why bother?

[couchslug]

"By all means, let us keep all our eggs in one basket and just wait patiently for some extinction event. "

In the event I become extinct, I might get motivated to do something about it.

Re:Why bother?

[downhole]

An interesting point, but I have a feeling that, at least for the foreseeable future, any space colonies will be far too dependent on expensive high technology gear to have the kind of political independence you're thinking of. Any person or group of people with enough money to even get into Earth orbit without drawing a Government paycheck probably also has enough money to buy lots of practical independence in plenty of places on Earth.

Re:Why bother?

[stonewallred]

True, yet unless we can somehow get around 1000 breeding age folks into space, and get them self-sufficient, then it is pretty much useless. What the manned part is meant to do is to attract attention and funding, so the science part can go on a head while allowing the PR part to bring in the dough.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound like any organization advanced enough to set up a permanent colony on another planet will not make absolutely sure they "own" everything about it, right down to your own civil rights - what's left of them. Every colonist will be tagged and monitored since it would be fatal to have even one go "rogue" and damage the life support.

And if you think "There's no way someone will risk killing themselves as well by destroying the life support!!" ... well... wake up.

Re:Why bother?

[ElectricTurtle]

Beware the argument from natural selection, it is not inherently superior. Natural selection produces things that work well enough, not things that work best. Natural selection produces life forms that can't feed themselves, such as the adult gypsy moth, others that die immediately after reproduction, such as the salmon, and lifeforms that die simply because their "design" sucks compared to others (honey bees' vs. hornets' stingers). Reproduction is the primary focus of natural selection, which is why some species are semelparitous.

As humans, we are capable of seeing beyond the 'good enough' mechanisms of natural selection. So yes, maybe you 'still are' that way, but I prefer to look ahead, and I don't think I'm the only one either. One of the causes of our recent economic problems has been the 'fiscal quarter' mentality, whereby only things that are expected in the next three months are important, and things years away are brushed aside. When 'years away' finally arrives, there is no longer enough time to do anything, the probability cone has narrowed and the potential actors are trapped in the disaster scenario they ignored until it was too late. Now I'm not big on the eco-cult, but the fundamental ideas of sustainable development are sound, and based on long term planning, not short term.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given human nature, I'd say the chances of all life in the solar system being wiped out would increase by several orders of magnitude if there were two planets inhabited by humans.

Damn stumpy legged Martians.

Re:Why bother?

[WindBourne]

Funny that you say that. It was the animals in the ocean and those that burrow mostly underground that survived the past ELEs.

Now, with that said, It should be obvious to all that we have little choice BUT to live in the ground where ever we go. At least for a time.

Re:Why bother?

[ElectricTurtle]

Caring is unimportant. Unfortunately people have started to deify the biosphere, and worse, have taken the view that it is static and should be static, regardless of what it takes to fight the agents of change (which are presently ourselves). Biospheres are not static. One may be better for one form of life and worse for another, and that is why life adapts. If anything should be pseudo-worshiped it is not the biosphere but adaptability. Prior to the oxygen catastrophe of the Siderian period the biosphere would not support any animal life as we know it. It took a previously small divergent segment of life to radically alter the atmosphere (sound familiar?) in order to change the biosphere such that previously impossible forms of life could be made possible. People today have such a poverty of imagination combined with a subjective bias for the familiar that they cannot imagine a biosphere without species X, and they cannot imagine a biosphere with the inclusion previously non-extant species Y. All biospheres, all species, are transitional states. Fighting change is futile and more artificial than anything mankind ever did with a factory.

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

That was the point; it didn't make us superior, it made us what we are. Among it - mostly incapable of directed actions of such kind / such scale. That I can see some (only some, don't kid yourself) utility in trying soon to have a backup outside of Earth, most people...well, just look how NASA is funded in comparison to the "defense."

(though you paint results of evolutionary process a bit harschly - it's all about survival after all; as with extinction events; "design" of honeybess doesn't suck for example, it causes more harm to the attacker)

Please, don't go on some sort of moral high horse (I'm also sympathetic towards sustainability, etc.). One could easily argue that the real underlying cause of our major problems is forgetting how humans really are, ignoring that how we like to see ourselves doesn't need to have much to do with reality (say - look how similar, also in what is bad in us, and what is good in us, we are to the hominds most closely related to our species; but no, people are so hang up on the tribal "we're special" that they blow up even such minor things as ethnicities way out of proportion - there's a high chance you live in a place where oonly small part of ancestry can make one "black" for some reason; nvm that by such criteria we are all "black" 100%). "Burrying our heads in the sand" is, for better or worse, not only almost certainly succesfull approach in whatever catastrophe we might face, but also the only thing we could realistically accomplish. And for millions.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating an independent extraterrestrial colony is a mammoth task

Someone should've told us that before we killed off all the mammoths.

Re:Why bother?

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Really: $50 and Up Underground House Book – Underground Housing and Shelter

Re:Why bother?

[ElectricTurtle]

Honey bee stings are actually some of the meekest out there, so the 'more harm to the attacker' is bunk. Asian giant hornets are so powerful that they kill more people than all other wildlife in Japan combined. European hornets are superior to European honey bees by a factor of a thousand. Honey bees are a result of natural selection, they are 'good enough' for their environment, but they are not superior, and other results of natural or artificial selection can and have overcome them.

"Burrying our heads in the sand" is, for better or worse, not only almost certainly succesfull approach in whatever catastrophe we might face, but also the only thing we could realistically accomplish. And for millions.

ROI is not high enough, it is not multipurpose. Off-world colonies can accomplish more than simple survival and redundancy, things which cannot be done here (or at least cannot be done with the same economies of scale). (See the Interplanetary Commerce section of Zubrin's Case for Mars.)

Re:Why bother?

[bmajik]

Well, sure. Except that for some people practical independence isn't good enough, and ideological independence is the whole point.

But that aside, the idea isn't that the moon will be a free place where the rules don't apply. Not initially, and perhaps not ever.

The famous trans-atlantic and trans-oceanic voyages in european history had state backing. But now, any random individual can build a sailboat and pilot it wherever they like. Today, individuals can build the ships of world-wide passage. Today, individuals can cirumnavigate the globe.

For a long time into the future, anyone standing on the moon will have stood on the shoulders of giants on Earth to get there. But what about the 1st generation of Lunar-born folks? What about the first self-sufficient Lunar indistry? What about the 2nd, and 3rd, and 4th generation of Lunar-born folks?

In the future, but perhaps within 100 years, when the free individual can buy or build their own space-faring craft, and can navigate the cosmos without a state sponsor, what then?

Humanity will expand to fill every domain. First as explorers, then as settlers, then as civilization. There will always be a leading edge, and on that leading edge, in the settling phase, people may find the freedom, if only for a few generations, to try new political experiments, to have first-mover advantage, and to live as freely as they are able.

The earth is a finte space. If you want to live on land, there is no leading edge, beyond which adventure and freedom can still be found.

The cosmos is effectively infinite. It was once impossible to cross the appalachian mountains, but a great mystery and opportunity laid to the west. It was once impossible to cross earth's orbit, but mystery and opportunity await above us.

It is still, in human-life-time-terms, difficult to cross the solar system. But I don't think that will always be the case.

Re:Why bother?

[bmajik]

The point isn't necessarily to move to the moon and stay, the point is to move into a domain (space) where you can _keep moving_.

I understand that there are only a few plausible set-down locations _today_. But there is no more of Earth to discover. There _is_ more of the cosmos to discover and reach.

Besides, in times past, _occasionally_ a bunch of pioneering seperatists will successfully shrug off their distant masters. It only lasts for a few generations, but if you are in one of those generations... what a reward, what exhilaration!

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

You glanced over how the presently possible individual voyages depend tremendously on the whole "system" in place.

Or how being free to choose their way won't have to mean freedom in the "nice" sense to colonists - in fact, I'd guess it to be unlikely; I'd guess the colonisation will happen not because it's sensible, but because of lack of better options to some individuals, after growing up in low gravity. With levels of struggle and frequent death perhaps greater than was typical on Earth.

And we're not really going anywhere outside the system without new physics. Maybe via embryo colonisation, but that's a bit outside the scope of what drives individuals and small groups, and requiring tremendous cooperation (nvm that there would be certainly so called "moral issues" and that such ship would be orders of magnitude more trivial to destroy than launch)

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

Honey bee stings are primarily against other insects; they do cause more harm to the attacker the way they are / don't lose them. The way it works against mammalian skin probably helps, too...many animals have a problem getting them out. And dying bee releases more scent signals calling other for an attack. Overall, bees seem quite succesfull / seems it works fine; they haven't been overcome by anything.

Regarding ROI - on the other hand, we both know that a crash project to "save our children" is the most likely scenario; with subsurface Earth dwellings the only possible measures on a large scale, and the only ones acceptable on "moral grounds" ("more children!") - that will make them the best ROI in the eyes of most people; it almost certainly will indeed prove to be one. That's not too bad. Don't count for more.

Re:Why bother?

[Grishnakh]

No, it's not an answer, unless you can get together a band of freedom-loving hippies with financial resources greater than the US Government's.

Going to space requires massive technological improvements to sustain human life there, and that requires tons of money. Whoever ponies up the money for this expedition will want the rights to everything there, just like the European royalty wanted rights to everything in the New World when they funded expeditions there. They didn't give up all that money just so some people could go explore the continent and do what they wanted there; they had a responsibility to plunder it and return that wealth (esp. gold) back to the initial investors. Of course, as travel became easier, some freedom-loving hippies managed to get themselves over there and set up new homes, but that was because the land was fertile and easy to live on (except for a few hostile natives). All anyone had to do was bring a rifle and an axe, so they could build a log cabin for shelter and shoot some deer for food. They didn't have to worry about bringing their own food, or worse, their own air.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Asian giant hornets are so powerful that they kill more people than all other wildlife in Japan combined.

Suzumebachi are only "so powerful" because of the amount of venom a wasp the size of a hummingbird can deliver. The toxicity is actually less than that of honeybee venom. Even taking into account the huge dose of venom delivered, human deaths are nearly always from anaphylaxis, not acute toxicity.

And I don't find the mortality statistic particularly amazing. Japan has a couple of bears and a few mildly venomous pit vipers, and most of the population lives in huge cities near none of those. What sort of wildlife would you expect to be killing Japanese people, rabid tanuki?

Re:Why bother?

[bigngamer92]

Yeah, you can escape to another planet to escape the law, until everybody on the central planet unites to put you under their thumb. Then what? Move out to the outer planets and form a lawless band on some old spaceship.

Reminds me of a show I watched...

Re:Why bother?

[lennier]

The best reason to try this on the moon is that there is nowhere on Earth where the people on the surface wouldn't presume to own what was underneath the surface.

And this won't be the case even more severely on the moon? If companies start mining in space, who do you think is going to own the valuable stuff three kilometers under the lunar regolith? Hint: not the employees.

Where is a free-minded man to live? Where is the next frontier?

Answer: Anywhere but space.

In space today and for the forseeable future, not only does a large organisation in which you are a tiny cog own the very habitat volume you live in, they control the entire supply chain from Earth including your oxygen. And they can switch it off anytime you even look like thinking of violating your employment contract.

Good luck starting any kind of libertarian freehold under those conditions.

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

Who are those "people" you speak of? At least a large portion (certainly one that seems to "matter") has quite different deities, typically giving them virtually free reign over the world - surely beneficial when outcompeting other groups that did deify the biosphere, which was much more of a rule in the past. Only problem with the former approach - humans, with their adaptability, can go quite far before hitting hard some limit...at which point we usually also overdo with how messy it gets.

Our adaptability also has its limits; we could have some problems with, say, anoxic event, snowball Earth, or something new on the scale of oxyden catastrophe.

Re:Why bother?

[Urkki]

But there is no more of Earth to discover.

Sure there is: the oceans. Most of Earth surface is completely uninhabited, and building an artificial island is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier and safer than building equal living area in space (including other planets).

Yet it's not happening.

Another thing of course is, that volume of expanding "balloon" increases polynomially, while a population grows exponentially. There will always be shortage of resources eventually, and therefore need to live together with people who don't agree with you (at the very basic level, they think the food you're eating should be eaten by them).

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

There might be some complications. Consider that, in the end, you'd want to transplant this mass in an environment which is a bit different. Which might lead to some...unintended consequences.

Think some "bad" strains taking over when more neutral ones in the gut or on skin have been wiped out by anitbiotics / etc. Or some weird strains already on Mir or ISS.

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

It's funny, isn't it? Almost like many of them don't realise how their wishes come true would result in tyranny... (well, or wishing to be at the top)

Re:Why bother?

[sznupi]

We won't be able to keep moving without new physics; certainly not without somebody else, somebody "free minded", stopping that at a whim (compare the complexity of launching large ship with launching one nuke at it, even long after it "set sail" - it will catch on, can be much faster given the same level of tech)

And you're buying into some myth; for most people, silent ones, life was damn harder than today in times with "reward & exhilaration"

Why are we still talking about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we agreed to kill any NASA funding that looked like it might be headed towards progress?

(captcha: realist)

Zapp Brannigan on Operation Moon Settlement

[eldavojohn]

The moon mole people--though defenseless and inviting--were no match for our rail guns and bunker busting missiles. After denying hailing frequency after hailing frequency of cultural exchange, I fearlessly and heroically protected the Earth by sitting at rest in a fully armored spaceship at the Earth/Moon L1 position. In a very sensual valour snuggie I drank the hot cocoa of the gods as wave after wave of our warriors bounced around the moon exterminating the moon mole people with golf clubs, the very same fearsome weapon used by the first of our warriors to set foot on the moon decades ago.

President Nixon, I present to you a new settlement and planet completely safe and devoid of the once furry stubby armed moon mole people!

Re:Zapp Brannigan on Operation Moon Settlement

[fritish]

I thought whalers settled the moon?

"We'll just take refuge in this old lava tube..."

[GameGod0]

Famous last words.

Re:"We'll just take refuge in this old lava tube..

[Anonymous Coward]

Staring Vin Diesel.

Stanford torus

[FalconZero]

Am I the only one who noticed that the colony pictured in the article is more likely a Standford Torus, or am I just being picky?

Re:Stanford torus

[euroq]

Am I the only one who noticed that the colony pictured in the article is more likely a Standford Torus

Nope! We've all played Halo :)

am I just being picky?

Well, yeah!

Re:500 degrees F

[ccandreva]

Someone wanna translate this into units of measurement used by, oh I dunno, the entire rest of the world?

Fscking hot.

It's a start

[MrEricSir]

You've got to start somewhere. Pretty soon, we'll invent the moon wheel!

Re:It's a start

[maxwell demon]

You've got to start somewhere. Pretty soon, we'll invent the moon wheel!

Well, assuming we can agree to its colour.

Re:It's a start

[natehoy]

And how many leaves it should cost.

Re:It's a start

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll be lucky if we can agree on how to spell color.

Underground a Benefit?

[CheshireCatCO]

While there are benefits to living underground, I don't think that living underground is itself a benefit. If it were, then more people on Earth would be living underground already. [Insert joke about Slashdot readers and basements here.] So I'm a little hazy on why the summary passed that off as the third "benefit". (And no, living like a science fiction movie isn't a benefit either. Not all SciFi is Utopian.)

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[sznupi]

I don't know; buildings do resemble, in a way, essentially an artificial cave.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[ElectricTurtle]

Excavation is expensive.

No, scratch that, excavation is fucking expensive.

Go look up the costs of major transportation tunnel projects. Billions. Imagine the cost of putting habitable structures of any size down there... especially when you can just build up with no excavation cost. (The excavation cost is on top of the cost of all the structure itself. Even after you get all the dirt and rock out, you still need walls and support structure, just like any other building, not to mention all the finishings.)

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[avandesande]

You never saw 'CHUD'?

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand not reading the article, but this is explained in the summary. Please go read that now. The reason why we don't have to live underground on Earth is because we have a dense atmosphere protecting us, a luxury not available on the Moon or on Mars.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Dunbal]

If it were, then more people on Earth would be living underground

      It all depends where you live. There is a huge cost to building underground since you have to move a lot of earth, you have to take steps to make sure your cave doesn't collapse, you have to deal with water seepage, you have to circulate air, and THEN you have to build your dwelling. On Earth it's usually not feasible, no matter how bad the weather. Although in really really cold climates most people have their cars in underground heated garages at home and where they go to work/shopping, or the mass transit is designed to deal with cold weather by being underground (subways) or even having closed, heated bus stops.

      But you're looking at it backwards, seeing no benefit to living underground. Sure, on earth and especially in the tropics, there is no benefit. In an extremely hostile environment like the moon or mars you pretty much HAVE to live underground. The daily temperature differences alone (ok, monthly in the case of the moon) would quickly destroy and crack most materials. The surface (barring the discovery of areas rich in uranium) would probably be dedicated to the collection of solar energy. Underground you'd be able to have an air-tight, radiation proof environment.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[IflyRC]

They just don't make movies like that any more. I'm getting all sentimental.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[drooling-dog]

And no, living like a science fiction movie isn't a benefit either. Not all SciFi is Utopian.

No, it isn't. Yet many people here imagine how unrelentingly cool and exciting their lives would be, if only they were living in The Future. Well, we are living in the future, from the reference point of a century ago, but that doesn't protect us from being depressed and miserable.

Guess what: The girls on the voyage to Proxima Centauri in 2300 aren't going to like you any more than the ones here and now, and you'll be hating them just as much for it. The stuff you'll do there every day will seem just as routine and mundane as your current boring life, and probably even more so. Everybody's favorite fantasy - the thing they'll yearn for every day of their lives - will be the legends they hear of life on our lush, gentle Earth, just as we're living it today.

So, let's just realize that we're already on a more utopian planet than we're ever going to find in the nearby galaxy, and spend our efforts on preserving it for our descendants...

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Icarus1919]

THANK YOU. Wish I had mod points.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[CheshireCatCO]

You entirely missed my point and didn't seem to have read what I wrote. I was quite explicit that there are benefits to living underground. However, I don't see living underground as a benefit itself. I'd much rather live above ground, thank you very much. I'm pretty sure most people agree with me. (Yes, if that's not a viable option, so be it. But don't try to sell "underground" as a bonus. It's like claiming that the leak in the roof of the house is a value-adding feature.)

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[CheshireCatCO]

Thank you. Now read what I wrote before replying, your post will look less ridiculous. The summary is selling the "underground" as a bonus feature rather than as a harsh necessity. I object to this cheap salesmanship.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[0123456]

Guess what: The girls on the voyage to Proxima Centauri in 2300 aren't going to like you any more than the ones here and now, and you'll be hating them just as much for it.

Yes they will, because they'll be programmed to. Nerds will fill their starships with Natalie Portman clones whose sole purpose in life is to worship them.

While I do tend to agree that sitting on a spaceship travelling for years from one place to another is likely to be boring after a while, as I see it the biggest benefit will not be gettig where you're going, but getting away from where you were. It's pretty hard for do-gooders to tell other people what to do if they're living in a self-contained habitat light years away in deep space.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[drooling-dog]

It's pretty hard for do-gooders to tell other people what to do if they're living in a self-contained habitat light years away in deep space.

Except... that habitat will have its own go-gooders and enforcers, and the rules will be vastly more restrictive than anything you see here. That's just a consequence of living with others in a closed space, and the absolutely vital requirement for extreme resource conservation. Someone's going to be on your case if you so much as whack off anywhere but in the water reclaimation port.

You may get away from where you were, but how are you going to get away from where you are when that turns out to be 100 times worse?

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[0123456]

Except... that habitat will have its own go-gooders and enforcers, and the rules will be vastly more restrictive than anything you see here.

Somehow I doubt the average nerd is going to load up a spaceship with clones of their mother. Oh, OK maybe you're right :).

That's just a consequence of living with others in a closed space, and the absolutely vital requirement for extreme resource conservation. Someone's going to be on your case if you so much as whack off anywhere but in the water reclaimation port.

You'd be mad to try travelling light years in something that fragile; you'd be almost certain to die due to some kind of failure during the decades required to get to another star. I'm thinking more like an O'Neill habitat than an Apollo capsule.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Locke2005]

Plus, on the moon or other planets, the view from the picture window pretty much never changes, so you wont miss it much.

Wanna know why we don't build more buildings underground on Earth? Because most areas have building codes that require a fire escape from every bedroom -- even if there are no flammable materials used in the structure! This requirement is easily satisfied with a window in an above ground structure, but would require an escape tunnel for every room if underground...

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Grishnakh]

I'd much rather live above ground, thank you very much. I'm pretty sure most people agree with me.

And why do you think that is? I'll tell you: the view sucks underground. In an above-ground house, you just put a window in, and you have a view of something outside besides dirt, even if it's just your neighbor's cookie-cutter house. Plus, if there's a fire, it's relatively easy to escape.

If you're on the Moon, what kind of view is there outside? Not much. I'm sure the endless gray dust and craters will get boring quickly. And if there's a fire, running outside isn't going to help you there.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Grishnakh]

Except... that habitat will have its own go-gooders and enforcers,

That's why the nerds need to band together and only allow other like-minded nerds on their ship, along with plenty of Natalie Portman sex-bot clones. When you form a closed society and keep out people with different ideas of utopia than you, and only associate with like-minded people, it becomes a lot easier to live in a society with other humans. This is the whole problem with "diversity": if you aren't picky about who you allow to be part of your society, you quickly get people whose culture or religion dictates that they force their morals on you, and when their morals are radically different from your own, the only recourse is war and extermination.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Risen888]

Different rules apply here. Different gravity, different atmospheric pressure (or lack thereof), different materials to actually dig through. Someone above in this thread laid out some of the engineering problems associated with building stuff on the moon, and they're right, that shit's not easy. But the actual digging seems like it should be the easiest part.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[sznupi]

Does it really change on Earth? Like, really? Apart from being nosy into what other people are doing, and predictable seasons & limited range of weather (both also on many other bodies)...what else is there to see?

And I believe people like to put flammable stuff in places where they live, too.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[khallow]

Guess what: The girls on the voyage to Proxima Centauri in 2300 aren't going to like you any more than the ones here and now, and you'll be hating them just as much for it. The stuff you'll do there every day will seem just as routine and mundane as your current boring life, and probably even more so. Everybody's favorite fantasy - the thing they'll yearn for every day of their lives - will be the legends they hear of life on our lush, gentle Earth, just as we're living it today.

Indeed. For example, the Apollo astronauts, to a man, complained about how dull and boring their trips to the Moon were.

And if something is routine and mundane, like colonizing other worlds, it's not worth doing. We've established that already, right?

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[sznupi]

I don't think it's safe to assume it will be easier. Different, yes; but not automatically easier.

Highly abrasive dust (not strictly about the drill, more about other important, more general parts of any machine), less support for heavy machinery, non-weathered formations, hidden chaches of rubble (after meteorides), troubles with getting rid of waste heat in heavy machinery; just possibilities from the top of my head.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo! If you like science fiction, consider reading this:

John Varley - Steel Beach

Health warning: don't read it if you feel depressed.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Dunbal]

I'd much rather live above ground, thank you very much.

      OK. But you would be dead in a few years thanks to cosmic and solar radiation. Unless you plan on building your buildings with several feet of lead/steel lining. I do not want to pay your launch costs however. All that stuff has to be shipped from earth.

      Yet still you see no benefit. Enjoy fantasyland.

Re:Underground a Benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are really bad at reading comprehension, aren't you? Maybe you should stop posting until you learn. You clearly didn't read anything that the OP said or you entirely failed to understand it.

Re:500 degrees F

[tresstatus]

Someone wanna translate this into units of measurement used by, oh I dunno, the entire rest of the world?

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=500+degrees+Farenheit+to+Celcius

Re:500 degrees F

[Anonymous Coward]

260 C

Re:500 degrees F

[toby34a]

Average temperature would be ~236 K (since it is stated -35 degrees F) in the moon craters, whereas the temperature swing would be ~278 K on the surface. Can't you divide by 1.8? And Celsius is just another arbitrary method akin to Fahrenheit, anyways, real men use Kelvin.

Re:500 degrees F

[Xphile101361]

I'm sure google could have taken care of this for you

Re:500 degrees F

[jadrian]

Before someone says it, we all know the FAQ and how slashdot is US centric, but this is in the Science section damn it.

Re:500 degrees F

[Tumbleweed]

Someone wanna translate this into units of measurement used by, oh I dunno, the entire rest of the world?

How about you convert the unit via the search engine used by oh, I dunno, the entire rest of the world? (except for China)

Or how about this - land a person on the Moon and return them safely, and we'll bitch about your using metric. Now go back to playing your vuvuzela and watching SOCCER.

Re:500 degrees F

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone wanna translate this into units of measurement used by, oh I dunno, the entire rest of the world?

Imagine ice that freezes at the temperature that our water boils. And then bring that to a boil. And then stick your face in the steam.

Re:500 degrees F

[Minwee]

Someone wanna translate this into units of measurement used by, oh I dunno, the entire rest of the world?

That's about 960 degrees R or 85 degrees N.

about 5 maxed out P4 cpu's

[Joe The Dragon]

about 5 maxed out P4 cpu's

Re:about 5 maxed out P4 cpu's

[natehoy]

How many burning libraries of Congress is that?

Re:about 5 maxed out P4 cpu's

[kylerowens]

If the Library of Congress is burning do you pour olympic swimming pools of hard drives on it till it goes out?

Re:500 degrees F

[sznupi]

Celsius is just another arbitrary method ... real men use Kelvin

Which doesn't stop the range of one unit in both scales to be equivalent...

Anyway, arbitrarity of the "important property of the most common molecule in the universe" kind isn't so bad.

For those of you watching in metric: -37C

[fantomas]

And for those of you from the few countries using the new-fangled* Celsius scale, that's a touch colder than -37C.

* (invented in 1742, current version from 1744)

Re:For those of you watching in metric: -37C

[sznupi]

Current version is from 2005.

Re:For those of you watching in metric: -37C

[fahrbot-bot]

• Leela: Fry, night lasts two weeks on the moon.
• Moon Farmer: Yep, drops down to minus-173.
• Fry: Celsius or Fahrenheit?
• Moon Farmer: First one, then the other.

Re:For those of you watching in metric: -37C

[samkass]

I would think computer scientists would dig Farenheight. On the scale, brine's (sea water) freezing point is 0, and fresh water's freezing point is 32 (2^5). Normal body temperature was 96 on the original scale, or 32+64, or 2^5 + 2^6. These reference points were easy to mark because you could bisect the markings repeatedly until you got down to an integer degree, since they could be easily expressed with powers of two. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out, because if brine freezes at zero the average human is 98.6, but it was a worthy base-two geek effort!

Re:For those of you watching in metric: -37C

[John Hasler]

> Normal body temperature was 96 on the original scale...

Fahrenheit's wife's armpit, actually.

Tubes

[Andrewkov]

Sounds great, as long as they don't, uh, collapse.

Re:Tubes

[Tekfactory]

Yeah, but seeing as you might want to park the Lunar rover, get out of you spacesuit, sleep, and maybe take a shower after a long day in the helium 3 mines. You might want to subdivide this big tube, pressurize it, wire it for internet, heating and cooling. Somewhere along the line you'll probably reinforce that structure, and when you do maybe you'll think about holding the roof up.

Also don't build in one of those low rent neighborhoods, find something classy by a big crater.

Re:Tubes

[Anonymous Coward]

uhg, now you sound like my wife.

Re:Tubes

[John Hasler]

Sounds great, as long as they don't, uh, collapse.

Right. After all, some of them are only a billion years old.

Re:Tubes

[Risen888]

Collapse? On the moon? Think it through.

i don't get it.

[underqualified]

we talk about colonizing and/or terraforming other planets when we can't even stop the ongoing negative changes happening to our own planet.

Re:i don't get it.

[hypergreatthing]

Where else can we practice living in a location that is devoid of and incapable of sustaining life? The moon of course! better start practicing now.

Re:i don't get it.

[Tekfactory]

You're right, screw the Configuration Manager and his fancy Test Environment...

Commit all changes to the Production Planet now.

Re:i don't get it.

[EnsilZah]

I don't get what you're trying to say.
Anyone who's talking about terraforming other planets is either a sci-fi writer or an academic writing a "If we someday had to do this, this is how we might do it" paper.
As for living in enclosed environments you can see several examples of that, most prominently the ISS as well as some underwater experiments and those biodome thingies.

If you're expressing some sort of sentiment about leaving the moon or mars dead and barren and pristine environments then I'm very much opposed and I'd rather see Mars become a giant landfill if that meant some bacteria got a chance for life if we didn't make it.

Re:i don't get it.

[Rhys]

The lack of an atmosphere, lack of gravity to sustain one, and lack of naturally occurring liquid water means the moon more or less totally lacks much of the negative changes we could induce by colonization. Air pollution doesn't do much for you when you don't have any air to pollute. There's no water cycle to carry waste where you don't want it. The outside environment (aka hard vacuum and or regolith) is already lethal/abrasive, good luck making it 'worse' by polluting it.

About all you'll get is the 'despoiling the view' -- but you have to do that directly by messing with the lunar landscape and soil. It isn't like you're cutting down thousands of trees in order to rip off the top of a mountain for the coal beneath. You can still do it, but it involves a lot more effort. (you actually have to do something to those how-many square kilometers?)

Re:i don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where else can we practice living in a location that is devoid of and incapable of sustaining life?

New Jersey?

Re:i don't get it.

[clarkkent09]

we talk about colonizing and/or terraforming other planets when we can't even stop the ongoing negative changes happening to our own planet.

If we really can't stop ongoing negative changes happening to our planet then that sounds like a pretty good reason to talk about colonizing and/or terraforming other planets.

Re:i don't get it.

[sznupi]

The issue here is that we do commit changes to the Production Planet constantly.

Re:i don't get it.

[SleazyRidr]

Only because we don't have a test planet.

Re:i don't get it.

[sznupi]

...which wouldn't be exactly near to the production planet anyway.

Re:i don't get it.

[sznupi]

Much easier - mirrors redirecting sunlight / playing with interference here and there in the optical chain; for quite a large part of lunar cycle, the Moon could be one gigantic display. Imagine the possib...uhm, ok, I'm not giving them any more ideas.

Re:i don't get it.

[sznupi]

When choosing between very slight changes & whole industrial / technological base at our disposal vs. monumental changes & barely anything to support them - that seems like a pretty good case of first trying to get our act together with the former scenario.

Re:i don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, that C02 is essential for the initial stages of terraforming - To get temperatures up, so then you can stick planty things there to make oxygen using the C02, then you have also the H20 being produced... add humans and simmer.

So maybe we were onto something....

Re:i don't get it.

[khallow]

we talk about colonizing and/or terraforming other planets when we can't even stop the ongoing negative changes happening to our own planet.

I don't think it's a question of capability but rather of desire. We don't want to stop the ongoing "negative" changes to Earth because we're developing a remarkable civilization which has those changes as a consequence. Also it's worth noting here that Earth regularly changes its climates. Why should we attempt to fix Earth's climate at a particular point? Is that really the best we can do?

Re:i don't get it.

[sznupi]

It would be at least interesting to keep the Mars pristine, for some time anyway - there's plenty left to learn about it, also about its possible past or perhaps even present life.

And considering that even in our system there's more than half a dozen candidates for life, and the number of stars & galaxies...I don't think the Universe & life would even notice the difference from such landfill.

Re:i don't get it.

[lennier]

But we don't have any test planets anywhere. We have some empty chunks of rock and gas in the Solar System which we would need to populate with self-contained domed cities before we could even begin doing any kind of 'test'.

Which, if we really wanted, we could build here on Earth for a lot cheaper.

Re:i don't get it.

[evilviper]

we can't even stop the ongoing negative changes happening to our own planet

What are YOU personally doing that is going to substantially combat these negative changes to our planet?

Nothing?

Well then, I guess you're free to do something else, huh?

On the one hand, there's sitting on your ass complaining. On the other, teraform other planets. Tough decision...

In neither case do you make "our current planet" any better or worse.

I thought whalers settled the moon?

[2names]

Nope, it was a Bob Marley solo gig. Sorry.

Re:500 degrees F

[vlm]

Just pick any ole unit. It doesn't matter at a high enough temperature, to a low enough level of accuracy.

Its interesting that all temperature units are "about the same magnitude". In comparison to length units of meters vs lightyears. Or energy, like calories to BTUs to electron-volts, all of which need serious scientific notation to convert.

Oddly enough Joules are within a factor of about four of calories, just odd luck or what? Sidereal seconds being close to "regular seconds" is kind of numerological cheating. Other than those two, I struggle to find units of measurement that are as close to each other as temperature units are.

First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[sznupi]

It all boils down to a system of tubes?

Re:First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

It's tubes all the way down.

Re:First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[GrumblyStuff]

Also sex.

Re:First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[HeckRuler]

no, the system of tubes boils up.

Re:First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

The tubes go deeper than that, son.
Our blood, nerves and respiratory system.
Each of us. It's tubes all the way.

Re:First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

Tubes and pipes... check.
Low gravity allowing impressive jumps... check.

I think I know where Super Mario came from. Not sure about the turtles.

Re:First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[sznupi]

Well...turtles were the most notable of first large biological beings which travelled beyond LEO, around the Moon, and returned safely.

Officially. Who knows what might have become of the turtles that "didn't make it"...

Don't forget about Meatloaf

[Anonymous Coward]

Please people don't forget about Meatloaf's contributions to space travel. As well as his contributions to the Linux scheduler, he is a key contributor to many software projects used by NASA. Say what you want about his music, but he is a leading light in the world of Computer Science.

Opportunity for Slashdotters

[PPH]

Space colonists will be selected from a population conditioned to survive underground for extended periods.

Their parents' basement.

Re:Opportunity for Slashdotters

[sznupi]

Also...don't forget about the ratio of ten women to each man. Which would, regrettably, necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious...service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Leia: The cave is collapsing.

[circletimessquare]

Solo: This is no cave.

Re:Leia: The cave is collapsing.

[lennier]

It's a space... .... giant eel thing?

The Emperor has gone too far this time.

Re:500 degrees F

[MillionthMonkey]

It's hot enough to cook your Thanksgiving turkey in an hour, although you should leave the oven door closed after turning off the heat.

Re:"We'll just take refuge in this old lava tube..

[wickedskaman]

I suppose that's better than No Eye Contact Vin Diesel.

Recommended reading

[ozziegt]

I would highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. It's great science fiction and he piles on the science. In his novels some colonists actually live in lava tubes on Mars. I never get tired of reading those 3 books.

Re:Recommended reading

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking for something along the lines of your comment.

If memory serves, he has one of the initial colonies set up in a lava tube (the next generation colonies then being tented craters).

Of course, the distinction only becomes important once the Corporations-Mars war of independence starts, and it's discovered that maybe defenseless tent cities were a bit too utopian...

Re:Recommended reading

[Anonymous Coward]

I would highly recommend stopping after the first book of aforementioned trilogy.

Re:Recommended reading

[Nethead]

I read all the books, good stuff. I just got really, really tired of the word "escarpment."

Re:Recommended reading

[drinkypoo]

I get a little tired of reading books 2 and 3, but this is what I thought of too. Why is it that the more we learn about Mars, the more real life looks like those books? Perhaps it's because at least the first one is some fantastically hard sci-fi.

Re:Recommended reading

[Cyclloid]

Red Mars(1st book) was great. In fact the psychologist talks about at least 2 different 2-axis grids that relate psychological state/emotion that I have plans on using for a chat bot.

I stopped mid way through the second book Green(?Blue?) Mars. I think it had to do with the book following a character(s) whose story didn't interest me.

The third book I can't comment on being that I haven't read it.

Lots of interesting topics/ideas:
Mars original environment preservation VS. immigration (Mar's natural habitat VS. development/progress/technology)
Longevity treatments for population of: under populated Mars VS. overpopulated Earth
Various habitats: tents, lava tunnels, asteroid/moon, ice
Technologies: automations, ultra-light flight vehicle, rock cars, space elevator

That being said I think I might try to start over and read the whole trilogy.

Re:Recommended reading

[Risen888]

Indeed, the first colony on Martian soil in those excellent, excellent books is in just such a lava tube. However, the actual first settlement is on one of the moons (it's the one inhabited initially by Arkady and the anarchists and first serves as a port before becoming the terminus of the first Martian space elevator. I think there's lessons all over that.

God damn, I'm gonna go start reading those again tonight.

Re:500 degrees F

[EnsilZah]

A moderate amount more than the temperature at which paper burns.

Ready to occupy

[Wylfing]

a fairly constant -35 degrees

So basically people from Minnesota could just move there.

Re:Ready to occupy

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Buffalo. That's shorts weather for us.

Re:Ready to occupy

[Locke2005]

So basically people from Minnesota could just move there.

As long as their is ice fishin', yah... we need a chance to git away from our wives for a bit.

Re:Ready to occupy

[JeanBaptiste]

kinda warm, but I suppose we could go

Re:Ready to occupy

[sznupi]

Actually, depending on how the structures of the base will be set up (for a long time probably just modules placed in a cave) - you will have to deal primarily with overheating / getting rid of waste heat. That's not so easy with surrounding (mostly) vacuum, convection doesn't work.

Re:Ready to occupy

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, depending on how the structures of the base will be set up (for a long time probably just modules placed in a cave) - you will have to deal primarily with overheating / getting rid of waste heat. That's not so easy with surrounding (mostly) vacuum, convection doesn't work.

However even on airless planetary bodies thermal conduction still works fine... I.E. you are in a tunnel already, so go further away from the surface and bore a some heat sinks a few meters into the wall and use fairly conventional liquid-based heat exchange technology to remove excessive heat.

Re:Ready to occupy

[sznupi]

Sure; still not so easy / makes the thing harder. And depends greatly on the state of your heatsink, so "still works fine" might be too strong way of saying it; especially if you consider that big part of ground on Earth working as a nice heatsink is...quite large quantities of liquid water in it.

Moon dirt = 'ground'?

[Visual Echo]

So soil on the moon is also called 'ground'? How boring.

Re:500 degrees F

[epp_b]

Celsius is not arbitrary. It's based on the chemical properties of a very common natural substance; namely, water. Water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C. Both very tidy and round numbers based on the most abundant substance on Earth... makes sense to me.

I'm not saying that using Kelvin as measurement of temperature is any better or worse, only that Celsius is not arbitrary.

Re:500 degrees F

[John Hasler]

Anyway, arbitrarity of the "important property of the most common molecule in the universe" kind isn't so bad.

What important property of H2 does the Celsius scale relate to?

Re:500 degrees F

[Anonymous Coward]

An important property when measured at one specific point, which just happens to be where humans live. So it is no more or less arbitrary than 'dangerously cold to humans to dangerously hot to humans'.

Re:500 degrees F

[nautsch]

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=500+degrees+Fahrenheit+to+Celsius

Fixed it for you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What sci-fi are you reading

[Voline]

"the sci-fi notion of underground space cities could become a reality."

Because the stuff I've read clearly calls for moon settlements to have transparent glass domes.

Re:What sci-fi are you reading

[confused one]

transparent glass domes don't do well when meteorites hit them. With no atmosphere there will be regularly occuring meteorites.

Re:What sci-fi are you reading

[Max Romantschuk]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

Highly recommended.

Re:500 degrees F

[sznupi]

Triple point of water is exclusive to where humans live?...

Re:500 degrees F

[John Hasler]

> Celsius is not arbitrary.

Neither is Fahrenheit.

> Water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C.

More or less, depending on composition and pressure.

> I'm not saying that using Kelvin as measurement of temperature is any
> better or worse,

Kelvin is based on absolute zero and the triple point of water of a specific composition.

damn provincials...

[Thud457]

that's only correct at one Earth atmospheric pressure, hoo-man!

Re:500 degrees F

[sznupi]

Sorry, I meant compound (far from native EN speaker, many terms aren't immediately intuitive)

Well, duh

[AdamWill]

"Thirdly, the sci-fi notion of underground space cities could become a reality.""

Well, duh. Shockingly enough, many 'sci-fi' writers are fairly smart people who know what they're talking about. Underground space cities aren't usually ideas authors just pulled out of their asses because they though it'd be cool. Mostly they show up because the authors sat down and thought 'hmm, well, if there was _really_ a settlement on a rock with no atmosphere and very little gravity and we wanted to deal with the problems of extreme temperature variations and exposure to radiation and so forth, I wonder what would be a good idea...oh, hey, underground cities!"

It tends to bug me when stories like this get written from a viewpoint (often subconscious) of 'hey, those crazy science fiction writers thought about this fifty years ago, but now someone with letters behind their name wrote about it in a Serious Publication, that makes the thought Real!'

Re:Well, duh

[confused one]

People forget that a lot of the sci-fi writers were scientists and engineers.

Re:Well, duh

[DerekLyons]

Well, duh. Shockingly enough, many 'sci-fi' writers are fairly smart people who know what they're talking about.

Umm... no. Most 'sci-fi' writers are of around average intelligence who recycle materials, ideas, and memes that other people have created.
 

Underground space cities aren't usually ideas authors just pulled out of their asses because they though it'd be cool.

Maybe, maybe not, but plenty of other things in SF are. (Personal jetpacks, FTL, 'atomic rockets', etc... etc...)
 

It tends to bug me when stories like this get written from a viewpoint (often subconscious) of 'hey, those crazy science fiction writers thought about this fifty years ago, but now someone with letters behind their name wrote about it in a Serious Publication, that makes the thought Real!'

Serioualy, most SF writes just Make Shit Up when they aren't cribbing from someone else's notes. Very few SF writers have the background to make any kind of credible analysis. Which is why it's interesting when someone who actually *does* have the credentials examines the idea and actually finds it plausible.

Re:Well, duh

[Your.Master]

Well, duh. Shockingly enough, many 'sci-fi' writers are fairly smart people who know what they're talking about.

Umm... no. Most 'sci-fi' writers are of around average intelligence who recycle materials, ideas, and memes that other people have created.

These statements aren't actually in conflict.

Serioualy, most SF writes just Make Shit Up when they aren't cribbing from someone else's notes.

If they crib from somebody else's notes who got it right, then they'll get that aspect right-by-proxy.

Re:Well, duh

[Risen888]

Most 'sci-fi' writers are of around average intelligence who recycle materials, ideas, and memes that other people have created.

Sure. Just like engineers.

(Personal jetpacks, FTL, 'atomic rockets', etc... etc...)

Nothing stopping us from having personal jetpacks today except that they'd be hellishly expensive. FTL, at least in modern SF, is most often used as a plot driver than a serious scientific proposal. (You can't have a galaxy-spanning story arc without it). I am not familiar with "atomic rockets."

Very few SF writers have the background to make any kind of credible analysis.

I'm really starting to think you're just a troll. This is patently untrue. Asimov wrote more non-fiction science than he did fiction and many of them are considered seminal works in their fields. Arthur C. Clarke had a physics degree and made a serious proposal for a worldwide satellite communications network in the '40s. I don't have time to sit on Wikipedia all night and do this, but you're just stupid and wrong.

Re:Well, duh

[Grishnakh]

I think you're confusing good sci-fi authors like Arthur C. Clarke with shitty hacks like L. Ron Hubbard.

When the parent said "many", he meant the good ones that people still read even though their books are several decades old.

Re:Well, duh

[DerekLyons]

If it weren't for the fact that that's not 'many' means, you'd have point.

Re:Well, duh

[DerekLyons]

Very few SF writers have the background to make any kind of credible analysis.

I'm really starting to think you're just a troll. This is patently untrue. Asimov wrote more non-fiction science than he did fiction and many of them are considered seminal works in their fields. Arthur C. Clarke had a physics degree and made a serious proposal for a worldwide satellite communications network in the '40s. I don't have time to sit on Wikipedia all night and do this, but you're just stupid and wrong.

Well, when you get time to actually get familiar with the field of SF, you'll find I'm not wrong. (Hint: Naming the background of two of the most famous out of thousands of authors across decades doesn't make you look smart - it makes you look like an idiot. Extrapolating from just those two makes you look like an idiot whose undergone a lobotomy.)

Re:Well, duh

[cjameshuff]

'many' does not imply a majority. The original poster was quite correct, many SF authors are in fact physicists, engineers, or others who are or have been active in those or related fields, and who actually do some research and analysis. Just offhand, there's Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Forward...

Re:500 degrees F

[confused one]

Kelvin? pshaw. Real Men use Rankine!

Re:500 degrees F

[gyrogeerloose]

Someone wanna translate this into units of measurement used by, oh I dunno, the entire rest of the world?

Almost as hot as El Centro, California in July.

Re:500 degrees F

[icebraining]

The third point, 96 degrees, was the level of the liquid in the thermometer when held in the mouth or under the armpit of his wife.

I think his wife's armpit is slightly colder nowadays.

Deja Vu

[StikyPad]

Astronaut 1 stamps her foot on the floor of the cave.

Astronaut 1: This ground sure feels strange. It doesn't feel like rock at all.

Astronaut 2 kneels and studies the ground, then attempts to study the outline
of the cave.

Astronaut 2: There's an awful lot of moisture in here.

Astronaut 1: I don't know. I have a bad feeling about this.

Re:500 degrees F

[PGOER]

You might be a real man using Kelvin, but real, true blooded, backwards thinking, inbred, semi-educated, Americans use Rankine.

What about moonquakes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without oceans, quakes on the moon last a very long time. How will these shelters be protected from the shaking?

Re:What about moonquakes?

[Grishnakh]

That shouldn't be very hard, since according to Wikipedia, moonquakes are much smaller in magnitude than Earthquakes. Remember, the Moon doesn't have continental plates.

Obligatory Heinlein comment

[michael_cain]

In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, both Luna City and Tyco Under include volcanic bubbles as part of their original "cubic". Perhaps not as realistic as lava tubes, but they work better as story elements than tubes would have.

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, you are just trying to take credit for the solution that George W. Bush's team had on this issue.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[sexconker]

Whoever modded this down is a liar, thief, and RACIST.

Hey! I'm a racist, you insensitive clod!

Either that or a lying thief!

Excavation can be very fast and very inexpensive

[perpenso]

Excavation is expensive. No, scratch that, excavation is fucking expensive.

It doesn't have to be. ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)

That's no moon

[CranberryKing]

It's a space station.

Mars however is an actual planet but with many underground cities.

Hi, I'm Tim James.

[MillionthMonkey]

Hi, I'm Tim James.
Some people are talking about going to Mars, a dark-colored planet. If I'm governor, we're going to Venus. This is Alabama. We build cities on white planets here. If you want to live there, learn it.
Venus has just the kind of environment Alabaman Republicans want. Maybe it's just the businessman in me, but we'll save money on heating. It just makes sense to me.... does it to you?

Collapsed?!?!?

[drdanny_orig]

If all we find are collapsed ones, what makes them think the uncollapsed ones are safe?

Re:500 degrees F

[Anonymous Coward]

Half of Crematoria? Which is close enough for me to want to stay underground...

Geoheating

[Firethorn]

How will this be done? Probably nuclear fission and high capacity breeder reactors. Because they can't be water cooled, they will have to be designed from the ground up to be able to use as much heat as possible for energy, and radiate either into the ground, or into space any energy that it can't use.

Well, you'd still probably have to ship quite a bit of water to use in the primary cooling/turbine generation systems, but I think 'radiate into the ground' is an excellent suggestion when average temperature at the sites they're proposing for the moon sits at -35.

I live up in ND, and it only fairly rarely gets that cold in the wintertime. 12" of sprayed foam insulation would help for both atmospheric containment and temperature shielding, but you're still going to lose a lot of heat, especially if the size of the base ends up being as big as I'd think it would.

OTOH, 500F temperature swing would give you very good levels of heat-extraction, nearly that of nuclear reactors. With a difference between -173C(280F) and 242F(117C), water might not be the best choice. Boiling water reactors heat up to around 285C(550F). I might actually use Ethanol instead- freezes below -114C(-174F), boils at 78C(173F).

You'd need some mega-engineering to make effective use of it though, I think.

Still, might be an idea - Nuclear for life support/critical functions, solar for industry/not time critical requirements/backup.

Progress

[Headw1nd]

After all our advances in technology and thousands of years of hard work towards our dreams, we finally cross the gulfs of space to settle upon our new homes; and end up back where we started, living in caves.

overthinking

[Spy Handler]

Some tubes may be filled with frozen lava

Otherwise known as rock

Re:500 degrees F

[Shotgun]

So, you're saying that it is 1.1 Library of Congresses hot?

Re:500 degrees F

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway, arbitrarity of the "important property of the most common molecule in the universe at an equally arbitrary pressure" kind isn't so bad.

FTFY

Re:500 degrees F

[sznupi]

Eh, another one...

Triple point of water doesn't depend on arbitrary pressure (yes, compound not molecule; I missed it / not all EN terms can be readily intuitive to non-native speakers)

Alcatraz II on the moon - Congress will fund it!

[DigiShaman]

So you want your underground Moon colony, but having a hard time getting funding for the project? No problem. Just spin to them as an ultra secure penal facility.

The politicians can now say the public is safe because the prisoners have no way of getting back home. The prison industry will love it. All that extra cash flow and stuff. The scientific community at large will now have a reason to turn a blind eye. And if they die in the vacuum of space, no one will care.

When you send mankind into space, expect all of it's demons that make up Humanity to follow right behind.

Written with a straight face?

[DynaSoar]

"...ready-made underground bunkers could provide ideal shelter..."

said ideal shelters detected by collapsed roofs.

Exogeologist: "Look at that collapsed cave! We could live in there."
Pilot: "Sure, you go in first perfesser."

This beats the astronauts' old "built by the lowest bidder" grumbles all to hell.

Unless you're Al Gore

[dgbrownnt]

Beware of the mighty Moon Worm...

Re:500 degrees F

[sznupi]

At many really meaningful scale, they're all pretty much the same. Scales of the Universe on one hand, granurality of spacetime on the other; temperatures of Big Bang vs. "usual" ones, pretty close to heat death already.

Remember Arthur C Clarke...

[owlseeker]

Remembering Arthur C Clarke's - A fall of moondust - and given that the dust of the moon has very unusual properties (as not worn round due to erosion), could be quite an engineering challenge

Re:500 degrees F

[MrTree]

http://xkcd.com/526/

H.G. Wells

[sciencewhiz]

Once again, H.G. Wells was right, with The First Men in the Moon.

That's a big Twinkie.

[Picass0]

TSIA GFY

>>I hate acronym abuse. Why can't people just speak fucking English? I mean, not even Google can decipher this post! Technology Services Industry Association? Twinkies? What the fuck are you waffling about?

Sheesh!