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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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).

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to your other parent?

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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: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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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]

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.

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?

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.

First Internet, now Moon and Mars

[sznupi]

It all boils down to a system of tubes?

Opportunity for Slashdotters

[PPH]

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

Their parents' basement.

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:"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: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.

Ready to occupy

[Wylfing]

a fairly constant -35 degrees

So basically people from Minnesota could just move there.

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.

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!'

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

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.