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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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!

"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.

about 5 maxed out P4 cpu's

[Joe The Dragon]

about 5 maxed out P4 cpu's

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.

[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.

Ready to occupy

[Wylfing]

a fairly constant -35 degrees

So basically people from Minnesota could just move there.