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We Need To Build Industrial Zones In Space In Order To Save Earth, Says Jeff Bezos (cnbc.com)
Onstage at the Code Conference, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that we have to start bringing parts of the industrial economy to space in order to "save Earth." Bezos also said that we must protect our planet, adding that we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth." From the report: Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn't be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years. "Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet," Bezos added. "Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn't be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space." Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said. "We don't have to actually build them here," he said. "The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. ... The problem with other planets ... people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it's cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space."
Raw materials.
You've just increased their costs hundred-fold, even if manufacturing were "free", power were "free" and delivery back to Earth comes free courtesy of gravity.
It's costs millions to put a few hundred kilos into orbit. Let alone getting it somewhere useful. And capturing, refining and using material already in space is basically 100% unproven at the moment - we've literally never done it and have no idea of the associated costs.
His ignorance of how solar works is pretty apparent from what he's saying. The flux of photons in space is about 1/3 more than than on earth (1366W/sq. meter in space vs 1000W/sq. meter on earth). Woopee. So you'd be willing to build factories and solar farms IN SPACE to get slightly more power? Nevermind that it will be thousands of times more expensive to put them in space; the radiation in space quickly renders all but the most expensive solar options non-functional in less than a year. This is a very stupid idea.
We could grease up his head and point it back at Earth.
Economics: Population growth is tied to scarcity. New technology reduces scarcity--when you scale up, you eventually stop adding 10% more human labor time (wages!) for 10% more e.g. food, and start adding 20% for 10% growth, and stuff gets expensive, and we lose the capacity to produce everything to scale with population--and that means population can grow without experiencing downward pressure. Freezing population growth would play all kinds of hell on the monetary system, and isn't a viable option for *many* reasons; it's also an economic behavior tied to technology.
Energy argument: Solar energy in space still would require massive collectors; the cost and scale of labor to put them up there, assemble them, maintain them, and operate them would be huge, incurring immense costs. It's really easy to pipe billions of barrels of oil into a building and burn them; it's really hard to collect that much sunlight. This argument holds true mostly for large-scale, high-consumption factories: a steel mill in space won't have any notable output capacity unless it's stationed on a dyson sphere with power cables run to it.
This guy doesn't realize he's talking about hundreds of megawatts here, entire power stations for single factories.
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I mean that seriously. What is the problem? We don't need an every increasing population. No matter what we do, in a long enough time scale population becomes a problem. Not to mention, everyone does not need to breed. I know there are some difficult questions to answer but just dismissing population control out of hand seems like the wrong answer.
>> we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth.
We're already at a point where the more educated/affluent you are, the fewer kids you have. Why is the converse so bad?
we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth."
We don't?
Because I sure as hell do. When I was born, human population was almost exactly 3 billion. Now it is 7.2 billion... no, wait, that's wrong already. Last time I looked was months ago. 7.4 billion now, per wikipedia.
Too many humans IS the main problem. Even if you address the energy problems, what about all the other problems caused by human over-population?
While I am generally in favor of establishing an orbital industrial base, the mention of orbiting "heavy industry" seems a bit strange. The high cost of lifting material into orbit, even with reduced-cost reusable boosters, would seem to rule out any industry where the term "heavy" equates to "raw materials that weigh a lot."
Don't expect to see, say, metals refining or glassmaking in orbit until we can access the asteroid belt's raw materials; we're far more likely to see industries with a high value-to-mass ratio, like semiconductor fabrication (which the article does mention), that can take best advantage of really hard vacuum, near-total lack of particulate contamination, and the ability to create extremely vibration-free environments. For my money, semiconductor fabrication is probably the killer app for space-based industrialization.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Now, replaced by rare Moonies and Marses. Space ships transporting space chips, gamma roasted and ready to enjoy!
"You don't want to live in a retrograde world where we have to freeze population growth."
Does he have any concept that the planet is effectively a closed system? He just expects the population to continue to grow unchecked?
The flux of photons in space is about 1/3 more than than on earth (1366W/sq. meter in space vs 1000W/sq. meter on earth).
Not at night which, to be fair, was his point.
I can't begin to understand why someone would seriously suggest something so ridiculous. After we have a fully working space tether, sure. Before that, absolutely not.
-SR
What I wonder about the whole idea is delivery. Sure, manufacturing would solve some problems, but how do you even GET the materials up there? The heat/emissions used to get materials there on a daily basis would far far be worse then the emissions of terrestrial manufacturing.
Not to mention how would they deliver the finished product? Chuck it out the window and let it fall? ... If that's the general idea, I have a list of people that I don't like that they could aim for on the landing...
that's yesterday news.
now everyone hyper focus on the UCLA shooting!!! We must then point out every political correct occurrence of the shooting?
Was he wearing a bow tie?
Yet another "visionary" jealous of Musk's spotlight.
... who always followed the mantra that growing a business is more important than making it profitable. So in his world, there cannot possibly be limits of growth just because earth has limited surface/resources, and just because bringing things into space is extremely expensive (and usually costs more energy than that thing could harvest in space).
To any reasonable person, of course, his opinion is total bullshit.
Don't chip factories use a lot of water?
Won't that be just a tad expensive to launch a million gallons of water for your factory? I don't think even Apple can $5000 phones.
Make sure to build plenty of Railgun Turrets, Repair Platforms, Fighter Bays, and a Star Base. Also leave some Dreadnoughts at home for Defense. What would SoaSE do?
... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet," ...
Yes, because smelting steel in zero-gravity will be lots of fun and can be powered 100% with solar. Not to mention the easy access to all the raw materials in Earth orbit.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Actually I was more intrigued by his suggestion that we should never freeze population growth. I'm not quite sure how he plans to do this with his plan. We might be able to increase the sustainable population limit using resources from space, although apart from the cost I doubt all the rocket launches required will hep the planet much. However that is just putting off the inevitable. Unless we figure out the technology required to get people off the planet and settle elsewhere we are going to hit a population limit at some point and likely in the not too distant future with or without space resources.
It never occurred to you just exactly why there's a huge commercial race now to dramatically lower the cost per lb of getting things into orbit?
Or the fact that space is LITERALLY littered with raw materials.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Keep feeding it, Bezos, Musk, Kurzweil, et al. 'cuz the world is childish enough to keep believing it.
Oh, and predict me an all electric 1 ton pickup, K? 'Cuz I want one.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
In the 1960s rockets landing on their tail and being reused was science fiction, unproven, and its associated costs unknown. 50 years later its doable and its costs known and its the less expensive tech.
... We already know how to mine the water and do quite useful stuff with it (drinking, breathing O2, H2+O2 for fuel, ...). Other simple and available organic compounds also have quite well known processes and uses.
Bezos specified he's talking about a hundred or more years in the future. In fifty years we went from aircraft that were little more than wooden/canvas structures with engines to landing on the moon. We are already landing on asteroids, already doing long range commercial analysis,
The missing pieces are largely matters of engineering not scientific understanding, and the engineering often not far removed from today's capabilities. And the economics of it all is largely a matter of scale. Apollo 11 bringing back a bag of rocks is like building Intel's i7 CPU fab and only building 100 CPUs. Those CPUs are awfully damn expensive. Now start doing things at scale and quantity as Bezos is talking about. And also as Bezos discusses, be sure to factor in the external costs of that earth bound manufacturing, particular health and environmental costs when your make comparisons, not simply the cost of the goods sold.
Some of you are concentrating on the lack of resources necessary for heavy industry. That's not really the problem. There are a ton of resources in space - lots of them in asteroid belts that are not in a gravity well, it's the lack of people that's a problem.
Even assuming we built a robot factory up there to build more robots to run the heavy industry, we would need so many people that commuting costs becomes cost prohibitive.
The only way it works is if the people live in space, then we end up with families moving to space for the jobs, and it's not 'moving the heavy industry', it's moving the population.
Now, there is one thing we COULD build in space and send back to earth - without a massive human population - and that's solar power. Which would have the real danger of global warming on a scale never before seen.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
By the time you ship a batch of processors from Mars, it will be outdated by the time it gets to Earth :-)
that would never have been if their creators had listened to all of the armchair inventors on /.
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means.
People criticize the colonization of Mars as unrealistic, but most of those plans involve making things destined for Martian consumption on Mars itself and using martian materials. Say what you will about Mars, but it's a whole planet. There's always building materials within easy reach, if you're not too picky about their specific composition
But as others have noted, Bezos's plan pretty much presupposes that every raw material that goes into every orbital factory has had a rocket strapped to it at some point, to bring it either from the surface of the Earth or from somewhere else in the solar system. That's got to be a hell of a freight charge.
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things. It's called talking out of your ass. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. The right thing to do is just to ignore it, even when a billionaire does it.
Here cometh the dyson ring
Picture that...
Someone tell him about the gravity well.
So, Amazon will move from drone delivery to lobbing your packages down from orbit. "Package vaporized in re-entry" will be added to the refund options.
Manufacturing most plastics requires petroleum. You can't get that from an asteroid, it has to be lifted off the ground.
You can manufacture plastic from carboniferous material; it doesn't have to be petroleum.
You could get raw materials to make plastic from carbonaceous chondrites, I expect, if plastic is indeed high on the list of materials you need to make.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We do have a habit of ruining the Earth's ecosystem in order to get access to raw minerals, so in this regard, Mr. Bezos is correct. However, it should be noted that we are already destroying the ecosystem with our chemical fuel power sources and discarded products. If we really want to save the Earth, we should 1) focus on moving away from chemical power sources to electromagnetic power sources and 2) reprocessing and recycling 100% of things that have been discarded (including sewage).
If we manage these two things, the Earth will have been mostly saved and we can shift more focus toward geoengineering and external mineral sources. That is how the Earth could be saved.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...except for the energy you're expending to get all your equipment and raw materials into orbit.
Of course, we could, someday, harvest most of our raw materials from comets and asteroids. Sure, I'd love to see this in my lifetime. I'm not optimistic, though.
if we want to save the planet earth, more scientists, less billionaires.
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means....
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things.
Measured:
4. deliberate and restrained; careful: measured language; measured terms.
This reminds me of an old SNL skit. Johnny Canal.
Proverbs 21:19
What is with these business guys (who got lucky a handful of times) thinking they have some special superpower or something? You (Bezos) built a glorified online Wal-Mart. WOW, good for you buddy. Stop fucking trying to "save the world" and FUCK THE HELL OFF. You're no more special or no more able than anybody else.
This is all just negotiating with death. "Let's move industry off-world!" instead of just coming to terms with the fact that we've hit the ceiling of the benefits of a consumer economy.
We're so consumed with the idea that we need higher and higher standards of living that we've lost sight of the whole purpose of a "standard" of living.
The only ones who would benefit from moving industry off-world are billionaires like Bezos and his .01% buddies. Fuck him and his breakaway civilization.
You are welcome on my lawn.
My first reaction was that this was ridiculous, but on second thought the concept itself is not actually all that wrong. It simply relies on a very specific barrier that has not been overcome yet: Gravity. Industrial endeavors of any kind are all very heavy, and current launch methods are all horribly inefficient (the best currently is the Ariane 5 at a little under 39% payload/vehicle weight, but it's still more or less a one-use/disposable vehicle). So for industry of any scale the cost of actually getting the necessary equipment far outweighs, massively outweighs, dare I say it, even ASTRONOMICALLY outweighs any savings you'd have from doing the work in space with a Zero-G environment and 24-hour solar power available (both very real but not immense savings). There is a reason that the International Space Station is the single most expensive object ever created by mankind (at $157 billion it comes in at more than 6 times the cost of the #2 object, the Itaipu Dam).
That being said, if we can manage to get a cheap method of reacting orbit, the primary barrier would be circumvented and it would make all kinds of sense to migrate such things to orbit. As the OP suggested, energy is abundant (both from solar sources and from various theoretical designs of orbital tethers tapping electrostatic energy in the atmosphere or electrodynamic magnetic harvesting. At that point the Zero-G environment would make large scale industrial and manufacturing endeavors much easier, especially if you can accept the idea that by that time the bulk of the raw materials would be harvested from non-terrestrial sources like asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.
Currently the most promising concept on tap seems to be the Orbital Space Elevator. We have basically all the fundamental technologies required with the advent of Carbon Nanotubes (as opposed to more theoretical solutions involving gravity manipulation, for example). It has come down largely to a manufacturing challenge of creating the 22 mile cable required, when currently nothing longer than about one meter has been achieved.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Earth has become a very small and limited place. Space is full of raw materials and energy, limitless amounts of them. It's definitely the new frontier and going to other places when the place they were was used up and overpopulated is exactly what people did since millions of years and what caused our species to spread over all the planet. Everyone who thinks that we will be limited to this rock just has no idea.
Look at this if you have a few minutes: http://www.bradshawfoundation....
Sure, you just place an order to the Mars division of McMaster-Carr and there you go... you virgin.
encircled by brown-nosers.
Because apparently they're just the same as white people.
Anybody care to provide any evidence of this?
I was about to come here to disagree with Bezos, partly about his arguing with the caricature of Musk's position strawmanned by the press. ...but you all have a huge misconception that must be addressed:
1) Getting to space need not be ridiculously expensive, and no, I'm not talking about a tether.
Reusable rockets running on methane (or hydrogen) and oxygen can be quite efficient. Natural gas happens to be the cheapest form of energy on the planet right now, but we can also synthesize it using electricity. And rockets are actually much more efficient than we give them credit for. It principle, with reusable rockets (and perhaps launch assist for the initial portion), we can get the price to orbit down to $10/kg. Perhaps about the same as the cost to fly around the world. We may not get there for a while, but there IS NO PHYSICAL REASON why cost can't get this low. This seems outrageous now because we throw the whole rocket away each time and so it appears unyieldingly expensive at 3 orders of magnitude higher ($10,000/kg), but Bezos' whole business in spaceflight is to pursue this reusable technology. Mastering reuse (which includes using appropriate materials for the conditions in question and developing appropriate automation) really could reduce cost that much.
2) You can get iron-nickel alloys in space that are already pre-refined.
3) Putting a Gigawatt solar array in space /someday/(when prices are lower) is not insane, even if it is today. The energy it generates will exceed the energy needed to launch it in a few days or weeks if properly designed.
I actually disagree with Bezos to some extent. But let's have the conversion start with some facts.
...because all the materials to be sent out into space will be shipped via Amazon Prime. So you know, just $99 a year.
Translation: We broke Earth, so let's move on to screw up the rest of the universe.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually population growth freezes itself when you educate people. Look at Japan. Low immigration and low birthrate has lead to population decline.
Education is not the reason why Japan is experiencing a population growth freeze. Japanese means of production are incredibly female-unfriendly (I've been in Japan, I've seen it.) A woman gets the choice of either work or have babies. There is little infrastructure or services for affordable child care. Even with maternity leave, the system makes it impossible and costly for a married woman to go back to work.
This is very unlike other developed countries.
And what you seen then is that pretty much half of the work force in on the bench, with families supported by one source of income. Since child care is so expensive, the end result was inevitable: marry later, and wait into your late 30s to have one child (because, even though the majority of couples want to have two, they truly cannot afford to do so.)
This wasn't like that before. In the 60's and 70's, it was easy for a married woman to get a part-time job at a factory, and the cost of raising a child wasn't as much. But that is no longer true.
Education is not the reason (or at the very least one of the primary ones) for the population implosion. That is just a cultural projection being made. That is all.
Do you have any idea on how much of a hubristic idiot one must be to even consider the possibility that one is able to predict the future this far ahead ?
He is not predicting. He is laying out a proposed plan and he wants to be part of the first building blocks. Whether the final product occurs in the next few centuries is not so much relevant as having a long-term investment plan for the next 2-3 decades under the assumption of continuous technological progress.
People like him have the means and ambitions to pursue it. If they fail, they fail. If they succeed, they succeed. The rest of us can simply play armchair coaches without any sort of ambition.
adding that we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth."
We already do, and always have.
Exponential growth can only go on for so long.
Putting heavy industry on the moon would make more sense...
1. You'd have access to a fair amount of raw materials. (Additional resources could be acquired by pushing asteroids into lunar orbit.)
2. You'd be able to dissipate waste heat into the lunar surface.
3. There's no environment you have to worry about messing up and you don't have to worry about your waste cluttering up earth orbit.
4. It's still relatively close to earth.
5. There's no atmosphere, meaning you can use a solar powered electromagnetic launcher to send finished products back to earth.
and pollute the current globe even more by bringing the equipment up and down.
Total fantasy, not sure what the guy is smoking, sure want nothing from it!
Maybe he is loosing it...
I can see a serious problem when something goes wrong and a little factory explosion occurs. Next up, the bits and pieces from the accident litter up the area and starts a chain reaction of destruction of anything in orbit. Already there are problems with avoiding old junk.
why not in a vacuum heat transfer is limited one can create a small energy input that will eventually build to very high temperatures,
focused solar on earth can melt steel even tungsten. Doing it in space you get more energy per meter square of surface area, and you have the bonus no gravity stress when building solar arrays they can basically be held together with toothpicks if the structure remains in a static position.
also who's to say solar would be the only option, nuclear reactors in space have an inherent safety advantage over earth based nuclear power, if it blows up no one is around to be killed by, and no habitat environments are contaminated.
seems everyone's focus lies with why this cant be done *NOW* not why it can't be a viable goal for future generations, as the article suggests this is a long term vision not a project that's happening today.
It seems that the number one issue rich people with lots of money want to solve as they get older is population growth. It's kind of disturbing. That's why Elon Musk is such a breath of fresh air. He actually wants to do something to save the human race that doesn't involve negative population growth.
Humanity needs to make hard choices.
1) we continue to have babies on demand and eventually (soon) everyone other than the 0.1% lives in abject poverty and Earth's ecosystem (likely sharply) degrades to the point of non-human habitation.
2) We curtail that severely (somehow!??) and the 20% or less of our current population that remains lives with resource usage similar to a second world power. We might already be at the point of no return where we need to reduce human population and resource usage below this for 100(s?) of years to recover FIRST.
There is this stupid thought that so long as its possible to feed the human population using technology then everything is great. That is just insanity since the technology used to feed that ever expanding population degrades the earth's carrying capacity. Not to mention that just being fed is a pretty sorry standard for human life; I suspect many would aspire to having something more so its a ridiculously small standard. You do the math.
This is literally the plot of the Mobile Suit Gundam Universal Century.
The Earth couldn't sustain its population or industry with just terrestrial resources, so they send mostly the poor up into space to mine asteroids and construct giant space stations to house the workers and industries they no longer want on Earth. Earth makes sure it retains jurisdiction over the sham governments that eventually form on the stations via the Federation, which is basically just the UN given the sort of power the US or EU currently has within their territories, only even more heavyhanded.
Zeon's two goals were liberation of the stations from Federation control and the creation of the Newtype (humans whose senses expanded thanks to changes wrought upon humanity by life in space.) The irony of this is it was all perverted by a new 'leadership class' in the form of the Zeon nobility.
Also apologies to any serious fans for errors or omissions, this is cribbed from some recent viewings of the material and not poring over every detail historian/otaku style.
NT
the trick is you
1 send robots to setup the core base (work domes and such)
2 when the core base is stable (viable atmo for X months) send oh convicts up to start expanding the base
3 then send normal blue collar folks ( Zero workers killed for X Months) to expand things and get Families up
4 then the execs get sent up (and the "Entertainment" type folks)
Freezing population growth is the solution, but communism depends upon population growth to work. Capitalism is a law of nature, like evolution, communism is a religion, like creationism.
Jeff Old Boy, Have you ever seen a 6km area US Steel Complex descending to Earth on a parabolic trajectory to slam Huston Texas?
You, your children and your grand children will never see that! No one else to the matter.
Can we start with the entire Washington Post operation? No space suits either...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Firstly to get those asteroid, assuming we do not wait for a NEO, we'll need a lot of energy to go get one in the outer system or possibly at some supposed to be at the lagrange points.The other possibility is to wait for one coming by and delta-v it into a stable orbit. The last one which does not allow you to chose, you have to catch what's passing by. That was the easiest part. Now you gotta mine it, and we have for all practical purpose no experience in it. It isn't as easy as scooping it even for asteroid thought to be a collection of lose rocks : remember newton's law , they don't disturb mining on earth but on an asteroid it is something else, you mining stuff need to be anchored and what it mines needs to get caught. Not the biggest obstacle but it is another one. And then there is the problem that it is not easy to have people living up (look at all the health problem we have with LEO astronaut), so it means automation a LOT of it, and possibly wait for days or weeks if something break. Finally while it is true there are a lot of CHON, we still need to process it which means energy and even solar panel need replacements.
What i am saying is : while it is on the technical horizon , barring stark penury on earth, there is no incentive to all the cost associated with mining in space. Maybe in 100 years when global warming seriously starts eroding our coast, and maybe if energy gets harder to get (oil/coal) and some raw material harder to get e.g. copper, maybe it gets expansive enough to start thinking about it. In all seriousness I am betting on never , e.g. by the time we need it we don't have anymore the energy or technical capability or opportunity of doing it ever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" -- O'Neill, 1969
Earliest source of this quote is widely claimed to be an interview by Stewart Brand in 1975. His (O'Neill's) paper on space colonization appeared in Physics Today in 1974. The original question seems to have been raised (in 1969) by O'Neill in a freshman physics course he taught at Princeton.
The students decided on the answer "no".
-- Alastair
to completely move the heavy industry of the world into low earth orbit, or the moon: if you spread the costs over 100 years, about a trillion dollars a year. yeh, lets do it. who cares if its a money loser for a century.
NASA researched this concept over 30 years ago, decided they had a free satellite the moon, permanent sunlight on the same side, all raw material present to produce almost anything, including solar panels. Microwave energy transmission to any place on Earth never again having to burn a single carbon atom to produce electricity. Of course located in the carbon energy capital of the world this went nowhere. Please visit www.lunarsolarpower.org and have a whole new world of possibilities open up to you! We have to go back to the moon!
The costs will decrease as new tech becomes available. Expansion will happen.
Where do you find the iron ore to melt? There's very little material in space near Earth.
From I understand the asteroid belt is quite far away in comparison to the moon. There are many logistical and fuel considerations to get to asteroid X, install something on it, mine or move it. Even if we do (from what other's have said) we might be able to make heavy raw materials but that's still just one step in a long journey.
LEO is an option but look how long it takes us to build IIS and its non-capacity for volume production or habitation. Also isn't there heaps of junk in LEO at the moment that is hazardous to space craft?
I am curious why the moon is not the first choice
Think of it like building a camping hut. Bit by bit materials are sent by unmanned vehicles. The only have to go one way so the fuel requirement is less (and they can form part of the construction material). Like the IIS it doesn't matter who sends or makes them as long as there is an open/coordinated design so they can be assembled or collectively utilised.
A problem with asteroid mining is that there is nothing there by the time we arrive. Surely by installing a power grind and robotically build habitations prior to going up there we would gain vastly more knowledge about creating colonies off Earth? "In an ideal world" we would create a monitored habitable farm on the moon with proven practices & stored farm produce long before we step into our new home.