to the moon civilian lunar colonization supported by present far side bases
My answer is that the Moon is indeed the logical next step for humans, not Mars. If we ever have millions in space in the near future, I expect it will be on the Moon. And meanwhile, the surface area larger than Africa and full of surprises, then I think we are going to be exploring it for a long time with robots and humans, finding new things all the time. It’s not at all the boring place it seemed to some after Apollo. They didn’t have enough time there, or enough experts, to discover the amazing things that are there to be found. They didn’t even find the lunar caves, some thought to be over 100 km long, or the ice at the poles, which we are pretty sure is there, at least some, but hidden from sight in the darkness, not seen light for billions of years..
Anyway - this is a question with many assumptions about why we go into space - Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup to save humanity. But Earth is by far the most habitable planet in our solar system and will be for the foreseeable future. We are evolved to live here, and the temperature, atmosphere, radiation environment, water are all perfect for us. We have food, air, everything we need here.
Do we need a backup? Is it possible to do a backup in space? What kind of a backup? Would it save humanity? Or would it actually be a threat to humanity itself? It’s easy to find science fiction stories where humans in space actually threaten Earth, and sending millions of people into space as quickly as possible could as easily make our situation more rather than less precarious. Think of the likes of ISIS in space? Or some strange ideology we haven’t heard of yet, maybe originating in space, a new “space religion”? Once you have millions in space, you can’t control how they think or what ideas they have and they might not be people you’d think of as the “good guys” however well-intentioned the first colonists. I think we are best not rushing into space, there’s no hurry about that. Let’s find out about space first, explore, learn, learn about our own capabilities too, have settlements in space when and where they are actually needed, as the needs arise. Rather than build the settlements first and then try to find a reason for them to be there, which seems often to be the plan especially with Mars colonization enthusiasts (Moon colonization enthusiasts tend to be a bit more hard-nosed and pragmatic, basing their ideas about what they at least think is a commercial case, often sketched out in some detail).
It’s also not neutral in its effect on Earth. There is no way that even billionaires could set up a colony on Mars without huge amounts of financial support from Earth. Because - it has no commercial exports. Not really. Deuterium doesn’t work, it’s not concentrated enough to be financially worth exporting to Earth. If it is going to be terraformed that’s a hugely expensive endeavour that may take a thousand years or more. If you think reversing global warming is hard, getting the excess CO2 out of our atmosphere, perhaps by mechanical methods, or by growing plants and burying them, or by using biofuel and then carbon capture and storage on the emissions - this is nothing compared to what is involved in trying to terraform Mars. There’s only 0.041% of the atmosphere by volume of CO2. Terraforming involves producing 100% of Earth’s atmosphere - or - at least 10% in a pure oxygen atmosphere that would be a major fire hazard. But it’s worse than that. To get the same pressure requires three times the mass of atmosphere in its low gravity. It’s far far more than is involved in all the CO2 emissions for the entire industrial revolution through to today. The last decade of CO2 emissions added about 0.001% of the Earth’s atmosphere. To find 10% as carbon dioxide (which would not be breathable but would help warm it up a bit) corresponds to 30,000 years of CO2 emissions of an entire industrial civilization of 7.5 billion people at our current rate - of all our industry.
The Mars terraforming enthusiasts talk about warming up Mars and the CO2 being produced from the subsurface - but if this happens naturally - why didn’t it happen at times in the past when Mars was more tilted on its axis and had a warmer climate and thicker atmosphere with liquid water? Or perhaps when a comet crashed into it. There doesn’t actually seem to be a lot of dry ice o Mars, maybe enough to increase the pressure to about double what it is now, not much more.
And - it’s not even enough to have a full Earth pressure CO2 atmosphere with three times the mass per square meter as for Earth - that would not warm up Mars enough, For instance, it’s apparently not warm enough for trees at the equator. Because Mars gets half the heat and sunlight from the sun that Earth has - which then you have to think of as warming it up relative to its equilibrium temperature from its internal heat - it’s a big drop in an influx of heat.
It needs to be some stronger greenhouse gas than that.
They propose to mine fluoride ore - but cubic kilometers per century, it would need to be, find it and mine it on Mars, and then you have 500 power stations just devoted to the power requirements to make those greenhouse gases, each a half gigawatt nuclear power station. Then - if there is enough CO2, which probably there isn’t, they hope it tips it over to do a runaway greenhouse - but if that was possible why didn’t it do that already in the past?
All this is hugely expensive and the Earth would have to foot the bill. Because there is no way that they are going to turn a profit on Mars. Not with their spacesuits as complex as a super-car and needing continuous maintenance, and eventual replacement fro Earth and their habitats and environmental control.
Except that is - if they use paraterraforming, building huge habitats and living inside those. Those make a lot more sense than living on a planetary surface and trying to terraform it. If the habitats are big enough you may get economies of scale. People don’t need spacesuits except in an emergency, never worn except to be sure you know how to do it, so don’t need to be replaced, just kept in good working order. you have your $200,000 spacesuit (assuming it comes down in cost a lot), but it lasts your whole life, you barely ever use it. It still needs soem commercial reason to be in space if you have thousands there. Not many peopole could afford a $200,000 spacsesuit. But the house inside your habitat - that would be maybe even easier to build and maintain than on Earth - if the exterior of the habitat is reasonably low maintenance.
That makes a lot of sense. It saves hugely on the atmosphere, instead of kilometers height you have only a few meters of atmosphere. Instead of filling a desert with water before rivers can flow, which is surely impossible on Mars - that’s another thing - they have images of Mars covered in seas - but where does all that water come from? I know it had seas in the past but the water is gone, either buried deep below the surface or more likely most of it lost to space. They forget that in a terraformed Mars with an atmospehre and humidity then the ice caps would be much larger, not smaller, than they are today. You can’t take the ice from the ice caps and assume all that water is available for the rest of the planet. Unless you can find a way to geoengineer a planet without ice caps, that gets half the radiation levels of Earth.
So - surely they don’t in practice terraform. Nobody is going to foot the bill for a thousand year Mars terraforming project from Earth and the Mars colonists for sure can’t afford it, they are struggling just to survive at all there. So, it has to be habitats. But then why Mars?
It’s far easier to use the Moon. The only benefit of Mars is its near 24 hour day. But - it’s not much of a benefit - without an atmosphere it means the temperature cycles through tens of degrees in temperature twice in every 24 hours. Big engineering challenge. It’s bad enough for our rovers but it’s a major stress for habitats. Not that you can’t do it, but why choose such place and why call this an advantage? It’s surely a disadvantge. The atmosphere is actually a disadvantage over the Moon (which I think is our natural place for humans to go next). The lunar hard vacuum, better than in a computer chip factory, far better, is ideal for electronics. You can even use calcium for wires in place of copper if you want (calcium is abundant on the Moon). You can do vacuum deposition of solar panels in in situ, maybe with a lunar “solar paving rover”. There is nanophase pure iron suffused into the regolith everywhere. This makes it as easy to turn into glass, through sintering, with microwaves, as it is to boil water. All the surface iron on Mars is oxidised.
It has ice at the poles in pure crystal form, nobody knows how much but some think millions of tons at least, maybe more. Also methane, CO, carbon dioxide and ammounia (useful for nitrogen).
It has the craters that have never seen sunlight for billions of years at liquid nitrogen temperatures - which incidentally are perfect for a seed vault. Passively cooled seed can stay there and be revived a thousand years later for many species. But not far away are the Peaks of Eternal (Almost) Light. There the temperatures are -10 to - 20 C beolow zero. Actually that’s perfect for a habitat as keeping it cool is usually the issue, not warm. It’s a constant temperature pretty much year round - with the sun above the horizon all year round except for maybe a couple of days occasionally in its “winter” due to a very very slight tilt relative to the ecliptic (the Moon is tilted far less than the Earth is).
With sunlight year round except those few days, then light for agriculture as well as for solar power is no problem at all. Far better light 24/7 than to have light only 12 hours a day and blocked out pretty much completely during the occasional global dust storm, sometimes for weeks on end. Better too much than too little which is why I see a 24 hour day as not a particular advantage for Mars, not on such a cold planet with almost no atmosphere.
And - the Moon has no life, but it may have past life - not native (at least, there is one possibility for native life briefly - it may have had a atmosphere of evolved gases from basalt eruptions billions of years ago enough for pressure similar to present day Mars, and perhaps water vapour too maybe just enough for life to take advantage of, not evolved there probably but brougth to it from Earth, Venus or Mars) - whether the Moon ever had native life - it surely has received many meteorites with intact organics in it from the Earth, after the largest impact shere and some would be preserved at liquid nitrogen temperatures at the poles. And also from Mars, Venus (maybe), and Ceres. If there was life in these places traces may be preserved at the poles - there are several scientific papers discussing this idea. From Earth there could be fragments of ammonites, and older stranger creatures. If we can find organics from the Dickensonia fossils on Earth
Ilya Bobrovskiy photo of Dickinsonia - Wikipedia fossil such as they analysed for organics - and found choloresterol Earliest animal fossils are identified
Imagine creatures like this, but from even further back fragments preserved at liquid nitrogen temperatures at the poles, maybe some of it later buried by subsequent impacts deep enough below the surface to have some of the organics preserved from cosmic radiation.
So, it’s of biological interest, but there is no chance of present day life on the Moon, seems generally agreed. That’s significant because we don’t yet know if there is life on Mars. If there is, it might be the first ever collision of two separately evolved biosphers. What happens when two biospheres collide? I do not think we should find out by doing it, but rather study . It is not guaranteed that Mars is safe for humans or humans safe for Mars.
But this is guaranateed for the Moon.
And - why do you do a backup? There is nothing at all that could destroy both Earth and the Moon that is even remotely plausible. There is nothing that could make Earth anything like as uninhabitable as Mars. Not even remotely. Remove 9o% of the oceans. 90% of the atmosphere. Make the entire surface radioactive. It’s still a paradise compared to Mars.
Earth is always the place that will be our home in the solar system, for millions of years. So long as Earth is in good condition then we are in a good state as a species. If space technology can make Mars or the Moon habitable, it can make even the most devastated Earth just as habitable, for far far less cost than Mars or the Moon. We have enough oxygen in the atmosphere for thousands of years even if photosynthesis stopped worldwide tomorrow - which ain’t going to happen.
Actually I looked through the various things suposed to make Earth life extinct. Supernovae and gamma ray bursts can’t, none close enough now that we know our stellar neighbourhood well. Superflares can’t - ours is the wrong kind of star (as the now know). Climate change can’t. Then Clathrate gun hypothesis is pretty much debunked, and as for fossil fuels we’d need ten times all the hydrocarbons in all forms, including also natural gas and shale oil etc, for a chance of a runaway greenhouse. Our sun just isn’t quite hot enough, though it might be 100 million years from now.
About the only thing that could is the impact of comet Swift Tuttle in the one in a million chance of it hitting in 2880. It is so big it would boil the oceans. But surely all the work of going interplanetary is far better used protecting Earth from these events - so rare they haven’t happened in the last three billion years. Humans would survive the Chicxulub impact, indeed, birds, small mammals, turtles and the dawn sequoia tree all did, so humans with technology, even the most primitive, able to survive anywhere from the Arctic to the Kalahari desert, we most certainly would survive.
Some of us would even survive a Swift-Tuttle impact, perhaps in nuclear submarines, or deep underground, witih enough preparation (and such a thing can’t happen without warning, much smaller comet are easily visible several years in advance). Indeed about the only other equivalent threat would be that of life with a different biochemistry returned from Mars. The worst case, according to the Nobel prize winning astrobiologist and father of planetary protection, Joshua Lederberg, is that life on Earth is unable to mount any defences, baffled by the alien biochemistry, which it never developed any resistance to. But in that probably remote eventuality, which can’t happen if we take the right precautions - we’d survive that too, some of us, in habitats basically “paraterraforming Earth” protecting the Earth life within from the alien biochemistry. For more on all this see my Could anything make us extinct in this century? by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday
As for issues from technology itself - it is very strange to go to Mars and set up the most technological society ever, if you think technology itself is going to be the problem.
Still I do see a value in a backup on the Moon. We can do a backup of knowledge. We can also do a backup of seeds and anything else that can be preserved easily. We can do that on the Moon most easily as it is geologically stable, and close to Earth, and below the surface, it’s cold enough to preserve seeds with passive cooling 24/7 year round. We can even design it so that it can be interrogated from Earth through radio, with a radio beacon for some distant future without space capability.
We can explore Mars too - but via telepresence from orbit not from the surface. Until we know it is safe (if it does turn out to be safe that is, not guaranteed).
Build habitats for humans on the Moon, in the vast lunar caves, from asteroids - enough resources in asteroids to build habitats with a thousand times the land area of Earth. Not a hollowed out asteroid. An asteroid completely dismantled - it’s amazing how much space you can get, living space, from the materials in a single small asteroid.
I do see humans in space. But I do not see Mars as a logical destination. The Moon rather because it is so close and the natural place to go next.
ANSWERING COMMENTS - SOME OTHER POINTS IN A MOON - MARS COMPARISION
These comparisons may surprise you. If you listen to the Mars colonization advocates they talk about all the things that Mars has going for it, and don’t dwell much on the donwsides, and have worked out solutions specific to Mars that would not work on the Moon. But there are Moon specific solutions that would not work on Mars too, and those don’t tend to get mentioned.
Lunar dust compared to Mars dust
The dust on Mars is laced with perchlorates which cause health issues, and with the UV then this turns to chlorates and chlorites which can be dangerous, even make you unconscious.
The lunar dust can be sintered, so you can have tracks of sintered dust, a sintered launch pad , sintered area around the base that can reduce the dust. Eventually roads with sintered hard shoulders too and barriers along the sides to keep out the magnetically levitated dust.
With Mars you can’t do that so easily, not only that, the Mars dust storms mean you get dust blowing over your colony frequently.
It is also very fine, as fine as cigarette ash, and would blow up around you wherever you walk on Mars. And the thin atmosphere is a disadvantage for the dust. Wherever you walk or drive, clouds of dust will be thrown up and hang in the air, while the lunar dust just does a ballistic curve and falls back to the ground.
Both have a problem of dust. I have a detailed Mars / Moon comparison in my Case for Moon first and the dust section is here:
CO2 on the Moon
First - the CO2 is not much of an advantage. The two ways that Mars colonists would use it are
- Making fuel to return to Earth or to get to orbit - for the Moon there is much less delta v to return, and it’s possible to get the effective delta v down to nearly zero with the Hoyt cislunar tether
- For CO2 in greenhouses. Remember it is only 0.04% in our atmosphere. We only need kilograms per colonist to start with. And as for growing food, then the CO2 you breathe out when eating your crops for one month return the CO2 needed for the next crop cycle to grow. Minus a small amount in feces (actually most of the mass of carbon in our food is exhaled, not excreted), and that also can be incinerated or in other ways returned. But so long as the colony is importing some food, they will be producing too much CO2 and CO2 scrubbing, as for Apollo 13 is normally the problem for a colony, not sourcing CO2.
- The Moon does have dry ice at the poles.
The main issue for habitat atmospheres is to source nitrogen. Still of the order of 100 kg or so per colonist, a small amount. If you wanted to fill vast spaces with atmosphere, perhaps lunar caves which may be kilometers in diameter in the low lunar gravity, amd if it is correct that there are 600 million tons or more in the form of ice up to 2 meters thick, with 6% ammonia, then there may be 25 million tons of nitrogen there .
I think if we have large scale colonization of millions on the Moon we likely source the nitrogen from Earth’s atmosphere as the quantities are rather small per colonist.
Variations in temperature
Although much of the Moon does have huge variations in temperature, from 127 °C to -173 °C, it’s not an air temperature. In the day-time the sun is easily shaded, and at night, remember that vacuum is an effective insulator. Indeed in daytime too, like a thermos flask, can keep it either cool or warm.
We don’t have experience of humans there on the night yet, but we have the lunakhod rovers which were able to survive fine night and day, and eventually when Lunakhod 2 failed, it was through overheating as a result of getting dust that fell into it and added to the insulation. It only needed a small radioistope heat source to last through the lunar night, and it had no problem keepint its electronics cool in the daytime.
The ISS has to face temperature extremes too, similar to those of the Moon, very cold when it is shaded by the Earth, and very hot in full sunlight.
Without thermal controls, the temperature of the orbiting Space Station's Sun-facing side would soar to 250 degrees F (121 C), while thermometers on the dark side would plunge to minus 250 degrees F (-157 C). There might be a comfortable spot somewhere in the middle of the Station, but searching for it wouldn't be much fun!
The Moon isn’t much different from the ISS in that respect. Humans wouldn’t have problems with either the lunar night or the lunar day as far as temperature is concerned. Though you would have to engineer for it, but on Mars you have extremes t00.
Mars temperature extremes
The 24 hour day of Mars actually leads to huge differences of temperature between day and night in Mars' very thin atmosphere. On a typical day at Gale Crater it varies by 80 C, or around 130 F. Temperature and pressure at Gale Crater
At night in the Martian "tropics" the air often gets so cold that carbon dioxide freezes out as dry ice, for 200 nights of the Martian year , carrying water with it to form the Martian frosts photographed by Viking. While in the day time the temperatures can get well above zero at times.
It’s a challenge, but we can engineer for it on the Moon just as on Mars. This is the NASA Multi Mission Space Exploration Vehicle exploring both an asteroid and the Moon
Lunar poles only 10° C variation around -30° C
However at the lunar poles you do not have temperature extremes. See the section of my book:
Quoting from that section:
“ (The average temperature may seem rather chilly at -30° C, but it varies by only 10° C in either direction and that's warm enough that a habitat there can be kept at a comfortable temperature of 20° C with the aid of a solar collector.”
See also
That’s at the peaks of “eternal” (almost) light. Nearby the lunar craters are at liquid nitrogen temperaures but that’s an asset. You don’t live there. You mine ice there, you might store your rocket fuel there.
Lunar caves
In other parts of the Moon then you can avoid the extremes in the lunar caves, some of which probably have an internal steady temperature of around -20 °C (see page 5 of this paper)
There are several known, we can only see a few meters into the caves but there’s other evidence from the Grail mapping project that they may extend for as much as 100 km as lava tube caves. In the low gravity they could be up to kilometers in diameter and are probably at least tens of meters in diameter.
One example is the Marius Hills pit entrance. It's about 40 meters deep The crispness of the landform suggests the collapse happened less than a billion years ago, and the lack of any raised rim or eject suggests it formed through collapse, not through a meteorite impact.
This image shows an oblique view. It's viewed from an angle of 45 degrees, and the light from the sun is at an angle of 34 degrees from the vertical. As a result they were able to confirm that the area of the floor illuminated in this image continues at least twelve meters under the overhang. Papers here, and here .
It probably continues much further. See sections of my book:
You also can make a kind of artificial cave by covering your base in regolith to meters of thickness. You need to do that anyway if you live there long term to keep out cosmic radiation, and that wlll do a lot to keep the temperatures steady inside, and reduce temperature stresses on the habitats.
Or there's this early 1967 Soviet idea of a self propelled self burying rover.
After traveling across the surface, it finds a soft spot to dig into the regolith for protection from solar storms. This would also protect the astronauts from micrometeorites.
Power at night - maximum 2 days at lunar poles, weeks in Mars dust-storms
The PEL’s have a maximum of 2 days of darkness for the best ones.
Meanwhile Mars has dust storms that last for weeks that cut out 99% of direct sunlight. The Moon has a maximum of 14 days of darkness and you know exactly what to design for. You need to design for a Mars colony to be able to last longer than that without sunlight because of hte Mars storms. Okay they don’t come every month but you still have to survive them when they come every two years and a major one once or twice a decade.
It is possible to power agriculture on the Moon and you don’t need a nuclear power plant - which is normally seen as essential for a Mars colony, to survive the dust storms if nothing else.
Modern LED lighting is around 100 watts per square meter, could be a bit over that, but a colonist needs only 30 square meters of agriculture with the LED system, so you need only kilowatts of power per colonist, not the megawatts that some have suggested based on an acre per colonist and using fluorescent lighting instead of LED’s.
Fuel cells can supply this and there are many other design ideas suggested by lunar colonization enthusiasts.
ADVOCATES OF LUNAR COLONIZATION
There are many who advocate the Moon, they just don’t get the publicity of the Mars colonists. Here are some examples and as I said they are very hard-nosed especially compared with Mars colonization advocates, who generally have little idea of how their colony would be supported economically:
- Paul Spudis, with his, The Value of the Moon: How to Explore, Live, and Prosper in Space Using the Moon's Resources.
- Dennis Wingo, CEO of Skycorp, and author of Moonrush, see his recent paper, and appearance on the Space Show.
- Madhu Thangavelu, David Schrunk, and other authors and contributors to The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement.
- David Schrunk's paper Planet Moon Philosophy , and their appearance on The Space Show.
It was also the policy of the US too during the Bush administration, with his Vision for Space Exploration program.
More comprisions:
- Micrometeorites - comparison of the Moon and Mars
- Solar storms and radiation shielding - Moon and Mars
- Greenhouse construction - comparison of the Moon and Mars
- Fertility of lunar and Mars soil
- Landing and taking off - comparison of the Moon and Mars
- Other Moon - Mars comparisons
- Mars or Moon spectacles and the old woman young woman illusion
- What about gravity - isn't that a big advantage for Mars over the Moon?
- Artificial gravity on the moon to augment lunar gravity
Many other ideas.
For the commercial side of things see my
This section originated as a Quora answer Could colonizing Mars be a lucrative or potentially profitable venture? and it was run by Forbes magazine as Is There A Fortune To Be Made On Mars?
For another approach on all this my
It talks about the practical issues of getting to Mars, how with the Moon medevac is 2 days away, for Mars at worst case over a year, and how we need systems tested in multi-year lunar missions before we can realistically even consider sending humans as far as Mars, and explores Chris Hadfield’s idea that we will be living on the Moon for a generation before we go to Mars. It also goes into the issues of biosphere collisions and covers the idea of asteroid resource use more too.
And for much more detailed comparison, and a “Case for Moon”, see my:
- MOON FIRST Why Humans on Mars Right Now Are Bad for Science - and on kindle.
This includes my An astronaut gardener on the Moon and continues some of the themes of the Case for Moon First with a special focus on lunar gardening.
For the planetary protection issues:
Touch Mars? Europa? Enceladus? Or a tale of Missteps? (equivalent to 1938 printed pages in a single web page, takes a while to load).
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