Brings to mind Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress [1] --- the entire plot turned on the prospect of lunar "society" running out of water because it used the water to grow grain and then exported the grain "downhill" to Earth.
From the submitted article's last paragraph: "None of this makes the moon a wellspring, and it would have a long way to go before it became a remotely hospitable place." The remainder of that paragraph speculates away the logical consequences of that sentence. Overall, the key fact about permanently shaded areas of the Moon, the places with the most water (and not much at that), is that they are extraordinarily cold. Figuring out ways to mine and extract the frozen water in such dark and cold conditions might be a lot more expensive and technically difficult than simply bringing along water from home.
Figuring out ways to mine and extract the frozen water in such dark and cold conditions might be a lot more expensive and technically difficult than simply bringing along water from home.
Best guess [1] for cost to lift a kilo/liter to orbit is $20,000 per.
Have to be real expensive to mine water to make it more expensive than shipping the stuff from the Pacific.
[1] It is surprisingly hard to tease out data on this value: government accounting is partly to blame. Also: FedEx does not (yet) list their rates for 'delivery to LEO'
I don't think that the 2012 cost of transferring water from Earth is relevant. If we're in the position of having colonies on the moon, then I assume that our technology and techniques will have improved to the point that transferring anything from the Earth to moon will be significantly less. Otherwise, we wouldn't have colonies on the moon.
This, of course, assumes colonies on the moon. Personally, I doubt we will ever have them. But if we do, I think it's also reasonable to assume that the cost will have been lowered significantly.
It's an upper-bound, sure, but I don't think it's relevant because I think that if we have a moon base, it's going to necessarily decrease by orders of magnitude. At that point, we're dealing too much uncertainty; we don't know how to mine water on the moon, and we don't know how much the transportation cost will decrease.
It's going to "necessarily decrease" in inflation adjusted terms: Sure. It's going to necessarily decrease by orderS of magnitude? No, I think that's too strong. Our most wild technological extrapolations only cover 2 or 3 orders, tops, and there's no guarantee they can or will be built. I do not see prices dropping to 2 cents per ton any time soon.
On the flip side, yeah, actually we can make a pretty good guess at how to mine this water. We actually are pretty good at mining. Run in through a machine that literally boils it out. Done. Throw the leftover rock in a big pile. At 2% concentration that's more than enough to get you started, it just needs energy, which is also fairly easily to get in this context. A real miner might do something else but that would certainly work.
My claim is that if transporting a liter of water to the moon does not decrease by orders of magnitude, then we won't have colonies on the moon. No colonies on the moon mean no reason to mine the water.
In other words, I think that the only circumstances in which we would want to mine water on the moon, transporting water would be orders of magnitude less expensive than $20,000/liter.
The "unknown" bits I was referring to are the infrastructure required to be on the dark side of the moon.
It's kind of hard to put a simple number on that (of course, you could have done tons of research to support this, I'm not sure). But it turns out one of the ordinary byproducts of ordinary rockets is water, which is why all space food is dehydrated. This means that if you sent a rocket with nothing on it at all (zero payload) it would arrive at the moon with water.
Of course I don't know how much and it is still likely to be ridiculously expensive.
Ok, so I'm a little sketchy on where I heard it originally, bu I think I was watching some sort of space show that said that hydrogen and oxygen mix together to propel a rocket but they capture some of the emitted water vapor and turn it back into water for other uses. I can't find specific reference to this recycling on the internet, but liquid hydrogen is a commonly used rocket propellant.
Is that $20,000 for the cost from the earth to the moon?
Because I would guess you could escape moon gravity and fall towards earth for a lot less than $20,000 per liter.
And large chunks of ice, hurled from the moon, would just melt in our atmosphere. Which is OK if you don't care to deliver water to anyone in particular and just want more of it on earth. You know, in case global warming doesn't raise sea levels enough.
Just send solar powered robots at in initial cost of $20,000 per kilo to mine the ice, and have them hurl it at earth for a lot less than $20,000 per liter.
$20,000 is cost of taking Earth water into space, and hopefully dumping it on the moon. That's compared to however much it is for existing moon-dwellers to setup and mine water from the moon.
Please indulge my ignorance... Maybe a chemist or someone better versed can answer; are we close, or is it plausible to construct a star trek like replicator to rearrange atoms to form new substances such as water?
But who knows. Maybe when society is so advanced that we have infinite power from controlled fusion, extremely accurate and high powered lasers and magnetic field generators, and quantum computers, we'll be able to build a box that moves around individual atoms to construct something.
Though that doesn't mean that nanotechnology is impossible. In fact, nanomachines in the form of microbes precede any macromachines. We are getting better and better at controlling microbes. Though we won't be able to use genetic programming on microbes alone to make a cake or steak from scratch.
You can form water from recombining oxygen and hydrogen. Or from material that contain oxygen and hydrogen.
Making water out of anything else, is possible in molecular quantities at an exorbitant price using a particle accelerator (or so). So in practice, impossible.
A Star Trek Replicator, even one that doesn't transmute different elements into each other and just re-arranges them, is a long way off. The best current design we have is called an ecosystem and uses plants, fungi, animals, other life forms and sun light.
To mostly mirror what eru said, we can easily combine hydrogen and oxygen just by burning them together.
You can also extract amounts of oxygen and hydrogen from more complex substances and turn them into water through the magic of that science we know as Chemistry. You should expect that this will generally take a bunch of energy, though.
Nanotechnology has the potential to let us construct much more complicated sorts of chemical structures. It would be really neat, but wouldn't really change how much energy it takes to separate water out of other materials, and would probably be a lot less energy efficient than standard industrial methods.
I thought that R. Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, really had a compelling argument against space travel in the short term. There's nothing more ridiculous than sending biological life into space. Let's shed some of our biological baggage, merge a little more with technology, and then work on sending a much more versatile and durable human v3.0 into space.
Sounds like a case of featuritis brewing. It's very easy to get caught in an evil cycle of rising expectations that move the actual launch further and further away. Let's ship an MVP first, launching early and often.
I suppose I can't disagree with you. The technology around space exploration should continue to advance, however I think that we won't make any real progress on colonizing the universe, or even the solar system, until we are much less fragile.
I agree and I salute you for giving way for jest in face of serious argument. To follow up along your reasoning, I think the weakness of man sets it's own limitations without us having to make conscious decisions on how far we should strive in each phase of human development. Rather push the boundaries until they push back.
Kurzweil is a smart guy, but he's wrong on this point.
Space is just a place.
Taking a real long-term view, it's no more ridiculous to live in the Moon, or Mars, than it was for early man to move out of Africa and settle Europe, Australia, the Himalayas, California.
Every place man has lived has been radically different from an African savannah. We get along by adapting, improvising, inventing, using technology.
This is not to discount the hazards, dangers, and exceptionally different environment found outside our atmosphere.
But it's time for a real, actual Space Age. We'll make it up as we go along, same as we always have.
...we really need to get the hell out of here. In 1 billion years the Earth will be a dead planet, because the Sun keeps changing. And a dinosaur-killing boulder will probably hit us much sooner than that.
You underestimate just how unhospitable space is and how little we are adapted to living there. The health of astronauts coming back from the ISS has deteriorated. Their heart has grown weaker, their bones have grown weaker. Psychologically, they aren't topfit either.
You underestimate just how unhospitable space is and how little we are adapted to living there.
It may appear to be that way from one post. I don't.
The health of astronauts coming back from the ISS has deteriorated.
The short-term affects of micro-gravity appear to be un-good, I agree.
Please note I was speaking of settling places with gravity. About that we simply don't know, yet.
Psychologically, they aren't topfit either.
If you spent six months living in an industrial facility the size of a winnebago you'd be a little off, too.
My expectations of 'the future' are that people will live in bodies with gravity - the moon, Mars. Off-planet facilities will be what off-shore oil platforms are today: a place to work, and live short-term, for high pay. Then you go home to the wife and kids.
I think you underestimate the degree of technological infrastructure needed to support modern living. Our food, homes, water, sanitation, etc. are all produced through a world spanning industrial supply chain. Without that support structure civilization would collapse to a tiny fraction of the current population, especially in cities. The industrial infrastructure to support a Mars colony is cetainly different and in some aspects more modern than that necessary to support New York City, but that difference is much less extreme than the difference between what it takes to support NYC today and what it took to support human civilization a few centuries ago.
Once off Earth colonization takes off that distinction will seem less and less significant over time.
Eh. Wetware is cheap (hell, it makes more of itself even when we don't want it too), and does a fair job of mending itself. Hardware is expensive, though it has the advantage of being easier to power and is lighter.
I think if you recognize the advantages and disadvantages of both you could effectively use either of them. Of course doing that might not be considered "humane" by our current standards.
I think the real hope is waiting for hardware to master the "fixing itself" problem (preferably by conquering replication, which would also largely fix the expense problem). Little need to drag along the wetware at that point though.
Wetware has life-support requirements. Even minimal wetware, though in spore form it may travel well. Depending on your definition of wetware, so long as you've got an ambient solar flux, power isn't hard to arrange, and it's possible that thermal sources (similar to existing deep-space power units) might work as well given what we've learned about deep sea vents and subterranean microbes.
Sentient wetware tends to bring along baggage of requesting rights and such, which can be expensive to provision.
Hardware can both survive and function in a wide range of extreme environments.
Cheap? I guess you don't have kids. There is a huge time investment getting an 8 lbs eat-sleep-crap infant to something that can operate simple machines.
Cheap in the sense that we have lots of them that can be put to work for a pittance. I suspect there would be no shortage of fully developed humans willing to go on "one way" missions to Mars or further. I know I would do it myself.
(dredmorbius: I am in fact referring to humans. Using microbial life is an interesting idea in its own right however.)
If we could plant the seeds of civilization on the moon in the next 100 years, that would be a fantastic advancement on conquering mars next and then the universe.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress