Category Archives: Moon Colonization

I grew up loving space. Outer space. That day I first pointed my telescope at Jupiter and Saturn, seeing the Great Red Spot, the bands, the rings, the moons ... these wanderers in the heavens looked more like paintings in the sky. I'll never forget the utter joy and happiness I felt when I first saw them. And how it changed me.

So yeah, I went to see Interstellar. How could I not? My review in a moment. No spoilers, either.

NASA is always fighting to prove its relevancy, ever since the honeymoon of wowing the world and landing a human being on the Moon ended. Why are we spending so much money to float things into space? Isn't it too dangerous? Shouldn't we be spending taxpayers dollars for people at home? Don't we belong here?

Sure, NASA has proven to act like a bloated bureaucracy at times, which is typical when you are part of a massive institution known as the US federal government. When I saw Interstellar this week, I felt as if Christopher Nolan summed up in so few words why NASA has been reaching past our planet's atmosphere - and why the agency, and more broadly we as a planet, should continue.

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." - Cooper

The Kardashev scale, proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in the 1960's, classifies human civilizations this way:

Type I: Able to utilize all of its home planet's resources

Type II: Able to utilize the energy of the star in its home solar system

Type III: Able to utilize the energy of its home galaxy

The great theoretical physicist Michio Kaku (whom I had the distinct pleasure in meeting one day years ago) says we may not even reach full Type I status until sometime well after 2100 AD. Yes, we as a human race have a long way to go. Don't let all of those iPhones, Segways and wrinkle-free jeans fool you. Our civilization is barely an infant when it comes to advancement.

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INTERSTELLAR - A Review by Matt O'Donnell

Leif Podhajsky

Zheng He! Zheng He! Is there a better icon for interstellar voyaging?

Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng set out from China on massive naval expeditions that reached as far as Mecca and Mombasa, journeys with more than 300 vessels and 28,000 crew, excursions far bigger and longer than those of Columbus more than a half century later. Staggering in price, formidable in technical sophistication, unprecedented in level of national commitmentZhengs voyages remain the closest functional equivalent to the cost, effort, and risk required to travel into deep space. Trying to picture what settling other planets might entail? One place to look is 15th-century China.

Zheng was an unlikely candidate for a life of far-flung adventure. At the time of his birth, China was torn by war between the Yuan dynasty and surging Ming rebels. Zheng was born into a Muslim family in the remote Yunnan province, then a battleground between Yuan and Ming. When he was about 10, invading Ming forces captured him and slaughtered most of his family. The boy was castrated. Forced to serve the Ming crown prince, Zheng eventually became his confidant and trusted adviser. After the last Yuan emperor fled in 1368, Zheng became part of an elite group of eunuch adventurers and troubleshooters at the Ming court in Beijing.

The Ming government backed Zheng for decades. Seven times the emperor arrogantly overruled his accountants and summoned the vast amounts of material necessary to provision thousands of people on years-long voyages. Ultimately, Zheng took the Ming banner as far as West Africa and the Middle East. These areas were poorer than China, but they were thriving and productive. Alas, traveling to Africa to buy its iron, no matter how high the quality, would be like driving a hundred miles to pick up a gallon of exceptionally good milknot a sensible use of time, money, or effort. In 1433, the voyages abruptly ceased; Ming bureaucrats had finally convinced the elite that they didnt make economic sense.

If we traveled to other worlds, could we avoid the Zheng He problem? Back in 1978, the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, a science fiction fan, playfully laid out the basic economics of interstellar trade. To justify the cost, Krugman pointed out, would-be starfarers must bring back something worth more than what they would have made by putting the same money in an interest-bearing account and staying on Earth. Going to distant planets, in other words, means fighting one of the greatest forces in human affairs: compound interest.

Today, the cheapest rockets available charge a little less than $1,000 to send 1 pound of material into low-earth orbit. Sending that pound to other planets, let alone the stars, would cost vastly more. To be sure, time and expense might be reduced by building space elevators and (should the laws of physics permit) taking advantage of handy wormholes. But the lesson of Zheng He remains: Exploration of distant lands will be a short-lived venture unless it yields something really, really valuable.

If future space voyagers decided to exploit a barren, lifeless planet, few would be upset. But such an endeavor is unlikely. As far as we know, a world without life would be a world without oxygen, a stable climate, or the possibility of growing food. Barring the discovery of some immensely valuable substance that doesnt exist on Earth, there would be no reason to set up shop there, let alone despoil it. A world with functioning ecosystems would be more attractive. But if local species were valuable, it would be more sensible to carry back to Earth a snippet of their DNA than whole animals. The entire Alien series can be considered as a proof by negative example of this assertion.

The real jackpot, of course, would be finding a nonhuman civilization: a planetful of new ideas, techniques, and expression. Here the temptation to interactthat is, to intervenewould be enormous. China again provides an example. Travel costs today are low compared to those in the 15th century. West Africa, meanwhile, is still full of valuable resources, products, and land, so Chinese ships are again going to Africa. In the past decade, the nation has shipped in a million or more migrants. Buying and leasing swathes of land to grow food for export to the homeland, grabbing deals to extract minerals, locking up local water suppliesthe newcomers have been throwing their weight around. Even though the Chinese have built many badly needed roads, bridges, and power plants, their moves have created a furor. Landgrab! cry African newspapers. Chinese workers have been attacked in Zambia, Cameroon, Niger, Sudan, and Angola.

History suggests that if anything of value is involved, contacts between distant societies are fraught. Think of Spain and the Aztecs. Corts could have traded peacefully for Aztec gold and silver, but that would have involved the expense of ferrying over goods from Spain for barter. Conquest was more attractive (economically, if not morally), and greatly abetted by an epidemic of smallpox introduced to the Aztecs by the Spaniards. Stuck at the end of a trillion-mile supply chain, voyagers from Earth might be less likely to replicate the triumph of Corts than the fates of Thomas Drummond and William Paterson. The two men were leaders of Scotlands biggest mission to the Americas: the attempt to implant some 2,500 highlanders in Panama starting in 1698. A grandiose effort for a poor country, the expedition sucked up as much as half of the nations available investment capital. It was that rarest of events, an unmitigated disaster. The locals in Panama werent interested in trade. Unable to grow food in the unfamiliar ecosystem and beset by diseases they had no experience with, the Scots died by the hundreds. Drummond vanished; Paterson lost his wife. As the few survivors limped back to Edinburgh in 1700, Scotlands economy collapsed, forcing it to merge with England.

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The Tricky Ethics of Intergalactic Colonization

Although President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf officially lifted the national state of emergency last week, it was not to say that the battle is over, even as some new hotspots have developed, but rather to encourage the country that the situation is now enough under control to allow people to move around again and to reopen markets in the rural areas.

With the Ebola crisis so much in the news these days and the emphasis on fear-mongering, it is a bit surprising that so little is being written or broadcast in the United States about the actual area where this epidemic broke out. Who lives there? Why did the outbreak occur there? Why did it spread so rapidly?

I have wanted to write about the West African country of Liberia for a long time. Liberia occupies a deep space in my heart. It taught me about animism and love of nature. My first child was born and died there, resting, one hopes, in a peaceful field that later became a virulent battlefield. Liberia taught me about humor and music. It taught me to love the rainforest and anticipate the rising of the full moon. And now there is Ebola. Although its President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf officially lifted the national state of emergency last week, it was not to say that the battle is over, even as some new hotspots have developed, but rather to encourage the country that the situation is now enough under control to allow people to move around again and to reopen markets in the rural areas.

When I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia from 1969-72, I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined the tragic future that lay ahead in just a short tick away. Two devastating civil wars from 1989 to 1996 and 1999 to 2003 spawned unthinkable violence and the virtual destruction of the entire country, and, now, Ebola. While the wars were in many respects internal cultural or "racial" fights, the fight with Ebola is for the soul of the country.

This image of a country market in Liberia during Jack Kolkmeyer's stay as a Peace Corps volunteer is among photos he took between 1969 and 1972.

How is it that such tragic circumstances pick out a certain place or bedevil a certain group of people? More importantly, perhaps, is the question, how does a place recover from such incomprehensible turmoil? This isn't intended to be a scientific discussion about Ebola but rather an introspective look into the heart and spirit of this area fighting for its very survivala struggle of almost biblical proportions. While the number of deaths appears to be dropping in Liberia, they continue to rise in Sierra Leone and Guinea, and a new case has recently emerged in Mali. To date, an estimated 5,177 deaths have been reported by the World Health Organization.

The original Ebola outbreak in this area reportedly started in the forested area around Gueckedougo in northeastern Guinea as the result of eating infected "bush meat" (bats, monkeys and small deer, among many other things) and quickly spread into neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. As the disease spread, it became of immediate concern to France and Great Britain. Guinea was a French colony until 1958 and many Guineans live in France. Sierra Leone became independent of British rule in 1961, although it remained part of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Liberia was another historic matter altogether. Along with Ethiopia, Liberia laid claim to being one of the longest independent nations in Africa. But still, and regardless of who is now in control, the colonizers of these places are deeply affected.

After the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, a group of Americans, in large part Southern plantation owners, formed the American Colonization Society in 1816, with the intention of repatriating freed slaves back into West Africa. The first groups reached Sierra Leone in 1821 and Liberia in 1822. From the outset, the colonists met resistance from indigenous groups, including the 16 different linguistic groups in Liberia. The American Navy, however, intervened in numerous instances and provided the coastal stability that the original group needed to take root and eventually create their own independent state in 1847.

Indeed, coastal Liberia was and still is an anachronistic throwback to the southern United States. Rambling, two-story wood and zinc houses with verandas dot the swampy coastline and punctuate equally arcane small settlements with names like Virginia, Maryland, Paynesville, Harper, Buchanan and Robertsport. Each community in turn harbors a small church, usually Baptist, Methodist, Catholic or Lutheran. I remember driving through a small community one day and seeing a sign that read: Church of the Ladder Day Saints. Thats a short and easy way to get to heaven, I thought.

A house in Monrovia

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Liberating Liberia

According to the European Space Agency's newest video, humanity lunar future includes roving Roomba-esque 3D-printers and domed homes made of packed moon dust that will house four people in the ever-twilight of the Moon's South Pole.

As awesome as this looks, this video is admittedly government-sponsored science-fiction; it was produced by the British architectural firm Foster + Partners and based on the science they thought might be feasible for a 2050 mission. "In reality any lunar base remains firmly on the drawing board," the ESA said in a buzz-killing statement accompanying the video.

Still, the ideas here really could say something important about future missions. "Each small step forward in research makes future lunar colonization a little more feasible," the ESA says. As the video states, a few of the biggest issues in lunar colonizationthe radical temperature swings, radiation, the endless barrage of meteoritescould be dealt with cheaply and easily by insulating colonists with a scaffolding of moon dust and a 3d latticework skeleton extracted from the soil.

However, what's true for Mars colonization is true for the moon, too: Building living quarters isn't the biggest hurdle for living off-world. Rather, the largest obstacles involve the more mundane matter of infrastructurereplacement parts resupply, food production, and the biological hazards of long-term low-gravity life.

But let's be realthose issues don't make very snazzy YouTube video. Impatient viewers, skip ahead to about 1:50 in the video above to see the future moon colony come together.

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Watch 3D Printer-Bots Build the Moon Colony of 2050 ...

With Americas climate agenda in the hands of deniers. some people are considering leaving the country. But why stop there? Why not another planet? Christopher Nolans new film Interstellar foresees a not-so-distant future where a ruined Earth can no longer sustain human life, prompting the remnants of NASA to search for a new planet to inhabit. Neither the problem nor the solution are as science fiction as we might like them to be. The colonization of another planet may come as soon as 2022, if Mars One has its way. This Netherlands-based company has already accepted 200,000 applications to take a one-way trip to the red planet for the benefit of reality television. Once there, the new Martians will produce their own water and food and probably die almost immediately.

Other (and perhaps more serious) efforts are also underway. Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the explicit mission of establishing a permanent Mars base. A firm proponent of space migration as a necessity to save the species, Musk believes we can have a million people on Mars within a century. Even closer to hand, NASA is a month away from the first test launch of Orion, a spacecraft designed to take humans to Mars by the 2030s. When we do land on Mars well be prepared thanks to the Mars Society, which just began its third simulated manned mission to Mars on the slopes of a volcano in Hawaii. Six people will spend the next 254 days living in a 1000 square foot pressurized dome and wearing spacesuits whenever they venture outside. Thinking even further ahead, both NASA and DARPA helped establish the 100 Year Starship project, a private foundation aiming to get humans out of the solar system.

But are such efforts worth it? As the crash last week of Virgin Galactics SpaceShipTwo demonstrates yet again, human space flight is fraught with peril. It is also expensive. It took $150 billion (adjusted for inflation) to get humans to the Moon, and NASA estimates that Orion will cost as much as $22 billion by 2021, when it plans a flyby of Mars (the GAO thinks it will be much more.) Meanwhile, the European Space Agencys Rosetta mission will attempt to land a robotic probe on a comet on November 12th, for only 1.4 billion Euros. NASA own Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars for over two years, at a cost of $2.5 billion. India recently sent its own satellite to orbit Mars for an astonishing $74 million. Is the physical presence of human beings necessary if machines can do all this?

Fighting against and adapting to climate change is a pressing need that will require money and resources, but prospects for action let alone success often seem grim. Should we be spending money preparing for human spaceflight and colonization when spending it at home might have greater returns? Or should we press forward in order to keep this as an option of last resort? What other benefits could human space habitation have for the planet and the species?

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Community Discussion: Should we colonize space?

History will record 1998 as the year technology demolished the barrier for entry into filmmaking, bringing together high-quality digital cameras and desktop computer editing to enable resourceful would-be directors to bring their visions to fruition. But just because you can make a movie doesn't mean you can get it to an audience to be seen, so that year, a group of Memphis film geeks put a sheet up on the wall of a downtown bar and projected movies they had made and movies they wanted to see.

A lot has changed since the Indie Memphis Film Festival's humble beginning. Cameras and editing software have capabilities undreamed of at the turn of the century, rendering celluloid all but obsolete. Home theater and streaming video have opened new avenues for distribution that have theater owners looking over their shoulders and Hollywood studios pushing out bigger and more elaborate spectacles. Indie films still struggle, but now there are thousands of them produced each year, by specialty studios and plucky visionaries with DSLRs. The festival itself has grown from its underground bar-room roots into one of the most respected and fun festivals in America. For audiences, the problem has evolved from "How can I find something different to watch?" to "How can I make sense of all these choices?"

That's where carefully curated festivals like Indie Memphis remain relevant. This year, more than a thousand entries were winnowed down to two dozen competition features, as well as showcases and gala screenings that not only explore the state of the art, but also celebrate classics that have left indelible marks on indie history.

The lineup of narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and experimental videos that will roll out over the four-day weekend at Overton Square venues Playhouse On The Square, Circuit Playhouse, The Hattiloo Theatre, and Malco's Studio On The Square is among the most diverse in the festival's history, offering something for every taste. Choosing from such a wide selection of movies can be a daunting task, so we'll break down your choices by areas of interest to help you explore one of Memphis' premiere cultural events.

HOME-GROWN

The Bluff City cinema underground looks healthy, as 2014's crop of local features include both veterans and newcomers. Three narrative features and one documentary will vie for the Hometowner prize.

Eric Tate, star of The Poor & Hungry, which launched director Craig Brewer's career at Indie Memphis in 2000, returns to the screen in Chad Allen Barton's Lights Camera Bullshit. Tate leads as Gerard Evans, a film school graduate who returns to Memphis to direct art films, but instead finds himself embroiled in a sordid comedy of filmic errors by his unscrupulous boss Don (Ron Gephart). Tate plays straight man to a cast of Memphis indie all-stars, including Markus Seaberry, Don Meyers, Jon W. Sparks, Dorv Armour, Brandon Sams, McTyere Parker, and the late John Still as a terrorist disguised as president William Henry Harrison.

Director Anwar Jamison returns to the festival with his second feature, 5 Steps to a Conversation. Jamison stars as Javen, an easygoing guy who is having a great day until his wife leaves him, saying he needs to grow up and get a job. He signs on with a sleazy, cult-like multi-level marketing company selling free pizza coupons door to door for $20. The film manages to be both funny and affecting (imagine Glengarry Glen Ross as a comedy) featuring strong performances by Jamison, David Caffey, Memphis slam poet Powwah, and 4-year-old Amari Jamison.

Satan (Sylvester Brown) tempts a married couple on the rocks in Just a Measure of Faith, the debut feature of husband/wife team Marlon and Mechelle Wilson. This sincere expression of religious conviction envisions a pair of souls hanging in the balance after a car wreck leaves Jacob (Tramaine Morgan) near death while his wife Kayla (Maranja May-Douglas) is haunted by past sin. It also features stirring musical scenes by gospel singer Euclid Gray.

Director Phoebe Driscoll's debut documentary Pharaohs of Memphis traces the history of jookin', Memphis' indigenous dance form, from its inception in the 1980s as a way to defuse tense situations on the street to its present as an international sensation, through interviews with the form's pioneers and its present star, Lil' Buck. Archival and contemporary footage illuminate the dancers' athletic beauty.

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Indie Memphis Film Festival 2014

Mars One has generated a lot of debate about its one-way mission plans. Can history be a guide to them? (credit: Mars One/Bryan Versteeg)

Mars One is promoting the challenging goal of establishing the first colonists on the Red Planet only 11 years from now. NASAs Apollo program had an even shorter time horizon (eight years from John F. Kennedys public national commitment to place a human on the Moon to the Apollo 11 mission) so its inevitable that these two very ambitious space projects will be compared.

A general impression is that the crew risk for the Mars One mission and for Apollo expeditions may be of a similar order of magnitude. However, some aspects of safety are not comparable. For example, in all segments of an Apollo mission there was a way to terminate the trip and bring the crew back to Earth. The lack of a return-to-Earth option is the key feature that makes Mars Ones goal feasible, but it also makes the risk harder to quantify.

Equipment failures are inevitable on an open-ended Mars colonization effort. This was not a big concern on the one- to two-week Apollo lunar expeditions. Machine technology has advanced tremendously in the last 50 years, so mechanical and electrical failures are less frequent, better understood, and more predictable that ever before. Techniques to detect impending failure can drastically reduce the risk of adverse consequences from that hazard.

Apollos early preliminary design concepts, though feasible, were soon obsolete as more efficient and safer ways to accomplish the mission were developed. In similar manner, Mars Ones plans may change a lot before they freeze the concept and progress on to detailed design. Flaws that appear as major risks in the current preliminary scheme should not be viewed with undue alarm.

In the early 1960s, the Apollo program gambled that it would be able to take advantage of several newly emerging technologies. NASA judged these developments to be so very desirable as to warrant the risk that they might not be perfected in time. These technologies included high power transistorized electronics, miniature on-board guidance computers, and the liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engine. If there had been problems that slowed development of any of these, the lunar landing would not have occurred in the 60s.

Problems with major new hardware did come very close to delaying the lunar landing program. Two examples were the catastrophic failure of bearings on the giant crawler transporters that moved the Saturn rocket out to the launch pad, and the structural failure of a huge space simulation vacuum chamber built to qualify the Apollo Command and Service Modules for space.

Mars One will also have to gamble that new, enabling technologies (such as advanced spacesuits) will be perfected in time for use on the planet.

From the earliest years of the human space program, NASA and its contractors faced unprecedented technical problems. For solutions they needed the best talent they could find. Many of the countrys most motivated engineers were attracted to the program because they wanted to be part of something exciting. And it wasnt just engineers. Other people, from nurses to machinists, wanted to make history so they migrated to the NASA centers. The working environment was especially stimulating because the Space Race with the Soviet Union to land humans on the Moon was a real competition. Employees felt like they were on a team participating in a sporting event.

NASAs efforts to obtain outstanding talent included personal visits by managers to college campuses, where engineering school deans had been asked to look for exceptional students. When such individuals were identified, the agency would encourage them to come work for the government after graduation. Thats how legendary engineer Max Faget (whose name is on the patent for the Mercury capsule) and Guy Thibodaux (designer of the Scout solid fuel satellite launcher) were recruited. NASAs talent search was not restricted to just the US. In the early 1960s, Canada cancelled its AVRO Arrow supersonic interceptor aircraft project, and suddenly scores of top engineers and designers didnt have a job. NASA was able to scoop up these Canadians and relocate them to Texas to take critical roles in the Apollo program.

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Lessons from Apollo for Mars One

Saskia Vermeylen, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University for The Conversation UK 2014-10-19 12:45:16 UTC

Whether you're into mining, energy or tourism, there are lots of reasons to explore space. Some "pioneers" even believe humanity's survival depends on colonizing celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars, both becoming central hubs for our further journey into the cosmos. Lunar land peddlers have started doing deals already a one-acre plot can be yours for just 16.75 pounds ($26.96).

More seriously, big corporations, rich entrepreneurs and even United States politicians are eyeing up the Moon and its untapped resources. Russia has plans for a manned colony by 2030 and a Japanese firm wants to build a ring of solar panels around the Moon and beam energy back to Earth.

We need to be clear about the legal validity of extraterrestrial real estate as the same ideas that were once used to justify colonialism are being deployed by governments and galactic entrepreneurs. Without proper regulation, the Moon risks becoming an extra-planetary Wild West.

To figure out whether "earthly" laws can help decide who owns what in space or if anything can be owned at all we must first disentangle sovereignty from property. Back in the 17th century, natural law theorists such as Hugo Grotius and John Locke argued that property rights exist by virtue of human nature but that they can only have legal force when they are recognized by a sovereign government. Within the context of space law, the big question is whether sovereignty reaches infinity how high must you go to escape your country?

When the U.S. was confronted with this query in the early 1950s, it lobbied for the recognition of outer space as a global commons. The Soviet Union was difficult to infiltrate to gather intelligence, so open access to Soviet air space was crucial for the U.S. during the Cold War. Perceiving outer space as a commons was also another way of preventing national sovereignty in space. But neither the USSR nor the U.S. was keen to fight out the Cold War on yet another front. Geopolitics dictated the decision to treat outer space as being non-appropriable.

This principle can be found back in Article 2 of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which clearly forbids "national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, means of use or occupation by any other means." It has been widely accepted: No one complains the various Moon landings or satellites in space have infringed their sovereignty.

However, legal commentators disagree over whether this prohibition is also valid for private appropriation. Some space lawyers have argued for the recognition of real property rights on the basis of jurisdiction rather than territorial sovereignty.

Historical records of the Space Treaty negotiations clearly indicate people were against private appropriations at the time, but an explicit prohibition never made it into Article 2. Lessons have been learned from this omission and the ban was far more explicit in the subsequent Moon Agreement of 1979. However only 16 countries signed the agreement, none of which were involved in manned space exploration, leaving it somewhat meaningless as an international standard.

Consequently, space entrepreneurs such as Dennis Hope from the Lunar Embassy Corporation seem to think that there is a loophole in Article 2 which allows private citizens to claim ownership of the Moon. Most space lawyers disagree however. They point out that states assume international responsibility for activities in space, whether by national companies or private adventurers, and therefore that the same prohibition extends to the private sector.

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Who Owns the Moon?

Anyone who grew up with the Apollo moon launches in the 1970s, along with the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" (which premiered in 1968), was left with the impression that there would be colonies on the moon any day now. Given that it's now more than 30 years later and there's been no significant progress, it's safe to assume there won't be a moon colony any time soon. But it's still a tantalizing thought. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to live, vacation and work on the moon?

Let's say we did want to colonize the moon. There are some basic needs that the moon colonists would have to take care of if this were any sort of long-term living arrangement. The most basic fundamentals include:

It would be ideal to get as much of these resources as possible from the moon itself, because shipping costs to the moon are unbelievable -- something on the order of $50,000 per pound. Just one gallon of water weighs about eight pounds, so it costs $400,000 to get it to the moon! At those rates, you want to carry as little as possible to the moon and manufacture as much as you can once you get there.

Obtaining breathable air, in the form of oxygen, is fairly easy on the moon. The soil on the moon contains oxygen, which can be harvested using heat and electricity.

Water is trickier. There's now some evidence that there may be water, in the form of buried ice that has collected at the south pole of the moon. If so, water mining might be possible, and it would solve a lot of problems. Water is necessary for drinking and irrigation, and it can also be converted to hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel.

If water isn't available on the moon, it must be imported from Earth. One way to do that would be to ship liquid hydrogen from the earth to the moon, and then react it with oxygen from the moon's soil to create water. Since water molecules are 67 percent oxygen and 33 percent hydrogen by weight, this might be the cheapest way to get water to the moon. As a side-benefit, the hydrogen can react with oxygen in a fuel cell to create electricity as it creates water.

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What if we lived on the moon? - HowStuffWorks

In the 2020s, Mars One essentially a Dutch-made extraplanetary reality TV show willsend amateur astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars. Their attempts to colonize the Red Planet will be televised which, according to a new report by aerospace researchers at MIT, might make for particularly morbid viewing. The MIT researchers analyzed the Mars One mission plan and found that the first astronaut would suffocate after 68 days. The other astronauts would die of starvation, dehydration, or incinerationin an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The analysis also concludes that 15 Falcon Heavy launches costing around $4.5 billion would be needed to support the first four Mars One crew. In short, the colonization of Mars will make for some seriously compelling TV.

Following the announcement of its one-way mission to Mars in 2012,some 200,000 people registered their interest on the Mars One website. That number has now been whittled down to 705 candidates a fairly even mix of men and women from all over the world (but mostly the US, of course!) Several teams of four astronauts (two men, two women) will now be assembled, and training will begin. The current plan is to send a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the first team of four to Mars in 2022 just eight years from now.The whole thing will be televised as a reality TV show. In the interim, a number of precursor missions supplies, life-support units, living units, and supply units will be sent to Mars ahead of the human colonizers. More colonists will be sent fairly rapidly thereafter, with 20 settlers expected by 2033.

The technology underpinningthe mission is rather nebulous, though and indeed, thats where the aerospace researchers at MIT find a number of potentially catastrophic faults. Basically, while we kind of have the technology to set up a colony on Mars, most of it is at a very low technology readiness level (TRL) and untested in a Mars-like environment. Mars One will rely heavily onlife support and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) squeezing water from Martian soil and oxygen from the atmosphere but these technologies are still a long way off large-scale, industrial use by a nascent human colony on Mars. NASAs next Mars rover will have an ISRU unit that will make oxygen from the Red Planets atmosphere of CO2 but that rover isnt scheduled to launch until 2020, just two years before the planned launch of Mars One.

Read:Musks million man march to Mars

After 68 days, oxygen levels will spike after the first wheat crop reaches maturity and then all hell will break loose

The paper prepared by the MIT researchers [PDF] is rather damning. Basically, due to the difficulty of shipping supplies to Mars, the colonists will mostly live off the land. The problem is, plants produce a lot of oxygen and in a closed environment, too much oxygen is a bad thing (things start to spontaneously explode). So, you have to vent the oxygen but we dont yet have the technology to vent oxygen without also venting the nitrogen, which is used to pressurize the various Mars One pods. As a result, air pressure will eventually get so thin that the colonists cant breathe with the first one dying of hypoxia after 68 days. Other potential modes of death are: starvation (the current Mars One plan simply doesnt contain enough calories for the colonists); dehydration; CO2 poisoning; and death by spontaneous immolation due to a rich oxygen atmosphere.

Read:NASAs Space Launch System is officially all systems go for Mars and Moon landings

The researchers also note that Mars Ones plan of sending more colonists after the original four is a bad, bad idea. Not only will this exacerbate any technological issues, but therell be an ever-increasing demand on resources like food and water, and faster wear-and-tear that will require more replacement parts. All of these factors willincrease the number of resupply craft, pushing the total cost of the project into tens of billions of dollars.

Breakdown of the first few cargo missions as part of the Mars One colonization. Note the growing percentage of ECLSS (life support) spare parts. It is expected that stuff will break down a lot on Mars, and new parts have to be flown in from Earth. (Or 3D-printed in-situ, but were not there yet.)

In short, the MIT researchers find a lot of problems with the current plans laid out by Mars One. Dutch entrepreneur and CEO of Mars One,Bas Lansdorp, disputes the contents of the MIT report, saying oxygen concentrators already exist and if oxygen levels and air pressure can be kept stable, then many of MITs other assertions about dehydration and starvation are moot.

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The first Mars One colonists will suffocate, starve, and be incinerated, according to MIT