h a l f b a k e r yRIFHMAO
(Rolling in flour, halfbaking my ass off)
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I am not an aeronautical engineer, so I am not sure what kind of technology this kind of
invention would require. It would probably look a lot like the biospheres here on earth..
Well, if you believe NASA...
http://www.lpi.usra...nts/ccg/index.shtml
The figure I remembered was about 4000 kilos, but maybe they've had time to revise their estimates in the intervening years. [AbsintheWithoutLeave, Apr 21 2008]
[link]
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The only application it would have would be as a tourist resort. otherwise it would rely too heavily on government funding. even then, once all the people that are rich enough to go there get bored with it, it wouldn't support itself and would get shut down.
nice thought though. "houston, this is moonbase..." |
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I guess the first couple of years of building atmosphere would be the hardest. Meanwhile, we could ship loads and loads of our organic waste up there to get a good methane/CO2 base there. Also, send a scientist up there, or someone who knows what they are doing. That person could have a medical for saying that they were born without a sense of smell. |
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Then, as more and more garbage piles up, it starts to ferment and make an atmosphere. |
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With the introduction of some spores, some used-up Christmas trees, and some sea-monkeys. A self-sufficient little biosphere could start! |
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On your thoughts of biospheres. |
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The structural designer of the "millenium dome" in London said that in theory a dome of almost any size could be built if you could find the materials eg. city-covering size. I thought that you might be able to cover cities on Earth and install huge filters and chemical processing plants to re-extract raw materials from the air pollution |
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With half a gravity and micro atmospheric drag to hold you back, build a fine large blending machine to agitate the native lunar dust with other compost. The twist is, use minute amounts of oxygen and water and squeeze the dust into bricks.
Houses built with these bricks would slowly ferment and provide some homelike indoorsy atmosphere for lunar couch potatoes. |
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IMHO, the key to building a cost-effective lunar settlement would be to fill a crater with a liquid that had an extremely low vapor pressure, so that the membrane to stop the liquid from boiling off would not have to be very strong or thick. A dwelling built immersed in this liquid at suitable depth would then have roughly equal pressures inside and outside its walls, again allowing them to be much thinner than would be required for a dwelling that had to sit in a vacuum. |
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Of course, for all this to work you need to be able to synthesize your materials out of moon rock. Not knowing much about that rock's composition I can't judge the feasibility. Does anyone know whether moon rock contains useful quantities of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, or other non-metals? |
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It's my understanding that the moon's escape velocity is low enough that gas molecules just hurtle off into space and never return. So any attempt to create a lunar atmosphere is sadly doomed. Sorry. |
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Actually, the moon already has an artificial athmosphere that we put there. In the 60s. It's 8% hydrgen and 92% rocket exhaust. |
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Oh my gawd! Someone saw this? More important, someone posted... gosh, thanks for the input guys, good or bad. It was an idea I had when I was like ten, so I owed it to myself to tell someone. Awesome... |
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Ok. Problem: where do you get a planet's worth of oxygen
to cover the moon. |
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Possible sources:
1) Multiple comet impacts
2) Extract it from moonrock
3) Discover frozen water deposits at the Moon's South
Pole crater (which is permanently in shadow)
4) Other? |
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Problems
1) Will need lots (>1000) comets to provide enuf O2.
2) Will need lots of electricity on moon to power
extraction machines. And I mean lots. Not a couple of
namby-pamby solar panels, but 2-3 orders of magnitude
bigger than Earth's current nuclear arsenal.
3) There isn't any/much water there: the theory didn't
pan out so good.
4) I can't think of another one. |
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However, the idea's sound. Any nation that devotes the
time and energy (>100years) to terraforming the moon will
be rewarded with a useable planetoid all to itself, and
just handy too. Problem is, no country's going to go that
much in debt for centuries/millenia just to give a useless
rock a blue sky. (the moon is stunningly poor in
resources: you could get more useable materials from a
household brick) |
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supercat wrote: "Does anyone know whether moon rock
contains useful quantities of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen,
sulfur, or other non-metals?" |
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My answer: No, to be blunt. You can get baking soda out
of the regolith (top layer), but that's about it.The stuff
you throw away as waste from a mine on Earth is *way*
more rich in raw materials than even the best moonrock.
Moonrock is (for all intents & purposes) useless for
anything except making bricks out of. |
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Martin: That's true for the rocks we've seen. Guess we'd
better go back and take a look at the others just be sure.
How many more can there be? |
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martin, would it make more sense to try the project on mars? |
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peter! thank you thank you thank you for the author and titles of the mars books that i've been looking for for years! and to everyone else that took the time to read and post, you rock! |
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ok
well i didnt read all of the comments,
and maybe some one mentioned it, but well...
Why do you think there is absoloutly no atmosphere on the moon?
well thats because it dosent have enough GRAVITY!!!!!!!!
and it will be brilliant to terraform mars cause its atmosphere is made of CO2, which is exacly what plants need... |
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Mars would probabley be a lot easier. Venus would be the second favourite but that would be the other way around ie. losing CO2..... An idea is born - ship atmospher from venus to mars until you have the corect amounts. Beter yet use a variant of my water tube idea - not realy trying to atract atention to my idea - honest ;) |
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For those who enjoy a good scifi story with themes along the lines of this idea try "Moonseed" by Stephen
Baxter |
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I put 'lunar atmosphere' in my MSN search engine and clicked on the third choice that came up. It brought me back here to this page. I was just looking for background for my halfbaked suggestion 'lunar announcements',. |
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Was that just a Lunar Hint? |
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It was a twitch in his eyelid. |
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Terraforming Venus is an idea I don't hear too much about. Is it impossible? Maybe... |
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To start with, put up a huge mylar sunshield in the Lagrange point in between the sun and Venus to put Venus in a permanent eclipse, and dropping the solar flux down to Earth levels. |
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Once things have cooled off, how could the water problem be solved? |
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ok, 2 things...i was wondering in a extremely low gravity situation like on the moon what gasses would be heavy enough not to be flung from the moon into space, and 2 i saw the post about putting the mylar shield between the sun and venus to cool the planet but i wonder, wouldnt that make it so nothing would grow? i would think that could make it hard to terraform on venus. and 3rdly, it seems that it would be relatively easy to make mars livable, and the russiens say they could get there in a mannd spacecraft within ten years if they had the funding, so why are we wasting our time spending 3 times as much money to get to the moon in 15 years when we could support russien technology instead to go to mars? |
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Sulfur Hexafluoride should be heavy enough to stay put on the moon. You couldn't breath it to live, but you wouldn't need a space suit to walk around. |
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The moon would need an artificial magnetic field to hold on to even that atmosphere, otherwise (I'm pretty sure) the solar winds would blow it all away. |
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Talk about taking a break between comments...wow! |
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I remember a paper from the 1970 that said that pollution from the Apollo landings probably doubled the mass of the lunar atmosphere. I'll see if I can find a link.
[EDIT] linky. |
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I don't think you'd need 1000 comets to give the moon a decent atmosphere. Hale-Bopp was about 60km across; if this was 50% volatiles at the density of water it would cover the lunar surface to a depth of about 25cm. If the earth's atmosphere was liquified it would be roughly 12m deep. So 25 of these could give you half the earth's atmosphere, and people live in Tibet so that could still be useful. Of course there are probably comets far larger than HB that rarely come to the inner solar system, so 1 or a few really mammoth ones might do. Also note that if we find a comet which has mostly inert gas components (nitrogen, argon, etc.), that might be enough to block out cosmic rays and allow bacteria to live; if the comet or an added asteroid dropped there contain carbon, the bacteria can eventually get oxygen out of the lunar soil, adding it to the atmosphere as they did on earth billions of years ago. |
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One potential problem: since the moon's gravity is much lower, you might need 6 times more total atmospheric weight to get the same breathable surface pressure as on a heavier body. A further side-effect of this would be that the moon's atmosphere would be much thicker than earth's, making stellar observations impossible; the sun would be dark red at noon, and the earth itself might be just a vague shadow. |
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The atmosphere would last 1000s of years before evaporating, long enough to be used by human civilizations; when it starts thinning we can find more comets, or by then we might have evolved into something else so the need for a habitable moon is moot. |
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[Marked-For-Deletion] No invention. |
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Couldn't it just have a roof all over it? |
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