I don't want to rain on everybody's parade. The Artemis II mission was definitely way cool. It is impressive that Homo sapiens has achieved the capability to do something that awesome. We rule!
That said, there is no defensible, or even presentable reason to create a human colony on the moon. There is absolutely nothing there of significant value to us, certainly not enough to justify the immense expense of sustaining human life on an airless rock that's almost 240,000 miles away. There is a hypothesis that there could be water ice in caverns near the south pole, which would be some help, as much because the people could live in the caverns as because of the water. Living on the surface of the moon would doom people to a horrible death, because there is no atmosphere or magnetic field to shield them from solar and cosmic radiation.
As for growing crops, obviously you can't do that with two weeks of sunlight followed by two weeks of darkness. Terrestrial plants are adapted to a 24 hour day. You'd need to use artificial light in your grotto. Okay, if you're near the south pole, you could put a ring of solar panels around the high latitude and cable them together to give you continuous electricity. Apparently NASA has decided that it would be easier to build a nuclear reactor on the moon. Okaaaaaayyy . . .
So there you are living in your cave with your nuclear reactor and your grow lamps, doing what exactly? Of course we don't know what 1/6 G does to the human body over time. That could be another big problem. Think about it. It's all we can do to sustain a small colony in Antarctica, which has no purpose other than national prestige and a bit of scientific research that could probably be done just as well by robots. And that is a far more hospitable environment, much cheaper and easier to supply. Sick crew members can be evacuated and any equipment or materials needed for emergencies readily supplied. In fact the summit of Mount Everest is a far more hospitable environment and we don't see people living there, now do we?
So, sorry, this is a) completely ridiculous and b) not going to happen. So dream about something else.
2 comments:
Don't be so quick to rain on this parade.
1/6G you say? What a boon for nursing home residents too weak to navigate in 1G! ... And they wouldn't care too much about long term effects on their bodies. There has to be the owner of a nursing home empire somewhere who'd like to find out if this could improve his bottom line. Our exploding population of new billionaires would surely be interested in this option as they age. All that's needed now is a rocket with a much gentler ride.
And life on the moon would be orders of magnitude easier than life on Mars! So Musk is insane. But we already knew that :-)
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