The Moon To Be Used As Humanity's "Toolkit" To Rebuild Race.
 

Extract of Daily Galaxy Blog

Anyone think this would make a great movie? :)

On a serious note, I think it's good that we're preparing now rather than later because the future might be less bright than we hope for.

I don't know for a movie, but it make me think of Fallout,
Btw very interesting post there, thanks to share.

You look like to be interested by physic work, are you?

Have you new Hubble update???

There's a problem with that plan.
IF an asteroid is big enough to devastate the earth, it could very well do a number on the moon as well.
If everyone is dead on the planet.... who's going to find the buried treasure on the moon? Aliens?
I think they're thinking too far ahead, and not in the right direction. We need to put a colony or station on the moon first, then start thinking about setting up an 'ark' to store things up there. We're talking at least fifty or more years into the future. IF we're lucky and major countries don't decide to self implode from budget crises.
There are a lot more issues in the present that need our help rather than making sure we survive our own stupidity or an accident of the universe.
Titan A.E. anyone?

The moon has been hit by asteroids with diameters of over 10 km, far larger than any hit on Earth (a 6km asteroid took out the dinosaurs). The moon is tough and since the moon is gravitational locked with the Earth (one side always faces the Earth) you can put the info on the side that faces the Earth and it probably will never be hit.

We can detect asteroids centuries in advance. Discovering an asteroid that is 10 years away would be catching us off gaurd. A decade is plenty time to launch a couple of humans to the moon as long as there's enough resources of the moon to sustain life temporarily.

It's estimated that if we were to start building an outpost on the moon now, it'd be 2100(+) before it would be a fully functional station capable of supporting a human civilisation. Yes there needs to be a station there too but the 'ark' should be the first step of the plan as there's no point spending trillions of dollars on a station that will be useless if a catastrophie breaks out before it's built.

That's true but equally I want at least a possibility that the human race's continuity can be assured. Hopefully future generations will learn from this one's.

Love that movie!! :D

Ah double post!

I've got three new vids uploaded in the last month. You'll have to wait until ESA give me their newest release before another Hubble Update is uploaded. Expect another vid in a couple of weeks, or even days! :D

Good I will wait for it, can you send me a VM when it will be ready?

So how are they gonna deal with less gravity? People living there would need to be exercising for sure, but animals and plants? I can only think of this huge moon weed they could grow there hahaha :D

Win :P :D

Reduced gravity has less of an effect on plants overall.

The biggest problem though is no atmosphere... the moon has next to no atmosphere at all, there is no CO2 for the plants, or nitrogen which is important for soil fertility.

Hahahahaha gigantism in weed (a stoner's delight :P jk).

Serious answer *sincere face*: They wouldn't try to create an ecosystem on the Moon. Im guessing if it's nuclear winter that has ravaged the Earth then humans would try to survive on the moon for as long as the Earth is inhabitable, then, with their hard drives of info on how to rebuild, return to Earth and start over.

Plants actually survive well in even Zero G, they just need a tiny bit of help. :)

Interesting concept, but I sort of have my reservations on it. If the Earth is ravaged to such a point where we would need to get the information on the ark, who is to say that enough technology would survive to actually put the information to use? If anything we need to be working on putting an actual, habitable ark on the moon, not just an information vault.

And 2100 for a moon colony? Are you freakin' kidding me? That's bulls***! We had the ability to get there 40+ years ago, yet we still don't have the technology to go back? WTF?! :angry:

I'm sure the info vault is just a first step, making a station there would come second (possibly during the construction of the 'ark').

Funny enough, 2100 is actually a conservative estimate but then again, this is for a fully functional civilisation on the Moon. It's estimated that it'd be at least 2050 before a station on the Moon becomes self-sufficient without the need of constant supply modules being sent to the Moon.

If any of you are curious about an outpost on the moon, there's a very interesting documentary about it: Living On The Moon

heh I just saw the document and, well it seems like we'll be doing the same thing there - harvesting the materials until they are gone completely.

Yup but it's not like people on the Moon have options. Regolith makes oxygen and water, two vital components for survival on the Moon and there's enough of it last centuries. I disagree with using up Earth's resources but for the Moon you simply don't have that option to go green.

Yeah, there are plenty of resources on the moon for a base there, primarily oxygen, but the main problem is getting everything there so that it's in a position so start using them. One of the main problems is surviving the lunar daytimes where it can reach 115 degrees or so.

Yeah scientists were thinking of putting a base on one of the poles, because it's primarily daytime there all the time. They're also planning on building huge solar panels there so it could always supply the Earth and the moon base with electricity.

But what happens when they use up all the dust from the moon? Also how do orbital stations get oxygen? I never knew how it doesn't get depleted? Some kind of photosynthesis?

Trying to use up all the Regolith on the Moon is like trying to deplete the Earth of dirt, there's a LOT of it. It may even take millenia for a base on the moon to use up all the Regolith but since everything on the surface is Regolith (bar some frozen water ice and Iridium) it would take ages for it to be depleted.

How the ISS maintains oxygen levels is because there are machines called Oxygen Generators on the station. On board there are huge tanks for pure water and we know that pure water is H20 (Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom). The generator uses what is called Electrolysis. It uses electricty to split the water into the two hydrogen atoms and the one oxygen atoms. The oxygen is then either used to fill oxygen tanks (in case of an emergency) or to give the astronauts oxygen.

There are also things called oxygen candles that provide temporary oxygen supllies if the oxygen generator were to ever fail.

There are also scrubbers which remove CO2 from the air allowing it to be recirculated without a build up of CO2 to dangerous levels.

True that.:)

What a lunatic (pun intended) idea. I mean - dont we have more serious issues to deal with? Especially if Earth is hit hard enough that only a database on the moon survives (meaning the "arks" already existing on Earth are destroyed also). I mean - what makes one think that the survivors of such a blow would be able to access data stored on (fragile!) hard disks on the moon or even fly there. This sounds all kind of nutty. If you want to protect something, bury it in several places on Earth, not on the Moon. To put plants and animals in there is rather strange anyways as it is a bit like the old joke about Noahs Ark in which the Dinosaurs did not fit in - who gets to choose what survives? Just plants and animals that are good resources for humans? You cant save an ecosystem in a database... The best thing to do is to make sure, the biggest mass extinction event already in place is stopped (which is the continous destruction of the ecology of this planet by the current economy and civilization). I would much rather worry about that than about some futuristig possibility of solar flares or asteroid impacts. Chances are if there is the need for such an "ark" within the lifespan of it, it will be brought upon the world by the very same mindset and technology that is needed to create (and access) them.

EDIT: Just thought what a pain it would be for civilization loving people to live on a devastated Earth knowing that all the information is just out of reach because they lost the ability to access it and they'd be reminded of that every night as the moon rises...

EDIT2: Just read that part on colonizing the moon - I sincerely doubt that by 2050 humans will even be close to building a station there. It is hard enough to maintain the space station and think of Mars missions or even to just make a manned moon mission again. The technology is not the problem, the problem are resources and mainly money and I think there are better ways to spend money indeed. IF you believe in a prevailing industrial civilization, the thing to put money in is to develop truely sustainable ways to live (and going to the moon does not help, maybe fusion will help and advanced recycling will help - at least for some decades or centuries). Once that is really managed, go on.

There are already many such projects on Earth. Even if most of civilisation is lost, the knowledge won't be entirely lost, especially since it's already known then even if part has to be rediscovered, it is a lot easier.

As for mass extinction events, I assume it was talking more about threats to civilisation rather than biodiversity... as it is, such projects can store genetic sequences, cell samples, seeds of plants etc anyway.

I think we should worry about how to fix things here before going up there. Really. Millions of dollars could be used there, billions; why not spend that money on something that could avoid blowing ourselves up? Like, nuke neutralizers. That would be cool.

I guess we're getting to a no return point and the only hope for humanity is escaping from Earth. From what we've made of it.

Ah - ok, I'm sorry, that is probably true. I was thinking again about nature and not so much about civilization. True - if you want to just keep civilization alive, it would probably be sufficient to store data and methods to set up some kind of reboot of the same system. Still - if you really want that, it makes more sense to store it on Earth as then people could still go there, take seeds, use the technology there to read the data.

If that is true and that point is near, then seriously we are ****ed. Because this is not going to be an option for probably many decades or even centuries. Space travel over long distances is SciFi. If you talk about a select few living on the moon - people could by the same reasoning also survive under these conditions on a devastated Earth.

I know the feeling of wanting to escape. I think many people on Earth today know that, at least the ones that realize what devastation is happening and are not still pretending that environmental destruction and finite resources are a lie. But the reactions are all so different.

Compare it to an escape from a building that quite obviously is unstable and about to collapse, but my path would be straight out of the door instead of climbing to the roof hoping for the unlikely chance for a helicopter ride to another building.

Likewise it does not really make sense to hope for some miracle solution that manages to save billions of people to space (or do you think you would be among the 1000 or 10000 or 100000 chosen if it came to it?) if there is a much more realistic and tangible way - basically save the land, keep the condition of this planet in a state that ensures your survival. At all costs. Whatever it takes.

Think of the two alternatives you and me proposed here - either get some spaceship or moon colony going with some few survivors of the humans race packed into a generation ship or stop civilization as we know it and the many survivors of that change would live differently - without supermarkets and cars. Guess what, you dont have supermarkets and cars in space either. The living conditions of such a crammed space colony would really not compare to life on Earth under "uncivilized" conditions, or would you think so?

A problem with my argument obviously is that your solution is something that people would just have to go on like they did before, just try harder, work more, spend more money and then believe it is reachable, while my proposed solution would require to step out of this track. Sadly the latter is something people are not used to and thus less likely to accept while the first solution is something perfectly along the line of thinking that has ruled the world in the past years. So admittedly, I have a harder stand here, but I hold it more sane.

If you've invented one, go ahead.
Oh wait, you haven't.

Great powers of deduction you possess, I see.

Nuke neutralizers - yeah. nice idea. Then its only biological, chemical and conventional warfare you have to take out next to make peace. So I am all in for neutralizing nukes and all the other WMDs, but thats just a start. Humans of this culture are waging a constant war against nature - conventional, chemical, biological AND nuclear. They bomb the earth for minerals, they poison the rivers and oceans with chemicals, they carry invasive species all over the world and they dump nuclear waste in the landscape or spray it in the air in "incidents". This is what has to be stopped, as this is not a theoretical possibility that might happen if someone hits a button, it is happening NOW.

Truthfully, I say this as someone who would rather there was no need for nukes... but as long as places like North Korea, Pakistan and China have them, as long as places like Iran want them... then the rest of the world would be stupid to get rid of them... They would be destroyed if they did.

The point of them as weapons is that if you ever need to actually use them, they've failed in their purpose. If there were no nuclear weapons (or other WMDs), I'm fairly sure the Cold War would have become World War 3 and would have seen tens of millions of deaths through conventional warfare.

Somewhere, James Cameron just vomited.

Well said.

I doubt it - the WMD scare was self strengthening and I doubt the hatred between the two sides would have ever been so great if it was not for the knowledge that the other could simply eliminate everyone in the own country at once. Violence ALWAYS leads to more violence and threats always lead to more threats - if that is the intention, then so be it.
And weapons failing their purpose? As if that never happened before. Sometimes, everything "fails it purpose" and then what?

The need is there to stop that vicious cycle of ever greater power - and this of course means that all sides will have to do so. And this is not going to be done by the governments, that is for sure.