Why moon?
Today we will be looking at colonizing the moon, and not just small bases, but real colonies. My focus today will be on the colonization and industrialization of the moon with thousands or millions of people.
The moon has a bit of a strange position in the discussion of space travel, it remains the only place mankind has visited in person but has been nearly half a century since we have been there, and only a dozen people have set foot on it.
It's hard to picture the moon and its surface, it's a big place having an area larger than Asia, so those dozen astronauts only saw a very small portion of it.
What about the craters then?
We tend to envision the moon as a great desert pockmarked with craters, but people tend to forget that those craters range from the size of a pebble and large enough to swallow most nations and deep enough to bury mount Everest.
We've got dozens of craters that could hold major metropolitan areas or even entire nations and you could quite easily dome over an entire crater and these would be large enough to hold entire ecosystems. Given the low gravity of the moon building structures, this large would be a possibility.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that all of those craters were formed by impacts. So building on the surface is always going to carry some inherent risk of damage, potentially catastrophic damage. The chances of a large impact wiping out your dome would be somewhere in the realm of getting struck by lightning on Earth however. So perhaps some kind of active defense system would be sufficient to maintain the integrity of the dome.
Wait, there's Lava too??
I also hear there are a lot of lava tubes on the moon, these tubes vary in depth across the surface and the low gravity allows them to get very large in diameter and in terms of distance can run for hundreds of kilometers/miles.
Building in the underground lava tubes would likely be the best first port of call. As the moon's day/night cycle is a month long and the light isn't filtered by an atmosphere so the surface is constantly bombarded by radiation or meteorites, therefore having a fair whack of ground between you and the harsh reality of space could keep you safer than building on the surface.
Plus it is likely you will have artificial lighting due to the day night cycle so you would not have to block out the two-week long sunlight in order to maintain a normal day to night earth-like ratio.
Transportation, Supplies, and Comms..
So in order to incentivize the movement of people and materials to the moon in a view of setting up a colony, we need to determine what the benefits the moon offers us. What is on the moon that earth lacks, what is on the moon that the rest of the solar system lacks.
Real time communication, the moon is close enough that we can send data in real time. Having this ability means we can cooperate with moon side experimentation and maintain a link in order to order supplies and so on. It only takes 2.6 seconds to send a message to the moon and back to the earth.
Being this close to earth means that if we needed to send any specialist materials or personnel it could be done fairly quickly. For example, a space going vehicle capable of 1G of acceleration constantly could make it to the moon in less than four hours. This is shorter than many flights on earth and certainly within the realm of possibility for a metallic hydrogen or fusion powered ship.
So, What else does the moon have?
Well, it lacks a significant atmosphere, but rather than a disadvantage this can actually be an advantage, the lack of a significant gravity well and zeroes atmospheric drag means it is very easy to ship materials from the moons surface back to earth, or out into the solar system.
So we could use the moon as a drop off point from asteroid based mining operations, pulling in highly desirable elements and minerals such as gold or platinum or even diamond from further out in the solar system and easing it down onto the moon ready to be shipped back to earth in order for consumption.
There is also the opportunity to mine the craters themselves on the moon, as they are created by those very same things we are thinking about mining, so we could easily trawl the surface or near surface for rare materials.
The moon also has a dark side, which will for a long period (2 weeks) is shielded from not only the sun but the earth as well, providing a perfect place to observe phenomena in our nearby neighborhood. No radio noise, no glare from reflection, and even more importantly no diffusion from an atmosphere.
We could also practice our terraforming, hazardous experimentation such as biological, nanotechnology, power generation. The moon being in close proximity to earth means if we require any additional information or materials and personnel for this experiments we could easily send them up there and try out all the things before we set out further across the solar system and move outside the safety net of the sphere of easy influence.
The moon has sources of water, which could easily be split with hydrolysis and turned into hydrogen and oxygen, large deposits of helium 3 which can be an excellent energy source in fusing reactors. The moon also has good amounts of potassium, uranium, aluminum, sulfur, magnesium and phosphorus all of which could be used for experimentation, power generation, or building.
The low gravity of the moon means you can build just like you do on the earth, a smelter on the moon will still work just like a smelter on earth, hot less dense substances still rise to the top, a distillery (we need that space booze) will also operate just the same. Not having an atmosphere means you don't have to worry about reinforcing structures to cope with those conditions, so building large on the moon is nowhere near as costly in terms of materials versus building on the earth.
Being that you have access to large amounts of raw and precious materials and the ability to easily move them from the moon back to the earth due to the low gravity and no atmosphere. The ability to create huge amounts of energy via fusing reactors or pulling in photons from the sun. You would be able to create a larger demand for personnel and offer a much higher rate of pay versus working earth-side.
This disparity in pay, opportunities to step out further into the solar system much easily compared to launching directly from earth, mining rights to rare materials and elements, engage in advanced science and cutting edge experimentation, ability to mass produce and ship back to earth plus the ability to build spaceships and much larger structures (for housing, science or manufacture) vastly cheaper and easier than on earth would all encourage people and organizations to take that leap out of the atmosphere and onto the moon and hopefully further out into the void.
I'd love to hear your thoughts any other things I might have missed in regards to the moon in the comments below.
Thank you for taking the time to read my simple words dearest readers, much love. <3
