

Ask HN: Why haven't we colonised the moon? - killbill

Why? Should we, and could we?
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venomsnake
Short answer - piss flows downwards in the gravity well.

Longer answer:

1\. Water - we need a lot of it for everything. There is not much on the moon.
There are few ways to do it - there is a lot of oxygen on the moon so we only
need the hydrogen. Lifting from the earth will be hard, capturing protons from
the sun wind seems feasible - but is unsolved.

2\. We lack in robotics and nanotech. A perfect colonization plan (also cheap)
will require us to lift only the wetware. (even better pre frozen embryos)

So if we manage to create self replicating GECK (solar cells, 3d printers,
etc) that weights about 2 tonnes. Deploy it there, wait for it to devour the
moon (since its exponential it could be just a few years), gather enough water
and then send small teams 10-20 fertile women with a lot of embryos to be
serially mothers for rent ... we could see something in our life time. Since
the moon will be one giant solar cell you could beam the excess energy to the
Earth and the moon is much better base to try to tame venus mars and the belt.

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veidr
Cost-benefit not favorable. Turns out those of us willing to pay to play in
lunar G can't afford to pay enough to make it work.

------
aw4y
Please no. Universe deserves something better than humans everywhere.

~~~
rman666
The universe is actually pretty big. The Moon is hardly, "everywhere."

