Challenges of Working on the Moon

00:00:04
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty nine, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the Moon while an estimated six hundred and fifty million people tuned in. It was an incredible moment, and frankly, when I watch videos on YouTube, I still get a little choked up watching it. That said, it turned out that getting the flag there and raising it on the Moon was a real hassle, and it's a pretty good illustration of the kinds of hassles that we experience when we send humans to space. For starters, there was this big political brew haha, which is a great word really that hopefully I pronounced correctly over what kind of flag or flags to put up there. So some folks wanted to bring loads of tiny flags, one for every nation currently recognized on Earth. But the US Congress felt like if the US was footing the bill, then it was an American flag that needed to go up, and funding for the Apollo program appeared to be contingent on this. Oh, it's a US flag that was planted on each of the Apollo missions that made it to the Moon. But the US had to be careful to let everyone know that planting the flag was just a symbolic gesture and was not their way of showing the world that the Moon now belonged to the United States because that would have broken recently established international law. All right, so the politics was complicated. The next problem was how to get the flag up there and how to make it look good in space. The first problem for making it look good was that there is no atmosphere on the Moon, so if you hang the flag, it's just gonna like sadly droop down and look super not majestic. So they had to adjust a flag pole that one telescope so that it wouldn't take up a lot of space and they could just expand it out. And then it also had to have a bar along the top that would hold the flag up so that you could see the stars and stripes better. It's really expensive to send stuff to space, and it's really cramped inside of the spacecraft, so they had to make it as light as possible, and because space was limited inside the lunar lander, they had to attach it to the outside of the lunar lander. That meant that it was going to be exposed to space when the lunar lander was coming down to the Moon. And it was going to get super hot, so they had to create this insulated container to make sure that the flag wouldn't get sort of burned up as it was entering the Moon. All right, So now they've got it to the Moon, and even then there were problems. So spacesuits are pressurized, and so it's not like wearing a normal pair of gloves. It's like a pair of gloves that sort of pushes against every movement that you tried to make. So they had to make the flag easy to get out and put up. But once they got up there, the ground was more compact than they thought it was going to be, so the astronauts couldn't get the flag down as far as they wanted. And because of that, and because they ended up putting the flagpole maybe a little bit too close to the lunar lander, when they took off to return, you know, for their trip back to Earth, buzz Aldrin looked out the window and saw that they had knocked over the American flag. That appeared to have happened about half of the time, because if you look at pictures now of the Moon where those flagpoles should be, we see shadows cast by flagpoles in areas where Apollo twelve, sixteen, and seventeen put flags, So those three are probably still standing, but the rest of the flagpoles probably have fallen over, and the flag itself is probably a mess. The flags were just run of the mill flags, which cost only five dollars and fifty cents. And if you've seen a flag that's been left out on a flagpole for years, you've probably noticed that the sun's radiation has started to make the colors fade. The flags on the Moon have had about fifty years of exposure to solar radiation in the vacuum of space, so there's probably not much red or blue anymore. It's probably white. But also maybe the flags have disintegrated by this point. Because the Moon has temperature swings that go from over one hundred degrees celsius to less than one hundred and fifty degrees celsius near the equator as you go from day to night. That stuff's really hard on equipment, so the flags are likely disintegrated by now. Dennis Lakaruba, whose company sold the flag to NASA, said I can't believe there would be anything left. I gotta be honest with you. It's gonna be ashes cause, look, the space environment is tough and we're planning on returning to the Moon. The Artemis one mission orbited the Moon without a crew in twenty twenty two. Artemis two is expected to leave no sooner than September twenty twenty five, and it will take a crew around the Moon without landing, sort of like what we did with Apollo eight. Artemis three is expected to happen no earlier than September twenty twenty six, but this one's going to actually land humans, including the first woman on the Moon, and they're heading to the lunar South Pole. So on today's episode, we're we're going to talk about the kinds of challenges we're going to experience on the Moon as we move towards setting up things like research stations, mining operations, and maybe eventually permanent human habitats. Welcome to today's show. It's going to be hard to work and live on the Moon.

00:05:31
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist.

00:05:34
Speaker 1: I'm Kelly Wiersmith. I'm a parasitologist. Daniel. What have you been up to this week?

00:05:40
Speaker 2: Well, in addition to doing my research at serin I'm also a professor, which means I teach, and this week I've been preparing my new class for this fall, where I'm talking about life in the universe, Does it exist? Where is it? How can we find it? Basically, I'm talking about aliens.

00:05:55
Speaker 1: Nice. That sounds awesome. So is it a lecture class or a conversation? I bet that would be some really awesome conversations.

00:06:01
Speaker 2: It's supposed to be a lecture, but I'm going to make a kind of conversational and it's for non majors, so we're talking like dance majors and artists and all sorts of fun folks.

00:06:10
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that sounds like so much fun. Can I take your class? Never mind, I don't want to go back to school.

00:06:18
Speaker 2: I'll give you an A and I'll have about you. Kelly. What's your week been like?

00:06:21
Speaker 1: So? I recently took over as vice president for the American Society of Parasitologists. So I've been doing some like organizational stuff that's not super exciting. But I also have been studying the reproductive behaviors of male small mouth bass. So one of my things that I do as an ecologist is I work on questions related to managing fish populations. And so we're working on some papers about bass reproduction. So I've had my head underwater all week.

00:06:46
Speaker 2: So why small mouth and not large mouth bass or medium mouth bass.

00:06:50
Speaker 1: There are no medium mouth bass, which is best friend of mine. But I have done work on large mouth bass too. That work involved making the fish vomits that I could see what they were eating. That was a way smelier job than this one, although this one involved wetsuits. And I'm going to tell you there's two kinds of people in the world, those who pee in their wetsuits and those who lie about it. And riding in the van with the crew every day was not always a lovely experience. And the van was like twenty years old because ecologists can't afford anything nice.

00:07:23
Speaker 2: Five minutes in and we're already talking about ar En. Welcome to the podcast with a Biologist.

00:07:29
Speaker 1: My husband has a timer actually when Biologist started together, and he keeps track of how long it takes for us to start talking about poop, which we're gonna do on today's episode at some point.

00:07:38
Speaker 2: I bet, which we're gonna do absolutely except it's going to be poop in space and anyway, Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, in which we talk about poop in space and poop on Earth and everything out there in the universe. We like to explore the deepest, darkest questions about how everything works, including tiny little particles and fruit bats and everything in between.

00:08:01
Speaker 1: Fruit bats are awesome.

00:08:05
Speaker 2: So in the intro, Kelly, you told us about how terrible it's going to be to live on the Moon, all the challenges, how hard even was to get an American flag to fly on the Moon. And my first question is like, well, why are we even thinking about it? Why is NASA planning to go back to the moon. Why are people talking about building a particle collider on the moon. Why does Jeff Bezos want to go to the moon. Why don't we just stay home?

00:08:29
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, there's so many different answers to that question. One of the big answers, like, the reason we went to the Moon in the first place is probably prestige. So, you know, humanity seems to have decided that being able to get to a place like the Moon and keep people alive is a great way to show how amazing your economy is, how amazing your scientists are and to just get the whole world sort of impressed with you, and so that's probably part of why we're going back. But there's also a bunch of small companies who are hoping to make some profits off of the Moon. So there's already people who are sending as of loved ones to the Moon, which is a bit of a controversial thing. There are people who don't feel like we should be littering the moon with the ashes of humans, but there's a company that's working on doing that already.

00:09:12
Speaker 2: And is that a nice thing to do for somebody? Or you like, I'm ejecting you from the planet because I didn't like you in life, So.

00:09:19
Speaker 1: I think it's supposed to be a nice thing. I think Jean Roddenberry, the guy who did Star Trek, was the first person, or was one of the first people to have his ashes sent to space. They haven't made it to the moon, but you know, I think it would be great if you could go to the Moon in life, But it's much cheaper and easier to send a small quantity of your ashes to space.

00:09:40
Speaker 2: Are you thinking, Gene Roddenberry literally went where no man had gone before.

00:09:44
Speaker 1: Well, I mean he was with a shuttle crew surrounded by men and maybe some women at that point in the shuttle program, and then I think he came back.

00:09:53
Speaker 2: To you know, speaking of Urine. That's how I always interpreted the Star Trek thing. To go where no man has gone before always made me think of like I'm peeing where nobody has ever peed before.

00:10:05
Speaker 1: You know, as a biologist, my brain actually never went with Aeron. I'm surprised.

00:10:08
Speaker 2: Oh well, I'll just ruined Star Trek for you.

00:10:11
Speaker 1: No, that's okay, I'm still good with Star Trek. It'll be fine.

00:10:14
Speaker 2: So tell me, is this desire to go to the moon do you see it as like a natural extension of you know, colonialism and exploration five hundred years ago when the Spanish were sending out their ships, they also wanted to like claim New Spain for the king and you know, find resources and gold and exploit people. Is this like a natural extension of it or is it like a difference in kind?

00:10:37
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, so that could be a whole episode on its own. There's a book that just came out called Ground Control by Savannah I forget her last name, But that's enough information for you to find that book, and she tackles that question head on. I think it's complicated. So one thing that's nice is that when you go to the Moon, for example, there's already international law saying you can't you know, America can't land plant a flag and say the Moon belongs to us. But there is a lot of ambiguity and international law about what you can do with the resources once you're there. So could Blue Origin, for example, extract water from the Moon and create a gas station on the Moon by splitting it into hydrogen oxygen, which is propellant for rockets, and then sell that back to people. The US interpretation of international law is that the answer is yes. But I think there's a lot of other countries who would disagree. Or I think China and Russia would disagree until they were able to do the same thing, and then they would agree, but they don't want to be the second country to be able to do that. So it's complex. So there's no people, so at least you don't have the problems with dispossession in GENOCIDEA.

00:11:43
Speaker 2: It could be aliens. There could be aliens.

00:11:47
Speaker 1: On the moon.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: We didn't know until we went, you know, and the same is true with Mars. Right, Lanning people on Mars is complicated for that reason.

00:11:54
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I think microbes on Mars are way more likely than microbes on the Moon, and that I think does make it complicx. But there are folks who argue that the US, for example, being able to get to the Moon before everyone else is sort of like we benefited from colonization and from you know, exploiting various peoples and that's how we got this far ahead. And now we're going to be the first ones to get the resources and we're not going to share it with people, and that's like colonization sort of continuing to benefit the colonizers. It's complicated. I think international law fixes some of these problems, but I'd like to see more clarity to make sure that everybody benefits from space a little bit more clearly. But let's get back to the science.

00:12:35
Speaker 2: Well, I have a very like twelve year old opinion on this, which is it excites me to hear about people going to the Moon in Mars and beyond because I want to know what's out there, right, and I feel like eventually we have to explore the universe, and eventually has to start somewhere, and they should probably start with the moon because it's the closest thing and that's a baby step. And so I like hearing about like concrete progress towards our eventual future as a galactic species. You know, a big reader of science fiction, and so it feels like if you can't even get to the moon, you're not going to get anywhere. So that's my like, you know, as a twelve year old view of going to the moon.

00:13:12
Speaker 3: Amen.

00:13:12
Speaker 1: No, I totally agree with you. So my husband and I wrote a book called The City on Mars, and it's all about space settlements. And the reason we took this project on initially was because we're both sci fhi nerds who love the idea of humans living in space. We just want to see it done right. And it's kind of complicated and those complications. We're not going to talk too much about the legal complications or the ethical complications today, more of the like challenges that the lunar environment poses when you're trying to work just do something like plant a flag on the moon. Even something that simple is complicated.

00:13:43
Speaker 2: Even peeing on the moon is going to be hard. So we were curious what folks out there thought about life on the moon. Is it going to be a rosy, relaxed retirement home where people can live out their cushy lives or is it going to be brutish and short and difficult. So I asked our listeners to comment on the question what is the biggest challenge for living on the Moon. If you'd like to participate for future episodes, please write to us to questions at Danielankelly dot org and will happily add your voice to the choir. So think about it for a minute. What do you think is the biggest challenge for living on the Moon. Here's what a bunch of our listeners thought. I'd say it's some combination of food and water having to be replenished, most likely from Earth. Also bone loss due to low gravity. I think radiation is going to be the main one that we'd have to pay attention to, and living deep underground doesn't seem like the most glamorous way to be exploring a new body.

00:14:38
Speaker 1: I would say probably the cost of keeping supplies.

00:14:43
Speaker 2: And yeah, I would say cost.

00:14:45
Speaker 4: There are so many ridiculous challenges facing humans on the Moon, and almost every one of them is a single point failure like radiation, exposure, or access to food and water. So it's tough to choose, but I'm going with supplying oxygen.

00:15:00
Speaker 5: I guess that would be the lack of any life supporting ecosystem. Radiation is going to be a big problem.

00:15:08
Speaker 6: But also I hear there's really difficult dust, which is kind of like asbestos, I think, very dangerous to inhale and also just damages everything. I can't see it being a huge problem humans living on the Moon. We've already got the International Space Station a few hundred years, few trillion dollars, and some clever engineers.

00:15:29
Speaker 5: I guess they would have to find a source of water on the Moon because bringing it from Earth would be incredibly heavy, and trying to recycle it from PSDD on the space station just doesn't seem as if it would be enough.

00:15:45
Speaker 3: Well, top of mind is what to do with all the cheese realistically? Actually how to deal with all of dust, since I'm not aware of any room bus that can handle it really well.

00:15:58
Speaker 2: I think the.

00:15:59
Speaker 7: Biggest challenge our humans living on the Moon will be I think.

00:16:02
Speaker 2: The dust over there, because it's charged, it gets everywhere.

00:16:07
Speaker 6: Mental health and growing food is the biggest obstacles to long term survivability on the Moon.

00:16:12
Speaker 2: Well, there's temperature variations because there's no atmosphere. That sun is going to heat up the surface really quickly and make it really warm, and then it's going to cool off doing night breathing, not floating away, lack of resources to farm water, all that stuff. I think without the atmosphere, meteors are going to come in and just ping the surface of the Moon there, which is why it is already so pock marked.

00:16:39
Speaker 1: I probably guess the fact that you don't have all the things you have on Earth would be the biggest problem living on the Moon, like oxygen, water, radiation shielding, that's my guest.

00:16:46
Speaker 2: I think the hardest thing would be defined the nearest box.

00:16:48
Speaker 1: It's a level way away.

00:16:49
Speaker 2: Surviving the radiation environment. So it's going to force them underground.

00:16:54
Speaker 7: The right the aditional water, it's probably going to be the regulars. The moon soil, it is just corrosive sticks to everything. It's probably going to cripple every mission that goes up there for an extended period of time.

00:17:07
Speaker 2: So nobody mentioned the thing I expected, which is, you know the issue of being lactose intolerant and living on a ball of cheese.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: If the moon were made of cheese, that would solve a lot of our food problems that we're going to have on the moon. Although how old is the moon, Daniel.

00:17:24
Speaker 2: Oh, the moon is billions of years old, so it's going to be very Gorgonzola.

00:17:30
Speaker 1: All right, that would really narrow the pool of folks who would want to go to the Moon. I'm guessing that would be a whole different set of problems.

00:17:36
Speaker 2: It's going to be a sharp cheese for sure. So tell me what you thought about these answers. Really, it seems like our listeners are kind of aware of a lot of difficulties for living on the moon.

00:17:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was impressed. Actually, it seems like they've got a lot of facts about the moon. Honestly, they had a lot more knowledge about the Moon that I had before I started this book about the settling Space. So I was impressed a lot of the problems that they mentioned. We're going to be going over today and we could have a whole show called the Moon kind of Sucks that could have like five or six different seasons. But we're going to just pick a couple of Kelly's favorite moon problems. But before we get into my first problem, what did you think about the listener answers?

00:18:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought they were great. I love that people really think about the problems of living on the Moon, and I hope it means that they really appreciate how cushy and wonderful life is here on Earth. No radiation issues, we got nice weather, food is easy to grow. Man, life here is great. So you may be anti Moon, I hope that means you're also pro Earth.

00:18:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Earth is where you find all the interesting parasites and wasps like that might not work for most people, but man, the idea of moving to a place where there's zero chance that I could, like find a wasp species that hasn't been identified by science yet, I'd be pretty bummed out about that.

00:18:51
Speaker 2: I'm not sure most people include wasps on the pro list for Earth, but you know, everybody's got their own thing.

00:18:57
Speaker 1: I study the ones that are like too small to sting, but I've helped describe two new was species, you know, new to science. But but anyway, I hate yellow jackets.

00:19:06
Speaker 2: All right, So tell us what is the number one big pain in the butt for living on the Moon.

00:19:11
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know that you can necessarily pick the biggest problem. But the problem that was complained about a lot by the astronauts and that seems particularly like a pain in the rear and to me is regolith. So regolith is the name for like the dirt that covers the surface of the Moon. So on Earth, when you've got dirt, we have wind and rain and these things sort of roll our pebbles and they become nice and smooth because of that. On the Moon, not only do you have no wind and no water because it's in the vacuum of space, but it just keeps getting hammered by stuff from space, which kind of keeps shattering, and then the heat like fuses things together again, and then the temperature swings come and they shatter things into pieces, and so it becomes super tiny and super sharp. So it's like having all of these little like glass knives on the surface. Astronaut John Jung referred to them as tiny razor blades and was really worried about breathing them in, which is a totally legit concern because on Earth we have a disease called stone grinder's disease, where people were like grinding stone and breathing in the tiny little sharp pieces, it gets stuck in their lungs and causes scars and it's hard to breathe. And so we're going to really have to worry about like where this regolith goes and make sure it's not in our habitats.

00:20:30
Speaker 2: So you're saying this kind of weird word regolyth, Right, this is a funny thing, And I guess it just means like the dusty little bits on the outside of a planet, right, because Earth also has regolith, right, This what we call soil here on Earth, I think geologists technically call regolith. It's like any sort of like dusty little bits on the outside of a planet. And I think that's kind of interesting that like planets have like rock and then on their edges they're kind of like covered in fine detail. I think that's sort of fascinating, and it was interesting to learn more about like where that comes from, Like why do we have regolith anyway? You know, why isn't the Moon just like a big rock? And why isn't the Earth just like a big rock? You said, like Earth has water and wind, And I think you're right, that's like a real source of the regolith. Like on Earth, why do we have soil, right, because we have weathering processes, But on the Moon we don't, right as you said, And the regolith actually comes from like those asteroid impacts. It's it's really fascinating that this is like shards of collisions, you know, Yeah, real tactile physical debris from a collision, and that's all there is. The Only way to make regolith on the Moon is to have this like destructive process that creates shrapnel basically, right, it's all shrapnel, super tiny shrapnel.

00:21:46
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean the destructive process I think also includes the like changing of temperatures and the expanding and the shrinking. But so I think regolith means something like blanket of dirt or something like that. I was talking about geologists the other day and I was like, what's the difference between regolith and soil and dirt? And he just went ugh and change the subject.

00:22:10
Speaker 2: That's one of those like meteor, meteorite, asteroid. Like the words are always a mess, right because everything is historical, and they're like, oh, we used to call it this and then we discovered that doesn't make any sense. But we try to shoehorn this thing back in the names always nonsense.

00:22:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, nature doesn't care that humans would really like to categorize things exactly. But I think that a lot of geologists would say that on Earth we have dirt and soil, and that like that definition wraps up the fact that there's microbes in there and so it's like a living thing. And regolith I've only ever heard it referred to as like places where we think it's just dead dirt that's jagged and awful.

00:22:49
Speaker 2: So you would say Earth doesn't have regolith.

00:22:51
Speaker 1: I this is the first time I've heard the word regolith applied to the Earth. Okay, but I'm not a geologist, so I'm not gonna like bet any money on. But that's my understanding.

00:23:01
Speaker 2: Geologists write in and tell us how wrong we are. Yes, but the important point is that the surface of the Moon is very different from the surface of the Earth. Right Earth, we have this nice cushy soil because of microbes and water and wind and the moon whatever, those little bits are are very very different and very very painful.

00:23:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they mess up equipment. Like astronauts would complain that, you know, they'd have these things on their wrists that would tell them like what they were supposed to be working on when and if they got dirt on it and they rubbed it off, it would scratch the surface and then they couldn't read it anymore. And so if you can imagine, like you know, people talk about wanting to process tons and tons of this regolith so that they can extract for example, there's a little bit of water in there, maybe you'd want to extract. That would be a real pain. There's helium three that people talk about extracting. That's a whole different show on why I think that's a bad idea. But the idea is, if you're processing all of this stuff, your equipment is going to be constantly like rubbing against this sharp, abrasive stuff, and it's going to wear down. So that's going to make it tough, and stuff clings so it's electrically charged, and it would cling to space suits. So space suits are supposed to be white so that you don't overheat. Daniel, maybe you can explain the physics of why that works. But they would like a lot of them fell over because it's like low gravity is fun but still hard to move in, and so they'd fall over and they'd like sort of turtle around for a while trying to get back up. They'd stand up just coated in regulith. And so now they're gray and they're like absorbing more heat and it's electrically charged. Why is it electrically charged, physicist friend.

00:24:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really fascinating that it's electrically charged. And one reason basically is that the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere, So the environment just above the surface is very, very different on the Moon than it is on Earth. You know. So, like we talked about the Moon being impacted by asteroids and creating this regolith, the Earth is also impacted by asteroids, but you know, we have an atmosphere which is like a big cushy blanket that absorbs all of those and turns them into nice streaks in the sky. And so that's why we don't have the same kind of debris, and the same thing affects the charge of the surface. So the Moon is actually electrically charged, but one side is positive and the other side is negative. It's really weird. So one side, the side that's facing the Sun, those photons make it all the way down to the surface and they kick electrons off the surface. This is just called like the photoelectric effect. Electrons and material will absorb photons and get kicked out, so photons make the sun side of the Moon be positively charged because they're kicking off the electrons. But there's also this plasma sheath that surrounds the Moon, and the interaction of that sheath with like the solar wind, all the particles coming off the Moon push electrons to the back side of the Moon where they stick. So the backside of the Moon is covered in extra electrons and the front side, the solar side, doesn't have enough electrons. So the whole Moon is electrically charged, including this recolith. But it's different on either side. It's really weird.

00:25:54
Speaker 1: Is it going to be harder to operate equipment on one of those sides? Would it be like more likely to short because of this electrical charge? Or is electrical charge in either direction equally bad.

00:26:05
Speaker 2: Electrical charge is equally bad in other direction for static electricity, like the stuff will cling to you, but it does change how you might take advantage of this charge. There are folks who are trying to make levitating gliders like drones that can fly in the moon using electrostatic repulsion because you can't have like a helicopter on the Moon there's no atmosphere. But if the surface is like negatively charged, you could make a negatively charged glider that floats above the surface, and that'd be a lot nicer than like rolling across all this regolith. There's actually folks who are building this technology.

00:26:37
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, two questions. I've never heard of this, all right, So first is there really enough charge to levitate and move an item an object? And then two does that charge get used up when you pass over it? Probably not right, Yeah, So there.

00:26:51
Speaker 2: Are folks who are doing this on Earth. They have a special chamber they've been testing this stuff with, and you can't levitate a whole lot like so far, they were able to levitate a one killer gram flyer about a centimeter above a moon like surface using like fifty kilovolt source. So you know, these are like macroscopic quantities. This is not like a wasp or something. You know, a kilogram is like a squirrel, So you can basically fly a squirrel across the surface of the Moon. And no, it doesn't use it up like it can be static. You could have something hovering essentially infinitely long using electrostatic repulsion. Right, it's stable the way like the Moon's orbit is stable, or on the Earth you could hover stably without expending any energy over an electrically char surface.

00:27:32
Speaker 1: I think that our mascot should be a squirrel hovering in a little spacesuit.

00:27:39
Speaker 2: It's so cute. But is it peeing in that space shoot? Is really the question.

00:27:43
Speaker 1: It either is or it's lying about it.

00:27:48
Speaker 2: There you go.

00:27:48
Speaker 1: There's so many ecologists who are going to be writing me telling me, they're like, we actually don't be in our wetsuits. You're you're sullying our good name. But anyway, all right, so this reguleth you could write on it. That would be sweet, But that wasn't helpful to the astronauts when they were walking around, and a bunch of them, like John Young was reporting that, you know, he went out there the first day, got covered in dust, and then when he was trying to put his spacesuit back on the next day, like the dust had gotten into all of the seals, and so he was having trouble getting like the helmet ring fastened well enough so he could make sure that he wasn't going to get exposed to the vacuum of space, and on Apollo fourteen, al Bean and Pete Conrad actually got like so much dust on their spacesuit that when the lunar lander like went back up and went to dock with the main spacecraft that was going to take them back to Earth, the pilot, who was Dick Gordon, was like, no, y'all, ain't bringing that junk into my spacecraft. You have to get naked and so before and so what they said naked in the biography and I don't know, presumably that means down to their skivvies, but anyway, they had to take off their clothes before they were allowed to get back in because Dick Gordon did not want to be breathing in these tiny razor blades, which totally makes sense to me.

00:29:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's fascinating. You were talking earlier about how this makes the astronauts' suit go from white to gray, which is a big issue in regulating their temperature. I think a lot of people misunderstand sort of how temperature works in space. They imagine space is cold, and so we probably need like a big blanket, right, But there's something surprising about space, which is is actually harder in space to cool down than it is here on Earth. Right here on Earth, the way you cool down is that there's air. Wind comes by and steals your heat. Right, you're losing heat to the air around you. You heat up the air around you, and then wind comes by and blows that away. You got to do it again and again. So that's why a blanket is useful, or a jacket or whatever. But there's no air on the Moon for you to lose your heat too. The only way to lose your heat is to radiate it away to glow. Everything out there in the universe that has a temperature is glowing. Like if you put on infra red goggles and look at your friend, you would see them glowing. They're giving off photons, and out in space, that's the only way to give off energy. So it's important to regulate your temperature. Like electronics on the space station can overheat because it's harder to lose that energy to cool down in space. So it's really important if you're going to reflect the energy back, if you're going to stay white, to not be covered in regolith.

00:30:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Soviets sent a rover on the Moon. They think that it got too close to like a crater, and it knocked a little bit of regolith on. I believe partly it covered one of their solar panels. But the bigger problem was that there was a little heating unit inside and with that little bit of insulation from the regolith, the whole thing overheated and then it wouldn't work anymore. And so yeah, radiating your heat off in space is a big problem.

00:30:33
Speaker 2: All right. So the Moon is covered in death dust, which you don't want on you and you don't want to breathe and really really wants to stick to you. Is there anything good we can say about this death dust? They're positive about regulith.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: There is, But you know what, let's keep the listeners on their toes and we'll take a break and then we'll get back to that. Okay, So before the break, Daniel wanted to know if there's anything good about the regolith other than its ability to levitate very cute squirrels wearing space suits on the lunar surface.

00:31:20
Speaker 2: You know, I'm pro universe. I don't want to just be down in the moon. I'm always looking for, you know, the bright side of the moon.

00:31:26
Speaker 1: Basically, Yeah, well, I have a friend who says that I'm relentlessly pessimistic about space. So it's good that I have you as a foil.

00:31:36
Speaker 2: To it, right, I'll try to be your yang.

00:31:38
Speaker 1: Yeah that's excellent. But okay, so let's talk about some benefits. So you can pile and you don't want the regolith in your habitat, but the regolith being on your habitat has some benefits. So when I first started thinking about habitats in space, I had imagined these like glass domed habitats where you're like looking out at the star. But as I was looking at proposals for actual habitats in space, almost all of them included being buried under meters of this regolith. And I know, right, so, sad, Wait.

00:32:11
Speaker 2: What's the point of being in space if you're just underground? I mean, you could live underground here on Earth.

00:32:16
Speaker 1: You were supposed to be the optimistic one, Daniel.

00:32:22
Speaker 2: I guess even if you're on the moon. If you're underground, you know you're on the moon, you feel closer to the cosmos or something something like.

00:32:29
Speaker 1: And they'll probably be like portholes you can look out of every once in a while, and the space walks would still be cool. So one of the nice things about having that regolith is that, as we mentioned already, the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere like you have on Earth, so the radiation in space hits the surface, and we don't really understand this radiation very well. So the fifty years of data that we have from astronauts orbiting the Earth, all of those astronauts were orbiting within the magnetic field that are our planet creates, and that shuttles a bunch of the space radiation to the poles where you get the auroras, which are beautiful, and then a lot of the rest of the radiation that gets through gets sort of stopped by our atmosphere. So we don't get hit by a lot of the space radiation, and neither do our astronauts. So most of the data that we have comes from the twenty four men who went to the Moon for like two weeks, not a lot of data. There's reason to suspect that this radiation causes cancer, but it's different than the kind of radiation we get on Earth. And when you provided us comments on the book, one of the things that was interesting was I thought that we knew that galactic cosmic radiation came from stars and other galaxies exploding and then sort of like the shrapnel is heading towards us. But you said, we're not actually sure where that comes from. Can you tell us more?

00:33:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really fascinating. You know. One way we can learn about what's going on in the universe is just picking up the messages that come to Earth. And mostly that's photons, Like we see distinct galaxies because they send us light, and we see other stars because they send us light. But there are other kind of messengers. We can also get messengers from distant galaxies and from other parts of the galaxy and from other parts of the Solar System that are little particles, you know, like protons and electrons and sometimes even like iron nuclei. And it turns out space is filled with this stuff, and a lot of it's a mystery. Like some of it, we understand, a lot of the radiation that's in our Solar System comes from the Sun, and stars don't have to explode to send us little bits of stuff, Like the Sun is pumping out solar wind. This is part of what contributes to the plasma sheath around the Moon. It's not just generating photons, but it's shooting out electrons and protons and all sorts of massive particles are coming out of the Sun. So if you're out there in the Solar system, you're going to be exposed to this stuff very high speed, like tens of kilometers per second for these tiny little bullets. So definitely probably bad for you. But that's just our Sun. And you know, we don't even really understand our Sun very well. We have models of the solar radiation and a lot of them don't really agree in detail with what we see coming from the Sun because we don't understand the physics of what's happening inside the Sun. And then as you look at higher and higher energy particles, like particles going faster and faster, a lot of these are generated outside of our Solar system. They come to us from nearby stars, or from the center of the galaxy, or from other galaxies. But the very highest energy ones that are super crazy, like where a single particle has as much energy as like a Major League baseball, these things we don't understand at all, Like there's nothing in the universe we know about that's capable of creating particles at that speed. But we see them and they hit the Earth and we know they're out there, So there's a lot of mystery about what out there is pumping out really weird particles. We call them cosmic rays when they hit the Earth and create showers when they're in space. They're an important source of radiation that can kill people. Yeah.

00:35:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you get hit with what is it called a solar flare where you get a bunch of stuff from the Sun all at once, they could kill you pretty quick. As far as I understand, we don't understand what like slow chronic doses over the course of a life will do in terms of cancer or cognitive declines or anything like that.

00:36:10
Speaker 2: And we haven't studied because it's basically unethical. It's like, you know, put somebody in a particle beam, see what happens. Well, we know it's going to be bad, we just don't know how bad or how quickly.

00:36:19
Speaker 1: Right, Well, Brookhaven National Lab recently got a thing that can simulate galactic cosmic radiation, so we're getting some data on like what it does to rodents. But there's all kinds of reasons that rodents are different than humans. Like I think if radioactive particle stops in you, it releases a lot more energy than it would if it just passed through you. So rodents, the fact that they're small, you'd expect the particles to be less likely to stop in them than they would if they went through a human. That's just one of many reasons why rats are not humans. So it makes these things complicated, so we don't understand it well. So if you were sending me out there, I would want to be shielded from it so that I just wouldn't know what was happening at all.

00:36:58
Speaker 2: So what's the best way to shield ourselves from all this crazy death bullets from space?

00:37:04
Speaker 1: The most common proposal right now, because it would require the least energy and would probably be easiest with the materials at hand, is to just take regolith and pile meters of it on top of the habitat, so the radiation hits the regolith and stops before it gets to your habitat. And like everything about space is complicated, so if it hits the habitat, you have to worry about like this thing called spallation, which I'm sure Daniel you know all about, but I'll try to explain it. So, like where a radioactive particle hits something and then breaks into a bunch of new kinds of particles. So you essentially get sprayed with like a shower of new radioactive stuff, which in some cases can be worse than the stuff that was heading towards your habitat in the first place. So you don't want it to get to your habitat at all. Is that reasonable, Daniel?

00:37:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's really reasonable. And you know, here's the chance for me to be the optimistic. It sounds to me like death dust can save us from the death particles, right, so like two deaths make life. It's like a negative one squeared or something.

00:37:58
Speaker 1: No, that that counts as a good outcome on the moon.

00:38:01
Speaker 2: That's good. That's good, all right, So we can use the regulator we pilot on top of our habitat. It can protect us from this cosmic radiation. And there's lots of it already there, it's easy to access. That sounds great except the fact that it's going to ruin our cosmic view from our moon living room.

00:38:17
Speaker 1: Right, But it's also it's going to help you with some more stuff. So the moon, especially near the equator, has intense temperature swings. So at the equator you go from negative one hundred and thirty degrees celsius to one hundred and twenty degrees celsius during the day. That is bad for humans, but that's also bad for equipment. So like you get a lot of equipment that expands and contracts as it goes from hot to cold and overtime.

00:38:39
Speaker 2: Why are there such extreme swings on the Moon? I mean, the Moon is about the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is Why are the extreme so severe on the moon?

00:38:49
Speaker 1: Because the Moon lacks an atmosphere to buffer those temperature changes, and so when you're in the cold, you are in the cold. There's no sunlight to keep you warm, and there's no heat that was absorbed and maintained to be slowly released at night by the atmosphere. Does that sound is that? Is that right?

00:39:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's just another reason why it's nice to have an atmosphere because it buffers you from this stuff. As you said, it holds in a lot of heat that absorbs during the day. The Moon actually has a tiny little atmosphere, like people say it has no atmosphere, and technically that's true because what they call it is an exosphere. There are some particles floating above the moon. It's not like zero pure vacuum, but it's not enough for the particles to actually like hit each other or ever bounce, so they call it an exosphere instead of an atmosphere. To have an atmosphere, you have to have enough density the particles are like interacting with each other. So there certainly are some particles around the moon, but not enough to provide really any temperature buffer. So, yeah, the temperature swings are pretty extreme. And as you were saying, that's gonna be pretty bad fear equipment, isn't it.

00:39:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, was that our first well, actually moment, I wonder if we should track those. Yeah, it's fun to have someone else knows something about it and can can add some more knowledge than what you had. So yeah, these temperature extremes bad on equipment, and also those like low temperatures are just bad period. So I was reading the Resources series, like this series about resources in space and how you can use them and what's up there by a. Bidescu and Zacne and Zacney pointed out in one of his chapters that when temperatures get cold enough, you reach this point for some metals called the ductile to brittle transition. So often when you've got a metal, like if something hard hits it, it just kind of dense and bends in, but it still maintains its overall structure.

00:40:38
Speaker 2: Is that what ductile means. It's like bendy and soft.

00:40:41
Speaker 1: Yes, I hadn't actually thought about that, but yes, that is what ductile means. Okay, So then otherwise it's brittle, so it's more like a rock, like if you hit it, it's more like lid acrack and kind of fall apart. And one of the ideas for why the Titanic sank, even though it was this great engineering marvel, is because it was cold enough that the metal it was made have had hit its ductile to brittle transition. So when it hit the iceberg, instead of kind of like just denting in a little bit, which they were hoping that the metal hull would do whenever it hit a hard object, instead it just kind of like cracked.

00:41:12
Speaker 2: Oh, so it went from like aluminum foil to glass.

00:41:15
Speaker 1: Basically, they should have had more lifeboats. That's the real thing. That was the real problem. They didn't have enough life boats for the people on the ship.

00:41:21
Speaker 2: But well, really they needed bigger doors, so you could fit two people on those doors. I mean, that's really the problem with the Titanic.

00:41:27
Speaker 1: That was the problem for Rose and Jack. That's true. I don't know if that would have helped everybody, but it would would have saved one of them.

00:41:32
Speaker 2: Every little bit helps Kelly, every little bit.

00:41:34
Speaker 1: All be honest, it looked like there was enough room for both of them on there to me.

00:41:37
Speaker 2: All Right, we're not going to answer that question on today's episode. Okay, but you're saying that stuff on the Moon, if it gets really really cold, is going to be dangerously brittle, and it's just going to break more easily rather than like bending if it gets bumped.

00:41:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, it might depend on the materials that you're using, So you're just gonna have to be careful about this kind of stuff. So it's just it's got extra layers of complication relative to doing things like mining and construction on Earth. So there's going to be that extra layer of complication. And so if you've got regolith, it's going to buffer these temperature swings and so you're not going to get as cold or as hot, which is going to be good for the humans. It's going to be good for the equipment, and it's going to be good for your heating and cooling bills, which is going to be important because it's going to be hard to generate power in space.

00:42:19
Speaker 2: All right. So living on the surface of the moon pretty terrible. But living under the surface of the Moon protects us from not having an atmosphere and the swings in temperature and lets us turn the terrible death dust into something positive. But that doesn't mean that living on the Moon is still going to be easy. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about how to pay for and how to power it all.

00:42:56
Speaker 1: All right, So, speaking of your electric bills, is the power in space going to come from? So On Earth, as of twenty twenty two, sixty percent of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels come from prehistoric animals and plants that have been buried underground for a really long time. Geologists are probably going to be really upset, but that's all I'm going to say on this matter. And so unless the Moon has some huge surprises in store for us, we're not going to be using fossil fuels on the Moon.

00:43:27
Speaker 2: You're saying there's almost no chance that there's a bunch of dead aliens buried in the Moon that turn into convenient fossil fuels for us.

00:43:33
Speaker 1: I'm saying it's unlikely and we shouldn't bank on it. We should have another plan ready, all right.

00:43:38
Speaker 2: If you're going to send your kids to the Moon, you should probably not bank on dead alien dinosaurs.

00:43:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, agreed, agreed, all right.

00:43:44
Speaker 2: But that's not the only way to get power, right, So what about some other ways to get power in the moon.

00:43:48
Speaker 1: So some other renewable methods that we use on Earth are also out of the picture. So there's no flowing water, so there's no you're not gonna have any dams, there'll be no hydropower. Wind power requires wind. With only an exosphere and not an atmosphere, you don't have enough wind.

00:44:05
Speaker 2: You got solar wind, but that's not enough to generate any energy either.

00:44:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not going to work. And geothermal energy requires heat drawn from deep underground, and the Moon is geolologically pretty quiet. We said silent, and we had someone in our book correct us and say, well it's it's quiet, it's not silent. There's still some stuff going on. So, Okay, it's a quiet moon, not silent. So if I were sending my kids to the moon, which I would never do, I would hope that they had some nuclear power. And nuclear power is something that a lot of folks are not super comfortable with for a variety of reasons. Concerns about using the products for making nuclear weapons, concerns about what happens with the waste when it's gone, concerns about what happens if a nuclear power plant like explodes. And I could go off on a long tangent about why I think nuclear power might be better than things like coal power, but I'm going to contain myself slightly, and I'll know that not everybody has problems with the nuclear power. For example, France's electrical grid is about seventy percent nuclear, so and they're not glowing too green over there. But it's a different question entirely when you're launching those nuclear materials into space, because those nuclear materials that you're gonna need if your rocket explodes on the way up to space, now, maybe that nuclear stuff has been spread all over the area where the explosion happens. So for example, all.

00:45:28
Speaker 2: Right, hold on, because I think there's an assumption here, right, You're saying we can't do fossil fuels in the Moon because there are no fossil fuels in the Moon. Now you're talking about nuclear power on the Moon, and I think you're assuming that we can't find fuel for nuclear power on the moon. We still have to bring it with us. And for fossil fuels, that's obviously absurd. You can't bring enough fossil fuel because it's not energy dense enough. But uranium, for example, very very energy dense, tiny amount of it can power things forever. I love the story for example that like these days, when they build nuclear power submarines, they don't even think about refueling. They just build in the lifetime of fuel. It never refuels, like yeah, boom, it's done. That's pretty awesome. It's just like a real demonstration of the incredible energy density of uranium. But is there no uranium to be found on the Moon? Why do we have to launch it from the Earth.

00:46:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question. There is plenty of material on the Moon to run nuclear power plants. It's just going to be really difficult to extract. So it's in sort of like low concentrations in various areas, so you'd probably, for example, have to process a bunch of regoliths to extract the nuclear fuel from it. And so if we're going to have people living on the Moon for a very long time, I think eventually we would want to figure out how to extract those materials to refuel or start nuclear power plants. But initially, if you want to get space research station or mining operation or habitat off the ground, you're gonna want to bring the nuclear power plant with you just to get things moving.

00:46:54
Speaker 2: And so you're saying it's dangerous to launch a rocket with uranium or plutonium in it, because sometimes rockets go boom.

00:47:02
Speaker 1: Yes, and you can be careful about how you pack it. But so, for example, we have these radio isotope heater units, and so this is not really using radioactive materials to generate energy, but just to generate heat so that on those cold space nights, the equipment doesn't like just freeze up, and you use stuff like plutonium, americium and polonium. Did I say that right? Americium?

00:47:26
Speaker 2: I've never known how to pronounce that, and I've always been terrified that I would be asked to on a podcast, and so now you're living my nightmare.

00:47:33
Speaker 1: All right, Well, set us letters if I got it wrong, and let us know how I should have said it right. And so these things they undergo radioactive decay, and when that happens, they release heat, and the heat helps sort of buffer the swing into super cold temperatures when robots are working on the Moon in shadowed areas. But the Soviets launched the lunkat Moon rovers and they had planned on powering one of them with polonium two ten. And in nineteen sixty nine, the rocket that was bringing the rover up exploded and it spread polonium over various parts of the USSR bad, right, yes, bad, not good, And then you can scale up. So the next more sort of complicated way to use radioactivity to power things is called a radio isotope thermoelectric generator. So essentially you just sort of add a thermo couple to get a little bit of energy out of all the stuff that's happening. So you still get some heat and you get a little bit of power, but like for two kilograms of plutonium, you get enough power to run a laptop. So this is not like a super great way to get energy. It's not going to be enough to run like a whole research station. So what we're gonna need are many nuclear fission reactors. This is where you're like actually making a fission reaction happen. You sort of can control how much power you can make the reaction happen faster or slower to sort of modulate the amount of heat that you get. And we have some experience with these. So the US in nineteen sixty five sent up a satellite we called SNAP ten A and it had a nuclear reactor. After forty three days, it kind of like stopped working and so it's still orbiting the Earth somewhere. But the Soviets were way more comfortable with this technology. They launched over thirty and when they were done with these satellites, they used the rest of the fuel to push them up into like a graveyard orbit. So there's a bunch of nuclear reactors, like over thirty of them probably still orbiting the Earth. But one of them didn't make it to the graveyard orbit. Cosmos nine fifty four accidentally descended back to Earth and it ended up falling over and breaking up over Canada and spreading nuclear material over a large swath of Canada, so you need to be careful with this stuff.

00:49:49
Speaker 2: But it's sort of amazing that they can make nuclear reactors that's small. People imagine nuclear reactors. They're thinking like three mile island. These like huge concrete domes like are really massive. Operation. Remember that they've made these things small enough to have like for them on an aircraft carrier or a couple them on a submarine. So you know when it's really important for like the military, scientists and engineers are really good at making things tiny, and so space can also benefit from this, right, like launching these reactors, they really can be pretty small. But you're right, they still have to have radioactive materials in them, and so it's still dangerous to send these things up. But you know the US has done this also, right, Like some of our rovers on Mars are nuclear powered.

00:50:30
Speaker 1: I don't think they're fission reactors, but the two simpler versions that we talked about initially, those have been sent in rover. Yeah, that's right by the US, but we haven't sent nuclear fission reactors past the orbits around the Earth.

00:50:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.

00:50:45
Speaker 1: I think we're going to need you if we're going to have research stations and habitats and folks are working on it. So in twenty fifteen, this group created the Killo power reactor using Sterling technology yeh or krusty advertise emphasize the y at the end. These authors are awesome. They always make sure that the acronyms of their projects match up with something in the Simpsons. So they also have the demonstration using flat top fissions, which is dough I think was the name of the beer in the Simpsons, and the fission reactor Integrated Nuclear Kinetics Code or FRINK, which I think was the scientist and anyway, so what's actually important is they were able to make a little reactor that could probably power something like thirty US households, and they're working on scaling this up and making it portable so that it could go to the moon on Mars. So this is a technology that people are working on and we're just going to have to figure out safe ways to make sure that even if a rocket does explode, god forbid, that we've like clad the materials well enough so that they would not be likely to break up and scatter over land or something like that.

00:51:53
Speaker 2: All right, So nuclear power from a physics perspective totally works on the Moon and is a good source of energy, and we have plenty of fuel here on Earth. The challenge is just getting the fuel from here to the Moon without killing everybody on the planet or causing.

00:52:05
Speaker 1: Cancer, and making sure we can run these reactors in the space environment, which is a complicated place to work. And then you have to make sure that you set it up far enough away from everybody so that you're not hitting them with doses of radiation. And so it's this nice, reliable method that actually hasn't been proven in space yet in the way you would need to set up a habitat. But another kind of power generating technique that we have a lot more experience with is solar.

00:52:31
Speaker 2: We're talking about all the sunshine we're getting on the Moon and how difficult it is because he's everything up. Why don't we just use solar power that cover the Moon in solar panels.

00:52:38
Speaker 1: So what's the problem, Well, solar on the Moon has some of the same problems that we have with solar on Earth, which is that when it's nighttime, you don't get the solar power. And on Earth we solve that problem with batteries, but on the Moon. That one night on the Moon is equivalent in time to two weeks on Earth. And so the battery packs that you would need are going to measure in the thousands of tons probably, and I'm not actually sure we have the battery technology ready to keep a habitat going for two weeks through a lunar night.

00:53:11
Speaker 2: Wait, so you're saying a lunar night is two Earth week long, Like, if you're on the Moon, you see the sun for two weeks and then you don't see the sun for two weeks. Yes, doesn't that depend on where you are on the Moon or something.

00:53:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, I should have said at the equator. That's important and we're going to get to that eventually. Thank you for helping with my setup. Yeah. And these solar panels, like, you can't just go to lows and pick up solar panels. These are solar panels that are going to have to be able to survive those massive temperature swings in this super harsh environment. So it's going to be sort of harder to make these, and they're going to need to be able to survive meteorite strikes. That horrible regolith when you go to brush it off after it sticks, that's going to mess them up also, So it's going to be complicated, but there's an area where it's going to be less complicated. So if you go to the poles. The poles on the Moon are nice because the Earth is more tilted than the Moon is. The Moon has a lesser tilt. So if you're at certain parts on the Moon, you're getting perpetually grazed by the sunlight. So you're not getting hit by it straight on, but you're getting sort of grazed off the side. And if you're up on a rim, for example, where some of the craters are, then much more of the time you will be getting at least some sunlight. And so these areas are known as the peaks of eternal light, but they should probably be more like the peaks of pretty much eternal lights. I think there's there's a spot where you can get like ninety percent of the time there's solar power, so that helps a lot with these battery problems.

00:54:37
Speaker 2: But this is underlying issue that you're talking about, which is batteries or I guess equivalently transmission, and that's that like solar power, you have the power when the sun is shining on the panel, and you don't have one, it's not shining on the panel, and so you need power regularly. But I guess my question is like, yeah, I guess you could use batteries, like use solar panels to charge at batteries and then draw off the batteries. Why not just like have a ring of solar panels around the equator. Some of them are always going to get sunlight, some of them are going to be in the darkness, and then just you know, have wires. Basically, why not just transmit the energy from the bright side of the moon to wherever you are.

00:55:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is another option that could totally work. It's complicated, and I think you want to do things as simple as you can initially, and most of the proposals that I've seen involve going to the craters first, rather than creating this system of solar panels orbiting the Moon that transmit power down. But that is totally another option.

00:55:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well I was thinking even just on the surface. But ye, power transmission is tricky, right, you generate power on the other side of the Moon, you got to get it here. You're going to lose a lot of that energy and then you've got to maintain this like moon size structure. There are some people who are talking about building a particle collider around the equator of the Moon, because hey, why not we always want one more particle collider, bro And that's one of the challenges is powering it and maintaining that whole thing. A moon size structure is not a small thing to keep running.

00:56:04
Speaker 1: And what's the benefit of having it on the Moon? Does the lower gravity help or something.

00:56:09
Speaker 2: No gravity doesn't affect particle colliders at all because particles are so small they have basically no gravity. It's just hard to find space on Earth for such a large device. You need a lot of people to sign off, and you're running a tunnel under their backyards. And there aren't so many objections on the Moon. So it's not like a practical or a great idea. It's just sort of like something people talk about sometimes got anyway. So you're talking about solar panels on the Moon, and you're saying difficult because you can't just use like generic solar panels. They're also going to get like destroyed by radiation and by recolith So do we have any kind of solar panels that will actually work and like last for more than five seconds on the Moon.

00:56:48
Speaker 1: Well, we have attached solar panels to rovers on the Moon and Mars and they've powered our rovers for a while, so we have figured out how to make this work. And one of the other nice things about being at the poles is that rather than having these massive temperature swings, it's always just really cold. So at the poles, like for example, at uh there's this ridge between the Shackleton and the de Gerlache. Oh my gosh, go ahead, everybody right in and tell me how I totally killed the name of that crater, because I'm sure I destroyed it. But it has like average summer temperatures around negative seventy degrees celsius, which is about like ten degrees colder than the average Antarctica temperature. But at least it's not swinging as much, so at least you just your plan for the cold. You insulate, you heat, and at least you're not dealing with the extremes. But the peaks are only about one one hundred billionth of the lunar surface, which is like two tennis courts. You can like spread it out a little bit. If you're willing to like bring longer poles and lift your solar panels up a little bit higher. You'll get sunlight more of the time that way. But it's not a lot of land, less than two tennis courts. So when you hear about the fact that China and the US both want to go to the poles because this area is great. Also, this is one of the only places you can find ice, there's a lot of geopolitical things to worry about in terms of whether there's going to be a scramble for these particularly great spots. So we got to three of the problems. Getting that water and using that water is going to be a real pain. Lack of an atmosphere, temperature, swings, radiation. That regolith is not good for growing things in like as you can imagine, roots are going to have trouble growing in tiny razor blades. There's also not enough carbon or like nitrogen and phosphorus. In fact, I think the most concentrated sources of carbon, and this will bring us full circle. One of the most concentrated sources of carbon on the Moon are the ninety six bags of feces in vomit left behind by the Apollo astronauts' base poo base poo. But technically that stuff still belongs to so you are not allowed to start growing your veggies. In Neil Armstrong's long lost bowel movements, I'm sorry lest.

00:59:07
Speaker 2: You kick off an international incident over space poo. Wow, that's right, all right. So there's lots of reasons why living on the Moon is going to be difficult. There sounds like there's some potential engineering solutions in some of these cases, but it's definitely not a place where people can look forward to retiring very soon. But tell us a big picture. Are we excited about going to the moon?

00:59:27
Speaker 1: I am excited about going to the Moon? I mean, like, yes, these are big problems, but they're exciting problems to solve, and I think the Moon is going to be a great place where we can learn the stuff that we need to settle frankly better places like Mars. So we can't figure out how bad is it that the Moon doesn't have the same gravity as the Earth, because Mars also doesn't have as much gravity as the Earth, how bad is that radiation? It does burying yourself in regulus solve all of the radiation problems, like it is a great close, kind of easy to get to, place to go to learn a lot of the stuff that we're going to need to know if we want to live and work in space. More So, I'm excited. I'm glad we're going back. I hope it doesn't kick off any geopolitical incidents, but I'm excited. Are you excited?

01:00:11
Speaker 2: I am excited. I think in the history of humanity, we've solved lots of problems, from like how do we get over that mountain? To how do we build something that floats over that ocean? And where do we find food on the journey? And all sorts of stuff, and people have died and it's been painful, but we've always figured it out, and because there always have been people who just want to go and want to know and want to see it and are willing to risk their lives and to die to help push the envelope forward. And so I'm excited that there are people out there willing to do it. I personally don't want to go to the moon or ever leave the surface of the Earth, but I'm very grateful for those explorers among us, and we're going to help us take the first steps to being a galactic civilization one day.

01:00:51
Speaker 1: I love it all right, Daniel. This has been so much fun, and thank you so much to the listeners for tuning in. Feel free to email us at questions at Daniel and dot org to tell us about all the words we mispronounce and to give us your thoughts on the episodes or other topics you might want to hear us talk about.

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