I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone.
What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder!
And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
jordanb 13 hours ago [-]
There was some concern when Apollo 11 landed that when they repressurized the LEM with moon dust samples inside it would start a fire. I think they had a small test article that they blew a small stream of oxygen over to ensure it wouldn't auto-ignite.
dotancohen 5 hours ago [-]
And if the sample did auto-ignite, what was the procedure?
bell-cot 58 minutes ago [-]
Throw all their samples back outside, then very carefully sweep the inside of the LEM and throw the broom & dustpan out too?
In theory, they could have been equipped to partially pressurize the cabin with (say) helium - which would allow some sort of vacuum cleaner to work. But that could have added a fair bit of mass (by the LEM's very tight mass budget standards).
verisimi 4 hours ago [-]
Empty out a glass of water and blow the floating blobs towards the fire.
quotemstr 2 hours ago [-]
The moon has gravity. The blobs wouldn't float.
TeMPOraL 31 minutes ago [-]
But you could pour water at the fire from across the room!
Lower gravity is giving the defender an advantage over the elements... at least until it gets low enough for things to start floating, when this flips around. In microgravity, water turns into floating blobs, but fire turns into actual floating fireballs.
Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice videogame idea hiding in there somewhere.
Chaosvex 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure it was a joke.
ItsClo688 8 hours ago [-]
the detail that kills me is moon dust has never contacted oxygen in billions of years, so every time an astronaut came back inside they were essentially doing a chemistry experiment for the first time. the whole moon is just waiting to react with air
adrian_b 3 hours ago [-]
The danger is not really great.
Any dust on the Moon still consists mostly of silicates which cannot be oxidized.
When dust comes from meteorites, it contains a fraction made of iron sulfide (with small quantities of other sulfides) and another fraction made mainly of hydrocarbons.
The metallic sulfides can be oxidized, but they will not burn violently. The hydrocarbons are like a tar or pitch, because the volatile hydrocarbons would have sublimated in vacuum. So neither that tar is easily flammable.
The gunpowder smell is likely to be caused by the oxidation of the sulfides from the dust, which releases sulfur dioxide, the same like burnt gunpowder.
FranOntanaya 4 hours ago [-]
Well, sort of. Solar wind does include oxygen ions, so it's exposed to a small extent.
slow_typist 3 hours ago [-]
How can it include oxygen?
Groxx 2 hours ago [-]
Stars kinda famously fuse elements up to iron as part of normal operations. And even if you exclude that, the entire solar system is leftovers from a previous star - all that is inside our current star too. Sure, much of it isn't at the surface, but there's not much of a reason to expect that literally zero of it randomly floats up among the lighter elements.
That said, "heavy ions and atomic nuclei of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and iron" makes up only "trace amounts" of the solar-wind plasma [1].
Stars make it, our sun is made of it, it’s the third most abundant element.
Distant third
stonecharioteer 7 hours ago [-]
This is what trips me up about terraforming. If we learn to create an atmosphere, are we going to instantly poison the oxygen we introduce?
adrianN 6 hours ago [-]
It took about a billion years of photosynthesis on earth before all the ferrous iron dissolved in the oceans was oxidized and atmospheric oxygen concentration began to take off.
prox 52 minutes ago [-]
Fascinating
ItsClo688 6 hours ago [-]
great questionprobably not poison it directly, but you'd lose a significant chunk to oxidation reactions before reaching any stable equilibrium. the surface is essentially a massive reactive sink. mars has a similar problem, the perchlorate in the soil would react badly with a lot of things we'd want to introduce.
the optimistic read is that oxidation reactions release energy and eventually reach stability. the pessimistic read is the timescale is geological.
dotancohen 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't Mars red due to oxygenation of the rocks? Is that ancient oxygenation or is there some quantity of oxygen in Mars atmosphere today? Does the atmospheric CO2 sometimes break down (maybe under sunlight) and release some small quantity of O2 or might there be another source? Might something underground be respirating atmospheric CO2?
cornholio 5 hours ago [-]
Terraforming is an exceptionally energetic endeavor. Even if you had the perfect combination of icy asteroids with just the right amount of water, nitrogen, oxigen etc. and the means to hurl them towards Mars, this kinetic event would be so energetic that it would take centuries to millennia before the surface would cool to habitable temperatures. it's not physically possible to do it ex in the span of a human lifetime.
Ar the scale terraforming entails, the crust reactions with the new atmosphere are closer to a rounding error.
deepsun 3 hours ago [-]
Well, oxygen _is_ poison. It's eager to react (sometimes violently) with almost everything. It rusts and oxidates perfect shiny metals and silicon making everything an oxide!
lukan 28 minutes ago [-]
No. "Poison" refers to a substance toxic to humans, but we can be exposed to pure oxygen and breath it very fine. But yes, oxygen is dangerous.
singularity2001 4 hours ago [-]
if the moon will be settled it will be settled by AI embodied in some kind of (nano) robot or artificially created life.
bell-cot 46 minutes ago [-]
Terraforming anything looks really expensive. Ask a finance guy to run numbers on terraforming places with gravity too weak to hold onto a useful atmosphere for any length of time*, and give you his opinion.
*say, Earth's moon
helterskelter 13 hours ago [-]
At least some ISS astronauts describe smelling burnt metal after returning from EVA, if memory serves. (Others may smell ozone, I've just always remembered hearing burnt metal).
thescriptkiddie 13 hours ago [-]
the exterior of the ISS is constantly exposed to small mounts of atomic oxygen, which is an incredibly strong oxidizer. probably in addition to ozone there is a huge variety of organic and inorganic oxides that get tracked in through the airlock.
Fun trivia (well, perhaps not fun) in the second paragraph: "the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which was retrieved in 1990 after spending 68 months in LEO"
Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on reentry made a mess of things.
>It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15
imzadi 12 hours ago [-]
Challenger was destroyed on launch, not reentry.
9 hours ago [-]
georgemcbay 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah it was Columbia that was destroyed on reentry (17 years later).
junon 13 hours ago [-]
I always heard burnt steak.
everyone 4 hours ago [-]
They say that about vaccum. eg. an airlock after re-pressurising it after a spacewalk. Apparently a vaccum sucks stuff like sulphur from within steel to it's surface.
25 minutes ago [-]
Bender 13 hours ago [-]
My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 Ozone and that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual black powder or nitrocellulose? I've smelled black powder at the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that also does not smell like Ozone to me.
mr_toad 13 hours ago [-]
‘Ozone’ is the smell of ionisation, ‘gunpowder’ the smell of oxidisation.
coffeebeqn 13 hours ago [-]
Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell
saltcured 12 hours ago [-]
I also associate ozone with some electric motors, I think because they have brushes that arc during operation. Older power tools I encountered in the 1980s often did this, and you could see the blue arc if you looked into the vents at the right angle.
aduty 10 hours ago [-]
Brushless motors are popular now, but if you get the cheaper cordless tools they'll still have brushed motors. I have some Black & Decker 20V ones that do it. They tend to have less torque but I don't need Milwaukee or Makita tools just for diy around the house.
Bender 13 hours ago [-]
Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell
Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its 34F outside right now.
rrr_oh_man 11 hours ago [-]
Side quest: Can you tell more about the UV sterilisation thing? Why do you do that? How often? Where? It seems like such a specific thing to do.
genewitch 7 hours ago [-]
Hi, i am not who you asked, but i feel like i've done enough research and have some warnings. UV-C light itself is antimicrobial, but only for surfaces that the light touches, and in the case of cloth it needs to penetrate a bit.
There are at least two types of UV-C light bulbs, as well as literal ozone generators that use ceramic platen and a fan. The type of UV-C bulb that is most common on Amazon and Ali is ~254 nanometers, and _does not_ produce Ozone. It does leave a smell, but it's more like an oldschool hospital antiseptic smell. probably the smell of the dead germs, yay.
Now 185nm is actually the correct size to turn O2 around the bulb into O3 (and more oxygens too, i once read, i think, kinda like cracking hydrocarbons to make longer chains or something).
UV-C bulbs (not base, which is an edison base) that can sterilize a room in 5-15 minutes are about 15-20 CM tall, with four crystal tubes that are connected together standing up on the base. image here [0]
you must run a fan over them if you want your money's worth. they get hot, the bases get hot, it makes the most sense in non-carpeted rooms to aim the crystal down and the base up, so that is real rough on them. that took me 2 bulbs to figure out.
If you can find a reputable place to get the box with ceramic and a fan that lasts more than 5 minutes, let me know, because that's closer to what i want for bedrooms and stuff.
The UV-C 185nm bulbs work great to make a car stop stinking, too! completely removes cigarette smells, if the car hasn't been smoked in for a while. run the A/C full blast and run the bulb for 15 minutes, open the windows for 5 minutes, roll em, sniff. Still smell? another 10 minutes, in the back seat, full A/C blasting. vent, sniff. Faint smell? replace the cabin air filter. Charge customer(?)
and i'm going to respond to your followup question to the GP as well: Covid. Obviously. They were telling us it would live on groceries and deliveries and that, so i put all deliveries in my laundry room and dosed em with UV-C for a minute. CDC or whatever studies said that 10-60 seconds was more than enough to kill sars-ncov-2.
I only use it for freshening cars, rooms, bathrooms, etc now.
WARNING: Do not be in the room with any UV-C light for more than a few seconds. Do not look at the bulb for literally any more than necessary to ensure it is on and safe. they make safety goggles that wrap your entire eye sockets to protect from UV, too. if you get a 185nm bulb, either completely ventilate the room with fresh air, or leave it sealed for 60 minutes then open it up for a few minutes, all the ozone reacts and goes away or something.
UV-C hurts your skin, yes, but it will make your eyeballs literally itch. so don't, don't don't look at it. they are not blacklights.
What about shadows? The UV-C light can't reach everywhere, right? What about the back and undersides of product packaging you want to sterilise?
genewitch 5 hours ago [-]
i didn't touch the bottoms and the backs. like, put on socks, grasp box between socked feet, open box, remove the air bag packaging stuff, and if you want, UV it again. however, if you're using 185nm the ozone will get the "back" and inside. not the bottom, maybe, but if you're concerned, flip it over. If you're concerned, make sure you read research papers on exposure time of pathogens to UV-C and/or Ozone to population destruction. as i mentioned, the papers i read before i bought the bulbs said 10-60 seconds for covid. originally there was a recommendation for up to 3 minutes, but some research group went and tested shorter and shorter lengths of time. so you'd need to know the pathogen you're targeting and run it accordingly.
dreamcompiler 6 hours ago [-]
> WARNING: Do not be in the room with any UV-C light for more than a few seconds.
This advice does not necessarily apply to far UVC (200-235 nm), which appears to be much safer for human skin and corneas than UVC outside this specific band. More research is needed before calling it "safe" but far UVC is almost certainly less hazardous than the rest of the UVC band.
Pay close attention to wavelength when purchasing UVC light sources.
254 doesn't make ozone but; yes, i explained the two i have used and researched. i have not researched far-UVC. it's still germicidal, i still wouldn't want to be in the room with it. I had to check what wavelength "common" UV lasers are, and i'm guessing 261nm or so. If you aim that at your skin, it feels hot real quick. Kinda feels, to me, like my entire life i've been told that all UV is bad, but UV-A blockers are snake oil, etc.
I'll keep my eye out for more research on far-uvc and the possibility of getting a bulb to test.
oh by the way, i must have sent back 2 dozen "185nm" UVC bulbs from a dozen "manufacturers" because they didn't produce ozone, because they were fraudulent listings of 253.7nm bulbs - so this is why i was trying to steer people away from amazon and ali, as it's real easy to get the wrong type if you're looking for ozone. I've only managed to acquire 4 bulbs total in the last 5 years that produced ozone, and i burnt out two before someone said "put a fan on it, those bulbs are designed to be inside an air exchanger!"
vintermann 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, this is a common dilemma in air sterilization. Far UV-C isn't as nasty for skin, but it produces ozone, and ozone is nasty and really bad for your respiratory health.
Bender 10 hours ago [-]
I primarily use them in the bathroom to kill off mold and bacteria about once every 3 months. I open up the water heater closet, drawers, etc... then I fire one of them up. I've used them in other places but the more they are used the more I have to vent the house.
rrr_oh_man 8 hours ago [-]
Has anything prompted you to do this? Have you been doing this for a long time? Have you noticed any changes (yes, I assume?!). Sorry for pelting you with questions, but this is so... interesting and I'm tempted to give it a shot.
I don't think any of you should want to be smelling Ozone.
Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The ozone species is even more oxidative.
Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's also killing us. Ozone is worse.
"Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth the squeeze.
dmurray 11 hours ago [-]
Aside from "killing us and giving us cancer every single day", isn't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every single minute and need to survive?
I'm not normally one to miss the sarcastic or satirical posts, but this one seems oddly earnest.
Brian_K_White 5 hours ago [-]
Yes and it wasn't sarcastic, both things (what you said and what they said) are simply true. I think their point was not to be alarmist like you should stop breathing, but simply that everyone knows the one thing and most people don't know the other thing, and it gives scale or context to the "you don't want extra ozone".
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> isn't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every single minute and need to survive?
I think they're referring to oxidative stress [1] caused by cellular respiration.
Part of aging is the result of oxidation of DNA over time and as cells reproduce.
Bender 13 hours ago [-]
Absolutely. I vent the house after running UV lamps using a 4400 CFM air mover. I leave the house and run errands. I have 3 of these [1]
They have a remote control that "arms" them and it starts beeping slow, the faster, then much faster then activates. It kills insects be destroying their lungs and entirely destroys mold, bacteria and even damages viral material. Hospitals run the same lamps in wings that they close down for sanitation. The entire area has to be 100% vented.
How long would it take for the ozone to recombine back, if you didn't vent the house?
heavyset_go 8 hours ago [-]
How does this affect surfaces like walls, finished wood furniture and floors, plastic, paint, etc?
I imagine it will cause some material to off-gas aldehydes at the very least.
vintermann 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think off-gassing is a problem, ozone treatment is famously how they get rid of cigarette smell in used cars, furniture and whole apartments.
But I would worry about the effect on e.g. plastic seals. There are a lot of plastics that become brittle with ozone exposure, let alone UV exposure.
alfiedotwtf 13 hours ago [-]
I worked for a germaphobe, and he put one of these ozone-injecting air purifiers in our tiny office. Every morning I would walk in and it felt like I was walking into a thunderstorm from the smell. No gunpowder, just thick ozone
cyberax 10 hours ago [-]
In general, if you can smell ozone, you should NOT be in that place.
KennyBlanken 11 hours ago [-]
The permissible exposure limit for ozone is 0.1 PPM.
The IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health) level for ozone is five ppm.
That's half of chlorine which is 10 ppm.
Most major brand air purifiers put out a very minimal amount; the ionization is beneficial because it makes the really tiny (and thus most hazardous) particles clump and fall/stick to surfaces faster.
It's the offbrand units that generate lots of ozone to make people think they're "doing something", and commercial ozone generators for car/room deodorizing, that you have to be extremely careful with. Those need to be set up and then the room left for hours for the ozone to react with stuff, and then ventilated thoroughly.
vintermann 2 hours ago [-]
I don't trust most air purifier manufacturers. They totally would add a fancy-sounding feature which sounds good, even if it has negligible effect, or even negative effect. Case in point: they're still pushing ultrasonic humidifiers.
The tiniest particles aren't necessarily the most dangerous, so even if "clumping" worked as advertised, it wouldn't necessarily be good. Air filters are worst at filtering particles at about 0.3 microns, they're better at filtering smaller ones (I understand it has something to do with brownian motion). I wouldn't be at all surprised if a similar thing affected our biological "filters". Either way, if you have a filter, you don't need UV to clean air. Just push more air through it if you need cleaner air faster.
LoganDark 11 hours ago [-]
Brushed DC motors (as in some drills, toothbrushes, etc.) emit ozone. Some light switches also create ozone-producing electrical arcing if you hold them perfectly between the on and off positions, or slowly cross the midpoint. (Less easy with the newer-style, less accessible rocker switches.)
colechristensen 13 hours ago [-]
You might be smelling the oxidation of biologicals via ozone and UV might have the same chemical effect
11 hours ago [-]
KennyBlanken 11 hours ago [-]
The only thing you're doing by sterilizing your house like that is making your immune system weaker.
Humans are built to withstand a constant assault on their immune systems. We couldn't have survived if we didn't.
Bender 10 hours ago [-]
Don't worry I know what I am doing.
VoidWarranty 11 hours ago [-]
Careful. The venn diagram bubble depicting your statement overlaps heavily with the anti-vaccine bubble.
Its a bit naieve to claim that cleaning one's home will result in an extinction of enough microbes so as to be threatening to our immune system.
> [...] Better hygiene meant that infants and young children had fewer opportunities to encounter and develop immunity to polio. Exposure to poliovirus was therefore delayed until late childhood or adult life, when it was more likely to take the paralytic form.[22]
Bender 8 hours ago [-]
Nothing strengthens an immune system like a weekly furry party or attending "tough mudders" events.
manwe150 5 hours ago [-]
That’s because the parent claim is known as the hygiene hypothesis and has been disproven by science, in common with anti vaccine claims. The immune system has not been shown to benefit from training, but has been shown to be damaged by illness.
vixen99 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe you should qualify 'anti-vaccine claims'. Throughout the history of vaccines which have saved countless lives, some people have died or suffered severe reactions linked to a vaccine. This is hardly surprising given our metabolic heterogeneity.
'Anti-vaccine claims' suggests a taking of sides on that knee-jerk division into those who claim without evidence that almost or even all vaccines are deadly and on the other hand, those who are frankly contemptuous of any claim that a particular vaccine (evident particularly with the vaccines developed in response to the Covid outbreak) might be dangerous for certain people. Both extreme views have been on view recently and are indefensible.
The major issue here is the difficult task of identifying people likely to react badly to any specific vaccine.
Meanwhile 'Congress and Institute of Medicine Confirm Government Licensed and Recommended Vaccines Can Cause Injury and Death' and 'The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act was the first U.S. law to officially acknowledge that childhood vaccines licensed and recommended by the federal government, which are routinely mandated for school attendance by state governments, can and do injure and kill a minority of children.'
b65e8bee43c2ed0 10 hours ago [-]
Thank you! I wish I could upvote this twice, fellow redditor!
adrian_b 3 hours ago [-]
I assume that they talk about black powder.
The dust that comes from meteorites contains up to 4 fractions: silicates, which cannot be oxidized, metallic iron, which oxidizes, but it does not form volatile substances that can be smelled, hydrocarbons in the form of a tar or pitch, which can burn but it cannot be ignited easily, and finally a fraction made of iron sulfide (troilite) with small quantities of other sulfides.
In contact with air, the sulfides will be oxidized, releasing sulfur dioxide. Burning black powder also releases sulfur dioxide, which is the main reason for its smell. Burning pure sulfur will produce the same smell.
corysama 12 hours ago [-]
The ozone report was specifically about space walks. The gunpowder report was about moon walks.
Presumably, moonwalks would also have some ozone like the space walk did. But, maybe the burning-moon-dust gunpowder smell was a lot stronger than the vacuumed-metal/paint ozone smell.
lifeisstillgood 9 hours ago [-]
Sorry for the tangent, but you sterilise a whole room with UV light? Is that efficient ? Do you do it after tidying / cleaning ? Is there a medical reason for the extra part? Is it just cool :-)
Bender 8 hours ago [-]
The house came with a bacteria that would normally be hard to get rid of. UV, bleach and peroxide took care of it. I just repeat the process to ensure there is no bacteria or mold. This seems to bother people in this thread which I find fascinating. A part of me wants to bring my black light to their dwelling.
vl 6 hours ago [-]
I have mold problem in one of the bathrooms. What would be your recommendation? Seal off bathroom and run UV, then vent? Or do I need to do entire house? I can also seal off bathroom and bedroom. Thanks!
blub 3 hours ago [-]
No, UV is unrelated to your issue.
First you need to figure out if it’s a surface infestation because of condensation or if it’s a constructive thermal bridge. The latter can be solved by raising the surface (wall, ceiling, etc) temperature through insulation or more inefficiently special heaters designed for this purpose.
In both cases, the contaminated material is removed down to the plaster or masonry. Wood, wallpaper and similar materials will likely be deeply contaminated and must be removed. For areas larger than 1 sq meter, it’s better to get a specialized contractor which will use HEPA vacuum cleaners, special bags, etc to ensure that the mould spores don’t spread in other rooms.
For small areas the agents of choice are bleach or hydrogen peroxide, both available in products for home use.
blub 3 hours ago [-]
Was it from flooding or how did it get there? How did you detect it?
BFV 55 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
krunck 14 hours ago [-]
Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity.
Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.
lukan 14 hours ago [-]
Without massive terraforming all of Mars is very hostile.
But having solid ground is still nice.
A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.
The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.
cosmic_cheese 14 hours ago [-]
Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health, but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's gravity well easier.
tarr11 13 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it will turn out to be easier to adapt lifeforms to the planets than to try to adapt the planets to the lifeforms.
lukan 13 hours ago [-]
Both probably, but you cannot really adapt life to no water and hard radiation. (at most sustain it in stasis, but not growing)
SoftTalker 7 hours ago [-]
Neither is realistic; living on the Moon or Mars or any other planet is a fantasy.
SecretDreams 5 hours ago [-]
This is the thinking of someone on the timescales of a single life. If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current trajectory (US/world politics not withstanding), I think nothing is really a fantasy. Rather, it's all possible but maybe just not in our own lifetimes. But it is also terribly difficult for us to plan for tomorrow, let alone for a future where our descendants are at the helm.
fellowmartian 5 hours ago [-]
I agree, it’s just a failure of imagination. Some folks correctly foresee not being able to continue what we’re doing now in the exact same way in some new context and conclude everything is impossible. Life isn’t this fickle, it’s adapted before and will adapt again. This is why great science fiction is so valuable, as some people are better at imagining new ways of being more than others, and can show the rest of us the possibilities.
cduzz 13 hours ago [-]
Venus seems like a wonderful place to live, relatively speaking.
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
jcranmer 13 hours ago [-]
> Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem.
Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
operatingthetan 13 hours ago [-]
If we terraform mars, isn't the dirt still toxic?
lukan 13 hours ago [-]
No, as terraforming means changing that.
Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
marcosdumay 11 hours ago [-]
Just exposing the Martian soil to water for some time is enough to destroy the perchlorates.
(Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too, so we can always test things there.)
operatingthetan 13 hours ago [-]
In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal footing with alchemy.
wolvoleo 13 hours ago [-]
Doing something like that at planetary scale is science fiction anyway even if we did have the tech to do it.
GuB-42 9 hours ago [-]
To put it into perspective, we are effectively terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way.
We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.
baq 12 hours ago [-]
Talking to computers and expecting computers to answer coherent English was science fiction 4 years ago. Don’t lose faith
datsci_est_2015 8 hours ago [-]
Emergent complexity doesn’t really apply to material sciences and organic chemistry in the same way it does for machine learning and digital systems.
TonyAlicea10 9 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t go that far. It was pretty clear a long time ago that humans spending so much time filling the internet with content was going to eventually enable neural networks to pretend to communicate.
The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
Maybe we’ll turn all of Mars into paperclips with our efforts! Glorious paperclips. First Mars, then the universe!
naravara 12 hours ago [-]
If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it.
Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal footing with alchemy
NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].
Which dome construction material would be transparent to sunlight but block ionizing radiation?
LorenPechtel 12 hours ago [-]
1) Why do you need sunlight?
2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.
lukan 12 hours ago [-]
Well, I did wrote "gives sunlight" and that is a valid reply to it. But ... I would need sunlight actually. That seems somewhat possible with light tubes, but the much nicer solution, a transparent dome to still see mars clouds at day and the stars at night, is indeed not possible with current materials.
card_zero 14 hours ago [-]
Since the perchlorate is generated by reaction with sunlight, it might be limited to a surface layer.
Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
kzrdude 13 hours ago [-]
Regolith is all the loose stuff, everything that's not bedrock, even if it might be quite deep.
vondur 13 hours ago [-]
Rocket fuel for the taking?
LorenPechtel 12 hours ago [-]
Another interesting one is Mercury. There is a latitude where the average ground temperature is comfortable for us. You simply need to dig in deep enough to put enough thermal mass above you to get that average rather than the swings. I don't know how deep that is on Mercury, on Earth 10 meters is enough. Real world, you'll want to go a bit farther towards the pole so your station is comfortable with the thermal load of whatever equipment you put in it.
permo-w 9 hours ago [-]
the swings?
datsci_est_2015 9 hours ago [-]
Assuming they mean the ground acts as a heat sink, and sufficiently underground you’re not subjected to the above average heat of the day and below average cold of the night.
pitaj 7 hours ago [-]
Isn't mercury tidally locked? Day is always day, night is always night.
gnabgib 5 hours ago [-]
It is not (it has a 88d year, and a 58.65d.. day[0]) , we just had a post about it - if you travel at 4kph you can chase the sun.. A Mercury Rover Could Explore the Planet by Sticking to the Terminator (18 points, 1 week ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720941
floating colony on venus I heard was debunked, but that was also GPT 4.1 which was misaligned so I should seek a different source, from people, when I revisit this chain of thought
ozgung 12 hours ago [-]
Sadly we underestimate the liveability of this Earth. Muskism makes people believe to the false premise that we can just buy a new planet, make it habitable with magical tech. Supported with pseudoscientific buzzwords like Terraforming etc. So we can recklessly consume this planet and jump to our new home when this one depletes. No need to care about our current home because it's a jumping board. Interesting as an old Sci-Fi fantasy so it attracts smart people, but if you really think about it's just lies and stupidity.
tim333 11 hours ago [-]
Musk was also into the solar panels and EVs so it's not all trash the planet. Even if living on Mars or Venus isn't practical we might develop interesting tech trying.
Gigachad 10 hours ago [-]
Wasn’t the solar panels thing just some financial fraud scheme?
oskarkk 10 hours ago [-]
Not exactly, it was a normal solar panel business started by Elon's cousins (SolarCity), but it wasn't going well, and in the end it was bought by Tesla for much bigger money than it was worth (let's say it was a bailout for Elon). Today Tesla solar panels are maybe 0.1%-1% of the business, they stopped giving any data on it years ago.
One of the worst things Musk did is link himself in peoples’ minds to things like space exploration and then linked these ideas to… other ideas I’m not going into on here.
All these ideas about space pre-date him by many decades.
MengerSponge 14 hours ago [-]
Mars is so bad, y'all.
chromacity 13 hours ago [-]
Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you, but living in an environment with background radiation levels 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry...
Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.
jancsika 7 hours ago [-]
If we redefine our community to include tardigrades the outlook improves considerably.
Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, and there is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat: "non-native?" Guess who else did:
Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses
Honestly, which achievement would be considered more impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his boot?
Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia tardigrade article[1]:
Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses
Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the team we've gone from
"never come into contact with the regolith"
to
"if you happen to come into contact with the regolith, remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the Moon, and observed their reaction...
two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia
> That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it.
It’s really only a concern if you ingest it.
12 hours ago [-]
fulafel 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not a Mars colonisation advocate, but sounds like exposure to that may be manageable:
"Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development." (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-life-...)
Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
imglorp 14 hours ago [-]
Or effective decontamination performed in the airlock. There was a recent demonstration of an electrostatic repulsion device reducing dust on suit fabric which might help with sticking. And an air shower like used for clean rooms does not seem too far out.
nomel 12 hours ago [-]
Is that required?
Could the suit itself be used as a type of airlock, to leave outside things outside?
For example, mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out? (yes, there would be some dust recovery required, but minimal in comparison)
imglorp 11 hours ago [-]
The challenge with the "suits stay outside" model is that you basically need some kind of airlock between the suit hatch and the ship hatch. You might imagine both hatches get contaminated when the suit is detached. Then when you dock, that whole between-hatch space needs to be decontaminated before you can open the two hatches, because the outside of the suit hatch brought that stuff into the airlock.
It looks like that requires a panel to move out of the way. I was thinking more like "zipper" (probably more of a contiguous interface), so closer to zero volume when attaching, then it "unzips"/splits and pulls the back of the suit open, into the cabin.
|
| /\
| to | |
| \/
I don't see why an intermediate airlock would be required, except maybe for redundancy/safety reasons if the "unzip" process went wrong.
Since the inside of the suit is already at pressure, you could just pop it open and step out.
The near-zero volume of the coupling would make things much easier to clean/isolate.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out?
Isn't there a plan for the Artemis lunar rover to be configured this way? The outside of the suit never comes inside the rover.
darknavi 14 hours ago [-]
If this fact piques your interest, the book Delta-v by Daniel Suarez glances off this fact and uses it to justify exploring asteroid mining instead of a colony on Mars.
LorenPechtel 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not impressed with his science.
bertylicious 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not impressed with your comment.
LorenPechtel 12 hours ago [-]
Personally, I suspect all anoxic environments will turn out to be unhealthy for humans. You'll have a bunch of reactive stuff about that on Earth would have been neutralized long ago.
charlieyu1 6 hours ago [-]
Can we decompose the perchlorates for oxygen and energy?
ck2 14 hours ago [-]
there's a great PBS Space Time for that (of course)
There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans.
How would lunar dust complicate building a lunar base? Would they just need a few brooms?
mncharity 11 hours ago [-]
> "I think one of the most aggravating, restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin, suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive, friction-like action to everything it gets on [...] the simple large-tolerance mechanical devices on the Rover began to show the effect of dust as the EVAs went on. By the middle or the end of the third EVA, simple things like bag locks and the lock which held the pallet on the Rover began not only to malfunction but to not function at all. They effectively froze. We tried to dust them and bang the dust off and clean them, and there was just no way. The effect of dust on mirrors, cameras, and checklists is phenomenal. You have to live with it but you're continually fighting the dust problem both outside and inside the spacecraft. Once you get inside the spacecraft, as much as you dust yourself, you start taking off the suits and you have dust on your hands and your face and you're walking in it. You can be as careful in cleaning up as you want to, but it just sort of inhabits every nook and cranny in the spacecraft and every pore in your skin [...]" Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 debrief[1]
An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts.
As a huge space nerd, I would like to point out that space, and other planetary bodies appear to really suck.
It seems to be under-reported that the Earth is pretty nice.
gcbirzan 9 hours ago [-]
Sadly, it's populated.
consumer451 9 hours ago [-]
My friend, misanthropy is giving last year energy. Don't get so down. In other under-reported news: until the Earth reaches 100% de-population, it can in-fact get worse. Therefore, it's currently not that bad!
Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live on a populated planetary body. The Peter Thiel has not yet achieved its ultimate goal. Good times.
OsrsNeedsf2P 14 hours ago [-]
They describe the dust on the moon as,
> Fine like powder, but sharp like glass
Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
heckelson 2 hours ago [-]
It's like Asbestos!
jjmarr 14 hours ago [-]
Have any of them developed cancer from the space asbestos yet?
porphyra 14 hours ago [-]
Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get cancer even from brief exposures:
> Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1]
Part of what makes asbestos (and also fiberglass) dangerous, isn't just the sharpness but also the long shape which means that macrophages can't engulf them.
Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
LorenPechtel 12 hours ago [-]
Sounds to me like the threat would be silicosis.
loloquwowndueo 14 hours ago [-]
Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that’d be a long time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it’s not likely to affect life expectancy I guess.
AngryData 14 hours ago [-]
We also have to remember that those astronauts were some of the most physically fit individuals in a nation of hundreds of millions which may skew the expected medical outcomes. Especially if we assume they always had the best healthcare available, if from nothing else than doctors asking similiar qiestions about the effects of space travel.
tempaccount5050 12 hours ago [-]
That's just simply not true at all, I don't know where you're getting this idea. Literally every Olympic athlete was more fit that an any astronaut ever.
spauldo 8 hours ago [-]
Most astronauts were chosen from a decent sized pool of military pilots. Pilots are some of the most expensive assets the military has (moreso than the planes they fly) and they have to be physically fit. People wanting to become astronauts are subjected to rigorous physical testing.
No, they're not Olympic athletes but they're considerably more fit than the average American.
wat10000 14 hours ago [-]
The exposure was brief, too. Wikipedia says mesothelioma has been known to develop from exposures of "only" 1 month. That's a scary short time if it's in your home or workplace, but comfortably longer than an Apollo mission. Could be an issue for a future base, though.
bdamm 14 hours ago [-]
It definitely puts a damper on my personal enthusiasm for visiting the moon hotel, or even encouraging researchers to live there.
themafia 13 hours ago [-]
The military does not survey the population and then select the fittest. So, as a function, it cannot actually perform as you say.
It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons to think these categories have good overlap.
zamadatix 12 hours ago [-]
They don't need to have sampled the entire population to have ended up with some of the most x individuals of the nation of y population size, they just need a large enough pool that the top end up among some of the best.
altmanaltman 14 hours ago [-]
I mean Neil Armstrong literally smoked and did not "believe" in excercise so they were absolutely not the most physically fittest people. They were just freaks in terms of enduring a lot of stress tests. Physical endurance is just one aspect they train for. Other aspects were much more valued like them being military flight pilots/smart enough to understand the systems/mentally strong enough to not break down etc. You were not selecting for absolute raw fitness for the apollo missions.
AngryData 10 hours ago [-]
They didn't select for pure physical fitness but they were already selected for fitness as a pilot and then again when they were selected from the pilots to train as an astonaut. Its not like they just picked arbitrarily from the potential pool of candidates and gambled on getting better than average.
altmanaltman 3 hours ago [-]
Again, they don't select for pure fitness when it comes to pilots as well. The fact is that you didn't need to be super fit to handle those crafts. Fitness today is much more prioritized because astronauts spend exponentially longer time in space now than they did then and they have to work out in space to keep their bodies from getting used to being in space and zero gravity. They now spends months in space, previously max they would go for is like a week.
So no, pilots or astronauts are not "some of the most physically fittest people in America". They were exceptional human beings but lets be realistic.
spauldo 8 hours ago [-]
Everybody smoked back then. Besides, until you get older your health is much more affected by your lifestyle than whether or not you smoke.
altmanaltman 3 hours ago [-]
Armstrong literally did not believe in physical excercise though. He thought the human heart had a fixed number of beats and didn't want to "waste" them. Look it up. They guys really did not care about physical fitness back then.
spauldo 1 hours ago [-]
Whether he believed in it or not, he passed rigorous physical tests for the Navy and NASA. They don't let just any slob be a fighter pilot, much less a test pilot or astronaut. If you don't have good cardiovascular fitness, you can't handle high G-forces or maintain good judgement while sleep deprived (those jets didn't fly themselves while the pilot napped like modern ones do).
Maybe he was just naturally fit. Some people are. But he was undoubtedly fit.
ButlerianJihad 8 hours ago [-]
It is important to point out that prominent physicians highly recommended cigarette smoking as a beneficial hobby for all Americans to partake in.
"In addition the Moon has no atmosphere and is constantly bombarded by radiation from the Sun that causes the soil to become electrostatically charged." - You can use a magnetic or electric field to push the soil away
hvs 13 hours ago [-]
If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/
It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars
I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable.
Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.
api 10 hours ago [-]
This is on my reading list. I've read synopses of it, and I don't think it's going to change my mind a lot. I'm still long-term pro-space-exploration, but even before this book I'd come to the conclusion that this is a lot harder than naive nerds tend to think. I think it's worth doing and probably will be done eventually, but it's gonna take a while.
I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself.
In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates or anything else you don't want.
Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or the Moon I've read about call for spending most time underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in space itself could be much nicer.
The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external space environment might be like:
Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd think.
For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc.
Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.
Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some critical or massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places.
In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total suicide mission.
Compared to this I think going to Mars is a dead end. Even if we go there and survive and prosper, now we're just doing planetary civilization again. We're back to squabbling over dirt. The real evolutionary leap is doing something different. Fish didn't come on land to stay fish.
But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion, very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics. Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility. Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key to self-sufficiency.
Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not going to "take."
themafia 13 hours ago [-]
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m463 14 hours ago [-]
we have similar problems with volcanic ash on earth
tim-tday 14 hours ago [-]
Exactly, but the lack of a water cycle on the moon means that all the dust is sharp and always will be.
It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact.
Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.
It degrades rubber seals.
jMyles 14 hours ago [-]
I walked up to the flows on Fagradalsfjall when it was erupting a couple of years ago, and I found the cinereous, sulfurous air to be very medicinal and clearing. I'm not sure it'd have good for me for more than a few hours, but as it was, it was great. I occasionally wish I were able to just have a chamber with that air in it.
kzrdude 13 hours ago [-]
There are some saunas on Iceland that expose you to earth gasses, might be exactly the kind of chamber you are after. I've visited one, and it was unfortunately cold for a sauna because that's naturally varying too.
youknownothing 8 hours ago [-]
To be fair, considering that there are minerals in the Moon that don't exist on Earth, it's normal that the human body experiments an allergic reaction to a set of substances that it hasn't ever been exposed to during thousands of years of evolution.
hellopineapple 8 hours ago [-]
Hourly cost doesn’t seems the right metrics, instead the cost should be tied to productivity or difficulty of problem solved
Cue Cave Johnson: “The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill.”
alex1138 6 hours ago [-]
It wasn't just lunar dust, all(?) the crews also reported smelling burning in the tunnel (tunnel connecting CM and LM), might be something to do with the docking latches
BFV 14 hours ago [-]
That’s such a weirdly specific detail but also kinda fascinating. Imagine going to the Moon and the first thing you notice is “huh… smells like gunpowder.
skywhopper 13 hours ago [-]
I just had a filling replaced at the dentist yesterday and when he was grinding away at it to shape it, I would get a terrible whiff of something like gunpowder. It was quite disturbing.
But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.
lucasaug 13 hours ago [-]
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade
mirekrusin 12 hours ago [-]
Sounds similar to asbestos.
tyrowvgt 6 hours ago [-]
Unbelievable, billions spent on sending few to moon while millions are dying homeless here
notepad0x90 6 hours ago [-]
sounds like you're focusing on the wrong billions, the war on iran alone could provide housing to all homeless in the US.
It's not for a lack of money people are homeless in the US (which is launching this). it's for a lack of political will, because voters don't want to provide free housing to homeless people. They're more concerned about being able to buy instead of rent a house (less apartments, more houses) or protect the value of their house ("no homeless people near me, and certainly an abundance of housing reduces prices for my house investment").
Hey, at least those issues won't be a problem, if homeless people can charter a flight to Mars, if these efforts pan out.
13 hours ago [-]
jiveturkey 14 hours ago [-]
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ButlerianJihad 14 hours ago [-]
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gunto 14 hours ago [-]
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labelbabyjunior 14 hours ago [-]
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smokedetector1 14 hours ago [-]
This is a very unpleasant comment, consider deleting.
labelbabyjunior 14 hours ago [-]
Try leaving your bubble sometime and stepping onto a construction site, you would be in awe.
ethagnawl 14 hours ago [-]
> no PPE needed
Says you ...
labelbabyjunior 14 hours ago [-]
Apparently you've never had drywall work done, the level of risk these guys take in stride is shocking.
Rendered at 09:13:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder!
And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
In theory, they could have been equipped to partially pressurize the cabin with (say) helium - which would allow some sort of vacuum cleaner to work. But that could have added a fair bit of mass (by the LEM's very tight mass budget standards).
Lower gravity is giving the defender an advantage over the elements... at least until it gets low enough for things to start floating, when this flips around. In microgravity, water turns into floating blobs, but fire turns into actual floating fireballs.
Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice videogame idea hiding in there somewhere.
Any dust on the Moon still consists mostly of silicates which cannot be oxidized.
When dust comes from meteorites, it contains a fraction made of iron sulfide (with small quantities of other sulfides) and another fraction made mainly of hydrocarbons.
The metallic sulfides can be oxidized, but they will not burn violently. The hydrocarbons are like a tar or pitch, because the volatile hydrocarbons would have sublimated in vacuum. So neither that tar is easily flammable.
The gunpowder smell is likely to be caused by the oxidation of the sulfides from the dust, which releases sulfur dioxide, the same like burnt gunpowder.
Have a reference tho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
Distant third
Ar the scale terraforming entails, the crust reactions with the new atmosphere are closer to a rounding error.
*say, Earth's moon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_International_Space_...
Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on reentry made a mess of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facilit...
>It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15
Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its 34F outside right now.
There are at least two types of UV-C light bulbs, as well as literal ozone generators that use ceramic platen and a fan. The type of UV-C bulb that is most common on Amazon and Ali is ~254 nanometers, and _does not_ produce Ozone. It does leave a smell, but it's more like an oldschool hospital antiseptic smell. probably the smell of the dead germs, yay.
Now 185nm is actually the correct size to turn O2 around the bulb into O3 (and more oxygens too, i once read, i think, kinda like cracking hydrocarbons to make longer chains or something).
UV-C bulbs (not base, which is an edison base) that can sterilize a room in 5-15 minutes are about 15-20 CM tall, with four crystal tubes that are connected together standing up on the base. image here [0]
you must run a fan over them if you want your money's worth. they get hot, the bases get hot, it makes the most sense in non-carpeted rooms to aim the crystal down and the base up, so that is real rough on them. that took me 2 bulbs to figure out.
If you can find a reputable place to get the box with ceramic and a fan that lasts more than 5 minutes, let me know, because that's closer to what i want for bedrooms and stuff.
The UV-C 185nm bulbs work great to make a car stop stinking, too! completely removes cigarette smells, if the car hasn't been smoked in for a while. run the A/C full blast and run the bulb for 15 minutes, open the windows for 5 minutes, roll em, sniff. Still smell? another 10 minutes, in the back seat, full A/C blasting. vent, sniff. Faint smell? replace the cabin air filter. Charge customer(?)
and i'm going to respond to your followup question to the GP as well: Covid. Obviously. They were telling us it would live on groceries and deliveries and that, so i put all deliveries in my laundry room and dosed em with UV-C for a minute. CDC or whatever studies said that 10-60 seconds was more than enough to kill sars-ncov-2.
I only use it for freshening cars, rooms, bathrooms, etc now.
WARNING: Do not be in the room with any UV-C light for more than a few seconds. Do not look at the bulb for literally any more than necessary to ensure it is on and safe. they make safety goggles that wrap your entire eye sockets to protect from UV, too. if you get a 185nm bulb, either completely ventilate the room with fresh air, or leave it sealed for 60 minutes then open it up for a few minutes, all the ozone reacts and goes away or something.
UV-C hurts your skin, yes, but it will make your eyeballs literally itch. so don't, don't don't look at it. they are not blacklights.
[0] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71LgjON7J+L._AC_.jpg
This advice does not necessarily apply to far UVC (200-235 nm), which appears to be much safer for human skin and corneas than UVC outside this specific band. More research is needed before calling it "safe" but far UVC is almost certainly less hazardous than the rest of the UVC band.
Pay close attention to wavelength when purchasing UVC light sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-UVC
I'll keep my eye out for more research on far-uvc and the possibility of getting a bulb to test.
oh by the way, i must have sent back 2 dozen "185nm" UVC bulbs from a dozen "manufacturers" because they didn't produce ozone, because they were fraudulent listings of 253.7nm bulbs - so this is why i was trying to steer people away from amazon and ali, as it's real easy to get the wrong type if you're looking for ozone. I've only managed to acquire 4 bulbs total in the last 5 years that produced ozone, and i burnt out two before someone said "put a fan on it, those bulbs are designed to be inside an air exchanger!"
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812225
Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The ozone species is even more oxidative.
Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's also killing us. Ozone is worse.
"Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth the squeeze.
I'm not normally one to miss the sarcastic or satirical posts, but this one seems oddly earnest.
I think they're referring to oxidative stress [1] caused by cellular respiration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress
They have a remote control that "arms" them and it starts beeping slow, the faster, then much faster then activates. It kills insects be destroying their lungs and entirely destroys mold, bacteria and even damages viral material. Hospitals run the same lamps in wings that they close down for sanitation. The entire area has to be 100% vented.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/AeraLight-Whole-Surface-UV-Sanitizer/...
I imagine it will cause some material to off-gas aldehydes at the very least.
But I would worry about the effect on e.g. plastic seals. There are a lot of plastics that become brittle with ozone exposure, let alone UV exposure.
The IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health) level for ozone is five ppm.
That's half of chlorine which is 10 ppm.
Most major brand air purifiers put out a very minimal amount; the ionization is beneficial because it makes the really tiny (and thus most hazardous) particles clump and fall/stick to surfaces faster.
It's the offbrand units that generate lots of ozone to make people think they're "doing something", and commercial ozone generators for car/room deodorizing, that you have to be extremely careful with. Those need to be set up and then the room left for hours for the ozone to react with stuff, and then ventilated thoroughly.
The tiniest particles aren't necessarily the most dangerous, so even if "clumping" worked as advertised, it wouldn't necessarily be good. Air filters are worst at filtering particles at about 0.3 microns, they're better at filtering smaller ones (I understand it has something to do with brownian motion). I wouldn't be at all surprised if a similar thing affected our biological "filters". Either way, if you have a filter, you don't need UV to clean air. Just push more air through it if you need cleaner air faster.
Humans are built to withstand a constant assault on their immune systems. We couldn't have survived if we didn't.
Its a bit naieve to claim that cleaning one's home will result in an extinction of enough microbes so as to be threatening to our immune system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio
> [...] Better hygiene meant that infants and young children had fewer opportunities to encounter and develop immunity to polio. Exposure to poliovirus was therefore delayed until late childhood or adult life, when it was more likely to take the paralytic form.[22]
'Anti-vaccine claims' suggests a taking of sides on that knee-jerk division into those who claim without evidence that almost or even all vaccines are deadly and on the other hand, those who are frankly contemptuous of any claim that a particular vaccine (evident particularly with the vaccines developed in response to the Covid outbreak) might be dangerous for certain people. Both extreme views have been on view recently and are indefensible.
The major issue here is the difficult task of identifying people likely to react badly to any specific vaccine.
Meanwhile 'Congress and Institute of Medicine Confirm Government Licensed and Recommended Vaccines Can Cause Injury and Death' and 'The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act was the first U.S. law to officially acknowledge that childhood vaccines licensed and recommended by the federal government, which are routinely mandated for school attendance by state governments, can and do injure and kill a minority of children.'
The dust that comes from meteorites contains up to 4 fractions: silicates, which cannot be oxidized, metallic iron, which oxidizes, but it does not form volatile substances that can be smelled, hydrocarbons in the form of a tar or pitch, which can burn but it cannot be ignited easily, and finally a fraction made of iron sulfide (troilite) with small quantities of other sulfides.
In contact with air, the sulfides will be oxidized, releasing sulfur dioxide. Burning black powder also releases sulfur dioxide, which is the main reason for its smell. Burning pure sulfur will produce the same smell.
Presumably, moonwalks would also have some ozone like the space walk did. But, maybe the burning-moon-dust gunpowder smell was a lot stronger than the vacuumed-metal/paint ozone smell.
First you need to figure out if it’s a surface infestation because of condensation or if it’s a constructive thermal bridge. The latter can be solved by raising the surface (wall, ceiling, etc) temperature through insulation or more inefficiently special heaters designed for this purpose.
In both cases, the contaminated material is removed down to the plaster or masonry. Wood, wallpaper and similar materials will likely be deeply contaminated and must be removed. For areas larger than 1 sq meter, it’s better to get a specialized contractor which will use HEPA vacuum cleaners, special bags, etc to ensure that the mould spores don’t spread in other rooms.
For small areas the agents of choice are bleach or hydrogen peroxide, both available in products for home use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars
But having solid ground is still nice.
A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.
The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
(Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too, so we can always test things there.)
We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.
The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
Keeping humans alive is hard.
Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.
NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/detoxifying-mars/
2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.
Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)
All these ideas about space pre-date him by many decades.
Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.
Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, and there is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat: "non-native?" Guess who else did:
Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses
Honestly, which achievement would be considered more impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his boot?
Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia tardigrade article[1]:
Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses
Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the team we've gone from
"never come into contact with the regolith"
to
"if you happen to come into contact with the regolith, remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the Moon, and observed their reaction...
two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia
2: https://sciworthy.com/could-tardigrades-survive-on-mars/
It’s really only a concern if you ingest it.
"Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development." (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-life-...)
Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
Could the suit itself be used as a type of airlock, to leave outside things outside?
For example, mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out? (yes, there would be some dust recovery required, but minimal in comparison)
Someone else linked to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...
edit: in that context^ search for "SEV suitport design" find NASA has written some docs on the matter, eg https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20130013652/downloads/20...
Since the inside of the suit is already at pressure, you could just pop it open and step out.
The near-zero volume of the coupling would make things much easier to clean/isolate.
Isn't there a plan for the Artemis lunar rover to be configured this way? The outside of the suit never comes inside the rover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FqozA4IpA
There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1
An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts.
An old tech memo and paper.[3][4]
[1] https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd... page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2] interactive microscope of regolith https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset... [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20... [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S
It seems to be under-reported that the Earth is pretty nice.
Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live on a populated planetary body. The Peter Thiel has not yet achieved its ultimate goal. Good times.
> Fine like powder, but sharp like glass
Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
> Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1]
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
No, they're not Olympic athletes but they're considerably more fit than the average American.
It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons to think these categories have good overlap.
So no, pilots or astronauts are not "some of the most physically fittest people in America". They were exceptional human beings but lets be realistic.
Maybe he was just naturally fit. Some people are. But he was undoubtedly fit.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-success...
It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/
I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable.
Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.
I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself.
In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates or anything else you don't want.
Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or the Moon I've read about call for spending most time underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in space itself could be much nicer.
The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external space environment might be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY
Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd think.
For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc.
Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.
Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some critical or massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places.
In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total suicide mission.
Compared to this I think going to Mars is a dead end. Even if we go there and survive and prosper, now we're just doing planetary civilization again. We're back to squabbling over dirt. The real evolutionary leap is doing something different. Fish didn't come on land to stay fish.
But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion, very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics. Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility. Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key to self-sufficiency.
Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not going to "take."
It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.
It degrades rubber seals.
But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.
It's not for a lack of money people are homeless in the US (which is launching this). it's for a lack of political will, because voters don't want to provide free housing to homeless people. They're more concerned about being able to buy instead of rent a house (less apartments, more houses) or protect the value of their house ("no homeless people near me, and certainly an abundance of housing reduces prices for my house investment").
Hey, at least those issues won't be a problem, if homeless people can charter a flight to Mars, if these efforts pan out.
Says you ...