Elon Pivots To The Moon
Posted by freedomforall 1 day, 2 hours ago to Technology
Excerpt:
"A city on the Moon will cost somewhere between $100B and $500B, require thousands of Starship flights, and demand a decade of nonstop construction in a place where the temperature swings 400°C between day and night, the dust cuts through metal seals like sandpaper, and a single cracked habitat window means everyone inside is dead in about 90 seconds.
Musk just announced SpaceX is doing it anyway. Here’s the actual engineering path.
You build at the south pole. Specifically the rims and floors of craters like Shackleton and Cabeus, where temperatures in permanent shadow drop below -230°C. NASA estimates 600 million metric tons of water ice are buried in these craters under about 40 cm of dry regolith. That water becomes your oxygen supply, your drinking water, your radiation shielding, and 78% of your rocket propellant by mass. The crater rims get near-continuous sunlight for solar power. You build where the resources are."
"A city on the Moon will cost somewhere between $100B and $500B, require thousands of Starship flights, and demand a decade of nonstop construction in a place where the temperature swings 400°C between day and night, the dust cuts through metal seals like sandpaper, and a single cracked habitat window means everyone inside is dead in about 90 seconds.
Musk just announced SpaceX is doing it anyway. Here’s the actual engineering path.
You build at the south pole. Specifically the rims and floors of craters like Shackleton and Cabeus, where temperatures in permanent shadow drop below -230°C. NASA estimates 600 million metric tons of water ice are buried in these craters under about 40 cm of dry regolith. That water becomes your oxygen supply, your drinking water, your radiation shielding, and 78% of your rocket propellant by mass. The crater rims get near-continuous sunlight for solar power. You build where the resources are."
cheap real estate, no taxes, and no governmental interference to speak of.
Could be that the blast is 100+ years away and underground Mars settlement
might be realized in time.
Know some talented actuaries and have tried to determine a +/- years into the galactic current sheet from one trip around the galaxy to another but can't seem to get a consistent set of data points.
My premise is that there might be variability in how and when our solar system encounters the waves of the current sheet. I would not expect each time around producing the same exact encounter..
Current "science" has proven to be much less accurate than that (albeit often there is a hidden agenda.;^)
They are just making a guess based on data that has not been proven. There is no data on how the poles
moved in the past. So they could slow down, reverse direction, or speed up. There is no data to make an
accurate prediction on that as far as I have seen.
They are just making a guess based on the best "available" data and that data is unproven.
There are too many assumptions based on unproven data, imo.
That said, imo, the only hope for human civilization is if their guesses are off by at least 100-200 years and
that technology advances make it possible to make better prediction and to protect the earth if needed.
Direct electric power without steam generators.
QED: No windows. Lots of sealed pressure-proofed compartments below ground level.
But, sure beats decarbonization at a higher cost which has achieved de-industrialization - except for the US with Trump!
Q: What do you do when you have $100 billion to invest and every earthside government wants to steal from you?
A: Use your assets (and the assets the government stole from others) and go to a locale that has less government intervention for a while.