NASA Says Moon Has More Water Than Great Lakes 255
jerryjamesstone writes "The US Great Lakes have some competition: the moon. Yes, that old thing in the sky may hold more than all of the water contained in the Great Lakes, according to a NASA-funded study. From the article: 'Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, along with other scientists across the nation, determined that the water was likely present very early in the moon's formation history as hot magma started to cool and crystallize. This finding means water is native to the moon.'"
So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
There ARE whales?
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
There _were_ whales. The whalers on the moon hunted them to extinction.
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Don't forget - Futurama marks its return on June 24 at 22:00 (10:00pm for you non geeks) on Comedy Central
libraries of congress... (Score:2, Funny)
how many libraries of congress would one unit of great lakes flood?
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What I want to know is: if you flooded the moon with as many great lakes as there are books in the LoC, to what depth would the flood waters rise?
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Re:libraries of congress... (Score:4, Interesting)
Preposterous, but now I'm curious! (Caution: I've only had one cup of coffee so far this morning, so please check my math!)
Depth of covering the moon with the contents of the Great Lakes, just once:
So, approximately 0.6 meters (just under 2 feet)!
If we use BooksInLoC of Great Lakes, that works out to:
So, to answer the original question: 17,400 Km (or approx. 10,800 miles) deep!
P.S. This was a fun exercise... I knew the Great Lakes were "big", and I knew the Moon was "big", but to think the Great Lakes alone could cover the entire Moon to a depth of about 2 feet... Just. Plain. Wow!
Extra Credit Question: If the moon were entirely covered by the water from the Great Lakes, how much brighter would it make a Full Moon seem on earth? Bonus: how bright is that compared to the Sun at noon?
Re:libraries of congress... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to Wikipedia, the moon has a mean radius of 1,737.10km and has a volume of 2.1958E10 km^3.
From your calculations, the great lakes have a volume of 22,560 km^3. Therefore, the volume of the great lakes times the number of books in the library of congress is 6.5424E11 km^3.
If we add this volume to the volume of the moon, the volume of our new moon is 6.76198E11 km^3. Assuming the new moon takes on a spherical shape, we can get the new radius of the moon by using the formula for the volume of a sphere, V=4/3r^3. Therefore, we deduce that the new radius is 7,974.65km.
Further assuming that the moon as it exists now settles in the center of this new waterworld relatively undisturbed, with it's mean radius remaining at 1,737.10km, we can calculate the mean depth of the water on the moon as 6237.55km.
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better question.. What are you like after a SECOND cup of coffee?
Nice work!
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42 football fields.
Re:libraries of congress... (Score:4, Interesting)
Football fields doesn't even bother me as much. At least it's a specifically known number (100 yards - and yes I'm going with the American/gridiron definition of football because we seem to be the only ones who measure in football fields :)) that is small enough to wrap your head around.
Great lakes? Ok, I know they're pretty big, but I don't know if there's hundreds of thousands of gallons, millions, billions, trillions, or even more gallons of water in those things. I just have no sense of it. Same with "Libraries of Congress". I have no clue how many books they have. I know it's a lot, but I don't know how many. Biggest library I ever saw was our college library; it was 5 stories which compared to our little ~6000 sqft county library back home seemed ENORMOUS, but other students constantly expressed how small and sucky our library was so maybe even that is small potatoes in comparison.
People seem to be attached to using stupid units though. Kinda like that relative who insists in telling you distances in units of time rather than length.
Cheating Moon (Score:5, Funny)
Whereas the lakes are, well, lakes... the moon is a sort of kinda planet. Planets tend to be bigger than lakes, and therefore I call this cheating.
Obviously, there are planets that are also a giant lake... the earth itself for example is quite wet. But those lakes we shall call oceans. So, oceans can compete with planets, but lakes can't. Ok?
-- wait, that's no moon!
Re:Cheating Moon (Score:4, Interesting)
and Neptune has more water than Great Lakes.
Re:Cheating Moon (Score:4, Funny)
Dude, people are still getting over the whole "Pluto not a real planet" thing and here you are promoting Luna to the status of a planet! Have you no SHAME, sir?
Re:Cheating Moon (Score:5, Funny)
When "Dude" was last in vogue, Pluto was still a planet.
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Dude! No way! Whoa!
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In my defense, I promoted Luna to a "sort of kinda planet"... and as far as I am concerned, Pluto is allowed to compete with the great lakes as much as it wants.
Actually, I think this is more complicated than it seems. Planets, moons, oceans and lakes. And then the water may be solid, liquid, gaseous. Bloody hell! We should install a committee to investigate the matter! It will report its findings around March 2017.
-- All your water are belong to us.
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Whether or not a body is a planet depends on its orbit as well as its size. Pluto's orbit is why they demoted it, not its size. IINM the moon is larger than Mercury. The moon is moving slowly away from the Earth, so at some time it will cease to be a moon when the center of gravity is outside the Earth (both the moon and earth "orbit each other" with the orbit's center inside the Earth) and the Earth/Moon will become a double planet.
The next trip to the moon will be a few cm longer than the last trip.
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While you can't see the Great Lakes in this picture, the Moon is not that big compared to them.
They would completely dominate Rhea's surface.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Rhea_Earth_Moon_Comparison.png [wikimedia.org]
Don't they know that already? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, that's right, they never did.
Units (Score:5, Funny)
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I thought the article you linked was a bit tongue-in-cheek until I read the Highland Council website [highland.gov.uk], which does indeed use the 'Wales' and the 'Belgium'. It also introduces the 'Luxembourg'.
I'm not entirely convinced of the usefulness of the 'Wales' though, seeing as it doesn't exist [bbc.co.uk].
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It's Belgium [zapatopi.net] that doesn't exist.
I will translate into American units: (Score:2)
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African or Indian?
The US great lakes? (Score:5, Insightful)
And here I thought the great lakes were in Canada as well.
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First get rid of that ridiculous Imperial system and then we'll talk. The English invented it and even they gave it up. The US is the last country left that uses Imperial - why not join the rest of the world in the modern era?
Re:The US great lakes? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, they got a border on all of them... except Lake Michigan! USA!
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And Land-o-Lakes butter...that's definitely American. And Ricky Lake.
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Shhhhh! Don't remind them or pretty soon they'll be sayin' we got WMD's as well, and full of terrorists, and the only way to solve the problem is to get rid of that pesky border altogether! Besides we aren't free enough yet I don't think either...
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Marge, anyone could miss Canada. All tucked away down there. - Homer Simpson
"US" Great Lakes? (Score:2)
I'm sorry, the "US" Great Lakes? Did you guys annex them or something? Did you forget you actually SHARE 4 out of 5 of those lakes? You know what one of them is called? LAKE ONTARIO!
Re:"US" Great Lakes? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The largest lake entirely within Canada is the Great Bear Lake. None of the Great Lakes are entirely in Canada, so none of them count. The deepest lake in Canada is Lake Manitou, which has an island inside it, and in that island there is a lake. That makes it the largest lake that's in an island that's in a lake in the world."
Though, I would expect people living next door to the US to be used to its "US is the world" attitude by now.
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That's nice, but Ryan Island is in Siskiwit Lake, which is on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. It is the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake* in the world". Which, I might add, is really close to Canada and could have been Canadian if the border were drawn more reasonably, but... it's in Michigan. :)
*This doesn't count the Black or Caspain Sea because they're saline, and it doesn't count Lakes Huron and Michigan as a single lake because no one but a nit-picking hydrol
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Only the ones with mudkips.
Additional finding not mentioned in article (Score:2)
Yes but... (Score:3, Funny)
but... (Score:2)
Well this gives a sensible answer to one question (Score:4, Funny)
Putting things to scale... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Putting things to scale... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the Moon contains even more than one teaspoon of water in 5 tonnes of rock.
Yeah, the article makes it clear that 50 parts per million is the highest estimate they can come up with. Also, it isn't water: it's hydroxyl (OH) groups on molecules in rocks, which is what you get when rocks forming in a wet environment.
This is the way geologists talk about things, but still, the reporting is almost as misleading as the recent pack of lies [timesonline.co.uk] from the people who brought you Iraqi WMD's claiming there is vast untapped mineral wealth in Afghanistan (which Stephen Peters, the head of the USGS’s Afghanistan Minerals Project, is strangely unaware of according to the linked article from the Times.)
The discovery of hydroxyl groups in rocks on the moon at the 50 PPM level is scientifically interesting because previously lunar minerals were believed to be absolutely anhydrous: the way I was taught geology back in the day we were told "lunar minerals are just like Terrestrial minerals, except they have no water". That has now been changed to, "except they have almost no water". Ford Prefect would be pleased.
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5 tonnes? Is that earth gravity or moon gravity?
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Er, 1 tonne = 1,000kg, gravity or no.
(Or do I hear a whooshing sound?)
Great Lakes Mention (Score:2)
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I did read the fine article and saw no mention of any lakes, let alone Earth's Great Lakes. Where did that come from or did subby take some liberties when composing this ... umm ... composition?
First paragraph?
NASA-funded scientists estimate from recent research that the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon's interior could exceed the amount of water in the Great Lakes here on Earth.
I always wondered... (Score:2)
I always wondered about this.
The moon is essentially "dead", right? No seismic activity to speak of (other then from gravitational forces), no molten core (am I right?) and is pretty much a large rock.
Wouldn't all of the heavy metals, during the course of the moon's existence, have gravitated towards the core leaving the core with a high concentration of heavy metals that would be relatively easy to mine? Big, deep holes drilled straight down to the good stuff?
Power all the tech needed with solar, crack the
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The most we've dug down on Earth is 12.2 kilometers [wikipedia.org]. It would be easier on the moon since there's not as much gravity and the moon is much more inert but drilling down 1738 kilometers is hard.
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We've only gone 12.2 km because the rock gets wicked warm.
You, sir, are obviously not a geologist. The real reason we've only gone that deep is because drilling deeper would threaten the habitat of an subterranean advanced reptilian-humanoid species that would destroy us if we intruded upon them.
More than the Great Lakes? [citation needed] (Score:3, Informative)
The article does not mention anywhere that the amount of water on is more than the great lakes system.
Firstly, the water is in the form of hydroxyl and the mineral apartite (article didn't go into more detail). Secondly, TFA states the amount of water is under 5ppm. Yes, parts per million. I can't see how anyone could arrive at the great lakes value unless they took the volume of the moon and took 5ppm of that, which is ridiculous.
Firstly, the moon's not a uniform material. Secondly, to get anywhere close to this amount of water, you'd need to mine and refine the majority of the moon. It's like saying we have 300 quintillion gallons of water on earth while neglecting to mention that 97% of it is salt water and some more of it in the ice caps.
The real takeaway from the article is that the previously estimated amount of water was 1 ppb and now it's around 5 ppm.
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NASA-funded scientists estimate from recent research that the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon's interior could exceed the amount of water in the Great Lakes here on Earth.
Epic fail.
Sorry guys.
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Firstly, the water is in the form of hydroxyl and the mineral apartite
Well then, the South Africans should have no problem extracting the water, given their recent history.
Guess the other nations (Score:2)
who are actually going to go to the moon will be pleased. I guess we can still look down on others in smug superiority after we convinced ourselves going back wasn't the best investment of our money. Too bad it was Bush who proposed us going there again
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Somehow I don't think the Earth-Bound States of America will suffer from not getting its hands on the water that could theoretically be extracted by laboriously pulverizing the entire volume of the moon. Since - as the article points out - the EBSA already has that same amount of water, already in drinkable form, lapping at its shoreline from Minnesota to New York. We'll manage.
Of Course! (Score:2, Funny)
That's because cheese contains water!
Another good sci-fi story bites the dust (Score:2)
I can't remember the name of the story as it's been years since I read it, but Isaac Asimov wrote a story about a moon colony and political upheaval; some anti-moon demagogues decided to kill the moon program by denying the colonists water and forcing them to come home. They got political support by somehow convincing people that the earth itself would run out of water. The colonists rebelled and went to (iirc) Saturn to bring water back.
It was a good story, too bad it's now pretty meaningless thanks to the
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That's the danger with science fiction, it gets out of date way too quickly; one new discovery or invention and bam; the story no longer works.
That's the danger with bad science fiction that is dependent on its science/technology for the core of its entertainment/enjoyment value, instead of just using the science/tech as a vehicle for the characters/story. Which is not the case with most Asimov I've read (though I haven't read the one you're speaking of). I thoroughly enjoyed The Martian Chronicles, Out of the Silent Planet, and Perelandra despite knowing that there was no breathable atmosphere on Mars/Venus. In fact, most Bradbury/Heinlein/Asimov
There's also Gold in the Sea (Score:3, Insightful)
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"NASA-funded scientists estimate from recent research that the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon’s interior could exceed the amount of water in the Great Lakes here on Earth. "
I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing. Transporting anything from the moon to the earth is so expensive that it likely isn't wort
Re:but then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Earth to the moon is really flippin' expensive, to be sure.
Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry. I'm not saying it's a solved problem, but it's a much, much easier one.
Then again, I've read too much Heinlein. *grin*
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Then again, I've read too much Heinlein. *grin*
Compare the last five minutes of the Apollo 11 landing [nasa.gov] with the lunar landing sequence in Rocketship Galileo. They had similar dramas. If anything Heinlein's crew handled operations better, while Armstrong got himself into a mess by working too much of Aldrins job.
Re:but then... (Score:4, Insightful)
You clearly don't know how this actually works. You can't just go straight down to earth, you have to aim quite precisely to make sure that you don't completely burn up. You also have to not land in the middle of times square or in the middle of an incredibly dangerous part of the ocean. Hauling a container (which I guess you think is really easy to build) full of some minerals (probably quite heavy due to size of container and density of anything worth mining) in the middle of 40 foot waves is a suicide mission.
Of course, you still have to get this magic container up to the moon. The heavier it is, the more expensive it is. And as for "giving it a kick", well, you have to transport the boot up there too. Then you have to assemble, test, power, and use this boot. How do you expect to do that cheaply?
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Railgun, fire crap at the earth like a weapon. if you aim right it'll impact right where you want it.
Side effect... makes a great weapon to lord over the other countries.
"nukes? HAHAHAHAHA!" WE'll simply fire rocks at your puny country until it's a part of the ocean, and THEN comeand mine the rocks we used to make you go away."
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It's far less difficult than you imagine.
The worst part would be mining for raw materials. You would need some heavy machinery. Luckily, you can send lighter machinery that grabs and processes materials for the heavier machines that, in turn, can grab more materials to be used to build more of them. You will have to send parts from Earth, but they would be comparatively small.
As for sending containers (obviously manufactured on the Moon) all you need is a big magnetic rail. Given no atmospheric resistance,
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One of the huge advantages of processing ore on the Moon is that you don't have to worry quite so much about oxidation of the minerals during the refining process. All you really need is a big mirror that collects energy from the Sun and if you really want to be efficient, some method of collecting the oxygen from the refining process (mainly to have the oxygen for other purposes, not to use it in the refining process). One of the larges problems with refining metals on the Earth is trying to get the meta
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Siphons don't work in vacuum, and they don't work if the distance between the two containers is greater than 10 meters (one atm of pressure at sea level). You can transfer liquid between two containers in a vacuum, but its a completely different
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Give things a kick, they come down on their own
Hmmm... i've always thought the moon would be much more useful if it was down here on Earth. How much of a kick do you think we would need to accomplish that?
(and where would we put it?)
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(and where would we put it?)
Pump the water out of the Pacific Ocean?
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We could park it in the oil leak, beats using golf balls and shredded car tyres!
now _that's_ thinking!
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Moon to the earth? It's called a GRAVITY WELL. Give things a kick, they come down on their own; all you need is enough casing to survive reentry
That better be a 1000km/s kick, if you really expect it to fall to earth. Otherwise it's gonna end up orbiting the Earth or the Moon.
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Transporting anything from the moon to the earth is so expensive that it likely isn't worth mining.
Building/launching from moon some space factories (or whatever needed) to mine the asteroids would be an investment that will pay for sure.
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I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing.
Similarly, there's no point in having babies, going to work, reading a book, sleeping in a house, eating dinner, watching movies, or putting up wallpaper.
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There have been cultures on the Earth where the amount of time required for an ordinary person to work in order to sustain basic living requirements was actually quite low.... on the order of an hour or two a day. There certainly were even for these cultures periods of time that everybody was expected to put in long hours during critical seasons and events that happened, but this tended to be the exception to the rule rather than the rule. What did these people do during the other hours of the day? Creat
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Space Elevator. Now.
Yea, it will require a large initial investment, but then moving stuff in and out of Earth's gravity well becomes really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that asteroid mining operations may become feasible.
I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already. Some lucky country on the equator could be in for some boom times!
Re:but then... (Score:4, Insightful)
Space Elevator. Now. .... I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already.
Dammit, I can't believe this keeps coming up. Because it DOES NOT EXIST! It's a science fiction fantasy. Will never work without massive leaps in technology that no one knows even how to approach solving. Might as well research magic at this point.
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Space elevator on Earth will likely never be possible without some huge unforeseen leap in materials science, this is true. However a space elevator on the moon to get manufactured materials into lunar orbit for a trip down hill may be.
A launch loop [wikipedia.org] would be more feasible, according to this. [launchloop.com]
Re:but then... (Score:4, Insightful)
Space Elevator. Now. .... I honestly don't know why there isn't a lot more effort in this direction already.
Dammit, I can't believe this keeps coming up. Because it DOES NOT EXIST! It's a science fiction fantasy. Will never work without massive leaps in technology that no one knows even how to approach solving. Might as well research magic at this point.
That's an unfair characterization. The technological hurdles are large but they are well-understood. There's an excellent 2002 report by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/521Edwards.pdf [spaceelevator.com] which discusses the technical problems in great detail. The primary issues preventing a space elevator are related to the tensile strength of the ribbon/line. Carbon nanotubes are in theory strong enough, but they need to be able to be manufactured at a much larger scale, with higher quality (especially in regards to average tube length) and need to be placed in a reliable matrix. The reason that it looks like there isn't much space elevator research is really because there's very little that would need to be researched that specifically about space elevators. The primary issue is carbon nanotube research and that's happening now at a quick pace because carbon nanotubes have lots of different applications. The technologies necessary for a space elevator are already being developed for other applications.
Re:but then... (Score:4, Informative)
Assuming we could go get an asteroid, a very, very large asteroid, and put it into GSO without either skipping it off the atmosphere or turning a city into a crater, we're left with the issue that we can't get a tiny, continuous cable into orbit with any current technology. The shuttle comes in 50% too small, and doesn't get to GSO, even Falcon 9 only has cargo volume of 14m^3 to GTO!
The next option is to somehow attach 1x10^9 30 cm sections of nanotube together, in a way that doesn't weaken them. That doesn't exist. We'd also have to be able to do this in space, since we can't realistically get a continuous cable up there.
So the only things stopping a space elevator are:
1) 1x10^9 carbon nanotube units short of reaching GSO
2) No way currently to move a large asteroid into GSO safely, nor many nations willing to let someone try for fear of an extinction event.
3) No way to get a continuous cable into GSO, despite the problems of #1
4) No known way to stick 1x10^9 chunks of carbon nanotube together effectively, preserving their high tensile strength. In space.
5) Current climber technology is shooting for 1km. That's only 42,163 km short of GSO.
6) Coincidently, the earth's circumference is about 40,000 km. Have we ever built ANYTHING on the scale of the earth's circumference? Have we ever tried to stress-test a cable of more than a km or two?
Sure, we could shoot for a continuous, 0.1 mm diameter cable, and that might fit on Falcon 9 and be possible to bring to GSO. But again, we're left with the problem with the asteroid, the climber, and stress-testing and QCing a cable that we can't build in a billionth of that length at a time, longer than the circumference of the earth. Or we somehow come up with a way to bond nanotubes together in a way that preserves their tensile strength, in space, with the ability to test and QC the work, and we're only left with the asteroid and climber issues....
Magic is unlikely to be better to research, but not by a lot...
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It's not called the dark side because it's dark. It's "dark" because that side never faces Earth. Thus, during a solar eclipse the "dark" side is completely illuminated by the sun.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
How much Wisconsin does the moon have?
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About a quart, if you measure on Tuesdays
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Good, let the desert southwest get their water from the moon!
The way NASA reckons it (the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon's interior), I bet the Southwest has a much higher "specific humidity" than the moon.
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That's fairly close to the plot of the original V mini-series... until you get to the twist(s) at least.
Re:Can we drink it? (Score:4, Funny)
[...] or at least give it to our plants, ehh?
There's no indication of whether it has electrolytes. That's what plants crave.
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More problematic would be collecting the stuff. "More water than the Great Lakes" sounds like a lot, and is, compared to "parched airless rock"; but per square kilometer it isn't very much at all. Unless the distribution is high
Re:Can we drink it? (Score:4, Informative)
More importantly: Can you go sailing on it? Swim in it? Fish salmon, trout, and invasive asian carp from it? Ride a scooter along hundreds and hundreds of miles of it? [toddverbeek.com]
If not, I'll stay here in Michigan, the Great Lakes State.
We're Bi-peninsular and Proud.
Yes! Michigan!
(This message has been a public service announcement, brought to you in cooperation with the Michigan tourism office and my summer travel plans.)
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same person. NASA was saving money.
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The border cuts four of the five lakes more or less in half [google.ca].
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Lake Michigan, the second largest of the lakes by volume (and third by surface area) belongs entirely to the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_lakes#Bathymetry [wikipedia.org]
Lake Superior, the largest of the lakes by any measure has a surface area almost 2/3 attributed to the United States, 53,700 km^2 of the 82,400 km^2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Superior [wikipedia.org]
I could not find splits for Huron, Ontario, or Erie. However, Ontario and Erie, from a map, appear to be
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But seriously, if you want anyone to get interested in the moon, you need to find out how much light sweet crude is up there.
Well since there has never been life on the moon, in the equivalent of our Mesozoic or Paleozoic timeframes, there would be none at all.
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There could be Uranium though... I wonder if people would object to a nuclear power station on the moon, sending energy to Earth via microwave... gets rid of the waste problem! (though the moon isn't geostationary, of course..)