We could never send a Morse signal to the Moon or Mars - the aerial mast necessary for that would be reaching out of the atmosphere and you would need to burn amount of coal equivalent Mt Everest to power it!
(Paraphrasing a bit but I do remember reading such an article, where they explained how it was nonsense to send interplanetary messages with their long wave omnidirectional antennas and inefficient early radios, including the immense amounts of coal that would have to be burned to run the steam machines powering the dynamos. In the end we had a solar powered lander sending images back from Mars in 1997, using a couple wats.)
The lack of water is related to the lack of hydrogen; you'd need to find a hydrogen source to synthesize water.
Lots of oxygen in moon rocks, though, so in addition to directly importing icy asteroids, importing hydrocarbon-rich asteroids would also help (with the added bonus of carbon also being something scarce on the Moon).
One point worth noting, as far as I can tell all the current research focuses on the surface. We simply don't know if there is water deeper than a few centimeters or feet under the surface.
Multiple missions that should be landing in the near future are looking just into that, in the south polar regions (Shackelton crater & co). So we should hopefully have some new data on this quite soon. :)
It took 200 years of industrial revolution to irremediably fuck up our paradise, sadly it would take much longer to terraform a dead rock to even 1% of what we had on earth
This is the classic fallacy of imagining a future problem with current technology.
By the time we have "one-million-person cities" on the moon, synthesizing water or hauling it from icy asteroids will not be a problem.
We could never send a Morse signal to the Moon or Mars - the aerial mast necessary for that would be reaching out of the atmosphere and you would need to burn amount of coal equivalent Mt Everest to power it!
(Paraphrasing a bit but I do remember reading such an article, where they explained how it was nonsense to send interplanetary messages with their long wave omnidirectional antennas and inefficient early radios, including the immense amounts of coal that would have to be burned to run the steam machines powering the dynamos. In the end we had a solar powered lander sending images back from Mars in 1997, using a couple wats.)
The lack of water is related to the lack of hydrogen; you'd need to find a hydrogen source to synthesize water.
Lots of oxygen in moon rocks, though, so in addition to directly importing icy asteroids, importing hydrocarbon-rich asteroids would also help (with the added bonus of carbon also being something scarce on the Moon).
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One point worth noting, as far as I can tell all the current research focuses on the surface. We simply don't know if there is water deeper than a few centimeters or feet under the surface.
Multiple missions that should be landing in the near future are looking just into that, in the south polar regions (Shackelton crater & co). So we should hopefully have some new data on this quite soon. :)
Moon? I’m starting to wonder if there’s enough water for cities on earth.
Huh? There's plenty of water, endless water. It's cheap-because-drinkable water that isn't aplenty.
On the Moon, this is what may be lacking.
On Earth, we can close loop recycle from drains. We can take sea water and desalinate. We can use osmosis and clean dirty ground water.
Is any of that cheap? Nope. But it's also not a blocker on having water to drink and bath with.
We will never run out of water, only "easy clean water".
It took 200 years of industrial revolution to irremediably fuck up our paradise, sadly it would take much longer to terraform a dead rock to even 1% of what we had on earth
Europe was deforested and you didn't drink from water downstream of cities long before the industrial revolution.
Not that it matters to your point about the moon.