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Shadowtirs t1_je07zz1 wrote

So the beads were formed from the heat of the impact? They said they were found around craters.

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k-laz t1_je0k9r2 wrote

So..... are we doing a good thing by locking up clean water in half-drunk water bottles buried in landfills around the world?

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PuppetryOfThePenis t1_je0nb5f wrote

Replying to k-laz (#2,418,922)

That way when our species is dead and gone for a millenia and then aliens come to visit they'll see there was water on our planet!

What if our species originated from Mars, and we flew to Earth because we wrecked our environment. Then we had a massive war with each other and practically all but died out, then we started to slowly build back up and now we're looking at Mars like maybe it's something we could explore. Like it's calling back to us. Maybe that's why we can't find the exact link between us and primates? lol that would be a trip.

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dirtballmagnet t1_je0rp8r wrote

Replying to Shadowtirs (#2,416,786)

This is how I would tell it to myself:

After the impact, the vaporized surface material would begin to cool and condense, pretty much like raindrops form in clouds. And there would be a cloud of volatiles and other stuff that wasn't yet condensing.

We can imagine that just before the rock cooled off enough to start changing phase, the water was freely intermixed with it. Then as it crystallized it would push out the liquids and gases, but sometimes the lattice would form like a tent around that pocket of gas, and trap it. Some of the trapped stuff would be water.

It seems a no-brainer to set up a giant magnifying class and start sintering lunar regolith. Focus sunlight, melt the rock, open the lattice holes, cook off and capture the volatiles and water, now you have a little water, tons of oxygen, and a stupid amount of titanium-rich slag that you might be able to use as feedstock for a 3d printing system.

Now you don't have to monkey around with the poles and their finite-over-human timescale-water supply. Just sinter layer after layer of rock that you've already excavated for your construction.

... Is my relatively uninformed opinion.

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i-kno-nothing t1_je1dwjr wrote

  1. build a magnetic satellite network shield around the moon.
  2. strategically place massive nuclear bombs around the entire moon, evenly spaced.
  3. explode said nukes.
  4. wait 10 years for radiation to dissipate.
  5. terraforming complete.
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Asraia t1_je1dwr3 wrote

That video was more about China's energy independence.

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Funkyduck8 t1_je1g6ml wrote

Is it not worrisome that countries will be trying to mine and extract minerals from the moon? If something goes wrong and the moon cracks, or fractures, wouldn't that spell absolute disaster for Earth? I may be fearful but as humans are destroying Earth with mining, imagine what could happen on something smaller.

Edit: downvoted for not wanting the moon to become another polluted, capitalistic cash grab. Lol

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EightballTV t1_je1lcm6 wrote

Replying to k-laz (#2,421,389)

"Very real problem"

I mean, it's real, it's not a problem though, lmao.

"Oh no, this water doesn't go back into the water cycle"

As if we don't have a planet with 90% oceans and issues with global warming and rising sea levels, soon it will be 95% lol. Maybe we should be putting MORE in bottles, fuck me, what a non issue.

Infact, the more I read that article, the more I realise how much bullshit it actually is. They seem to think water in bottles is no longer in our atmosphere. No, it's still in our atmosphere. Plastic doesn't last forever. We aren't launching it into the sun ffs.

"While nearly 70% of the world is covered by water, only 2.5% of it is fresh. The rest is saline and ocean-based. Even then, just 1% of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields."

They do know how rain works, yeah? That the 2.5% fresh water is taken from the oceans, then dropped onto the mountains as rain, where the mountains filter it? Have they even heard of clouds before? I mean, I was taught that at like 8 years old or less.

And if you wanna talk about droughts, and the effect of droughts, then I can guarantee you the droughts were not caused by some water being in a bottle, lmao. Maybe they should take up a new cause that actually matters, like global warming.

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arshesney t1_je1ln5g wrote

Replying to PuppetryOfThePenis (#2,419,426)

Mars was too cold and atmosphere didn't really stuck. Venus was much better, but look at how that turned out and that's just for a bit of much needed AC.
Good thing that in the mentime that hellish third planet turned out pretty nice, they say third time the charm, no..?

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MonkeyTigerCrazy t1_je1majt wrote

Replying to Funkyduck8 (#2,424,438)

No, it’s not because even if we cut the moon in half nothing would really happen other than it just reshaping into another sphere, and there’s no incredibly valuable environment to destroy there so it doesn’t really matter

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CroiDubh t1_je1n109 wrote

Well with all that pulling and dragging of the tides it had to happen at some stage

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arshesney t1_je1nfsn wrote

Replying to Funkyduck8 (#2,424,438)

Crack or fracture? Have you seen how many craters there are on the Moon? Do you think anything man-made can get close to that scale?
No, you can throw the global nuclear arsenal to the Moon and it won't budge, and it'll still be there long after we are gone.

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Fit-Capital1526 t1_je1nhfm wrote

Replying to EightballTV (#2,425,396)

An awful lot of water is locked in the ground anyway. This has very little affect overall. It barely touches what is entering the short term water cycle from the melting of Greenland (which was declared doomed a few years ago)

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alematt t1_je1o534 wrote

Can't wait to crush me some beads on the moon for full hydration. I can see the commercials now

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cjameshuff t1_je1p9n6 wrote

Replying to deathputt4birdie (#2,424,673)

Helion doesn't need He-3, their reactors are supposed to produce their own by D-D fusion. And at any rate, the glassy beads of the regolith apparently contain up to about 2 parts per thousand of water. The He-3 content is more like 15 parts per billion.

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lolwutpear t1_je1xgkp wrote

Replying to k-laz (#2,421,389)

>22 million gallons annually

Or about 67 acre-feet. For comparison, California's reservoirs have a capacity of slightly over 40 million acre-feet.

Obviously we should try to conserve fresh water everywhere, but I think we've got bigger fish to fry.

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thaisin t1_je1y2h9 wrote

I can see the signage clearly in my mind "Break glass to drink"

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Volerra t1_je2048i wrote

If I could just hitch a ride to the moon, I'd make a killing on Etsy

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stewartm0205 t1_je21jmb wrote

There is also the possibility of water underground. We should drill and see.

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SpoilsOfTour t1_je23vse wrote

Replying to [deleted] (#2,424,526)

When I was a kid I had a physics teacher who tried to get us excited with this theory. His argument was that the moon is

  1. Perfectly spherical

  2. Locked with one side that always faces Earth

  3. Placed at such a distance that it appears exactly the same size as our sun in the sky.

I doubt that he truly believed it, I think he just wanted to make the subject more interesting for kids, but I've always been fascinated by astronomy, and the idea that things aren't what they seem is always cool.

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Joeva8me t1_je278gm wrote

Is this the shit that’s supposed to help me lose weight?

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greatstarguy t1_je28kfp wrote

Replying to maulinrouge (#2,426,712)

Imagine crushing a Snickers bar in your hand. Your body heat makes it softer, and when you squeeze it, the filling comes out.

That’s basically what they’re proposing. Heat and compress moon rocks to get the water and oxygen out of them, and you can use those for life support and the leftover slag for building things. If it’s all solar-powered, it’s a lot more convenient than other methods.

The sticking point here is how much we’ll be able to get out of these rocks, and how useful the leftover slag is.

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farmdve t1_je2axx4 wrote

Are you all subscribed to WSJ? I saw no one mentioning the cut off article and the big sign saying I need to pay.

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FaintDeftone t1_je2cf9t wrote

Those aren’t beads, that’s reptilian overlord food.

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Neonvaporeon t1_je2g4lv wrote

Replying to Orffen (#2,430,165)

Acre-feet is an agricultural term so that's probably why you haven't heard of it. Feet of water is generally used to describe how much water a plant needs, acre-feet are how much water a crop needs (almonds need 4 acre-feet of water annually in California.)

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_Jam_Solo_ t1_je2i8wc wrote

Replying to dirtballmagnet (#2,420,182)

What's weird about the moon, is there is no atmosphere, so, it's like having no water for things to float in. Things that might normally float here, like water vapour, would just fall to the ground on the moon, and only float over whatever else happens to be down there from the explosion.

I'm not sure how useful your system would be though. I feel like the amount of time and energy you'd need to spend melting the regolith and collecting the gasses and whatnot, might be excessive in comparison to the amount of water you'd get. Also, I'd imagine you'd get different results from different impacts. Some impacts might be quite water rich, and others no water at all. But even the water rich ones, might not be rich enough for this to be a viable method of collecting enough water for anything.

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Neonvaporeon t1_je2ivgw wrote

Replying to Orffen (#2,430,882)

Plants generally capture water through their roots which typically spread evenly in all directions, water travels down through the soil until it hits a ledge then travels along its path (called percolation.) That means a rough measure of the amount of water is plenty to guage requirements for shallow rooted plants, like most food crops. An acre is a measure of area and a foot is a measure of length, combined those give the 3 dimensions to make volume. Water is sold by volume, and for agricultural purposes that is the measure it is sold by to farms (typically.)

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mooimafish33 t1_je2oev3 wrote

Replying to PatFluke (#2,431,987)

They spin Ceres actually, but it's pretty much exactly your idea. Millions of people live in tunnels they have dug all throughout it, and it was spun up enough for the people to experience like .7G

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PatFluke t1_je2qlm4 wrote

Replying to i-kno-nothing (#2,432,344)

Smash a big rock into it? Massive engines pointing 45 degrees up from the surface with fusion reactors powering them throwing particles out of orbit circling the equator? Magic? I dunno I was being dumb when I wrote my comment lol. Sounds like a cool ideaz

Edit: I’m not cool enough for ideaz.

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ThatLeetGuy t1_je3467a wrote

Replying to NotYetSoonEnough (#2,420,119)

I actually think about this every time I throw away a water bottle, because I do use them often. I always dump liquid contents from bottles before I throw them out. I don't do a lot for environment conservation, but not littering and not throwing water into landfills are the two mounds I'll die on.

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Eye-tactics t1_je357jb wrote

Replying to [deleted] (#2,424,526)

The moon is a fragment of an ancient planet named Theia. It collided with earth and the molten remnants formed into a sphere by gravity. I'm pretty sure there isn't anything weird about the moon being circular like that. There are literally remnants of the planet sticking out of our crust and core of the planet recently mapped.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/bits-of-theia-might-be-in-earths-mantle/ The animation in this article show what I'm talking about.

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thezenfisherman t1_je41bcn wrote

Replying to dirtballmagnet (#2,420,182)

According to NASA "Between 1969 and 1972 six Apollo missions brought back 382 kilograms (842 pounds) of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust from the lunar surface."

Why didn't we know this since these landings?

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johnsilverfox t1_je5e0nq wrote

I read this the other day this is sooo cool, I think the Chinese discovered this finding?

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ErikGoesBoomski t1_je76vyl wrote

Replying to afraid_of_zombies (#2,461,537)

Can industrial waste processing bring back the flora and fauna that have been removed by humans? How about removing the mercury from our air and waterways? Or all the radioactive particles we have been pumping into the world for the past few decades? I guess it isn't so much about squandering the natural resources of the planet, more along the lines of rapidly making it into an inhospitable wasteland.

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NoYouAreABot t1_je7brol wrote

Someone call Douglas Voght of the Diehold Institute. Sounds like a micronova to me.

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afraid_of_zombies t1_je7h86n wrote

Replying to ErikGoesBoomski (#2,463,413)

I cant see the goalposts you have moved them so far.

Continue to scream on the internet, tomorrow I will go to work and make the world that much cleaner.

Oh, and air scrubbers as well as ground water remediation. To answer your flippant question.

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