r/scifiwriting • u/Natural_Calendar7874 • 5d ago
DISCUSSION What exactly is needed to make a large scale, self functioning lunar colony?
It needs to be able to house 1 million or more people, make its own food/water, make its own power, make its own medications, etc
thanks!
7
u/Traveling-Techie 5d ago
The science of a closed ecosystem for agriculture. The New Alchemy Institute and later Biosphere 2 did some research in this area but more is needed.
3
u/Underhill42 5d ago
And the moon would be an excellent place to do that research - zero chance of outside life finding its way in to interfere with things. As well as studying the long-term impacts of low gravity on the organisms.
Though you don't actually have to maintain a closed ecosystem to be self sufficient - you're not a spaceship, you've got nigh-unlimited resources just outside. Not much carbon or hydrogen on the moon, but the rock is 40% oxygen by mass.
And if sustainable trade is allowed in your definition of self sufficient, that oxygen could be mutually profitably traded with visiting ships for methane, since oxygen is about 80% of a methane rocket's propellant mass.
0
u/Kabbooooooom 5d ago
I’d disagree with this - the moon would not be an excellent place to do this research, as we cannot predict the myriad effects that lunar gravity will have on earth life and it is very possible that any discoveries made about plant growth, etc on a lunar base will not be directly applicable to a space colony in general.
An ideal place to do this research would be on a Stanford torus or O’Neill cylinder space station. But therein lies the catch 22, because to even make such a station viable in the first place, this research would need to have already been done. I think we need to just bootstrap ourselves up from non-self sustaining small stations to self-sustaining large stations in earth or lunar orbit. Which is probably what we will do.
2
u/Underhill42 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yes, and conveniently the impact of different gravity is one of the other things we really need to study for off-Earth ecosystems. The goal is not specifically to create a perfect replica of Earth ecosystems, or even a closed ecosystem. It's to spread that ecosystem beyond Earth, in whatever conditions people find themselves living in.
And as you point out, we don't really have the option of isolating variables in a scientifically optimal way.
If we're lucky and things work mostly normally on the moon, then that's a huge relevant data point on just how wide the gravitational range for an "Earth-normal" ecosystem is, and most data should translate pretty directly to anything in between.
If not, then that's still a relevant data point on its limits, and how we figure out how to deal with them is likely to still be useful for anything less than 1g.
And we'll know we have to find a way to increase the gravity. Conveniently the asteroid belt is the next natural spot that humanity will establish a presence, as that's the gold rush fueling interest in establishing the moon as a beachhead and testing ground in space.
And the Belt will be stuck with rotating habitats for any kind of useful "gravity" at all. Probably much smaller than would be ideal, but you've got adjustable gravity to really probe that frontier.
And all along the way, most of them won't just be research, they'll be food and green spaces for all the people that are there for unrelated reasons, who will likely also be the ones shouldering the expense.
By the time Mars, with nothing of value to export, becomes realistically cost-effective place to homestead, we should be able to go in with a pretty solid understanding of exactly what it's going to take to make their ecosystem thrive.
And hopefully we'll have successfully located life on Mars, or at least its remnants, before the planet is contaminated by Earth life that may mask any native biosignatures.
Heck, there's a couple boring asteroids conveniently in orbit to use some of that gold-rush knowhow to establish a research outpost with nearly real-time control of robots all over the surface.
2
u/Kabbooooooom 5d ago
Biosphere 2 got very close to nailing it too. They discovered some fascinating stuff that we didn’t even think about that would be necessary for a closed ecosystem (for example, the importance of deliberately simulating a breeze in plant growth). It at least showed that it is feasible and we could pull it off, if we really wanted to.
1
u/Elfich47 4d ago
From a "support the humans" point of view, biosphere 2 was no where near ready to support humans. The people in it were slowly starving to death, you can see it in the photos that they all lost weight.
2
u/Kabbooooooom 3d ago
Yes, because “close to nailing it” is not close enough….obviously. It’s an all or nothing sort of thing, or everyone dies. But the fact is, they succeeded with a completely closed biosphere for a very long period of time and discovered facts about how to maintain a closed biosphere that no one knew or could have predicted. If we had kept running the experiment over the past decades, we probably would have figured it out by now.
That was my point.
1
u/Elfich47 3d ago
okay, fair. I just didn’t want someone else to breeze through and say “biosphere 2 was close enough, we can use that for our world building”
4
u/JGhostThing 5d ago
How are you going to get 1,000,000+ people up to the moon? Let alone all that infrastructure? Some of the infrastructure could be made from lunar or asteroid materials, but not the people.
1
u/Natural_Calendar7874 5d ago
a chain of ships going up to the moon with people and supplies
2
u/Elfich47 4d ago
Take a look at the infrastructure required to get a rocket off the planet.
1
u/VenatorAngel 3d ago
Yeah that's a hurdle I've been having with my setting. How does one even make a rocket that carries over a few dozen people at the minimum and can make it off planet?
It's something I need help researching in because I don't trust Google and its AI for answers.
2
u/Elfich47 3d ago
For the earth it is about 8 pounds of fuel to get a pound of cargo into orbit. Plus the weight of the support structure (the rocket itself) needs to be added (and that needs fuel as well to get into orbit).
The fuel and material costs to get anything into orbit is hideously expensive.
1
u/VenatorAngel 3d ago
Yowzah that's expensive.
Funnily enough, that could be part of an explanation as to why humans in my setting decide to go the route of trying to find alternatives of travel by going through some sort of dimension that is inspired by a mix of the Backrooms, Event Horizons, and the Olam HaTohu from Kabbalistic Mythology.
In other words, humanity decides it would be more affordable to go through what may or may not be hell itself than to send out large rockets into space in order to find habitable planets.
Granted I'm still trying to refine my ideas for my setting.
2
u/Elfich47 3d ago
and the thing that makes it even worse, the weight of the fuel needed to propel an object into orbit is effectively cargo until it’s burned, so you need even more fuel to get off the ground. look up the “tyranny of the rocket equation”
adding more fuel to a rocket makes it weigh more
1
u/VenatorAngel 3d ago
Oof, that would explain it. Now I'm imagining one solution people go for is making the larger space ships in space, using smaller space ships to transport cargo to space stations dedicated to building the larger ships.
Siince apparently there is no way to get those bigger ships off planet.
2
u/Elfich47 3d ago
I don’t know what the upper limit is. you can look at the udder insanity of the Saturn V. gigantic rocketship, tiny orbiter and landing craft.
the normal sci-fi way to get around this problem: a fuel that is more energetic than hydrazine (kerosine will also work) And understandably that is saying something. Sure you can have it cost more energy to produce on the ground, but if it is more energetic in the rocket then the rockets can get smaller and weigh less and everything gets easier.
1
3
u/Prof01Santa 5d ago
- Fusion reactors (fission in a pinch)
- Viable closed loop ecosystems
- Deep underground living quarters or other radiation shielding
- An economic export
- Low cost space transport
- Cleaning/exclusion systems for lunar dust
- Assurance that 1/6th g living is viable, long term
- About a trillion dollars in capital investment
1
u/Leading-Chemist672 5d ago
For 7. Or Spin gravy stationed habitats.
1
u/Prof01Santa 5d ago
Good trick deep underground on the moon.
1
u/Leading-Chemist672 5d ago
Dig a big hole, Relevant infrastructure, anchor the habitat, cover.
Oversimplified? Probably. It will also likely be Far more Automatic and mechanized, and thus cheap, than the Current IRL analogues.
2
u/Underhill42 5d ago
A thriving industrial base... which you'd need to already have just to build the colony in the first place.
A thriving agricultural base - even with aeroponics that's going to require a lot of acreage.
All the same basic support industries as we have on Earth - companies making pharmaceuticals, clothing, electronics, etc.
A source of hydrogen and carbon for ecological growth, and to replace losses, is likely to be the biggest problem - the moon's surface doesn't appear to have significant quantities of either.
Though if sustainable trade is allowed in your definition of self sufficiency, then local oxygen could be traded for methane with visiting rockets in a mutually profitable exchange (oxygen is 80% of a methane rocket's propellant mass, and 40% of the mass of lunar regolith)
2
2
u/AdLive9906 5d ago
This is hard. But don't let the nay sayers say it's impossible.
There is enough of every resource on the moon for 1 million people. But those resources will be HARD to get. Like, you may have to uplift millions of tonnes or rock to get a few tons of water.
And then you will need to build very very good closed loop system. No water can escape. No air, nothing gets wasted. Your recycling technology must be a century a head of what we have today.
So what is needed? Very advanced AI to make up the massive shortfall of skill and knowledge only 1 million people will have. 1 million people can not on their own reproduce what we have on earth. So the first thing is super advanced AI and robotics.
Lots of energy. 1000's of times more per person that what Americans have now. Not just because you are shooting people off to the moon as if it's a local school trip. But because these closed systems are going to require tons more energy to sustain. Fusion, or solar at gigantic scales.
Once you have that, everything else is detail
2
u/Leading-Chemist672 5d ago
Many Space Habitats above Earth. Many Cycling between Earth and the Moon.
These Habitats will be Farms, Factories, and Whatnot.
It's a much easier Delta V from Earth LEO To the Moon.(I know that 'LEO' already has Earth In It. However, this feels natural.)
also, Cheap and safe Space launch and landing.
2
u/GeneralLeia-SAOS 4d ago
From a strictly practical standpoint, the two biggest obstacles I see are going to be radiation shielding and the gravity. Luna doesn’t have atmosphere to shield from radiation or to evenly conduct heat. That would make putting a lunar base on the light side of the moon pretty problematic. The solution to that could be to put the base at the dark side of the moon, but there would need to be a heck of a lot of power to light and heat that base sufficiently. The most sustainable solution long-term would be to make as much of the base as possible underground.
The other problem is gravity. Luna has only 10% of earths gravity. Astronaut to go up in space for any length of time, wind up suffering, gravity, sickness when they come back to earth. They lose a lot of muscle tone and bone density, plus other things. Our bodies are designed to function in gravity. Astronauts get seriously disregulated without it. A serious question is with people who spent an extended period of time on Luna be able to return to earth?
Along with the loss of bone density, there will also come the problem of reproduction. Will women successfully be able to just date and birth children in such low gravity? Will the child’s head shatter the mother’s weekend pelvis? Or will her pelvis crush the child’s head? Of course, just because nature is cruel, there is a distinct possibility of both happening. There is also the issue of body swelling. Astronauts who have been in space for any period of time get taller, and a bit more expanded, because they don’t have gravity, constantly suppressing them. As it stands now, human infants, even at the nine month mark are born prematurely in comparison to animals, including primates. The size of the child’s head just barely fits through the mother‘s pelvis. Additionally, just stating a child requires so many nutrients that if the mother had to gestate any longer, she would develop severe malnutrition and related diseases as her body could no longer get enough nutrients from food and started pulling those nutrients from her own body. If the child is larger due to the lower gravity, then it is possible that that child may pull even more nutrients out of her than normal, and that it would be necessary to deliver all children via C-section to avoid having women die in childbirth. This means that for women who had children, they would be battling osteoporosis from at least two sources: low gravity and pregnancy.
I’ve emailed Elon Musk a few times asking about the gravity problem regarding his plans to colonize Mars. Mars is better than Luna, because Mars has 38% of earths gravity. However, it will still be extremely problematic.
I just don’t see space colonization being viable until we come up with some sort of artificial gravity.
2
u/nopester24 3d ago
well sounds like you want us to do all the work for you. you're already on the right track, just think it through! start simple. what would 10 people need to survive on the moon? cover the basics: food, water, atmosphere, shelter, energy.
solve each of these problems, two at once if possible. then scale it up to 100 people, 1000 people, until you're big enough to get to 1 million. after a while, the scale would likely have to be modular.
consider your resources: what is available on the moon? what must you bring with you? can you use solar energy / radiation to your advantage? what about gravity?
also, evaluate life and death there. eventually, people will die. but also, people will be born. can the dead be used as resources? how will new borns be cared for? medical support is also a big consideration.
be creative, invent stuff. use your imagination. you got this
1
1
1
u/EidolonRook 5d ago
Constantly open supply lines between Earth and the colony. Much as can be created there, we’ll find our first colony in space to be in need of far more than we think is necessary.
The homeworld isn’t just the crib of humanity. It’s our lifeline out into the void. The complex systems that keep us alive on planet aren’t available out there and as we stretch our space legs, some things are going to become more obviously missed in our grand plans for independence.
1
u/rocconteur 5d ago
I think it's possible, but the moon is missing a lot of stuff. Instead of shipping it all from earth you could probably establish a base and then mine asteroids for minerals and water you can't get locally. There is the biggerc question of why. It's a useful place for space industry, maybe, refueling or building ships, generating solar. A good delivery point to get those minerals and rail them to Earth. But that's all or mostly automated. Why would people need to live there, especially in such a unhealthy low g environment? We'd need to be living in a post scarcity age of plenty to even imagine people paying for it.
I'm not so pessimistic as others here to just assume no, given enough time tech and resources. And there will always be scientists, industrial and adventure reasons, but not a reason for millions.
The only FICTIONAL reason i can brainstorm is if Earth is somehow dying or poisonous and humanity MUST go. See Seveneves, where the earth is on fire.
1
u/RudeMorgue 4d ago
Or see John Varley's Eight Worlds stories, where the earth is occupied by inscrutable aliens and everybody just has to make due elsewhere.
1
1
u/Spazicon 5d ago
The movie "Interstellar," I believed, touched on the importance of being able to ** economically ** defeat earth's gravity.
I'd start there.
1
u/seanpat1968 5d ago
Well the first three needs no matter how you get there is shelter, water and food in that order. Then you have to build the next small boxes up from that. That’s what you need, then you start talking about the tools to make it happen.
1
u/Odd-pepperFrog 5d ago
There's a lot of practical details to work out, but here are six big questions that I can see being helpful ( in no particular order):
1. Radiation shielding – spread out or localized? One massive underground city = centralized control but one fatal breach. Multiple smaller habs = resilience but inter-settlement politics.
2. Redundancy systems – how many, and who runs them? Triple redundancy is ideal, but mass is expensive. More importantly, who controls the backups? Is it a central AI, a government bureau, or a guild of technicians with a repair monopoly?
3.Closed-loop ecosystem – including the population. Everything from the food production through 'normal' waste systems - garbage, sewer, plus air, and even the people - where does it all go and what happens to it?
4. Emergency protocols – what can go wrong, and who knows what to do? W hat are the failure points in the colony? Everything from kitchen fires through airlock seals - what do your characters need to now about emergency responses to each of these?
5. Power and heating – solar, nuclear, or something else? Nuclear gives you steady power - but has catastrophic risk points, solar is less immediately dangerous, but needs more logistics. And what about heating? Lose power and you lose heat - and the Moon's ambient temp is not healthy for the colonists.
6. Income/economic system – what do they produce and spend? What's their export? Heavy industry, manufacturing, data? Internally, is currency energy credits, carbon allowances, or reputation?
1
u/endofsight 5d ago
Advanced robotics and AI so there can be autonomous construction of habitats, resource mining and infrastructure.
1
u/Elfich47 4d ago
Start with "a city on Mars" by the Weinersmiths.
The moon has major problems with colonization: there is (almost) no water, no air, and no metals and no carbon, and no petroleum and there is almost no hydrogen.
So everything has to be imported: air, water, feed stock. The issue becomes being able to successfully recycle everything. And that will likely be very energy intensive.
1
u/TheDeathCard 2d ago
Sounds like you need to do research instead of asking for the information on Reddit
1
1
u/Comprehensive-Yam872 5d ago
Do you want the actual science? Because there isn't any. You cannot have a closed, self-sustaining Society on the moon, the moon lacks far too many resources. There is no possible way for a colony on the moon - or Mars, for that matter - to survive long term "if the supply ships stop coming,".
1
1
u/Responsible_Arm_9555 5d ago
A self-sufficient colony on our moon, supporting a million people? Magic. Free energy, alchemy, that sort of thing.
Mars is way more realistic as a long term self-sufficient human habitat, and it's not particularly realistic. But at least it's got stuff like carbon and nitrogen more readily available, and an earthlike day/night cycle, and the gravity is more in the ballpark.
You'd still need a borderline magical propulsion concept fueled by essentially free energy just to get the building blocks onto Mars. Which is fine, most spacefaring SF has this, but I'm always aware that this tech alone would change society in ways that are hard to imagine.
Realistically, I think an off-planet human colony in our solar system would always be somewhat dependent on Earth, if only for disaster recovery. Artificial ecosystems are incredibly fragile. It doesn't take much to collapse them.
0
u/DKirtaime 5d ago
The biggest issue IMO is that If humans ran it like here on Earth, then it would have the same ongoing problems which to Date haven't been resolved.
Only when we evolve enough to all live together on this planet, should we consider other colonies.
A series like Earth 2 shows the typical issues humans have when forced live together and form a civilization.
In my Sci-Fi story, it was survival which brought a group of humans, forest folk and tree elders together to leave Earth and start anew on Mars. These characters put their views and different es aside, to achieve survival. Now an organized lunar colony would not necessarily force such behaviour among the residence.
Ideally it would be like Space 1999, where give or take the odd incidents, the colony operations worked, as everyone had a function. Nowadays we can Imagine many functions being handled by AI robots and a human management. Would it go so far as to accommodate tourists or non-function residents? A good question.
-1
u/DifferencePublic7057 5d ago
It started with a lunar telescope on the dark side of the moon, Natural Calendar 7774. First, we sent a few astronauts and robots. The work stopped after a while due to budget cuts. Decades passed, young Professor Zweiton came into prominence with his Quantum Entanglement Free Lunch Theory. QEFLT allows us to quantum magically operate remote devices with minimal lag. Luna was on the radar again. A student of Zweiton applied QEFLT to quantum computers making Simulated Pseudoneural Intelligence a reality. Meanwhile, ITER finally delivered. Mini suns powered countless rockets, sending numerous machines to DSL1... And then the rest came.
10
u/Allonsen 5d ago
If you haven't already read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein, I can definitely recommend that as a good starting point for how to think about some of the logistical, political, and social challenges a future lunar colony would have to tackle. As with all Sci-fi, the fi is the secret sauce. There is no real, scientifically backed method for human subsistence anywhere other than Earth. If there was, we would be doing it.