Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity.
If we redefine our community to include tardigrades the outlook improves considerably.
Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, and there is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat: "non-native?" Guess who else did:
Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses
Honestly, which achievement would be considered more impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his boot?
Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia tardigrade article[1]:
Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses
Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the team we've gone from
"never come into contact with the regolith"
to
"if you happen to come into contact with the regolith, remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the Moon, and observed their reaction...
two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia
I'm not a Mars colonisation advocate, but sounds like exposure to that may be manageable:
"Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development." (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-life-...)
Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
That’s such a weirdly specific detail but also kinda fascinating. Imagine going to the Moon and the first thing you notice is “huh… smells like gunpowder.
There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans.
I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone.
What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder!
And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
the detail that kills me is moon dust has never contacted oxygen in billions of years, so every time an astronaut came back inside they were essentially doing a chemistry experiment for the first time. the whole moon is just waiting to react with air
Outer space smells like burnt flesh is what I've heard. Space is full of toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are created in novae and are everywhere in outer space in small amounts. They're the same chemicals that generate when organic compounds and fossil fuels are burnt.
Makes me wonder even more why some people really want to go and live there.
Oxygen if the third most abundant element in the universe.[1]
The Moon minerals contain plenty of it:
The finer regolith, the lunar soil of silicon dioxide glass.[2]
Minerals forming the lunar crust are made up of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, along with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.[3]
I figure you mean free oxygen or diatomic oxygen O₂, but that stuff is rare in the universe, as it’s quite reactive, and largely irrelevant for asteroid impact chemistry extreme heat and pressure, plenty of oxygen available in the rocks smashing together.
> And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
I work with industrial vacuum machinery and the big slow down in a vacuum system is coaxing out water vapor which sticks to chamber and plumbing walls like glue. My guess is dissolved oxygen in the water vapor or the water vapor itself reacting with dust particles.
> If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars
I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable.
Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.
This is on my reading list. I've read synopses of it, and I don't think it's going to change my mind a lot. I'm still long-term pro-space-exploration, but even before this book I'd come to the conclusion that this is a lot harder than naive nerds tend to think. I think it's worth doing and probably will be done eventually, but it's gonna take a while.
I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself.
In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates or anything else you don't want.
Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or the Moon I've read about call for spending most time underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in space itself could be much nicer.
The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external space environment might be like:
Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd think.
For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc.
Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.
Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some critical or massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places.
In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total sui...
Cue Cave Johnson: “The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill.”
> "I think one of the most aggravating, restricting facets of lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin, suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive, friction-like action to everything it gets on [...] the simple large-tolerance mechanical devices on the Rover began to show the effect of dust as the EVAs went on. By the middle or the end of the third EVA, simple things like bag locks and the lock which held the pallet on the Rover began not only to malfunction but to not function at all. They effectively froze. We tried to dust them and bang the dust off and clean them, and there was just no way. The effect of dust on mirrors, cameras, and checklists is phenomenal. You have to live with it but you're continually fighting the dust problem both outside and inside the spacecraft. Once you get inside the spacecraft, as much as you dust yourself, you start taking off the suits and you have dust on your hands and your face and you're walking in it. You can be as careful in cleaning up as you want to, but it just sort of inhabits every nook and cranny in the spacecraft and every pore in your skin [...]" Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 debrief[1]
An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts.
"In addition the Moon has no atmosphere and is constantly bombarded by radiation from the Sun that causes the soil to become electrostatically charged." - You can use a magnetic or electric field to push the soil away
To be fair, considering that there are minerals in the Moon that don't exist on Earth, it's normal that the human body experiments an allergic reaction to a set of substances that it hasn't ever been exposed to during thousands of years of evolution.
It wasn't just lunar dust, all(?) the crews also reported smelling burning in the tunnel (tunnel connecting CM and LM), might be something to do with the docking latches
52 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 71.1 ms ] thread> Fine like powder, but sharp like glass
Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars
Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, and there is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat: "non-native?" Guess who else did:
Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses
Honestly, which achievement would be considered more impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his boot?
Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia tardigrade article[1]:
Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses
Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the team we've gone from
"never come into contact with the regolith"
to
"if you happen to come into contact with the regolith, remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the Moon, and observed their reaction...
two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia
2: https://sciworthy.com/could-tardigrades-survive-on-mars/
"Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development." (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-life-...)
Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1
What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder!
And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
Makes me wonder even more why some people really want to go and live there.
The Moon minerals contain plenty of it:
The finer regolith, the lunar soil of silicon dioxide glass.[2]
Minerals forming the lunar crust are made up of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, along with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.[3]
I figure you mean free oxygen or diatomic oxygen O₂, but that stuff is rare in the universe, as it’s quite reactive, and largely irrelevant for asteroid impact chemistry extreme heat and pressure, plenty of oxygen available in the rocks smashing together.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
3. https://science.nasa.gov/moon/composition/
I work with industrial vacuum machinery and the big slow down in a vacuum system is coaxing out water vapor which sticks to chamber and plumbing walls like glue. My guess is dissolved oxygen in the water vapor or the water vapor itself reacting with dust particles.
It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/
I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable.
Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.
I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself.
In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates or anything else you don't want.
Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or the Moon I've read about call for spending most time underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in space itself could be much nicer.
The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external space environment might be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY
Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd think.
For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc.
Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.
Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some critical or massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places.
In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total sui...
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-success...
An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts.
An old tech memo and paper.[3][4]
[1] https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd... page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2] interactive microscope of regolith https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset... [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20... [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S
It seems to be under-reported that the Earth is pretty nice.