[ExI] The Moon's Cold Embrace

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Tue Aug 11 22:52:56 UTC 2020


 

 

> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] The Moon's Cold Embrace

 

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 1:57 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

Farming is a particularly difficult problem on the moon.  It takes
around 25 kW of light on a farming area to support a person.  Where
does it come from?  You also have to get rid of 25 kW per person.  How
is that done?
…

 

>…To me, this is a secondary reason to plant a colony near the north or south pole, after the availability of water ice surviving in permanently shadowed craters: you can build a ring of solar panels, such that some of them will always be in sunlight.

 

>…As to getting rid of heat, could you dig heat sinks into the Moon and radiate heat into the rock?  Not as efficiently as into open air on Earth, but could it work? 

 

 

 

 

Not so much radiate heat into rock, but conduct it.

 

My intuition is to be skeptical of the idea because it is such a very limited resource: the regolith starts to warm up the minute you start dumping heat into it, and it is all downhill from there.  The rock starts out hot with the drilling process.  

 

Radiating into cold space feels more like the right answer on the moon.  We would need to shadow the radiator with something, but it gets really really cold in the shadows there, and all that unobstructed view of cold space everywhere, that seems like the right answer for waste heat.

 

spike  

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