Humanity is ready to build a lunar base or in pursuit of light and space

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

On the obelisk over the grave of our great compatriot K. E. Tsiolkovsky cites his textbook words: "Humanity will not remain forever on Earth, but, in pursuit of light and space, at first it timidly penetrates beyond the atmosphere, and then conquers the entire solar space."

Throughout his life, Tsiolkovsky dreamed of the cosmic future of mankind and with an inquisitive look of a scientist peered into its fantastic horizons. He was not alone. The beginning of the twentieth century for many was the discovery of the Universe, albeit visible through the prism of scientific delusions of that time and the fantasy of writers. The Italian Schiaparelli opened the "channels" on Mars - and mankind became convinced that there is a civilization on Mars. Burroughs and A. Tolstoy inhabited this imaginary Mars with people-like inhabitants, and after them hundreds of science fiction writers followed their example.

Earthlings are simply accustomed to the idea that there is life on Mars, and that this life is intelligent. Therefore, Tsiolkovsky's call to fly into space was met if not immediately with enthusiasm, but, in any case, with approval. Only 50 years have passed since Tsiolkovsky's first speeches, and in the country to which he dedicated and transmitted all his works, the First Satellite was launched and the First Cosmonaut flew into space.

It would seem that everything will go further according to the plans of the great dreamer. Tsiolkovsky's ideas turned out to be so bright that the most famous of his followers - Sergei Pavlovich Korolev - built all his plans for the development of cosmonautics so that in the twentieth century a human foot would set foot on Mars. Life has made its own corrections. Now we are not very sure that a manned expedition to Mars will take place at least until the end of the 21st century.

Probably, this is not only a matter of technical difficulties and fatal circumstances. Any difficulties can be overcome with the wisdom and inquisitiveness of the human mind, if a worthy task is set before it. But there is no such task! There is an inherited desire to fly to Mars, but there is no clear understanding - why? If you look deeper, this is a question facing all of our manned astronautics.

Tsiolkovsky saw in space untapped open spaces for mankind, which is becoming cramped on their home planet. These expanses must, of course, be mastered, but first you need to deeply study their properties. Half a century of experience in space exploration shows that very, very much can be explored by automatic devices without risking the highest value of the universe - human lives. Half a century ago, this idea was still a topic of controversy and discussion, but now, when the power of computers and the capabilities of robots are approaching human limits, these doubts are no longer a place. Over the past forty years, robotic vehicles have successfully explored the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, planetary satellites, asteroids and comets, and the American Voyagers and Pioneers have already reached the boundaries of the solar system. Although the plans of space agencies sometimes include reports on the preparation of manned missions into deep space, so far not a single scientific problem has been voiced in them, for the solution of which the work of cosmonauts is absolutely necessary. So the study of the solar system can be continued automatically for a long time.

Let's get back, after all, to the problem of space exploration. When will our knowledge of the properties of cosmic spaces allow us to begin to inhabit them, and when will we be able to answer the question for ourselves - why?

Let's leave for the time being the question of the fact that there is a lot of energy in space, which mankind needs, and a lot of mineral resources, which in space, perhaps, will be obtained cheaper than on Earth. Both are still on our planet, and they are not the main value of space. The main thing in space is what it is extremely difficult for us to provide on Earth - the stability of living conditions, and, ultimately, the stability of the development of human civilization.

Life on Earth is constantly exposed to the risks of natural disasters. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and other troubles not only cause direct damage to our economy and the well-being of the population, but require energy and costs to restore what was lost. In space, we hope to get rid of these familiar threats. If we find such other lands where natural disasters leave us, then this will be the “promised land” that will become a worthy new home for humanity. The logic of the development of earthly civilization inevitably leads to the idea that in the future, and perhaps not so distant, a person will be forced to look outside planet Earth for a habitat that could accommodate most of the population and ensure the continuation of his life in stable and comfortable conditions.

This is what K. E. Tsiolkovsky, when he said that humanity will not remain forever in the cradle. His inquisitive thought drew us attractive pictures of life in "ethereal settlements", that is, in large space stations with an artificial climate. The first steps in this direction have already been taken: on permanently inhabited space stations, we have learned to maintain almost familiar living conditions. True, weightlessness remains an unpleasant factor in these space stations, an unusual and destructive condition for terrestrial organisms.

Tsiolkovsky guessed that weightlessness might be undesirable, and suggested creating artificial gravity in ethereal settlements by axial rotation of the stations. In many projects of "space cities" this idea was taken up. If you look at the illustrations for the space settlements theme on the Internet, you will see a variety of tori and spoked wheels, glazed on all sides like earthly greenhouses.

One can understand Tsiolkovsky, at the time of which cosmic radiation was simply unknown, who proposed creating space greenhouses open to sunlight. On Earth, we are protected from radiation by the powerful magnetic field of our home planet and a fairly dense atmosphere. The magnetic field is virtually impenetrable for charged particles ejected by the sun - it throws them away from the Earth, allowing only a small amount to reach the atmosphere near the magnetic poles and create colorful auroras.

Today's inhabited space stations are located in orbits located inside radiation belts (in fact, magnetic traps), and this allows astronauts to stay at the station for years without receiving dangerous doses of radiation.

Where the earth's magnetic field no longer protects against radiation, the radiation protection should be much more serious. The main obstacle to radiation is any substance in which it is absorbed. If we assume that the absorption of cosmic radiation in the earth's atmosphere reduces its level to safe values, then in open space it is necessary to enclose inhabited premises with a layer of matter of the same mass, that is, every square centimeter of the area of the premises should be covered with a kilogram of matter. If we take the density of the covering substance equal to 2.5 g / cm3 (rocks), then the geometric thickness of the protection should be at least 4 meters. Glass is also a silicate substance, so to protect greenhouses in outer space, you need 4-meter thick glass!

Unfortunately, space radiation is not the only reason to abandon tempting projects. Indoors, it will be necessary to create an artificial atmosphere with the usual air density, that is, with a pressure of 1 kg / cm2. When the spaces are small, the structural strength of the spacecraft can withstand this pressure. But huge settlements with a diameter of tens of meters inhabited premises, capable of withstanding such pressure, will be technically difficult, if not impossible, to build. The creation of artificial gravity by rotation will also significantly increase the load on the station structure.

In addition, the movement of any body inside the rotating "donut" will be accompanied by the action of the Coriolis force, creating great inconvenience (remember the childhood sensations on the yard carousel)! And finally, large rooms will be very vulnerable to meteorite strikes: it is enough to break one glass in a large greenhouse for all the air to escape from it, and the organisms in it would die.

In a word, "ethereal settlements", upon close examination, turn out to be impossible dreams.

Maybe it was not in vain that the hopes of mankind were associated with Mars? It is a fairly large planet with quite suitable gravity, Mars has an atmosphere, and even seasonal changes in weather. Alas! This is just an outward resemblance. The average temperature on the surface of Mars is kept at -50 ° C, in winter it is so cold there that even carbon dioxide freezes, and in summer there is not enough heat to melt water ice.

The density of the Martian atmosphere is the same as that of the earth at an altitude of 30 km, where even airplanes cannot fly. It is clear, of course, that Mars is in no way protected from cosmic radiation. To top it off, Mars has very weak soils: it is either sand, which even winds of thin Martian air blow up in extensive storms, or the same sand that is frozen with ice into a solid-looking rock. Only on such a rock nothing can be built, and underground premises will not be an exit without their reliable strengthening. If the rooms are warm (and people are not going to live in ice palaces!), The permafrost will melt and the tunnels will collapse.

Many "projects" of the Martian building envisage the placement of ready-made residential modules on the surface of Mars. These are very naive ideas. To protect against cosmic radiation, each room must be covered with a four-meter layer of protective ceilings. Simply put, cover all buildings with a thick layer of Martian soil, and then it will be possible to live in them. But what is Mars worth living for? After all, Mars does not have that desired stability of conditions, which we already lack on Earth!

Mars still worries people, although no one hopes to find beautiful Aelith on it, or at least fellow men. On Mars, we are primarily looking for traces of extraterrestrial life in order to understand how and in what forms life arises in the Universe. But this is an exploratory task, and for its solution it is not at all necessary to live on Mars. And for the construction of space settlements, Mars is not at all a suitable place.

Maybe you should pay attention to the numerous asteroids? Apparently, the conditions for them are very stable. After the Great Meteorite Bombardment, which three and a half billion years ago turned asteroid surfaces into fields of large and small craters from meteorite impacts, nothing has happened to asteroids. In the bowels of asteroids, habitable tunnels can be built, and each asteroid can be turned into a space city. There are not many asteroids large enough for this in our solar system - about a thousand. So they will not solve the problem of creating vast habitable areas outside the Earth. Moreover, all of them will have a painful drawback: in asteroids, gravity is very low. Of course, asteroids will become sources of mineral raw materials for mankind, but they are completely unsuitable for the construction of full-fledged housing.

So, is it really the endless space for people the same as the endless ocean without a piece of land? Are all our dreams of the wonders of space just sweet dreams?

But no, there is a place in space where fairy tales can be made come true, and, one might say, it is completely in the neighborhood. This is the Moon.

Of all the bodies in the solar system, the moon has the greatest number of merits from the point of view of humanity seeking stability in space. The moon is large enough to have noticeable gravity on its surface. The main rocks of the moon are solid basalts, extending hundreds of kilometers below the surface. The moon has no volcanism, earthquakes and climatic instabilities, since the moon has no molten mantle in the depths, no air or water oceans. The moon is the closest space body to Earth, making it easier for colonies on the moon to provide emergency assistance and reduce transport costs. The moon is always turned to the Earth on one side, and this circumstance can be very useful in many ways.

So, the first advantage of the Moon is its stability. It is known that on a surface illuminated by the sun, the temperature rises to + 120 ° C, and at night it drops to -160 ° C, but at the same time, already at a depth of 2 meters, temperature drops become invisible. In the bowels of the moon, the temperature is very stable. Since basalts have low thermal conductivity (on Earth, basalt wool is used as a very effective thermal insulation), any comfortable temperature can be maintained in underground rooms. Basalt is a gas-tight material, and inside basalt structures, you can create an artificial atmosphere of any composition and maintain it without much effort.

Basalt is a very hard rock. On Earth there are basalt rocks 2 kilometers high, and on the Moon, where the force of gravity is 6 times less than on Earth, basalt walls would support their weight even at a height of 12 kilometers! Consequently, it is possible to build halls with a ceiling height of hundreds of meters in the basalt depths, without using additional fasteners. Therefore, in the lunar depths, you can build thousands of floors of buildings for various purposes, without using any other materials, except for the lunar basalt itself. If we recall that the lunar surface area is only 13.5 times less than the Earth's surface area, then it is easy to calculate that the area of underground structures on the Moon can be tens of times larger than the entire territory occupied on our home planet by all forms of life from the depths of the oceans to the tops of the mountains. ! And all these premises will not be threatened by any natural disasters for billions of years! Promising!

It is necessary, of course, to immediately think: what to do with the soil extracted from the tunnels? Grow kilometer-high waste heaps on the lunar surface?

It turns out that an interesting solution can be proposed here. The moon has no atmosphere, and the lunar day lasts half a month, so a hot sun shines continuously anywhere on the moon for two weeks. If you focus its rays with a large concave mirror, then the temperature in the resulting spot of light will be almost the same as on the surface of the Sun - almost 5000 degrees. At this temperature, almost all known materials melt, including basalts (they melt at 1100 ° C). If basalt chips are slowly poured into this hot spot, then it will melt, and from it you can fuse layer by layer of walls, staircases and floors. You can create a construction robot that will do this according to the program laid down in it without any human participation. If such a robot is launched to the moon today, then by the day when the manned expedition arrives on it, the cosmonauts will have, if not palaces, then at least comfortable housing and laboratories waiting for them.

Merely building space on the moon should not be an end in itself. These premises will be needed for people to live in comfortable conditions, for the placement of agricultural and industrial enterprises, for the creation of recreation areas, highways, schools and museums. Only first you need to get all the guarantees that people and other living organisms who have migrated to the Moon will not begin to degrade due to not quite familiar conditions. First of all, it is necessary to investigate how long-term exposure to reduced severity will affect organisms of a diverse terrestrial nature. These studies will be large-scale; it is unlikely that experiments in test tubes will be able to guarantee the biological stability of organisms for many generations. It is necessary to build large greenhouses and aviaries, and to conduct observations and experiments in them. No robots can cope with this - only the research scientists themselves will be able to notice and analyze hereditary changes in living tissues and living organisms.

Preparing for the creation of full-fledged self-sustaining colonies on the Moon is the target task that should become a beacon for the movement of humanity towards the highway of its sustainable development.

Today, much in the technical construction of inhabited settlements in space does not have a clear understanding. Power supply in space conditions can be quite simply provided by solar stations. One square kilometer of solar panels, even with an efficiency of only 10%, will provide a power of 150 MW, though only during a lunar day, that is, the average energy generation will be half as much. It seems that it is a little. However, according to forecasts for 2020 world electricity consumption (3.5 TW) and the world's population (7 billion people), the average earthling gets 0.5 kilowatts of electrical power. If we proceed from the usual average daily energy supply for a city dweller, say 1.5 kW per person, then such a solar power plant on the Moon will be able to satisfy the needs of 50 thousand people - quite enough for a small lunar colony.

On Earth, we use a significant portion of our electricity for lighting. On the Moon, many traditional schemes will be radically changed, in particular the lighting schemes. Underground rooms on the moon should be well lit, especially the greenhouse. There is no point in producing electricity on the lunar surface, transferring it to underground buildings, and then converting electricity into light again. It is much more efficient to install concentrators of sunlight on the surface of the Moon and illuminate fiber-optic cables from them. The level of today's technology for the manufacture of optical fibers allows you to transmit light almost without loss over thousands of kilometers, so it should not be difficult to transmit light from the illuminated regions of the moon through the optical fiber system to any underground room, switching concentrators and optical fibers following the movement of the sun across the lunar sky.

At the first stages of the construction of a lunar colony, the Earth can be a donor of the resources necessary for the arrangement of settlements. But many resources in space will be easier to extract than to deliver from Earth. Lunar basalts are half composed of metal oxides - iron, titanium, magnesium, aluminum, etc. In the process of extracting metals from basalts mined in mines and adits, oxygen will be obtained for various needs and silicon for light guides. In outer space, it is possible to intercept comets containing up to 80% of water ice, and to ensure the supply of water to settlements from these abundant sources (annually, up to 40,000 mini-comets ranging from 3 to 30 meters fly past the Earth no further than 1.5 million km from it).

We are confident that over the next three to five decades, research into the creation of settlements on the moon will dominate the promising developments of mankind. If it becomes clear that comfortable conditions for human life can be created on the moon, then the colonization of the moon for several centuries will be the path of earthly civilization to ensure its sustainable development. In any case, there are no other bodies more suitable for this in the solar system.

Maybe none of this will happen for a completely different reason. Space exploration is not just about exploring it. Space exploration requires the creation of efficient transport routes between the Earth and the Moon. If such a highway does not appear, then astronautics will have no future, and humanity will be doomed to remain within the boundaries of its native planet. Rocket technology, which allows scientific equipment to be launched into space, is an expensive technology, and each rocket launch is also an enormous burden on the ecology of our planet. We will need a cheap and safe technology to launch a payload into space.

In this sense, the Moon is of exceptional interest to us. Since it is always facing the Earth with one side, from the middle of the hemisphere facing the Earth, you can stretch a space elevator cable to our planet. Don't be intimidated by its length - 360 thousand kilometers. With a cable thickness that can withstand a 5-ton cab, its total weight will be about a thousand tons - it will all fit in several BelAZ mining dump trucks.

The material for the cable of the required strength has already been invented - these are carbon nanotubes. You just need to learn how to make it defect-free along the entire length of the fiber. Of course, the space elevator must move much faster than its earthly counterparts, and even much faster than high-speed trains and airplanes. To do this, the lunar elevator cable must be covered with a layer of superconductor, and then the elevator car can move along it without touching the cable itself. Then nothing will prevent the cabin from moving at any speed. It will be possible to accelerate the cab half the way, and brake it half the way. If at the same time the acceleration "1 g", which is customary on the Earth, is used, then the entire journey from the Earth to the Moon will take only 3.5 hours, and the cabin will be able to make three flights a day. Theoretical physicists argue that superconductivity at room temperature is not prohibited by the laws of nature, and many institutes and laboratories around the world are working on its creation. We may seem optimistic to someone, but in our opinion, the lunar elevator may become a reality in half a century.

We have considered here only a few sides of the huge problem of space colonization. An analysis of the situation in the solar system shows that only the moon can become the only acceptable object of colonization in the coming centuries.

Although the Moon is closer to Earth than any other body in space, it is imperative to have the means of reaching it to colonize it. If they are not there, then the Moon will remain as unattainable as the big land for Robinson, stuck on a small island. If humanity had at its disposal a lot of time and enough resources, then there is no doubt that it would overcome any difficulties. But there are alarming signs of a different development of events.

Large-scale climatic changes, before our very eyes, are changing the living conditions of people on the entire planet, may in the very near future force us to direct all our forces and resources to elementary survival in new conditions. If the level of the world's oceans rises, then it will be necessary to deal with the transfer of cities and agricultural land to undeveloped and unsuitable for agriculture. If climatic changes lead to a global cooling, then it will be necessary to solve the problem of not only heating housing, but also freezing fields and pastures. All these problems can take away all the forces of mankind, and then they may simply not be enough for space exploration. And humanity will remain on their home planet as on their own, but the only inhabited island in the vast ocean of space.