The Moon

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-02 00:58:34

This image shows one possible way that the Moon could be terraformed.

In principle this version of the Moon is not that much different from the Stanford Torus as shown in this picture.

Both are space stations, both have ceilings which hold in atmosphere, while one uses centrifugal force for gravity, the other uses gravity for gravity.
One could hold up the ceiling over the Moon using inflatable towers like these:

I suppose these towers would extent beyond the ceilings into space and cables would extend downward to distribute the weight of the ceiling, such as in a suspension bridge, but air pressure underneath would also lighten the load, the cable system is just a back up and can hold the ceiling in place until we build up a substantial atmosphere to carry this weight. Venus or perhaps a comet would be a source of nitrogen for this atmosphere.

louis · 2016-12-02 18:40:58

Talking about the Moon, a couple of years ago I think it was I mentioned how I thought the Moon would be a perfect place for ashes of the deceased to be buried. Seems like people are taking this idea forward:

http://elysiumspace.com/product/lunar-memorial/

Essentially the Moon is so close to us - only 3 or 4 days away - that there any number of development options. But this is an easy low fruit option to pick - creating a lovely necropolis which people on Earth can relate to and which doesn't take up valuable parkland on Earth.

It may well be that lunar colonisation will take place piecemeal in the sense that there will be many domed and covered areas and eventually these will be linked up with pressurised transport tubes (or maybe "hyperloop" type transport).

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-03 02:02:43

What is the use of burying ashes on the Moon? Ashes don't carry the information necessary for reconstituting the person later on, a person frozen in liquid nitrogen perhaps has this information. Space can be cold, a frozen body stored in the right place can remain frozen for a long time without power generation necessary to keep it frozen.
2096332.jpg?480
I don't see much use in storing ashes on space, this would be much better!

elderflower · 2016-12-03 06:02:13

Radiation would continue to damage the frozen body, so you would have to keep it under the surface of something very cold.

louis · 2016-12-03 07:32:35

Well unless you die young, you'll wake old, so where's the sense in that! lol I suppose we might see age reversal technology in due course, but then it would be weird to have old memories in a young body...

Still, to stay on topic - I think ashes on the moon will be attractive for sentimental reasons: a comfort for loved ones left behind to look at the Moon and know some part of them is there.

Something like that will help kickstart lunar development as you will need a permanent base to service the necropolis.

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

What is the use of burying ashes on the Moon? Ashes don't carry the information necessary for reconstituting the person later on, a person frozen in liquid nitrogen perhaps has this information. Space can be cold, a frozen body stored in the right place can remain frozen for a long time without power generation necessary to keep it frozen.
http://perfectionextended.weebly.com/up … 32.jpg?480
I don't see much use in storing ashes on space, this would be much better!

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-03 09:10:45

elderflower wrote:

Radiation would continue to damage the frozen body, so you would have to keep it under the surface of something very cold.

It would damage the DNA, not so much the cellular structure, which is what determines who you are. The DNA information can be encoded elsewhere, more securely.

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-03 09:11:59

louis wrote:

Well unless you die young, you'll wake old, so where's the sense in that! lol I suppose we might see age reversal technology in due course, but then it would be weird to have old memories in a young body...
Still, to stay on topic - I think ashes on the moon will be attractive for sentimental reasons: a comfort for loved ones left behind to look at the Moon and know some part of them is there.
Something like that will help kickstart lunar development as you will need a permanent base to service the necropolis.
Tom Kalbfus wrote:
What is the use of burying ashes on the Moon? Ashes don't carry the information necessary for reconstituting the person later on, a person frozen in liquid nitrogen perhaps has this information. Space can be cold, a frozen body stored in the right place can remain frozen for a long time without power generation necessary to keep it frozen.
http://perfectionextended.weebly.com/up … 32.jpg?480
I don't see much use in storing ashes on space, this would be much better!

Aging is a disease that awaits a cure! That is my take on it. Why does the human body self destruct? Fin d out why and we can fix it perhaps.

Antius · 2016-12-03 13:42:55

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

louis wrote:
Well unless you die young, you'll wake old, so where's the sense in that! lol I suppose we might see age reversal technology in due course, but then it would be weird to have old memories in a young body...
Still, to stay on topic - I think ashes on the moon will be attractive for sentimental reasons: a comfort for loved ones left behind to look at the Moon and know some part of them is there.
Something like that will help kickstart lunar development as you will need a permanent base to service the necropolis.
Tom Kalbfus wrote:
What is the use of burying ashes on the Moon? Ashes don't carry the information necessary for reconstituting the person later on, a person frozen in liquid nitrogen perhaps has this information. Space can be cold, a frozen body stored in the right place can remain frozen for a long time without power generation necessary to keep it frozen.
http://perfectionextended.weebly.com/up … 32.jpg?480
I don't see much use in storing ashes on space, this would be much better!
Aging is a disease that awaits a cure! That is my take on it. Why does the human body self destruct? Fin d out why and we can fix it perhaps.

Imagine what a disaster it would be if people stopped dying. Ultimately it would mean that we would have to stop having children. Isn't it better for 10,000 people to live 100 years each, than 1 man living a million years? To live forever, would mean halting evoloution. Better to accept a finite existence and let a fresh generation follow us. I don't want to live at the expense of my children.

Last edited by Antius (2016-12-03 13:43:32)

Terraformer · 2016-12-03 13:45:10

Isn't it better to have 2 million people who die at 40, than 1 million who die at 80?

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-03 15:33:48

Antius wrote:

Tom Kalbfus wrote:
louis wrote:
Well unless you die young, you'll wake old, so where's the sense in that! lol I suppose we might see age reversal technology in due course, but then it would be weird to have old memories in a young body...
Still, to stay on topic - I think ashes on the moon will be attractive for sentimental reasons: a comfort for loved ones left behind to look at the Moon and know some part of them is there.
Something like that will help kickstart lunar development as you will need a permanent base to service the necropolis.
Aging is a disease that awaits a cure! That is my take on it. Why does the human body self destruct? Fin d out why and we can fix it perhaps.
Imagine what a disaster it would be if people stopped dying. Ultimately it would mean that we would have to stop having children. Isn't it better for 10,000 people to live 100 years each, than 1 man living a million years? To live forever, would mean halting evoloution. Better to accept a finite existence and let a fresh generation follow us. I don't want to live at the expense of my children.

Would you like to be a pile of ash sitting on the Moon? What do you suppose happens when you die? For me I expected to colonize space during my lifetime, I was born in 1967, and living 80 years would bring me to 2047, and while it appears that the 80 years prior to my birth was full of technological accomplishments, the 80 years following it won't see much progress at all, since nearly 50 years of it have already been spent! I figure my best chance ever to go into space would be to freeze myself, not to incinerate myself, a pile of ash can't be reconstituted as a person just by adding water! So what's the point of sending it into outer space? Humans have constructed this fantasy world of an afterlife often involving angels with wings, harps and halos, lots of people believing in variations of the afterlife have been motivated to do destructive things in the here and now, such as terrorists blowing themselves up to kill others, as part of their admission to paradise! if people can be so easily deceived, what are the chances that what we learn in church isn't just wishful thinking so we can go on living our lives to the very end of our days, with the expectation that we will go on somehow after we die? I have seen no independent evidence in the existence of a God other than what's in the Bible.

If given a choice, I'd rather not die, how about you? Do you believe what you were told in Church or what ever belief system you grew up under? What is real? Does it matter to you what is actually real rather than what your society intends for you to believe? There are many cultures in the World that believe a bunch of different stuff, they can't all be right, and how do we know that any of them are right? The point is we don't? I'd rather go on living in this world if possible, I'm learning so much stuff and every thing I learned will be gone if I die! My memories my perception will all rot away with my death, is there a soul? There is no scientific reason to believe in one, the brain explains all that we are, and if that dies, we are gone, unless you believe that the information in our brain is somehow copied by a soul. Yes it is possible, but there is no evidence for it. Everything I see in this world tells me that what we see is all there is, there is no evidence of soul duality. Why should I have fait in what one person tells me than in what another person tells me, or in what I read in scripture that was written by a fallible human being thousands of years ago? Morality is one thing, belief in an afterlife is another. I don't know if there isn't one, but I don't know if there is either! One possible afterlife is freezing yourself and then being reconstituted later, I can envision how tht might happen, this soul/heaven/hell thing is a belief system, I've seen no evidence for it, I could imagine that life is a virtual reality and that when we die, we just wake up, but there is no evidence for that either, so I don't want to take any chances that it isn't true. So yes, Aging is a disease, even if we find a cure, something else will probably kill us in the fullness of time, but if the choice is between going on living and letting my body self-destruct in the natural way, I'd rather just go on living!

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2016-12-03 15:34:09)

elderflower · 2016-12-03 16:32:22

Given the option of dying or of living the vast majority will surely pick the latter. I would. I want to see humans spreading beyond one planet.

Antius · 2016-12-03 17:13:12

elderflower wrote:

Given the option of dying or of living the vast majority will surely pick the latter. I would. I want to see humans spreading beyond one planet.

Most people would. I would too. But it doesn't make immortality any less of a disaster. Look at how overpopulated our planet is already.

I am also inclined to believe that individual human beings are more like cells in an organism, the greater organism being society. We go through different stages in life, we are constantly changing, but as time goes on we become set in our ways and less adaptable. This is an inevitable result of having a living brain. It is not like a reprogrammable computer. It grows and adapts in certain ways but it is by its nature finite in its extent and longevity. Much of what we are is in our genetics. A smaller part of a man's 'soul' is defined in childhood and we progressively lose the ability to evolve our ideas and our thinking as we grow older. That is why in my opinion it is important to have a fresh generation every thirty years and the older ones to make way for them.

The idea of an immortal man is something of an enigma. He cannot be human in any real sense, because beyond a certain point he cannot both grow and keep what he is with him. Do you think a 19th century man would really have the ability to adapt to the modern world in a way that would allow him to keep up with a man born afresh? His formative years would weigh him down more and more and his mind would be clogged with neural pathways that were increasingly redundant. To be effective as a man, he would in fact have to be nothing like a real human being as we would recognise it. The way he reasoned and learned and adapted to the world would need to be fundamentally different. His brain could not be organic as each new wave of learning would need to overwrite part of what had come before. And organic brains do not work that way.

An immortal man could not be alive in the way we understand it. Nothing living can be immortal, as the act of being alive is the act of growing. And to be immortal presumes the ability to reach some kind of steady state, which is the antithesis of being alive. Living things are by their nature finite in both space and time. That is why we reproduce. There will never be an immortal man.

Last edited by Antius (2016-12-03 18:34:21)

elderflower · 2016-12-03 17:28:35

But you cannot guarantee the turnover of generations if ageing is greatly extended, without introducing compulsory euthanasia. That raises all sorts of possibilities for potential power abuses.

Antius · 2016-12-03 18:05:30

elderflower wrote:

But you cannot guarantee the turnover of generations if ageing is greatly extended, without introducing compulsory euthanasia. That raises all sorts of possibilities for potential power abuses.

I get the feeling that it will never be a problem. My suspicion is that human lifespan will never be much more than it is now. There are certain basic limits that we will never get over without becoming a completely different thing to what we are. Like I said, an immortal man is a paradox. He cannot be alive in any real sense.

Although technological innovation has done a spectacular job of reducing infant mortality and deaths due to infection, childbirth and industrial accidents, adult life expectancy has not increased so much in the past century as we are generally led to believe. In fact, mid Victorians who lived on whole foods and had much higher nutrient loads than we do, had about the same adult life expectancy as we do now. We die of different things, but we do not live any longer.

I am inclined to share Tom's scepticism in the reality of an immortal sole. As we learn more and more about the human brain and its workings, there is progressively less room for a sole in the essence of what a man is. There are certain types of brain injury that will change not just a man's abilities but the very essence of his character. He will be a completely different person afterwards compared to who he was before. This tells us that who we are is a function of the architecture of our brains. It is difficult to see how a soul fits into this arrangement. When that man dies, who gets to go to heaven? The man he was before or the man he became? If what we are is a function of our brains, what does the sole actually consist of? It cannot be a record of a previous existence, for non of us have such memories. It cannot be our basic character, as this too is a function of physical development. What then can it be? Are we also to believe that only human's have soles? A dog has character. A dog has emotions, can feel sad, upset, embarrassed, ashamed, contented and happy. They even have rudimentary language. Some breeds are as intelligent as a small child. Does a dog then have a sole? How far down the evolutionary scale does a creature have to go, before it stops having a sole? Does a rat have a sole? We evolved from rat-like creatures after all. Does a cockroach have a sole? How about a bacteria?

Last edited by Antius (2016-12-03 18:29:11)

SpaceNut · 2016-12-03 20:26:15

Sure we have Brief Guide to Genomics sequencing or this one, with splicing or editing
which all start with the reverse process of making protiens, RNA,and DNA to make up a cell http://www.sysbio.org/resources/tutoria … wfinal.pdf

The ethical delema is if we do have the data to make another me or you how do we generate the conciousness that makes us a being.

Antius · 2016-12-03 20:52:40

SpaceNut wrote:

Sure we have Brief Guide to Genomics sequencing or this one, with splicing or editing
which all start with the reverse process of making protiens, RNA,and DNA to make up a cell http://www.sysbio.org/resources/tutoria … wfinal.pdf
The ethical delema is if we do have the data to make another me or you how do we generate the conciousness that makes us a being.

You will be making a twin. Someone that shares quite a lot of who you are, but cannot share your experiences. To what extent are you creating a new person? If you are creating a new person, why not do it the old fashioned way?

I like the idea of making a 'fresh' copy that a person's consciousness can be imprinted upon. Kind of like the Asgard in the Star Gate sci-fi. The problem with the idea is that the human consciousness is the result of growing synaptic connections in the brain. That process takes time and it is hard to see how it can be rushed or even directed in a certain way. The only way to replicate a person's consciousness would be to take an identical clone and give it the same experience in real time. The formation of synapses means that the formation of a person's personality and memories is a hard wired feature of their brain and this process takes a long time, literally a lifetime. You therefore cannot upload or download a person in the way you would a computer programme. The brain just doesn't work like that. A computer can be programmed, but a brain has to grow. And it absorbs information at a very limited rate that is hard to accelerate even slightly. So the idea of an uploadable consciousness is as much a fantasy as a Star Trek transporter. The best you might hope to achieve is activate the memories in their brain some time before death and retrieve the information. The person then thinks the memory, their life flashes before them and you somehow record it. There is no way of uploading it into another brain, the best you could hope to do is store the information electronically. You are not recording a person as such, just a selected few of their memories.

Last edited by Antius (2016-12-03 21:17:00)

Terraformer · 2016-12-04 08:03:05

I don't think there's much reason to worry about having millenia old humans who have been stuck in the same mental rut for the vast majority of their lives. If we've managed to overcome neurodegeneration, our brains will be much more plastic and adaptive than they are now in old age. If we haven't, we'll have to figure out how to deal with a vast number of undying dementia patients. Put them in cold sleep until we have a solution, as an alternative to suicide?

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-04 08:30:07

Antius wrote:

elderflower wrote:
Given the option of dying or of living the vast majority will surely pick the latter. I would. I want to see humans spreading beyond one planet.
Most people would. I would too. But it doesn't make immortality any less of a disaster. Look at how overpopulated our planet is already.

I am looking now, and I don't see standing room only, it is crowded if you live in a city, but most places aren't cities. Your solution for over crowding is that everybody dies, my solution is that we get off the planet. If all your interested in is maintaining one planet, then what are you doing here?

I am also inclined to believe that individual human beings are more like cells in an organism, the greater organism being society.

I don't feel like a cell in a superorganism, I feel like an individual, I don't see society as superior to the individual, I've seen society do a lot of stupid things, herd instinct doesn't always lead to the wisest course of action. Collectivization has been a disaster, and I don't view individual human beings as disposable, as some religions in the middle east has it, people sacrificing themselves for the "common good" of society is abhorrent, There have been too many suicide bomb attacks by people that want to view themselves as cells in a superorganism on a mission for God to kill a bunch of other people! And back during World War II, there were Japanese fighter pilots willing to sacrifice themselves for their Emperor. I don't think us individuals can coexist in a world with such "group think" people. A society with disposable humans that are just cogs in a great machine in society is not a society I want to live in. I don't want to be a cog or a disposable part!

We go through different stages in life, we are constantly changing, but as time goes on we become set in our ways and less adaptable.

That is because we learn from our experiences, young people are foolish and gullible, they are easily swayed by propaganda because their life experience is short and they don't know any different. Most of what a young person has learned about the world is what he has learned in school, not life experiences.

This is an inevitable result of having a living brain. It is not like a reprogrammable computer. It grows and adapts in certain ways but it is by its nature finite in its extent and longevity. Much of what we are is in our genetics. A smaller part of a man's 'soul' is defined in childhood and we progressively lose the ability to evolve our ideas and our thinking as we grow older. That is why in my opinion it is important to have a fresh generation every thirty years and the older ones to make way for them.

Our brains ages just as we do, it is assumed that if we can halt and reverse the aging process, we can do it for our brains as well, there is no reason to suppose why not.

The idea of an immortal man is something of an enigma. He cannot be human in any real sense, because beyond a certain point he cannot both grow and keep what he is with him. Do you think a 19th century man would really have the ability to adapt to the modern world in a way that would allow him to keep up with a man born afresh?

Yes, actually I do, we teach our children what they need to know to live in a 21st century society, and there are parts of this world that do not appear to be living in the 21st century, under the right circumstances they can adapt too.

His formative years would weigh him down more and more and his mind would be clogged with neural pathways that were increasingly redundant. To be effective as a man, he would in fact have to be nothing like a real human being as we would recognise it.

Not aging is not the same thing as immortality, people can still die from many causes, just not through the degradation of the human body through aging. You ever been to a nursing home? If you manage to live a long time, you get to spend the final years of your life in a nursing home, where you'll have people that will help you go to the bathroom, feed you, and comb your hair, this is the wonderful result of the aging process if you live long enough, and it is this disease that I want to see cured!

The way he reasoned and learned and adapted to the world would need to be fundamentally different. His brain could not be organic as each new wave of learning would need to overwrite part of what had come before. And organic brains do not work that way.
An immortal man could not be alive in the way we understand it. Nothing living can be immortal, as the act of being alive is the act of growing. And to be immortal presumes the ability to reach some kind of steady state, which is the antithesis of being alive. Living things are by their nature finite in both space and time. That is why we reproduce. There will never be an immortal man.

The Universe can take care of death, I just don't like to have it programmed into my cells, that is all. I don't like having to anticipate my death within the next 60 years, I want to be able to try and keep on living without my cells programmed to self-destruct after a certain number of divisions. I hope we learn enough about human cells to learn how to stop and reverse the aging process by for my body does its thing and self-destructs!

Also just let me add one more thing, for those of you who are concerned about global warming, I am skeptical about it myself, but if it were true, why should I change the way I live to combat it, if I'm going to be dead within 60 years? With bodies programmed to self destruct it is unnatural for people to think long term and plan for multiple generations. Having a finite life span prevents us from traveling to the stars, they easiest way to go there is by slow boat, but what stops us is the finite human life span. If the human life span wasn't limited, a voyage of several hundred years wouldn't be a deterrent to us. The greatest barrier to interstellar travel is time in combination with our finite human lifespan, preprogrammed into our cells to self destruct within about 100 years or so!

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2016-12-04 08:38:37)

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-04 08:48:01

Antius wrote:

elderflower wrote:
But you cannot guarantee the turnover of generations if ageing is greatly extended, without introducing compulsory euthanasia. That raises all sorts of possibilities for potential power abuses.
I get the feeling that it will never be a problem. My suspicion is that human lifespan will never be much more than it is now. There are certain basic limits that we will never get over without becoming a completely different thing to what we are. Like I said, an immortal man is a paradox. He cannot be alive in any real sense.
Although technological innovation has done a spectacular job of reducing infant mortality and deaths due to infection, childbirth and industrial accidents, adult life expectancy has not increased so much in the past century as we are generally led to believe. In fact, mid Victorians who lived on whole foods and had much higher nutrient loads than we do, had about the same adult life expectancy as we do now. We die of different things, but we do not live any longer.
I am inclined to share Tom's scepticism in the reality of an immortal sole. As we learn more and more about the human brain and its workings, there is progressively less room for a sole in the essence of what a man is. There are certain types of brain injury that will change not just a man's abilities but the very essence of his character. He will be a completely different person afterwards compared to who he was before. This tells us that who we are is a function of the architecture of our brains. It is difficult to see how a soul fits into this arrangement. When that man dies, who gets to go to heaven? The man he was before or the man he became? If what we are is a function of our brains, what does the sole actually consist of? It cannot be a record of a previous existence, for non of us have such memories. It cannot be our basic character, as this too is a function of physical development. What then can it be? Are we also to believe that only human's have soles? A dog has character. A dog has emotions, can feel sad, upset, embarrassed, ashamed, contented and happy. They even have rudimentary language. Some breeds are as intelligent as a small child. Does a dog then have a sole? How far down the evolutionary scale does a creature have to go, before it stops having a sole? Does a rat have a sole? We evolved from rat-like creatures after all. Does a cockroach have a sole? How about a bacteria?

What is a soul? A soul is information, it is the way our brains are organized to make us who we are, it is not the brain cells themselves. Some people have another definition of a soul, that is a kind of ghost that we can neither see touch or feel, something that superimposes itself on our bodies and manipulates them like a puppet, the closest real thing to the religious definition of a soul is software, or information. The information needs a machine to act on otherwise it can't have real experiences, we are basically organic machines created by the random actions o the Universe, we can find ways to preserve our souls I suppose, just as we find ways to store information.

SpaceNut · 2016-12-04 17:58:00

Sure would be interesting if we could capture that soul chemically in the brain and some how pass that information along to the new you but I am not sure that we will get there for quite some time. Of course we may also want to try it in some sort AI machine as well.

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-12-04 20:20:08

Until such time, we can freeze people. I figure we can freeze people and charge them a fee to be reconstituted on the Moon after we've completed terraforming it. Getting back to the subject, I think we can put shutters on the roof of the Moon, so that we can shut off light from the Sun when I suits us, and provide artificial lights on the ceiling above the part of the Moon facing away from the Sun.

karov · 2017-07-24 11:41:19

http://www.iflscience.com/space/scienti … -the-moon/

karov · 2017-10-19 14:56:16

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/f … -cave.html

100 m wide x 50 000 m long x ~50m ceiling high ( ~20 floors )

5 000 000 m2 = 5 km2

~ 30 000 population?

Monaco.

SpaceNut · 2017-10-19 18:43:55

Yup short visits to the surface as needed and safely tucked away inside from the blasting that might happen at any moment by the sun....

elderflower · 2017-10-20 07:14:30

That will need an awful lot of gas to fill it. Oxygen can be had from regolith but you also need buffer gas to reduce fire hazards and provide an earth like environment. You will also need to insulate and line it to retain moisture, avoiding attack on the substrate by ice and by hydration, and to prevent dripping condensate and leaching of minerals from the rock.

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