Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to your edition of the Project Moon Hut podcast series, the Age of Infinite.
For many of you who don't know, the podcast series has been designed for the Project Moon Hut movement to give you some type of explanation of what's happening within the space industry and more specifically within the auspices or the the region called Mearth, where we're trying to develop sustainable life on the moon by accelerating a space based economy and helping to facilitate that on Earth. Our guest today on the line is Jeff Grayson. Hello, Jeff. How are you? Fine. Thank you.
Jeff and I met approximately two and a half, three years ago at the Pioneering National Space Summit in Washington DC. A 100 of the, I would say, top, maybe Jeff that's a good way to say it, top individuals in the space industry got together. There were 7 astronauts. I don't know if the administrator was there, but there were plenty of people who would put up the space shuttle. And this was an American based meeting, and that's the first time we've gotten together.
Jeff doesn't realize that I think I had met him, the year earlier at the Global Technology Symposium where he had also spoken on the space industry. And from his background, Jeff has been around, since 1997 in terms of the space industry. He worked for Rotary Rocket, and he since founded, XCOR, Aerospace and Agile Aero, as well as some other industries. So other companies. So he's been around for a long time. So let's get to the meat of things.
Our our topic today is homesteading the moon, a different vision of the future. Jeff, did you bring some bullet points or some topics that we're gonna be covering today? I do. Really just 4 segments. I wanna talk about what real settlement is. I wanna talk about a low technology approach settlement.
I wanna talk about the export markets that settlers will be able to address, and then the social factors that that we take for granted that need to be rethought for what it will take to make it a viable settlement. I I like the topics. Okay. So let's start with the first one. What do you mean by a a real settlement? What what is that definition for you?
Well, we have a picture in our heads that that's come down to us, you know, from the from the space age, from all the great paintings, from all the movies that we've seen about what human activity on the moon might be like. You know? And and when when you think when people think about what that's like, they have a picture in their head.
And that picture in their head is, you know, shiny aluminum cans sitting on the surface and people sitting at consoles with blinking lights and lots of computers, and walking around in shiny space suits. And it's a very it's a vision that's synonymous with Von Braun's vision of what lunar development would be like, with what NASA's vision of what lunar development would be like, and there's there's no foundation under it. There's no sustainability to it.
If you look at any historical settlement activity that's gone on and we actually have many examples. We have the Polynesian colonization of the Pacific. We have things like the Nordic colonization of Iceland and Greenland. We have the colonization of the Americas. We have the westward movement. We have the Mormon colonization of Utah.
Some of these left historical records, and none of them have this highly capital intensive look where where how where you live and how you work is somehow dropped on the surface, prefabricated, and the artifacts that people use and the the economy that they build is mostly made up of the things that they brought with them. That is just not how economic activity takes place.
So you're seeing that so if I'm getting it right, you're telling me that everything that we've heard about or seen is basically a transposition of what we believe Earth is like, so therefore, we're going to have similar types of lifestyle on the moon. Or the what we what we believe that things like the International Space Station are like. So we envision something like the International Space Station being on the moon, or something like you saw in 2,001.
So you think think about something like that being on the moon. Yep. But but if you go a layer deeper and you say kind of what's holding this up? You know, what what are those people doing? Why might they be there? Who's paying for all that? You quickly find that the the the capital cost that will be required to set something like that up for a large population is just unsustainable, but we should not be daunted by that.
You know, if you if you asked what the capital cost would be like to replicate the standard of living in England, in in the colonies of the pilgrims, you would have thrown up your hands and said that's hopeless. Mhmm. You know, nevertheless, in the fullness of time, the standard of living, you know, in the new land came to meet and eventually exceed the standard of living in the home country, but it didn't happen by importing at all. It had to be built. It had to be grown.
There's an organic character to a functioning economy. And if we're going to have what what I think of as a real settlement as is distinct from some kind of outpost, is distinct from people who are there just because they're all supported by the umbilical that's coming back from the home country or in this case the home planet.
If if they're if those people treat the new land as home, they're gonna live there, they're gonna work there, they're gonna make their stuff there, and they're gonna have something to do, some economic activity, most of which is going to be selling their goods and services to each other, some of which needs to be selling things back to the home country to pay for their imports.
But it's it's a very different vision of the future than 6 highly paid, well trained civil servants taking 6 month tours in in a shiny aluminum can full of blinking lights. So just, are we are you saying that you believe that we'll be able to create sustainable life, self sustainable life on the moon? Or will we be, sustainable using Earth as a means of facilitating items that we can't build, grow, develop on the moon?
Well, I think it's gonna be a long time before any extraterrestrial settlement is self sufficient in a material sense. But then Japan and Hong Kong aren't self sufficient in a material sense, but they don't have to be subsidized. So I'm speaking of settlements that are self sufficient in an economic sense. Okay. That that they don't they don't have to be, you know, taxpayer funded as an active charity into perpetuity. And I agree with you.
I I think that the it's not going to be taxpayer driven to be able to succeed, and that's one reason Project Moon Hut is around. We believe that we can add that value. Okay. So I agree with you completely. Okay. Well, in order to achieve that vision, requires thinking through the artifacts that will be used, the habitat space, the way the economy is going to work, and what I think of as a very low technology approach. And that is a very foreign view to most space advocates.
Space people tend to be very technophile. They're comfortable with technology. That's why they get in the space industry. They think about solving problems in a very high technology way. But the if we want the an economically self sufficient activity, then as much as possible, not over not everything, but as much as possible of what people need to stay alive and to do their work needs to be made locally. We have no example of ever replicating technological civilization in a new colony.
You know, the Mhmm. There hasn't been colonization since 18th century levels of technology. Really? Yeah. That's because we at that point, we had covered everything. We've covered Pretty much. Yeah. And and we haven't colonized Antarctica yet. We're we're treating it with that kind of outpost model where everything is an umbilical back to the home country. Right. So the we don't know how many people it takes to maintain what you might call a technosphere.
Mhmm. But if you think about how global and interconnected the high technology economy is here on Earth, it's not encouraging. You know what you would you would when you think about all the artifacts, and all the specialized industries that it takes to make these artifacts, it seems like a huge endeavor. And it is. I I think one of the, moments that was, pivotal in my thinking was one day Laurie when right helping to write Pay the Things, she had made the comment.
Do you think about how much it takes to put a dinner table together? Just a Mhmm. A family dinner. I mean, you've got salt, you've got glass, you've got pepper, you've got spices, you've got meats or or fruits and vegetables, you've got plates, you've got chairs. And just to be able to facilitate something as simple as a dinner table is a highly complex, interconnected, interwoven ordeal. Absolutely.
And there's a a classic story in economics called Ipencil, which makes very much the same point, that nobody on this planet knows how to make a pencil. No. They don't. The be because of all the different pieces that have to go into one. So what's the most basic fundamental thing that you need for for people to stay alive on another planet? Well, you need you need the basics. You know, you think of those on Earth as being, you know, food, water, shelter.
On on the moon, you have to extend that to atmosphere and habitat pressure and power because there's no way to do any of these things without power. So if you just think about how to get just those things So your food water your food water shelter, atmosphere, power, and habitat Pressure. Think about that way. Okay. Yes. And and, you know, pressurized habitat volume is, in my mind, the fundamental place to begin.
Because if you if you could make more pressurized habitat volume with the materials at hand, then you could expand your economy. You could expand your living space and and house more people. And absolutely the lowest technology way to handle things like life support is to grow plants, but plants take space to grow in pressurized volume with with light coming in. And so it's the same problem. And I think about this in energy payback terms.
If you want the if you want a high gain system where the where the population and the economy can grow at a reasonable clip, the habitat space that you build needs to pay back the energy that it took to build it in some reasonable period of time. You know, if that's kind of a an energy way of thinking about payback time.
And if you run the numbers, and you think about the kind of habitat people usually visualize like aluminum cans, and you think about how much energy it would take to gather up that material, refine it into aluminum, shape it into a habitat that holds pressure and all that, it would take, like, a 100 years for the solar energy that would be converted into plant matter in that greenhouse space to be paid back.
Yep. So I started looking at that problem, and I found that there's very encouraging ways to do it that very little work has been done on. Okay. Give me the example. The most fundamental thing you have on the Moon is rocks. You're surrounded by rocks. That's kind of all you've got. Well if you if you shape rocks, you can make barrel vaults, you know, rather like Roman style architecture.
Okay. And if you pile enough of the powdered rock that makes the surface of the moon, regolith it's called, If you pile enough of that on top in a clever way that's hard to describe without pictures, the mass of that overburden, the mass of that dirt Yep. Holds the roof down against internal pressure. Like an igloo? Yeah. But it's it's again, it's hard to describe without a picture. It's it's sort of a way of, you're you're creating an arch.
You're creating a mechanism in which by putting the regolith on top of the material Right. You end up forming a structure. Right. And there's a structure where you have to kind of collect up the the the force of the mound of dirt over a large area and sort of concentrate it down onto the small igloo or the small barrel vault. Yeah. Because the pressure is large, and the gravity is low.
But when you when you cook up the numbers on that, I mean shaping rocks is about 6 orders of magnitude less energy intensive than turning rocks into metal. And the absolute lowest energy thing you can make on the moon is a mound of dirt because you're surrounded by powdered regolith. All you have to do is scoop it up. Right.
And with that kind of an approach, if you can also make glass, and you don't need nearly as much glass to let the light in as you do to hold the pressure other material to hold the pressure in, It looks like in the rough order of magnitude you can get a structure where as greenhouse space, the plants that would grow in that would pay back the energy it took to build that structure in something like a year.
So we're using we're using this barrel vault as a means to be able to facilitate creating space for the development of plants, not Well Are are we also doing this for human life? We are. But it turns out that the that that to run a biosphere, you need much more volume for the plants to operate in than you do for the people. Right. So that's what I'm saying.
The the big advantage here is we could theoretically take a section of the International Space Station for, and cut it off and put it on the moon. 8 people living in that one facility, the Winnebago on the moon.
Yes. And at the same time, in order to facilitate the plant growth, instead of trying to build domes, as well as other structures which would require either 3 d printing or new material or new material development or bringing materials from Earth which would be costly, we could take the the surface of the moon, shape it in a way, utilize that space, that cavernous space as a means to grow plants. Yes. Okay. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. You said that right.
And in some locations on the moon, you can go to an even lower tech approach. It's it's been known for a long time that there are very large caves on the moon. They're they're they're lava tubes. And because of the way of the moon's lower gravity, they grow to much larger dimensions than they do on the Earth, on the order of half a kilometer in diameter.
Wow. So I mean, instead of the this cramped little life in cans thing, there's spaces under the moon that are huge, you know, city sized, already shielded from the radiation by the thickness of the lunar crust above, just needing to be sealed off, and filled with an atmosphere to perform large habitat volumes. There's an engineering challenge in drilling the holes in the roof to let the sunlight in.
Yep. And that's you know, I I have gone back and forth on which one of those is the most practical. They're both good. They'll probably both be used depending on whether there are or aren't lava tubes near the location on the moon that a particular economic activity wants to be at. I'm I'm smiling and laughing at the same time right now. You probably know and don't know that I've only been involved or engaged in the this, let's call it, space industry for about 3, three and a half years.
And my journey being at the Pioneer International Space Summit, that was my second event ever. And the first one I went to was just 3 months earlier a month or 2 earlier at the, in Hawaii. So I've been asking questions such as, can we live underground? Do we have are there caves on the moon? I I want at one point I said to somebody, why are we trying to build everything?
Why don't we just put something on the moon in the crater and put regolith over it and that means we can shield from the radiation? And you'd be surprised how many people react in a way such as, haven't thought about that. Thinking, how have you not thought about this? You've been you've been studying this for 27 years and here I am asking you a question such as is there a place that we can go underground? And so many people don't have these answers.
So I'm glad you're mentioning that you have that we have them. Do we have empirical proof of this? I do we have we have x-ray or or sometimes No. We don't. No. What we've got is you you may or may not be familiar with lunar rills. Rills? R I l l s? R I l l e s. They kinda look like riverbeds, and what they are is collapsed lava tubes.
And there are some places where there there are what's called interrupted rilles, where you can see that the lava tube did not always collapse, so it will start and stop again. And there are a few places where we have found skylights where you where there's a hole on the lunar surface that opens up into a larger space below. Okay. So we can tell that there's a cave down there, but we can't prove how big it is without going and and visiting it.
Yeah. We can tell because of the river size that assuming that that would be the same or or similar size. Meaning, if we were to watch a river go into a mountain right now, we're going to assume that's as wide as the river that enters it. Yes. So that we can make some assumptions. You can you can see from the size distribution of the ones that have collapsed. You can see that they don't collapse below a certain size.
Okay. And that's where I get the estimate of how big would they would the would the caverns be. I I'm loving this. I'm loving this because the the low tech solution has been, I don't know, pushed aside. Is that a good way to say it? It's almost as if like as you started off saying, everybody wants to have these beautiful cities and they draw intricate diagrams and they sell it to the community that this is what space is going to look like.
Yes. And the entire time I've been working on this project, the Project Moon Hut, one of the things we've been talking about is how can we do this inexpensively? Not $500,000,000,000, but how can we use what is on the moon and facilitate making this happen faster? And this is a great this is a great piece of insight for me, at least, to understand there's an opportunity out there. Yes. And the the next larger problem is power.
Okay. You need a lot of power to do things on the moon because, you know, everything there starts as a rock. So anything complicated that you wanna make takes a lot of power to make. And, again, there are people immediately jump to things like solar cells. Solar cells take an enormous industry to make. I mean, if you just think about it, we've we've only in the last 10 years have we got to the point where we know how to make cost effective solar cells. That's a very high technology product.
But if you can make any metals at all on the moon, you can make big mirrors because any metal that you make on the moon will stay shiny because there's no air to oxidize it. Right. So you can do much lower tech things where you just put up big mirrors and use that to either collect heat or to drive a very low tech 19th century heat engine. You know?
It's boil boil the working fluid and turn a turbine, or boil a working fluid and move pistons to get mechanical power that that they would have recognized in England in the 1800. We're talking about 2 sides of the moon, and I I made the early mistake in this industry of calling it the dark side. So we've got the, the the far side Yes. And, that's at 100 degrees, minus 180. Is that what it's correct? It's minus 180 and plus 100 on the sun facing side.
Can't we just use, at least on half of the time that we're there, can we use that a 180 a 100 degrees Fahrenheit Celsius temperatures and not have to go too crazy with creating mirrors and all of that where the heat will just start turning engines or motors? Well, the the temperature difference there is okay. I don't know if that's a good question. It's a good question.
Okay. There are no bad questions, but but the for for fundamental technical reasons, the less the temperature differences that you're trying to work across, the more machinery it takes to get power. Okay. So the it it there however, you're onto a good thing there, which is the the biggest challenge after getting the power in the first place is how do you keep the power on during the night, which lasts 2 weeks.
Yep. And the very lowest tech approach I've seen on that is you heat rocks, either till they're till they're hot rocks or until they're molten rocks, and then you extract. You use that source of heat over the night to keep running your heat engines that you normally powered with hot sunlight during the day. You don't get as much power that way, but it's still way cheaper than bringing up batteries from Earth.
So it's just like the wood burning stoves that ended up putting the soap stone on the sides? Yes. Because soap stone is a good, holder. I'm one word. I can, holder of heat for a period of time so it can maintain it for longer than normal cast iron or any type of metal. So okay. And when you're doing it for 14 days, you have to the numbers are such that you have to put a little more ingenuity into it than that, but Yeah. The principle is the same.
Okay. So and then lastly, the big thing you need is, you know, volatiles. Do we we call them things like oxygen, water, car you know, a source of carbon to feed your plants with. But now we know that all those things are available at the lunar poles. Right. So it seems very obvious that that an early outpost will come near the lunar poles. A an obvious question to which we do not yet know the answer is, do there happen to be convenient caves conveniently close to the lunar poles?
That's a good question that we don't know the answer to. So we're we're talking about having a like, on the interstate, being able to pull off at the right place and be able to get food. So let me ask you this or if I can ask for a definition, or clarity. That's probably a better word. Oxygen, water, carbon, nitrogen, what we need to for human life to exist. Most of the people I'm assuming who will be listening don't know that there is water on the moon.
I was just with an individual who is invested heavily in space and I shared with him that the comment. I showed him the pictures and he said, I didn't know this. It it's probably the most significant thing that's been discovered as far as human expansion beyond the Earth in my lifetime. You know, it was theorized, but it was treated as a very wild theory 30 years ago. And since then, the evidence has gotten stronger and stronger to the point where it's essentially overwhelming at this point.
It is it is hard to understand without getting deep into the politics of how we do space, why no one has sent a sampling mission to see what's the physical state of the ice there. But we did drop an impactor into it. We dropped a spent rocket stage in and and analyzed the gases that came off the crater. And from that, we know that there is methane and ice in some form.
Nitrogen is likely to be scarce, but it that's of all the things you'd have to import, that's the least troublesome because the nitrogen that the human beings use cycles over and over again. Very little of the mass involved is nitrogen in the ecosystem. So you just because it's the first time it's being brought up, you said a a spent rocket stage and you called it an impactor. Is an impactor just a definition for something that we threw at the moon?
Is it theoretically we took something so that individuals can understand this, is we took some, some big piece of mass. We threw it at the moon. We crashed it in it. The poles. Threw a plume threw up a plume. We were able to use spectroscopy across it, be able to see that within the plume there were ice crystals, and we were able to identify that there existed water on the moon. And since then, we've done other types of work to be able to identify where that sits. Is that kind of correct?
Yes. Okay. So now we've got the basics of how you could have people on the moon, then you have the basics of how they could start to build the overwhelming majority of the of the mass of stuff they need from local resources. But they're obviously not gonna be able to make everything. They're they're not gonna be materially independent. So however small their imports may be, they're not going to be 0. And if they're economically self sufficient, they have to pay for them somehow.
So then you come to the critical problem of export markets, or as I also sometimes call them, cash crops. You know, almost all successful colonies have something that they send back to the home country to pay for their imports. And that's the one of the reasons or one of the many reasons that explorers went on journeys and expeditions. It was to find something that a trade route could be formed and product could be sold between 2 markets. Right.
Now historically, one of the most frequent cash crops is real estate. You know, if you think about that, in essence, by building out habitat volume on the moon, you are creating real estate, which and if you can create the real estate much faster than you need because it doesn't take that long to pay back, then you've you can sell that to the next people who want to come. The people have talked about other markets. It's hard to know which one's going to be the most important.
An obvious near term one is water for rocket propellant. There's there's no way you're gonna be traveling to and from the moon without needing that because you need to refuel the ships that land on the moon so they can be used over and over again. It is it is an obvious thing to say, can we find other customers for that? There are some. Unfortunately, one of the likely major customers for that would be governments. Yep. And that's an unpredictable market.
But you could also envision selling it to companies that, for example, want want to carry satellites up to geostationary orbit, and that's one potential market. In the and there are various materials that people have talked about exporting from the moon. Some of them are not very credible. Some of them are maybe potentially credible. I think the long term one is going to be that solar power in some form or another can be collected in space and used to power the Earth.
Yes. And that the economics of that with all the solar cells being manufactured on the Earth and brought from Earth are questionable. You know? Some people think it will make sense. Some people think it won't make sense. I don't think anybody really knows for sure. But it's inarguable that the economics of that get enormously better if you can use most of the mass of that construction to come from somewhere that's already off the Earth.
Yes. And there's there's a 100 schemes for doing that, and I'm not gonna opine on which one is best. But the the I think that energy market energy is one of the largest industries on Earth. I think that the moon serving as a source of materials, whatever they might be, possibly manufacture artifacts, but at least just raw mass, to to form and support the future energy industry is a very likely export market.
Yes. And and the by accelerating the space based economy, the expectation or the hope is that innovation will be driven by the access to low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, high Earth orbit, or anywhere in between, from the moon to Earth or from the moon to, within the space of Mearth, we're calling, between the moon and Earth. That gives us opportunities to change how we live on Earth.
And I think one of the challenges that when peep when individuals are talking about space, there are other space enthusiasts and they love this love space and they're interested in space. Yet the real opportunity lies in if we do what we're talking about, we can make earth a different place to live. You could be warm warm all winter and cold during the summer with no cost of energy or we can you we can clean the air with devices that today are expensive to run with energy.
But yet if energy became a cost of 0 or a minimal cost, then we could facilitate cleaning the air or the water and or any others type means of production that we'd like to use them use it for. Well, I I like to use an even nearer term analogy than that.
Okay. If if you if you look at the difference in per capita energy between, you know, the industrialized world and the part of the world where the people are living in poverty, and you ask how much energy would would it would it take if the if the country is currently in poverty came up to the standard of living of the industrialized countries? Well, it would take about 15 terawatts. All of Earth civilization today uses about 50 terawatts.
We we do not have the ability to increase our energy production by that fraction right now. Here's a number. The first, about 7 years ago when I first started visiting Hong Kong, and the SCMP, their newspaper had on the front cover, that if the world lived using the same resources that are utilized in the Hong Kong community every day for food, water, shelter, transportation, communication, entertainment, you'd need 13 more Earths just to fulfill that need? I think those numbers are wrong.
But but even if we only need another 5th of an earth, we don't happen to have one. No. We don't. And I'm just reading what was in the paper. I just thought it was a an interesting take on the fact that we do spend in the industrialized world. We spend a tremendous amount, and this would facilitate or change the way we live. Yes. And and it's a it's a very clean form of power. It it doesn't have nearly every form of power has some side effects, but has many fewer than most other forms of energy.
And if you expect that the economy is gonna continue to grow and perhaps the population is gonna continue to grow, that need for more energy is just gonna continue to grow. And and you, you know, there's a lot of politics and a lot of ideology that different people have about different aspects of the energy industry, and and I don't and I think that whole argument is in some sense beside the point. Arguing over whether we should do more or less of this or that energy is kind of beside the point.
The real point is we need more. Yes. And and we need it to be cheaper, not more expensive. And we need it to be less, not more environmentally damaging, so that we can continue to use more of it without an unacceptable environmental side effects. And we know how to do it. We just have to go do it. I completely agree. So what other markets when you look at export markets do you take a look at as a means for Well, I'll mention just one, which is very counterintuitive.
But, you know, I've looked at things like government supported bases around the moon. You know, it's it's very difficult to see how if governments are going to send expeditions to Mars, for example, how they're gonna do that without there being some kind of facility somewhere in Earth Moon space. Mhmm. And if you ask what's what are the what do those people need that they can't recycle? The answer is food.
It's it's very, very challenging to think about how a small outpost that might have 2 or 4 or 6 people in it around the moon somewhere to support government activities is gonna get their food. You'd have to bring it all from Earth. Mhmm. Well, it's a lot cheaper to bring it up from the moon. And if there's a lunar activity, you know, food's the first thing they're gonna need. It's an extremely I mentioned it only because it's such a low tech product.
You know, people don't think about that as being a thing. But, again, if you look at at all the past kinds of colonization experience that we've ex conducted on the Earth, you know, about the first thing that you have in surplus in a colony is food. So we'd be take we'd be growing food in terms of fruits and vegetables, in these new cavernous facilities. And could we be are you also assuming that we'd be, biosynthesizing our proteins at this point?
Let's go 5 years down the road from now or whatever the timeline may be that we would not be using animal based protein, but we'll be able to synthesize any type of proteins we'd like and be able to to do that on the moon? No. Because I think, again, that's gonna be a very high-tech industry. Okay. I think if if they want something that looks like hamburger on the moon, they're gonna have to get it the old fashioned way. Okay. So what type are we just talking fruits and vegetables?
So those are the types of things that'll be shipped? I don't know. I think we're off the end of my crystal ball. Okay. But I just wanted to get people to start thinking about the concept that even something as simple as food, you know, if there's other people in near earth space, they need groceries. And the the exports from the moon don't have to be super high technology products that no one can do without. Nope. Very few past colonies had that kind of property.
They just need to be something they can sell to somebody for enough to pay for their imports. What about the the asteroids that have platinum and iron ore and other resources, the the metals that we might need on Earth. Do you see that as a market? I do. But I do I I I am I am of two minds about asteroidal resources. They're clearly there. They clearly exist, and and I think the day will come when they'll be important.
But I'm skeptical that that'll be the in the earliest days of the economic development of of space. And the reason for that is that the the asteroids that are economically most interesting are the ones that are easy to bring material back from. But because of the way the orbital mechanics work, by definition, those are asteroids that are in almost the same orbit that Earth is.
And again, by the way orbital mechanics works, those are asteroids where the chance to visit them comes very infrequently. What about astro not asteroid mining, but on the moon? Asteroids that have impacted the moon? That was where I was going next. Perfect question. Okay. Yes. There's and there's nothing you can get on an asteroid that hasn't already hit the moon. Correct. That's where all those craters come from. That's where they're from.
Yes. Yes. There are even people who think that the platinum we have on the Earth mostly comes from asteroid impacts. Right. That's what I that's what I've heard from almost everybody. But certainly, like, the water that's on the Moon is almost certainly from cometary impacts on the Moon where the water vapor that came off the cometary impact collected in the lunar poles where it's cold.
So if we were to use I'm gonna use a political situation as a means of just describing how there could be a market. Maybe you could tell me what your thought is. Up to 50% of the rare earth metals are produced, manufactured, extracted in China. And there was a conflict between Japan and China. So China turned off those rare earth metal shipments. And the Chinese manufacturing base had to scramble because it's in almost every cell phone and technology device that you have.
Yes. The US has not allowed the development, partially because it's, the extraction is extremely toxic. It's also because we don't have as much. I mean, the the small the biggest facilities we have here, I think one just went bankrupt. They're not huge as they are in in China. Politically, to be able to get rare earth metals or now rare rare moon metals might be a real incentive for organizations to participate in a marketplace of being able to do extractions.
What you say is technically possible. It it is, it it a quick correction. It's not true to say that the US doesn't have them. The US actually was the world's center of production of them Okay. Until until our environmental regulations That's what I'm saying. They're toxic to bring shut down. Yep. Well, all all mining has has some side effects.
Mhmm. You know, I'm I'm skeptical of counting on a market that is itself the subject of political whim because it can change as quickly it could change back as quickly as it changed. You know, one day, we had active mines, and the next day, we didn't. That was a political choice. If we needed rare earth metals, and we, you know, didn't have them, that political choice could be changed back. Would the moon facilitate? And my my question is It is possible.
It is technically possible, for the moon to be a source of platinum, rare earth metals, and lithium, which, of course, is becoming more important in the world economy because of its use in batteries. Yep. Though those are all available on the moon. They are not the easiest things to get from the moon, but they are there. And if there were a a political imperative to get them without unsightly side effects on the earth, what you what you speak of can be done.
Okay. It's a it's a topic for another conversation. So let's what about the social factors then? So that's the one I really wanna come hit the hardest. The among the many things that we think about in in space activity that we that are the most damaging to our ability to get there are are are the pictures in our head of what this society will be like. Because of the predominance of government agencies in the development of space, people think about it that way.
They they think about it as if these are going to be quote unquote astronauts, and they're gonna have a mission control that tells them what to do, and they're gonna and they're gonna have equipment that that's owned by somebody else. To to coin a phrase that I that I used in another speech, those aren't settlers. They're serfs. Yep. The you know, and look again at the example of Antarctica. We've had an enormous human presence in Antarctica for 50 years. They do not make one thing there.
They they don't make anything. Every single thing that everybody uses in Antarctica is flown in or shipped in, and there's that's not for technical reasons. It would be totally possible to in fact, it'd be quite easy to make the Antarctic base, you know, 90% or so less dependent on imports, But but we forbid them from doing that. We treat Antarctica as a scientific preserve. We we do not nobody who lives there owns anything that it is there. They're all just visiting. That is not gonna work.
We are we are not going to develop an economic presence off the surface of the Earth that way. If we are going to have people, they're gonna have to own their stuff. You know, they're not gonna have they're not gonna call some distant corporation or government agency and say, I had a better idea for how to make a cheaper habitat. Will you please give me permission and approve my proposal to let me go do that?
You know, if if that's the way if that's gonna govern the pace of innovation, the innovation is not gonna have a satisfactory pace. And all of our ideas, mine, yours, the best experts out there, anybody, about what's gonna work and what's not gonna work in this very new environment are gonna seem laughably naive after we've been doing it for a few years.
You know, the the after people have lived on the moon for a couple of years, the all the only experts on what it's like to live on the moon are gonna be people living on the moon. Right. So they are gonna have to have authority over the resources or at least over some of the resources that they have access to. They're gonna have to have autonomy to decide how to organize themselves, how to structure, you know, the things that we all take for granted. We don't even think about it.
You know, the the markets that we use. I'll give you an example. What we think of as owning real property is a legal construct that has developed out of centuries of common law practice where people worked out through customary use what is the right bundle of rights that you have over an asset that defines what it means when you say you own a piece of property. We can't design that now. The people who live there are gonna have to be able to design that.
And that's a very controversial issue in the space community. What you're what you're theoretically proposing or you're not theoretical. What you're proposing is that the individuals that live on on the moon get to make their own choices. Yet with every individual who goes to the moon, they bring their social construct. They bring their legal construct. They bring their norms. They bring everything with them that permeates how they are as human beings. So we also not so.
We also have an addition, probably in the earlier stages, some, let's say, country ownership that is desired, whether it be the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans, the Indians, the Japanese, the Israelis. There there are many players in this space of space, and they're going to wanna place claim to these territories. How do you facilitate or how do you believe we'll get over that hurdle to allow someone to get to this Utopian design opportunity that you're proposing?
Well, I'm not sure that it's Utopian. You know, it it it's this very radical concept called freedom. You know, that that that, you know, ultimately people have a right to to self determination. They have a right to live their own life. That's your belief. Yes. It is. It is. But but but let's just say that that there's been some correlation between the between the proliferation of that belief and economic success. You know, I I you do know I I live part of every year.
Every month I'm in Hong Kong. It's I also call that home. I remember in my very early stages, years being there, there was an individual who is an American who said, see here. We have no violence, and there's not a lot of violence there. You don't see gun shootings. You don't see all sorts of types of activities that she didn't like. I'm not gonna say that she didn't like being American, but she didn't like it.
And she said, see, the Chinese have figured this out, and they've been able to make a difference here. So based upon what we've even seen in the political environment over the past few, past few years, I'm not so sure that we'll be able to make that jump as human beings. I know you believe in it, but I don't I I feel Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Russia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, everybody's got their own way of looking at the world. Well, they do. And, one of the great challenges in getting Okay.
In order for this to work, we're going to need to allow a lot of experimentation, and neither my preferences nor yours nor anyone else's for what will make a successful extraterrestrial society should be allowed to rule the day. That's what I really mean. I don't I don't mean that they should be free to live the way that I think they ought to live or that you think they ought to live. I mean, they should be free to live the way that they think they ought to live.
And I don't think there's gonna be just 1 You take your you take your, I was gonna say your passport, but you don't need a passport. You're gonna hop into a vessel of some sort or mechanism that gets you to the moon. And now you become no longer part of the society in which you came from. So you're no longer Canadian or you're dual citizenship or dual dual planetarium ship.
And when you're there, you now you're you're giving this openness, this ability to make new laws structure the way property rights exist, markets can exist. I will Or maybe there's maybe there's a different settlement there that, you know, has achieved true true communism in our lifetime. I may not expect it, but we shouldn't rule that out. So so it's not freedom. It's the choice to choose the society in which you'd like. Yes. Because we can't know what's gonna work there.
And yet it's it is a big rock. That's It is. And so, therefore, we could have many different types of governance on markets, not unlike the way we have it here on Earth. But what I do think so so how we're gonna get there is not all at once, but I think it's very important that people start thinking about this because right at the beginning, we're gonna the first few outposts that are or first few settlements that are there need to be cognizant of this need.
They need to be cognizant of the fact that if we try to have everybody operating with puppet strings that reach back to the earth, chances are based on past terrestrial analogs, that's not gonna work. Well, you could end up having that string until the group of individuals say we no longer want that string. Well, that's true. Like an umbilical cord that eventually gets cut.
But I think there that that if we are smart about this, even the first few settlements, there are historical analogs, You know, I've I've sometimes talked about the Merchant Adventurers Company of Tyco. Mhmm. You you know, that that there are analogs like that where, of course, the sponsoring organization or sponsoring government is going to want to retain an interest in the outcome of their investment. Yep. And that is right and proper that they should.
But there is a big difference between saying, for example, you know, we as the sponsoring company own x percent of of this asset, and, you know, we we have a mechanism for retaining the economic value that we put into this enterprise until that is paid off with interest. There's a difference between that and say and treating it with sort of the NASA or Antarctic model where there isn't even the concept that anybody owns anything or has any control over any element of their time.
That's just not gonna work. The two points. One is that I the International Space Station is somewhat of a model of where multiple, countries and individuals have lived in and worked together in a very harmonious environment. I would let's just call it simply that. Yes. I was just in one of the components of Project Moon Hut is the discussion of legal and cultural and societal changes that'll happen when people, for example, see the overview effect, which is seeing the entire Earth.
I had I was speaking to an individual in Israel. I just spoke at a few places in Israel about the topic. And this lawyer said, I'd be interested in working with you to address some of these issues as how they might rise up in the future. And I said, the challenge is not to design it. It is to think about it before we even get there. Yes. And that's that's where the billion hearts and minds of Project Moon Hut, have their foundation is.
We need to be starting to think as a as a global community what this may look like, not that we have answers. It's very different than showing up and being surprised. Yes. And I think the the point I'm I'm really trying to make, which I think we we can wrap on, is recognize the limits of our knowledge, recognize that that we cannot make all those decisions today, and we won't even be ready to make them the day that they land.
So we need to we need to structure a successful settlement so there's at least enough autonomy, enough ownership, and enough freedom among the settlers that they have the ability to try things out that we might not have expected. I love it. I love it. It's a it's a a great way to end one of our, very early podcasts. We've as as you know, Jeff, I called on you, because of our friendship and our knowing each other for these years.
Knowing that you'll bring something new to the table and as these are going to be some of the original first few podcasts, I think you laid a great foundation for some of the answers to different questions that people might be asking, on a in a global scale. So I completely appreciate you taking the time. We had some technical issues yesterday, and you were very willing to make the change and and work with us today to make this happen.
So I completely, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking the time. It's been a pleasure. So for everybody, I thank you for listening. Project Moon Hut is about 3 and a half years old at this time. And if you're interested in learning more, you can go to projectmoonhot.org. Take a look around and we're we're growing. We're developing. We have volunteers all over the world from Macedonia to Latvia, Israel, Hong Kong, Shanghai, the states.
And they're being you have the opportunity to also sign up for Project Moonhead information. Let me tell you, it's not about the sign up. We don't wanna just send you emails and information. We're going to be developing a primary dataset that will help one of our arms of Project Moon Hut, called the Alliance Development component. So please sign up. It gives us the ability to communicate with you to get you on to the next phase of development of the moon.
You can also go to facebook, dot com forward slash project moon hut and you can like us there. As well as you can go to at project moon hut on Twitter. So you can be kept abreast of some of the areas in which we feel, as Project Moon Hut's team, that your knowledge and your understanding of what's going to happen in the future will help us to facilitate creating a different world. We never say the word better because better is relative. A different world for everybody on this planet.
So, Jeff, once again, thank you very much. This has been a a privilege and an honor to take the time to learn from you today, and I did learn a lot. So thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm David Goldsmith. Thank you for listening, and we hope you listen to the next podcast from the Age of Infinite, Project Moon Hawk podcast series. Thank you. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to your edition of the Project Moon Hut podcast series, the Age of Infinite.
For many of you who don't know, the podcast series has been designed for the Project Moon Hut movement to give you some type of explanation of what's happening within the space industry and more specifically within the auspices or the the region called Mearth, where we're trying to develop sustainable life on the moon by accelerating a space based economy and helping to facilitate that on Earth. Our guest today on the line is Jeff Grayson. Hello, Jeff. How are you? Fine. Thank you.
Jeff and I met approximately two and a half, three years ago at the Pioneering National Space Summit in Washington DC. A 100 of the, I would say, top, maybe Jeff that's a good way to say it, top individuals in the space industry got together. There were 7 astronauts. I don't know if the administrator was there, but there were plenty of people who would put up the space shuttle. And this was an American based meeting, and that's the first time we've gotten together.
Jeff doesn't realize that I think I had met him, the year earlier at the Global Technology Symposium where he had also spoken on the space industry. And from his background, Jeff has been around, since 1997 in terms of the space industry. He worked for Rotary Rocket, and he since founded, XCOR, Aerospace and Agile Aero, as well as some other industries. So other companies. So he's been around for a long time. So let's get to the meat of things.
Our our topic today is homesteading the moon, a different vision of the future. Jeff, did you bring some bullet points or some topics that we're gonna be covering today? I do. Really just 4 segments. I wanna talk about what real settlement is. I wanna talk about a low technology approach settlement.
I wanna talk about the export markets that settlers will be able to address, and then the social factors that that we take for granted that need to be rethought for what it will take to make it a viable settlement. I I like the topics. Okay. So let's start with the first one. What do you mean by a a real settlement? What what is that definition for you?
Well, we have a picture in our heads that that's come down to us, you know, from the from the space age, from all the great paintings, from all the movies that we've seen about what human activity on the moon might be like. You know? And and when when you think when people think about what that's like, they have a picture in their head.
And that picture in their head is, you know, shiny aluminum cans sitting on the surface and people sitting at consoles with blinking lights and lots of computers, and walking around in shiny space suits. And it's a very it's a vision that's synonymous with Von Braun's vision of what lunar development would be like, with what NASA's vision of what lunar development would be like, and there's there's no foundation under it. There's no sustainability to it.
If you look at any historical settlement activity that's gone on and we actually have many examples. We have the Polynesian colonization of the Pacific. We have things like the Nordic colonization of Iceland and Greenland. We have the colonization of the Americas. We have the westward movement. We have the Mormon colonization of Utah.
Some of these left historical records, and none of them have this highly capital intensive look where where how where you live and how you work is somehow dropped on the surface, prefabricated, and the artifacts that people use and the the economy that they build is mostly made up of the things that they brought with them. That is just not how economic activity takes place.
So you're seeing that so if I'm getting it right, you're telling me that everything that we've heard about or seen is basically a transposition of what we believe Earth is like, so therefore, we're going to have similar types of lifestyle on the moon. Or the what we what we believe that things like the International Space Station are like. So we envision something like the International Space Station being on the moon, or something like you saw in 2,001.
So you think think about something like that being on the moon. Yep. But but if you go a layer deeper and you say kind of what's holding this up? You know, what what are those people doing? Why might they be there? Who's paying for all that? You quickly find that the the the capital cost that will be required to set something like that up for a large population is just unsustainable, but we should not be daunted by that.
You know, if you if you asked what the capital cost would be like to replicate the standard of living in England, in in the colonies of the pilgrims, you would have thrown up your hands and said that's hopeless. Mhmm. You know, nevertheless, in the fullness of time, the standard of living, you know, in the new land came to meet and eventually exceed the standard of living in the home country, but it didn't happen by importing at all. It had to be built. It had to be grown.
There's an organic character to a functioning economy. And if we're going to have what what I think of as a real settlement as is distinct from some kind of outpost, is distinct from people who are there just because they're all supported by the umbilical that's coming back from the home country or in this case the home planet.
If if they're if those people treat the new land as home, they're gonna live there, they're gonna work there, they're gonna make their stuff there, and they're gonna have something to do, some economic activity, most of which is going to be selling their goods and services to each other, some of which needs to be selling things back to the home country to pay for their imports.
But it's it's a very different vision of the future than 6 highly paid, well trained civil servants taking 6 month tours in in a shiny aluminum can full of blinking lights. So just, are we are you saying that you believe that we'll be able to create sustainable life, self sustainable life on the moon? Or will we be, sustainable using Earth as a means of facilitating items that we can't build, grow, develop on the moon?
Well, I think it's gonna be a long time before any extraterrestrial settlement is self sufficient in a material sense. But then Japan and Hong Kong aren't self sufficient in a material sense, but they don't have to be subsidized. So I'm speaking of settlements that are self sufficient in an economic sense. Okay. That that they don't they don't have to be, you know, taxpayer funded as an active charity into perpetuity. And I agree with you.
I I think that the it's not going to be taxpayer driven to be able to succeed, and that's one reason Project Moon Hut is around. We believe that we can add that value. Okay. So I agree with you completely. Okay. Well, in order to achieve that vision, requires thinking through the artifacts that will be used, the habitat space, the way the economy is going to work, and what I think of as a very low technology approach. And that is a very foreign view to most space advocates.
Space people tend to be very technophile. They're comfortable with technology. That's why they get in the space industry. They think about solving problems in a very high technology way. But the if we want the an economically self sufficient activity, then as much as possible, not over not everything, but as much as possible of what people need to stay alive and to do their work needs to be made locally. We have no example of ever replicating technological civilization in a new colony.
You know, the Mhmm. There hasn't been colonization since 18th century levels of technology. Really? Yeah. That's because we at that point, we had covered everything. We've covered Pretty much. Yeah. And and we haven't colonized Antarctica yet. We're we're treating it with that kind of outpost model where everything is an umbilical back to the home country. Right. So the we don't know how many people it takes to maintain what you might call a technosphere.
Mhmm. But if you think about how global and interconnected the high technology economy is here on Earth, it's not encouraging. You know what you would you would when you think about all the artifacts, and all the specialized industries that it takes to make these artifacts, it seems like a huge endeavor. And it is. I I think one of the, moments that was, pivotal in my thinking was one day Laurie when right helping to write Pay the Things, she had made the comment.
Do you think about how much it takes to put a dinner table together? Just a Mhmm. A family dinner. I mean, you've got salt, you've got glass, you've got pepper, you've got spices, you've got meats or or fruits and vegetables, you've got plates, you've got chairs. And just to be able to facilitate something as simple as a dinner table is a highly complex, interconnected, interwoven ordeal. Absolutely.
And there's a a classic story in economics called Ipencil, which makes very much the same point, that nobody on this planet knows how to make a pencil. No. They don't. The be because of all the different pieces that have to go into one. So what's the most basic fundamental thing that you need for for people to stay alive on another planet? Well, you need you need the basics. You know, you think of those on Earth as being, you know, food, water, shelter.
On on the moon, you have to extend that to atmosphere and habitat pressure and power because there's no way to do any of these things without power. So if you just think about how to get just those things So your food water your food water shelter, atmosphere, power, and habitat Pressure. Think about that way. Okay. Yes. And and, you know, pressurized habitat volume is, in my mind, the fundamental place to begin.
Because if you if you could make more pressurized habitat volume with the materials at hand, then you could expand your economy. You could expand your living space and and house more people. And absolutely the lowest technology way to handle things like life support is to grow plants, but plants take space to grow in pressurized volume with with light coming in. And so it's the same problem. And I think about this in energy payback terms.
If you want the if you want a high gain system where the where the population and the economy can grow at a reasonable clip, the habitat space that you build needs to pay back the energy that it took to build it in some reasonable period of time. You know, if that's kind of a an energy way of thinking about payback time.
And if you run the numbers, and you think about the kind of habitat people usually visualize like aluminum cans, and you think about how much energy it would take to gather up that material, refine it into aluminum, shape it into a habitat that holds pressure and all that, it would take, like, a 100 years for the solar energy that would be converted into plant matter in that greenhouse space to be paid back.
Yep. So I started looking at that problem, and I found that there's very encouraging ways to do it that very little work has been done on. Okay. Give me the example. The most fundamental thing you have on the Moon is rocks. You're surrounded by rocks. That's kind of all you've got. Well if you if you shape rocks, you can make barrel vaults, you know, rather like Roman style architecture.
Okay. And if you pile enough of the powdered rock that makes the surface of the moon, regolith it's called, If you pile enough of that on top in a clever way that's hard to describe without pictures, the mass of that overburden, the mass of that dirt Yep. Holds the roof down against internal pressure. Like an igloo? Yeah. But it's it's again, it's hard to describe without a picture. It's it's sort of a way of, you're you're creating an arch.
You're creating a mechanism in which by putting the regolith on top of the material Right. You end up forming a structure. Right. And there's a structure where you have to kind of collect up the the the force of the mound of dirt over a large area and sort of concentrate it down onto the small igloo or the small barrel vault. Yeah. Because the pressure is large, and the gravity is low.
But when you when you cook up the numbers on that, I mean shaping rocks is about 6 orders of magnitude less energy intensive than turning rocks into metal. And the absolute lowest energy thing you can make on the moon is a mound of dirt because you're surrounded by powdered regolith. All you have to do is scoop it up. Right.
And with that kind of an approach, if you can also make glass, and you don't need nearly as much glass to let the light in as you do to hold the pressure other material to hold the pressure in, It looks like in the rough order of magnitude you can get a structure where as greenhouse space, the plants that would grow in that would pay back the energy it took to build that structure in something like a year.
So we're using we're using this barrel vault as a means to be able to facilitate creating space for the development of plants, not Well Are are we also doing this for human life? We are. But it turns out that the that that to run a biosphere, you need much more volume for the plants to operate in than you do for the people. Right. So that's what I'm saying.
The the big advantage here is we could theoretically take a section of the International Space Station for, and cut it off and put it on the moon. 8 people living in that one facility, the Winnebago on the moon.
Yes. And at the same time, in order to facilitate the plant growth, instead of trying to build domes, as well as other structures which would require either 3 d printing or new material or new material development or bringing materials from Earth which would be costly, we could take the the surface of the moon, shape it in a way, utilize that space, that cavernous space as a means to grow plants. Yes. Okay. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. You said that right.
And in some locations on the moon, you can go to an even lower tech approach. It's it's been known for a long time that there are very large caves on the moon. They're they're they're lava tubes. And because of the way of the moon's lower gravity, they grow to much larger dimensions than they do on the Earth, on the order of half a kilometer in diameter.
Wow. So I mean, instead of the this cramped little life in cans thing, there's spaces under the moon that are huge, you know, city sized, already shielded from the radiation by the thickness of the lunar crust above, just needing to be sealed off, and filled with an atmosphere to perform large habitat volumes. There's an engineering challenge in drilling the holes in the roof to let the sunlight in.
Yep. And that's you know, I I have gone back and forth on which one of those is the most practical. They're both good. They'll probably both be used depending on whether there are or aren't lava tubes near the location on the moon that a particular economic activity wants to be at. I'm I'm smiling and laughing at the same time right now. You probably know and don't know that I've only been involved or engaged in the this, let's call it, space industry for about 3, three and a half years.
And my journey being at the Pioneer International Space Summit, that was my second event ever. And the first one I went to was just 3 months earlier a month or 2 earlier at the, in Hawaii. So I've been asking questions such as, can we live underground? Do we have are there caves on the moon? I I want at one point I said to somebody, why are we trying to build everything?
Why don't we just put something on the moon in the crater and put regolith over it and that means we can shield from the radiation? And you'd be surprised how many people react in a way such as, haven't thought about that. Thinking, how have you not thought about this? You've been you've been studying this for 27 years and here I am asking you a question such as is there a place that we can go underground? And so many people don't have these answers.
So I'm glad you're mentioning that you have that we have them. Do we have empirical proof of this? I do we have we have x-ray or or sometimes No. We don't. No. What we've got is you you may or may not be familiar with lunar rills. Rills? R I l l s? R I l l e s. They kinda look like riverbeds, and what they are is collapsed lava tubes.
And there are some places where there there are what's called interrupted rilles, where you can see that the lava tube did not always collapse, so it will start and stop again. And there are a few places where we have found skylights where you where there's a hole on the lunar surface that opens up into a larger space below. Okay. So we can tell that there's a cave down there, but we can't prove how big it is without going and and visiting it.
Yeah. We can tell because of the river size that assuming that that would be the same or or similar size. Meaning, if we were to watch a river go into a mountain right now, we're going to assume that's as wide as the river that enters it. Yes. So that we can make some assumptions. You can you can see from the size distribution of the ones that have collapsed. You can see that they don't collapse below a certain size.
Okay. And that's where I get the estimate of how big would they would the would the caverns be. I I'm loving this. I'm loving this because the the low tech solution has been, I don't know, pushed aside. Is that a good way to say it? It's almost as if like as you started off saying, everybody wants to have these beautiful cities and they draw intricate diagrams and they sell it to the community that this is what space is going to look like.
Yes. And the entire time I've been working on this project, the Project Moon Hut, one of the things we've been talking about is how can we do this inexpensively? Not $500,000,000,000, but how can we use what is on the moon and facilitate making this happen faster? And this is a great this is a great piece of insight for me, at least, to understand there's an opportunity out there. Yes. And the the next larger problem is power.
Okay. You need a lot of power to do things on the moon because, you know, everything there starts as a rock. So anything complicated that you wanna make takes a lot of power to make. And, again, there are people immediately jump to things like solar cells. Solar cells take an enormous industry to make. I mean, if you just think about it, we've we've only in the last 10 years have we got to the point where we know how to make cost effective solar cells. That's a very high technology product.
But if you can make any metals at all on the moon, you can make big mirrors because any metal that you make on the moon will stay shiny because there's no air to oxidize it. Right. So you can do much lower tech things where you just put up big mirrors and use that to either collect heat or to drive a very low tech 19th century heat engine. You know?
It's boil boil the working fluid and turn a turbine, or boil a working fluid and move pistons to get mechanical power that that they would have recognized in England in the 1800. We're talking about 2 sides of the moon, and I I made the early mistake in this industry of calling it the dark side. So we've got the, the the far side Yes. And, that's at 100 degrees, minus 180. Is that what it's correct? It's minus 180 and plus 100 on the sun facing side.
Can't we just use, at least on half of the time that we're there, can we use that a 180 a 100 degrees Fahrenheit Celsius temperatures and not have to go too crazy with creating mirrors and all of that where the heat will just start turning engines or motors? Well, the the temperature difference there is okay. I don't know if that's a good question. It's a good question.
Okay. There are no bad questions, but but the for for fundamental technical reasons, the less the temperature differences that you're trying to work across, the more machinery it takes to get power. Okay. So the it it there however, you're onto a good thing there, which is the the biggest challenge after getting the power in the first place is how do you keep the power on during the night, which lasts 2 weeks.
Yep. And the very lowest tech approach I've seen on that is you heat rocks, either till they're till they're hot rocks or until they're molten rocks, and then you extract. You use that source of heat over the night to keep running your heat engines that you normally powered with hot sunlight during the day. You don't get as much power that way, but it's still way cheaper than bringing up batteries from Earth.
So it's just like the wood burning stoves that ended up putting the soap stone on the sides? Yes. Because soap stone is a good, holder. I'm one word. I can, holder of heat for a period of time so it can maintain it for longer than normal cast iron or any type of metal. So okay. And when you're doing it for 14 days, you have to the numbers are such that you have to put a little more ingenuity into it than that, but Yeah. The principle is the same.
Okay. So and then lastly, the big thing you need is, you know, volatiles. Do we we call them things like oxygen, water, car you know, a source of carbon to feed your plants with. But now we know that all those things are available at the lunar poles. Right. So it seems very obvious that that an early outpost will come near the lunar poles. A an obvious question to which we do not yet know the answer is, do there happen to be convenient caves conveniently close to the lunar poles?
That's a good question that we don't know the answer to. So we're we're talking about having a like, on the interstate, being able to pull off at the right place and be able to get food. So let me ask you this or if I can ask for a definition, or clarity. That's probably a better word. Oxygen, water, carbon, nitrogen, what we need to for human life to exist. Most of the people I'm assuming who will be listening don't know that there is water on the moon.
I was just with an individual who is invested heavily in space and I shared with him that the comment. I showed him the pictures and he said, I didn't know this. It it's probably the most significant thing that's been discovered as far as human expansion beyond the Earth in my lifetime. You know, it was theorized, but it was treated as a very wild theory 30 years ago. And since then, the evidence has gotten stronger and stronger to the point where it's essentially overwhelming at this point.
It is it is hard to understand without getting deep into the politics of how we do space, why no one has sent a sampling mission to see what's the physical state of the ice there. But we did drop an impactor into it. We dropped a spent rocket stage in and and analyzed the gases that came off the crater. And from that, we know that there is methane and ice in some form.
Nitrogen is likely to be scarce, but it that's of all the things you'd have to import, that's the least troublesome because the nitrogen that the human beings use cycles over and over again. Very little of the mass involved is nitrogen in the ecosystem. So you just because it's the first time it's being brought up, you said a a spent rocket stage and you called it an impactor. Is an impactor just a definition for something that we threw at the moon?
Is it theoretically we took something so that individuals can understand this, is we took some, some big piece of mass. We threw it at the moon. We crashed it in it. The poles. Threw a plume threw up a plume. We were able to use spectroscopy across it, be able to see that within the plume there were ice crystals, and we were able to identify that there existed water on the moon. And since then, we've done other types of work to be able to identify where that sits. Is that kind of correct?
Yes. Okay. So now we've got the basics of how you could have people on the moon, then you have the basics of how they could start to build the overwhelming majority of the of the mass of stuff they need from local resources. But they're obviously not gonna be able to make everything. They're they're not gonna be materially independent. So however small their imports may be, they're not going to be 0. And if they're economically self sufficient, they have to pay for them somehow.
So then you come to the critical problem of export markets, or as I also sometimes call them, cash crops. You know, almost all successful colonies have something that they send back to the home country to pay for their imports. And that's the one of the reasons or one of the many reasons that explorers went on journeys and expeditions. It was to find something that a trade route could be formed and product could be sold between 2 markets. Right.
Now historically, one of the most frequent cash crops is real estate. You know, if you think about that, in essence, by building out habitat volume on the moon, you are creating real estate, which and if you can create the real estate much faster than you need because it doesn't take that long to pay back, then you've you can sell that to the next people who want to come. The people have talked about other markets. It's hard to know which one's going to be the most important.
An obvious near term one is water for rocket propellant. There's there's no way you're gonna be traveling to and from the moon without needing that because you need to refuel the ships that land on the moon so they can be used over and over again. It is it is an obvious thing to say, can we find other customers for that? There are some. Unfortunately, one of the likely major customers for that would be governments. Yep. And that's an unpredictable market.
But you could also envision selling it to companies that, for example, want want to carry satellites up to geostationary orbit, and that's one potential market. In the and there are various materials that people have talked about exporting from the moon. Some of them are not very credible. Some of them are maybe potentially credible. I think the long term one is going to be that solar power in some form or another can be collected in space and used to power the Earth.
Yes. And that the economics of that with all the solar cells being manufactured on the Earth and brought from Earth are questionable. You know? Some people think it will make sense. Some people think it won't make sense. I don't think anybody really knows for sure. But it's inarguable that the economics of that get enormously better if you can use most of the mass of that construction to come from somewhere that's already off the Earth.
Yes. And there's there's a 100 schemes for doing that, and I'm not gonna opine on which one is best. But the the I think that energy market energy is one of the largest industries on Earth. I think that the moon serving as a source of materials, whatever they might be, possibly manufacture artifacts, but at least just raw mass, to to form and support the future energy industry is a very likely export market.
Yes. And and the by accelerating the space based economy, the expectation or the hope is that innovation will be driven by the access to low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, high Earth orbit, or anywhere in between, from the moon to Earth or from the moon to, within the space of Mearth, we're calling, between the moon and Earth. That gives us opportunities to change how we live on Earth.
And I think one of the challenges that when peep when individuals are talking about space, there are other space enthusiasts and they love this love space and they're interested in space. Yet the real opportunity lies in if we do what we're talking about, we can make earth a different place to live. You could be warm warm all winter and cold during the summer with no cost of energy or we can you we can clean the air with devices that today are expensive to run with energy.
But yet if energy became a cost of 0 or a minimal cost, then we could facilitate cleaning the air or the water and or any others type means of production that we'd like to use them use it for. Well, I I like to use an even nearer term analogy than that.
Okay. If if you if you look at the difference in per capita energy between, you know, the industrialized world and the part of the world where the people are living in poverty, and you ask how much energy would would it would it take if the if the country is currently in poverty came up to the standard of living of the industrialized countries? Well, it would take about 15 terawatts. All of Earth civilization today uses about 50 terawatts.
We we do not have the ability to increase our energy production by that fraction right now. Here's a number. The first, about 7 years ago when I first started visiting Hong Kong, and the SCMP, their newspaper had on the front cover, that if the world lived using the same resources that are utilized in the Hong Kong community every day for food, water, shelter, transportation, communication, entertainment, you'd need 13 more Earths just to fulfill that need? I think those numbers are wrong.
But but even if we only need another 5th of an earth, we don't happen to have one. No. We don't. And I'm just reading what was in the paper. I just thought it was a an interesting take on the fact that we do spend in the industrialized world. We spend a tremendous amount, and this would facilitate or change the way we live. Yes. And and it's a it's a very clean form of power. It it doesn't have nearly every form of power has some side effects, but has many fewer than most other forms of energy.
And if you expect that the economy is gonna continue to grow and perhaps the population is gonna continue to grow, that need for more energy is just gonna continue to grow. And and you, you know, there's a lot of politics and a lot of ideology that different people have about different aspects of the energy industry, and and I don't and I think that whole argument is in some sense beside the point. Arguing over whether we should do more or less of this or that energy is kind of beside the point.
The real point is we need more. Yes. And and we need it to be cheaper, not more expensive. And we need it to be less, not more environmentally damaging, so that we can continue to use more of it without an unacceptable environmental side effects. And we know how to do it. We just have to go do it. I completely agree. So what other markets when you look at export markets do you take a look at as a means for Well, I'll mention just one, which is very counterintuitive.
But, you know, I've looked at things like government supported bases around the moon. You know, it's it's very difficult to see how if governments are going to send expeditions to Mars, for example, how they're gonna do that without there being some kind of facility somewhere in Earth Moon space. Mhmm. And if you ask what's what are the what do those people need that they can't recycle? The answer is food.
It's it's very, very challenging to think about how a small outpost that might have 2 or 4 or 6 people in it around the moon somewhere to support government activities is gonna get their food. You'd have to bring it all from Earth. Mhmm. Well, it's a lot cheaper to bring it up from the moon. And if there's a lunar activity, you know, food's the first thing they're gonna need. It's an extremely I mentioned it only because it's such a low tech product.
You know, people don't think about that as being a thing. But, again, if you look at at all the past kinds of colonization experience that we've ex conducted on the Earth, you know, about the first thing that you have in surplus in a colony is food. So we'd be take we'd be growing food in terms of fruits and vegetables, in these new cavernous facilities. And could we be are you also assuming that we'd be, biosynthesizing our proteins at this point?
Let's go 5 years down the road from now or whatever the timeline may be that we would not be using animal based protein, but we'll be able to synthesize any type of proteins we'd like and be able to to do that on the moon? No. Because I think, again, that's gonna be a very high-tech industry. Okay. I think if if they want something that looks like hamburger on the moon, they're gonna have to get it the old fashioned way. Okay. So what type are we just talking fruits and vegetables?
So those are the types of things that'll be shipped? I don't know. I think we're off the end of my crystal ball. Okay. But I just wanted to get people to start thinking about the concept that even something as simple as food, you know, if there's other people in near earth space, they need groceries. And the the exports from the moon don't have to be super high technology products that no one can do without. Nope. Very few past colonies had that kind of property.
They just need to be something they can sell to somebody for enough to pay for their imports. What about the the asteroids that have platinum and iron ore and other resources, the the metals that we might need on Earth. Do you see that as a market? I do. But I do I I I am I am of two minds about asteroidal resources. They're clearly there. They clearly exist, and and I think the day will come when they'll be important.
But I'm skeptical that that'll be the in the earliest days of the economic development of of space. And the reason for that is that the the asteroids that are economically most interesting are the ones that are easy to bring material back from. But because of the way the orbital mechanics work, by definition, those are asteroids that are in almost the same orbit that Earth is.
And again, by the way orbital mechanics works, those are asteroids where the chance to visit them comes very infrequently. What about astro not asteroid mining, but on the moon? Asteroids that have impacted the moon? That was where I was going next. Perfect question. Okay. Yes. There's and there's nothing you can get on an asteroid that hasn't already hit the moon. Correct. That's where all those craters come from. That's where they're from.
Yes. Yes. There are even people who think that the platinum we have on the Earth mostly comes from asteroid impacts. Right. That's what I that's what I've heard from almost everybody. But certainly, like, the water that's on the Moon is almost certainly from cometary impacts on the Moon where the water vapor that came off the cometary impact collected in the lunar poles where it's cold.
So if we were to use I'm gonna use a political situation as a means of just describing how there could be a market. Maybe you could tell me what your thought is. Up to 50% of the rare earth metals are produced, manufactured, extracted in China. And there was a conflict between Japan and China. So China turned off those rare earth metal shipments. And the Chinese manufacturing base had to scramble because it's in almost every cell phone and technology device that you have.
Yes. The US has not allowed the development, partially because it's, the extraction is extremely toxic. It's also because we don't have as much. I mean, the the small the biggest facilities we have here, I think one just went bankrupt. They're not huge as they are in in China. Politically, to be able to get rare earth metals or now rare rare moon metals might be a real incentive for organizations to participate in a marketplace of being able to do extractions.
What you say is technically possible. It it is, it it a quick correction. It's not true to say that the US doesn't have them. The US actually was the world's center of production of them Okay. Until until our environmental regulations That's what I'm saying. They're toxic to bring shut down. Yep. Well, all all mining has has some side effects.
Mhmm. You know, I'm I'm skeptical of counting on a market that is itself the subject of political whim because it can change as quickly it could change back as quickly as it changed. You know, one day, we had active mines, and the next day, we didn't. That was a political choice. If we needed rare earth metals, and we, you know, didn't have them, that political choice could be changed back. Would the moon facilitate? And my my question is It is possible.
It is technically possible, for the moon to be a source of platinum, rare earth metals, and lithium, which, of course, is becoming more important in the world economy because of its use in batteries. Yep. Though those are all available on the moon. They are not the easiest things to get from the moon, but they are there. And if there were a a political imperative to get them without unsightly side effects on the earth, what you what you speak of can be done.
Okay. It's a it's a topic for another conversation. So let's what about the social factors then? So that's the one I really wanna come hit the hardest. The among the many things that we think about in in space activity that we that are the most damaging to our ability to get there are are are the pictures in our head of what this society will be like. Because of the predominance of government agencies in the development of space, people think about it that way.
They they think about it as if these are going to be quote unquote astronauts, and they're gonna have a mission control that tells them what to do, and they're gonna and they're gonna have equipment that that's owned by somebody else. To to coin a phrase that I that I used in another speech, those aren't settlers. They're serfs. Yep. The you know, and look again at the example of Antarctica. We've had an enormous human presence in Antarctica for 50 years. They do not make one thing there.
They they don't make anything. Every single thing that everybody uses in Antarctica is flown in or shipped in, and there's that's not for technical reasons. It would be totally possible to in fact, it'd be quite easy to make the Antarctic base, you know, 90% or so less dependent on imports, But but we forbid them from doing that. We treat Antarctica as a scientific preserve. We we do not nobody who lives there owns anything that it is there. They're all just visiting. That is not gonna work.
We are we are not going to develop an economic presence off the surface of the Earth that way. If we are going to have people, they're gonna have to own their stuff. You know, they're not gonna have they're not gonna call some distant corporation or government agency and say, I had a better idea for how to make a cheaper habitat. Will you please give me permission and approve my proposal to let me go do that?
You know, if if that's the way if that's gonna govern the pace of innovation, the innovation is not gonna have a satisfactory pace. And all of our ideas, mine, yours, the best experts out there, anybody, about what's gonna work and what's not gonna work in this very new environment are gonna seem laughably naive after we've been doing it for a few years.
You know, the the after people have lived on the moon for a couple of years, the all the only experts on what it's like to live on the moon are gonna be people living on the moon. Right. So they are gonna have to have authority over the resources or at least over some of the resources that they have access to. They're gonna have to have autonomy to decide how to organize themselves, how to structure, you know, the things that we all take for granted. We don't even think about it.
You know, the the markets that we use. I'll give you an example. What we think of as owning real property is a legal construct that has developed out of centuries of common law practice where people worked out through customary use what is the right bundle of rights that you have over an asset that defines what it means when you say you own a piece of property. We can't design that now. The people who live there are gonna have to be able to design that.
And that's a very controversial issue in the space community. What you're what you're theoretically proposing or you're not theoretical. What you're proposing is that the individuals that live on on the moon get to make their own choices. Yet with every individual who goes to the moon, they bring their social construct. They bring their legal construct. They bring their norms. They bring everything with them that permeates how they are as human beings. So we also not so.
We also have an addition, probably in the earlier stages, some, let's say, country ownership that is desired, whether it be the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans, the Indians, the Japanese, the Israelis. There there are many players in this space of space, and they're going to wanna place claim to these territories. How do you facilitate or how do you believe we'll get over that hurdle to allow someone to get to this Utopian design opportunity that you're proposing?
Well, I'm not sure that it's Utopian. You know, it it it's this very radical concept called freedom. You know, that that that, you know, ultimately people have a right to to self determination. They have a right to live their own life. That's your belief. Yes. It is. It is. But but but let's just say that that there's been some correlation between the between the proliferation of that belief and economic success. You know, I I you do know I I live part of every year.
Every month I'm in Hong Kong. It's I also call that home. I remember in my very early stages, years being there, there was an individual who is an American who said, see here. We have no violence, and there's not a lot of violence there. You don't see gun shootings. You don't see all sorts of types of activities that she didn't like. I'm not gonna say that she didn't like being American, but she didn't like it.
And she said, see, the Chinese have figured this out, and they've been able to make a difference here. So based upon what we've even seen in the political environment over the past few, past few years, I'm not so sure that we'll be able to make that jump as human beings. I know you believe in it, but I don't I I feel Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Russia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, everybody's got their own way of looking at the world. Well, they do. And, one of the great challenges in getting Okay.
In order for this to work, we're going to need to allow a lot of experimentation, and neither my preferences nor yours nor anyone else's for what will make a successful extraterrestrial society should be allowed to rule the day. That's what I really mean. I don't I don't mean that they should be free to live the way that I think they ought to live or that you think they ought to live. I mean, they should be free to live the way that they think they ought to live.
And I don't think there's gonna be just 1 You take your you take your, I was gonna say your passport, but you don't need a passport. You're gonna hop into a vessel of some sort or mechanism that gets you to the moon. And now you become no longer part of the society in which you came from. So you're no longer Canadian or you're dual citizenship or dual dual planetarium ship.
And when you're there, you now you're you're giving this openness, this ability to make new laws structure the way property rights exist, markets can exist. I will Or maybe there's maybe there's a different settlement there that, you know, has achieved true true communism in our lifetime. I may not expect it, but we shouldn't rule that out. So so it's not freedom. It's the choice to choose the society in which you'd like. Yes. Because we can't know what's gonna work there.
And yet it's it is a big rock. That's It is. And so, therefore, we could have many different types of governance on markets, not unlike the way we have it here on Earth. But what I do think so so how we're gonna get there is not all at once, but I think it's very important that people start thinking about this because right at the beginning, we're gonna the first few outposts that are or first few settlements that are there need to be cognizant of this need.
They need to be cognizant of the fact that if we try to have everybody operating with puppet strings that reach back to the earth, chances are based on past terrestrial analogs, that's not gonna work. Well, you could end up having that string until the group of individuals say we no longer want that string. Well, that's true. Like an umbilical cord that eventually gets cut.
But I think there that that if we are smart about this, even the first few settlements, there are historical analogs, You know, I've I've sometimes talked about the Merchant Adventurers Company of Tyco. Mhmm. You you know, that that there are analogs like that where, of course, the sponsoring organization or sponsoring government is going to want to retain an interest in the outcome of their investment. Yep. And that is right and proper that they should.
But there is a big difference between saying, for example, you know, we as the sponsoring company own x percent of of this asset, and, you know, we we have a mechanism for retaining the economic value that we put into this enterprise until that is paid off with interest. There's a difference between that and say and treating it with sort of the NASA or Antarctic model where there isn't even the concept that anybody owns anything or has any control over any element of their time.
That's just not gonna work. The two points. One is that I the International Space Station is somewhat of a model of where multiple, countries and individuals have lived in and worked together in a very harmonious environment. I would let's just call it simply that. Yes. I was just in one of the components of Project Moon Hut is the discussion of legal and cultural and societal changes that'll happen when people, for example, see the overview effect, which is seeing the entire Earth.
I had I was speaking to an individual in Israel. I just spoke at a few places in Israel about the topic. And this lawyer said, I'd be interested in working with you to address some of these issues as how they might rise up in the future. And I said, the challenge is not to design it. It is to think about it before we even get there. Yes. And that's that's where the billion hearts and minds of Project Moon Hut, have their foundation is.
We need to be starting to think as a as a global community what this may look like, not that we have answers. It's very different than showing up and being surprised. Yes. And I think the the point I'm I'm really trying to make, which I think we we can wrap on, is recognize the limits of our knowledge, recognize that that we cannot make all those decisions today, and we won't even be ready to make them the day that they land.
So we need to we need to structure a successful settlement so there's at least enough autonomy, enough ownership, and enough freedom among the settlers that they have the ability to try things out that we might not have expected. I love it. I love it. It's a it's a a great way to end one of our, very early podcasts. We've as as you know, Jeff, I called on you, because of our friendship and our knowing each other for these years.
Knowing that you'll bring something new to the table and as these are going to be some of the original first few podcasts, I think you laid a great foundation for some of the answers to different questions that people might be asking, on a in a global scale. So I completely appreciate you taking the time. We had some technical issues yesterday, and you were very willing to make the change and and work with us today to make this happen.
So I completely, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking the time. It's been a pleasure. So for everybody, I thank you for listening. Project Moon Hut is about 3 and a half years old at this time. And if you're interested in learning more, you can go to projectmoonhot.org. Take a look around and we're we're growing. We're developing. We have volunteers all over the world from Macedonia to Latvia, Israel, Hong Kong, Shanghai, the states.
And they're being you have the opportunity to also sign up for Project Moonhead information. Let me tell you, it's not about the sign up. We don't wanna just send you emails and information. We're going to be developing a primary dataset that will help one of our arms of Project Moon Hut, called the Alliance Development component. So please sign up. It gives us the ability to communicate with you to get you on to the next phase of development of the moon.
You can also go to facebook, dot com forward slash project moon hut and you can like us there. As well as you can go to at project moon hut on Twitter. So you can be kept abreast of some of the areas in which we feel, as Project Moon Hut's team, that your knowledge and your understanding of what's going to happen in the future will help us to facilitate creating a different world. We never say the word better because better is relative. A different world for everybody on this planet.
So, Jeff, once again, thank you very much. This has been a a privilege and an honor to take the time to learn from you today, and I did learn a lot. So thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm David Goldsmith. Thank you for listening, and we hope you listen to the next podcast from the Age of Infinite, Project Moon Hawk podcast series. Thank you.