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Comment by redahs | Hacker News Reader

There's not much reason to settle the moon and mars prior to the remote establishment of an independent food supply. Aggressive remote terraforming through domes, mirrors, foreign microorganisms, explosives, and robots should come first. Establishing automated synthetic systems on these rocks to mimic what nature provides for free on Earth is the hard problem to be solving. Without such systems already place, wages will be extremely low and no one will want to live there.

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It may be easier to undertake a massive industrial operation on an unfamiliar celestial body when there is a human around to oversee things first-hand and troubleshoot issues when (not if) they arise.

First Lunar habitats are going to be mostly underground anyway, and nuclear-powered. Not much is needed to terraform.

I'm constantly "impressed" (not in a good way) at how good some people are at saying completely unfounded statements as fact. There is literally no reason to believe either premise of most bases being underground, nor is there to believe nuclear power will be the dominant power source. We have a hard time getting RTGs inside steel boxes capable of surviving disasters into orbit.

You don't need the reactor working, or assembled, on the way to the destination. Consider a pebble-bed design.

Digging underground is a reasonable way to get a massive layer of radiation protection without carrying it with you. This is important when you are just starting a long-term habitat. Later designs can of course be different.

1) The issue isn't limited to the existence of the reactor. It is linked to the public perception of anything nuclear being launched into the air. A commercial/proven pebble-bed reactor doesn't even exist yet, and last I heard they only started the first design in 2018.

Digging underground is reasonable if your only requirement is "block radiation". Its less reasonable when requirements also include 'get the digging machines into space', 'have it survive landing', and 'learn all the new fun techniques required to dig into lunar regolith in a low g environment with never before tested or used techniques and equipment'

There are already big suitable underground spaces in the form of lunar lava tubes. Those should help massively with bootstrapping of any undrground lunar colony.

Actually, its not hard to make RTG that survives reentry, multi RTGs did just that, one of them even being relaubchen after they recovered it.

Also since some rather missinformed protests back in IIRC cassini times I don't thin anyone really cares about modern RTGs being launched these days.

Viability due to public opinion is a reason. I think that NASA has been successful enough in popularizing the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets, 'Planetary Protection', that any plan for 'aggressive remote terraforming' would be met with public outcry, for the sake of preserving areological history.

"the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets"

I think their ideal is to protect planets from interfering with their ecosystems unintentionally. Microbial contamination, for example. Especially Mars, since we don't know what kind of life, if any, existed or currently exists there. Also some of Saturn's and maybe Jupiter's moons. But I think if there were ever a strategic reason and viable option to terraform one of those bodies, which I think is pretty unlikely anyway, NASA would probably consider it. But by that time, I think it's extremely likely that NASA and the USA probably wouldn't exist as we know it anyway.

NASA states that the first goal of Planetary Protection is to "Carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by terrestrial organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft in order to guarantee the integrity of the search and study of extraterrestrial life, if it exists." [0]

It does seem that unintentional interference is the main concern, but intentional interference almost certainly won't be considered on the relevant timescale, which is now until the first Mars landing, since aggressive terraforming was posed as an alternative to unsustainable Martian colonies.

[0] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection

Please, leave Mars’s surface alone! We’re merely starting to explore it and we don’t understand it. Don’t ruin it before we have a chance to.

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