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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

At least on the surface of the moon, you're going to be in darkness for 14 days every 28. This not only means you won't be generating solar power, but your battery efficiency will probably also take a hit due to the cold temperatures (not to mention, you'll have to heat things too). So you'd have to have enough batteries for 14 days.

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There's small areas at the poles which are called peaks of eternal light, but for the most part you are entirely correct.

I find those pushing solar on Mars to be more perplexing, for humans to go there we are going to need nuclear, there's simply no way around this.

Many have an understandable aversion to nuclear but for anything on other bodies the alternatives can't compete.

It’s because the people interested in exploring and settling Mars are private citizens. Nuclear power is the domain of governments and/or highly regulated entities.

What? You don't think national space agencies are interested in exploring and settling mars?

AFAIK no private company or individual has ever sent anything to mars while national space agencies have launched or tried to launch 147 missions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

C’mon, the obvious context here is SpaceX which wants to make a colonist of 1M people on Mars with solar power.

The parent comment said:

> the people interested in exploring and settling Mars are private citizens

which is what I argued against.

Also I'm pretty sure the national space agencies would like "colony of 1M people on Mars with solar power" too, and looking at the progress made they seem closer.

We shouldn’t ruin Planet A in our attempt to switch over to Plan B.

The amount of geoengineering needed to make Mars hospitable would solve all environmental problems on earth five times over.

If you try a terraforming experiment on Mars and it fails, nobody's life/house/country/etc is ruined, which isn't true of geoengineering on Earth. I agree with the sentiment that there really is no Plan B to fixing climate change but that doesn't mean the goals of space colonization and fixing climate change are contrary.

Only if the entire process is self-sufficient. For now we are burning precious Earth resources to do anthing in space.

Precious? The primary elements "wasted" in space exploration are aluminum, silicon, hydrogen, and oxygen. All of those things Earth is just lousy with. Even launching a rocket a day wouldn't put any sort of dent in the availability of any of those elements. A rocket a day also wouldn't meaningfully add to levels of harmful pollution. The Earth is really big. It has lots of pretty much everything.

Doing stuff in space is expensive in an economic sense but it's not really all that resource intensive. Most of the cost is paying people to design, test, fabricate, and operate the hardware.

Ok, but to put a rocket in space you need a surrounding economy on a specific technological level which is costly resourcewise. Could SpaceX or NASA happen in e.g. Congo, Nepal or Papua New Guinea alone?

Well okay, we can stop exploring space when we dismantle the entire industrialized world.

Terraforming on Mars would take millennia, and over that long amount of time, settlement would presumably continue and the amount of colonists would grow. Thus, eventually flaws in the terraforming effort would eventually impact on local people.

This assumes that there aren’t other life forms in space/planets.

Latest evidence is that there are no peaks of eternal light on the moon -- some craters may get upto 90%, and a fair few polar crater rims are 80%

https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/selene-data-suggests-no-per...

Or plonk three clusters of solar cells at 120 degree gaps and lay cable to connect them? No storms or weather to worry about damaging the cable and you'll always have power.

Getting 7,000 km of cabling on or below the moon’s surface and maintaining it (no storms or weather, but meteorites and radiation) may be the better choice, long-term, but I doubt it’s doable short-term.

Edit: it also won’t completely solve the power outage problem. The moon doesn’t receive direct sunlight at all during lunar eclipses, which can be over an hour.

Not 7000km if you settle at one of the pole :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_Moon#Pol...

Quote from Wikipedia : "the Moon's axis of rotation is sufficiently close to being perpendicular to the ecliptic plane that the radius of the Moon's polar circles is less than 50 km. Power collection stations could therefore be plausibly located so that at least one is exposed to sunlight at all times, thus making it possible to power polar colonies almost exclusively with solar energy. Solar power would be unavailable only during a lunar eclipse, but these events are relatively brief and absolutely predictable."

Calculate watts/kg for the total system, and be sure to include cost of heating, which comes nearly free with nukes, and you'll lean back to nuclear. The barrier to nukes is usually programmatic, not cost or technical.

I won't be surprised if this ends up solved in low-tech way - just mine and smelt 50 tons of iron/nickel and then build 1MWh Edison battery.

What's an Edison battery? I searched and did not find anything conclusive.

I meant this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

I think this is referring to a nickel-iron battery, or NiFe for short. It's old tech, but is pretty indestructible. I have 20 of them in my off-grid system.

If building stuff is an option, 14 days might not be so bad.

You can store heat as heat, cooling as ice. They already need a huge water supply, why not freeze it for cooling?

Another option, unique to the moon. Why not just run wires to the sunny side. You could probably use uninsulated wire at a pretty high voltage. Nothing to disturb it or get electrocuted up there. You could do like 5 kilovolt on a hair thin wire to get usable amount of power across the moon with maybe 200lb of it

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