Discussion

The toxic side of the Moon

ButlerianJihad: Is that how Michael Jackson died?

jjmarr: Have any of them developed cancer from the space asbestos yet?

porphyra: Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get cancer even from brief exposures:> Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1][1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...

loloquwowndueo: Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that’d be a long time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it’s not likely to affect life expectancy I guess.

AngryData: We also have to remember that those astronauts were some of the most physically fit individuals in a nation of hundreds of millions which may skew the expected medical outcomes. Especially if we assume they always had the best healthcare available, if from nothing else than doctors asking similiar qiestions about the effects of space travel.

wat10000: The exposure was brief, too. Wikipedia says mesothelioma has been known to develop from exposures of "only" 1 month. That's a scary short time if it's in your home or workplace, but comfortably longer than an Apollo mission. Could be an issue for a future base, though.

krunck: Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars

snthpy: TIL

bdamm: It definitely puts a damper on my personal enthusiasm for visiting the moon hotel, or even encouraging researchers to live there.

altmanaltman: I mean Neil Armstrong literally smoked and did not "believe" in excercise so they were absolutely not the most physically fittest people. They were just freaks in terms of enduring a lot of stress tests. Physical endurance is just one aspect they train for. Other aspects were much more valued like them being military flight pilots/smart enough to understand the systems/mentally strong enough to not break down etc. You were not selecting for absolute raw fitness for the apollo missions.

tim-tday: Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.

MengerSponge: Mars is so bad, y'all.

lukan: Without massive terraforming all of Mars is very hostile.But having solid ground is still nice.A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.

cosmic_cheese: Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health, but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's gravity well easier.

ortusdux: This is a big perk of the newer lunar rover design, wherein the suits stay outside the vehicle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1

imglorp: Or effective decontamination performed in the airlock. There was a recent demonstration of an electrostatic repulsion device reducing dust on suit fabric which might help with sticking. And an air shower like used for clean rooms does not seem too far out.

operatingthetan: If we terraform mars, isn't the dirt still toxic?

lukan: No, as terraforming means changing that.Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.

corysama: I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone.What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder!And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.

Bender: My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 Ozone and that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual black powder or nitrocellulose? I've smelled black powder at the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that also does not smell like Ozone to me.

coffeebeqn: Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell

tarr11: I wonder if it will turn out to be easier to adapt lifeforms to the planets than to try to adapt the planets to the lifeforms.

lucasaug: When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade

hvs: If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/

helterskelter: At least some ISS astronauts describe smelling burnt metal after returning from EVA, if memory serves. (Others may smell ozone, I've just always remembered hearing burnt metal).

junon: I always heard burnt steak.

Bender: Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smellThose are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its 34F outside right now.

echelon: I don't think any of you should want to be smelling Ozone.Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The ozone species is even more oxidative.Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's also killing us. Ozone is worse."Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth the squeeze.

thescriptkiddie: the exterior of the ISS is constantly exposed to small mounts of atomic oxygen, which is an incredibly strong oxidizer. probably in addition to ozone there is a huge variety of organic and inorganic oxides that get tracked in through the airlock.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_International_Space_...

themafia: The military does not survey the population and then select the fittest. So, as a function, it cannot actually perform as you say.It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons to think these categories have good overlap.

zamadatix: They don't need to have sampled the entire population to have ended up with some of the most x individuals of the nation of y population size, they just need a large enough pool that the top end up among some of the best.

saltcured: I also associate ozone with some electric motors, I think because they have brushes that arc during operation. Older power tools I encountered in the 1980s often did this, and you could see the blue arc if you looked into the vents at the right angle.

mr_toad: > That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it.It’s really only a concern if you ingest it.

operatingthetan: In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal footing with alchemy.

wolvoleo: Doing something like that at planetary scale is science fiction anyway even if we did have the tech to do it.

generic92034: I would not be so pessimistic. Look what the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria have done for our atmosphere.

LorenPechtel: Personally, I suspect all anoxic environments will turn out to be unhealthy for humans. You'll have a bunch of reactive stuff about that on Earth would have been neutralized long ago.

nradov: Which dome construction material would be transparent to sunlight but block ionizing radiation?

LorenPechtel: 1) Why do you need sunlight?2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.

lukan: Well, I did wrote "gives sunlight" and that is a valid reply to it. But ... I would need sunlight actually. That seems somewhat possible with light tubes, but the much nicer solution, a transparent dome to still see mars clouds at day and the stars at night, is indeed not possible with current materials.