RETRO MECHANICAL TECH ON THE MOON by Dave Dietzler 2008 Imagine retro mechanical technology on the Moon instead of the latest electrical and electronic gadgets and machines. Here's why: 1) complex manufacturing processes may be limited until a really large industrial base grows.....until then it will be easier to cast scissors and make razor blades than it will be to make fancy electric beard trimmers and electric razors for instance. It will be easier to make a coffee pot that sits on the solar stove than it will be to make a coffee making machine... 2) Copper on the Moon, forget it, only 25 ppm Calcium can be used out-vac but in air it spontaneously ignites Aluminum? We could get it from anorthite CaAlSi2O8 that is abundant in the rugged highlands....Heres the bite...Either we electrolyze it in a flux of lithiumm flouride, two elements we have only in ppm....or we leach it with H2SO4 then take the Al2(SO4)3 and roast it to Al2O3 and electrolyze it in NaAlF6, something we'd have to import along with carbon electrodes, or carbocholrinate it to AlCl3 that won't burn up the electrodes but will require Cl present only in ppm... or solar carbothermal reduce the Al2O3 mixed with SiO2 to get a Al/Si alloy that is further purified..... Cast basaalt resists up to 98% H2SO4 and high silicon alloy iron from magma electrolysis could be used to handle H2SO4 but here's the problem....when mining He3 we heat the regolith up and get he4, CO, CO2, CH4, H2O and N2 but we have to crank the heat up higher to get SO2 that will react with H2O since the moondust has catalytic properties to form H2SO4 that will be real hard on the mining machines... So Al production present difficulties...Thus we are only going to make the minimal amount of Al on the Moon..... We can make things mechnical instead of electrical....real old fashioned stuff....and it will be highly efficient. Iron, titanium, magnesium, silicon, glass, basalt, volatiles, can all be mined from smooth maria plains...easier to work in than the rugged highlands...and the extraction processes are simpler. Lack of copper and reliance on steel bus bars and limited amounts of aluminum for wiring....thus it seems we will rely on mechanical things...how about a solar steam engine that runs a shaft to power many other machines with imported belts unless we can make belts out of glass fibre?? And with our lack of assembly lines and electrical conductors say we build one large electrical motor to run the shaft at night??? Or even use muscle power to stay in shape in the low lunar gravity?? Or use compressed air storage and a compressed air motor?? 3) lack of plastics...so we use glass fibre cloth to insulate what wires we have...and carve things from bone and make things out of metal...and use lots of returnable glass and cast basalt bottles... When we go down in sealed lava tubes and start building apartments and hotels from black casalt bricks and blocks we should encounter some interesting acoustics....we could have concert halls and big megaphones for speakers to shout thru at lectures...create new muscial inturments from cast basalt, glass and iron with steel strings...and since gravity is lower and things fall slower the fragility of these items may not be such a problem when we drop them.... We will have those funnels and pipes instead of intercoms to communicate with room service down in the lower floors of hotels... and dumbwaiters perhaps...easy to operate dumb waiters by hand crank in low lunar G....and we could have shaft and pulley in the walls and ceilings to operate ceiling fans powered by a central solar steam or stirling engine by day and by night perhaps flywheels will be capable of storing enery from the the day to run the fans as well as a central electric motor or compressed air motor... Sure, there will be low mass imported electronix...crews and tourists will take their i-pods and cell phones up there with them Also, by day we can pipe light into interiors with glass fibre optic pipes with a shutter to turn off the light....by night, how's about jars of bioluminescent salt water bacteria or glow worms?? We will just import some small amount of these then grow them to large masses and have big jars and/or aquariums full of these glowing creatures... We have discussed power grids on the Moon but a power grid with sub stations can be a real complex thing and will use lots of aluminum...so why not solar collectors and glass fibre pipes and/or mirror towers to pipe sunlight from dayside to night side???? So all you mechanical engineers, let's brainstorm up ideas about a mostly mechanical retro Moon !!!! Or are you going to leave it all up to my crazy creativity ! And think about the exotic appeal this would have to tourists down here on the highly electrified Earth. So we are buidling habitat down in sealed lava tubes where the temp will be a constant minus 4 F or minus 20 C.....but once we pipe sunlight in it will warm up to comfy temps.. Now there is a lack of carbon and halogens for refrigerant...but if we dig into the walls and floors of the tubes until we get into the cold matter we can have cold rooms for storing all sorts of things and even making ice...with No Machinery or energy drain at all...we can deliver crushed ice for ice buckets in rooms to keep wine cold...those rich tourists are going to want their wine for sure...and we can have ice boxes in rooms...just take some cast basalt or metal and use loose packed regolith for insulation or go as far as glass wool and we have ice boxes and all U have to do is call room service to have more ice sent up by dumbwaiter... As for the melt water, they can send a bucket down to room service or drink it or there will be a drainpipe down to the room serve kitchens and they will filter it and use it for cooking Won't be any microwave ovens, but so what? The chefs will cook everything up on solar and electric stoves....and if we can ever drill deep enough to obtain geothermal heat on the Moon we will tap that by night...think about deep drilling on the Moon-no ground water.... Despite the 19th century feel to all this, we will not make women where corsets and bustiers... they will bring their own clothes up to the Moon and perhaps sell some of them to permanent residents rather than bring them back to Earth...we will have leather, sheep skins and wool, hemp, some cotton cultivated in the Moon. It will probably be more productive to actually raise livestock than grow meat in culture dishes because that way we can have meat and leather and bone and use the guts for dog and cat food, fertilizer, soap, glue, etc. Europeans will eat organ meats and there will be plenty of them up there so we will sell organ meats also...we will use everything but the squeal...the livestock of course will be kept in rooms where all the manure stinky out coming air is filtered and deodorized somehow.... What about water faucetts in rooms? Will we have pressurized water or hand pumps to pump water up to rooms?? For toilets pressurized water will be more popular.. . How's about huge glass columns full of bioluminescent creatures for street lighting at nite?? Might be dimmer than the skylites and piped in sunlight by day but it would put us to a lunar rythmn..... Some people threaten me with grey goo nanobots but i say Nature already has them- a test tube full of biolum bacteria, a jar full of glow worms, a couple of calves and a tube full of sperm, seeds of all sorts for crops and fruit trees.... When the Moon is dark, the Earth is full....so the skylights and heliostats that pipe lite in by day will also pipe Earthshine into the lava tube towns by night, illuminating the places with blue-white Earth light in addition to the biolum columns or street lights that look like a tree with globes of biolum creatures in them....Nightlife on the Moon...2 weeks in a row...we will have to keep all the bars and restaurants open 24/7 365 days a year.... How bright is the full Earth and the Gibbous and quarter Earth's??? I am told the full Earth is 18.5 times brighter than the full Moon. With enough lens or mirrior area we could harvest and concentrate quite a lot of it...That in addition to bioluminescent columns should supply reasonale amounts of light by night. Will we dare burn candles?? Why not?? We just need enough air purification machinery and those lava tubes are pretty big...I guess we will make candles from vegetable oil derived wax...we could have alcohol burners with glass wicks too like the ones i had in my chemistry sets as a kid...and of course jars of biolum at cafe tables...Tritium lamps are interesting as they will supply dim light for years w/o electricity. The bars and rests on the streets will just have ice delivery from the dug out cold rooms so there will be plenty of cold drinks...CO2 for carbonated beverages will just be frozen out of the air with cryogenic air purification machines if we use them...membrane filters using imported plastic membranes might be more efficient, simpler and reliable... The farms will be illuminated by nite by a combination of red and blue LEDs and harvested Earth shine so they will still be converting CO2 to oxygen...even though plants use O2 to burn sugars in the dark their net prodution of O2 is still high enuff to keep the air breathable and we can always make enuff O2 from moondust by day and store it up for nite. We just have to filter out the CO2.... perhaps some of the cold storage rooms could serve as large dehumidifiers and we could drink water condensed out of the air instead of water from the sewage purifiers...that water could go to the farms and the crops and fruit trees will transpire it into the air...that would be clean and psycologically un-offensive unlike purified sewage water... Down in the lava tubes we will have huge periscope windows the size of picture windows to give that outside feeling at various social centers. hydroelectric power storage is a possibility for night span, but i fear risking water that way...but then again we could let the water flow from a tank then thru the turbogenerators and then to waterfalls down in the tube and down into ponds in the tubes that we swim and paddle boats around in during nitespan...then pump it back up during day when we have full power...Earthlite skinny dipping !!!! perhaps we will have big mechanical clocks that show the relative positions of Earth and Moon....And sprial stair cases leading up to air tite observatories on the surface where we look thru big scopes at planets, stars, nebulae shining bright in the vacuum never obscured by clouds so nobody ever gets let down during the crescent phases or any phase of the Earth because there is no atmosphere to scatter lite...might even have a solar scope to look at the sunspots, etc. This place is going to be great. Could we concentrate sunshine on big piles of rock by day to get them red hot and blow air thru them??? A low tech heating system. Don't touch... . We could use magnesium to make all sorts of out-vac huge reflector systems since we can make magnesium just by applying solar energy to silicothermic reductions systems.. our hunch is that magnesium will be easier to produce than aluminum...given the challenges of aluminum that aren't really that insurmountable we will be reserving aluminum for huge mass driver coils first and hi tension power lines....possibly rocket fuel....magnesium and LOX monopropellant is shock sensitive so it is no good for rocket fuel but can make an explosive...but if we can find a pressurant gas we can just blow magnesium into a rocket engine where it mixes with LOX. Simple gaseous O2 might work because I don't know that gaseous O2 and mag dust is vibration and shock sensitive... Making optical glass fibers and reflector systems is going to be crucial..lots of engineering details there for the detail minded engineers.. Leather can be tanned with tannic acid from plant sources or by smoking it over a fire...the most primitive way....Now, what if we can tan leather with solar energy??? Need leather for shoes, boots and clothing. if we have cattle we will need dewormers cause we don't want cattle with tape worms...but it don't know...could solar UV sterilize the cattle feed and kill any tapeworms or eggs in the feed??? Conceivably, we can get enough C, H and N from regolith volatile scavenging to make drugs and dewormer...but what if we use guts and manure to make drugs and chemicals too??? The meat by products are just a bunch of dead biochemicals... From; http://beef.unl.edu/FAQ/200412130.shtml This is a compilation from a number of sources. Some of them combine bones and hooves together. A good number of the products contain gelatin, which can be extracted from bones and hooves. Buttons, bone china, piano keys, glues, fertilizer, neat’s-foot oil, gelatin for photographic film, paper, wallpaper, sandpaper, combs, toothbrushes, violin string, animal feeds (meat and bone meal; bone meal for dog food), pet chews (dog and parrot), combs, gelatin candy (Gummy Bears), marshmallows, mayonnaise, gelatin, photographic film, fine bone china, pet food, vitamin capsules/gel coatings, imitation tortoise shell, imitation ivory, and foam for fire extinguishers. Also see; http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-1594/N-642web.pdf About cattle by products Though cattle are not the most efficient sources of protein, by using everything but the squeal cattle raising becomes very efficient. . Humans could tan under sunlite systems by day....and get their vitamin D if they don't like milk. A cow can give 2.5 gallons per milking and two milkings per day...so we should have plenty of milk, butter and cheese....and plenty of cold storage for it.... I can picture a lava tube with a reinforced concrete floor as Peter Kokh has drawn and trams running under the floor and down there will be the cattle feed lots and farms.... Modular buried bases will come first until we expand industry and explore for good lava tubes then prepare them for habitation. .We will make soap by mixing plant and animal fats with NaOH and CaOH...lye and lime...we could use soap for washing clothes too and bleach whites with ozone gas bubbled into the water...we can make ozone with oxygen and electricity... So we might not have electric knifes but just good steel butcher knives and hand cranked meat and bone grinders or even big bike powered meat and bone grinders...and canning will be done in old fashioned canning jars....but we should have most food fresh from the farms and feedlots and we could even yoke the cattle to a turnstyle to exercise them and develope good lean muscle meat and generate sone energy too...and our combs and toothbrushes will be made of handcarved bone...Lunans will have plenty of hobbies to keep them busy...and make a little money on the side... Sewing machines will use old fashioned foot treadles...we just won't have the industry or the conductors to make tons of electric motors and besides on the Moon keeping those muscles working to avoid atrophy will practically be a religion... Lunar workers will demand high pay if they have to go up there for four years at a time let's say, and permanent ex-patriots from Earth willl want good pay also....Now if wealthy tourists are willing to sell their stuff be it clothes, jewelry, watches, i-pods, cell phones, etc. there could be quite a business in "selling it on the Moon" Some of that fine wine made on the Moon won't be cheap and we will get their money and give it rite back to them if they sell us their stuff....And some might want to buy those made-on-the-Moon musical insturments and take them back to Earth... they might trade us small electronix and clothes for Moon made jewelry studded with shiny lunar zircon crystals...and even buy plain old Moon rocks just to have a piece of the Moon when they come home....they might buy cobalt blue stained glass items...it is easy to get cobalt from meteoric iron fines merely by using CO gas as I have written about earlier and very little cobalt goes a long way for staining glass...necklaces of cobalt blue beads...simple enough...chess sets made for titanium in 3D sintering devices and chess boards made of frosted glass for white squares and black basalt for black squares...perhaps the Ti pcs will be white and the black pcs be basalt....And we will even broadcast concerts from the Moon to Earth and make a fortune from that. Celtic Women on the Moon for instance O'Neill et al rejected incineration of trash and sewage and they rejected composting as this would pollute the air in space colonies and they recommended the Zimmerman process of wet oxidation where stuff actually burns underwater and supplies it's own energy...I agree with them; however, a while back i saw a picture of normal fruit grown in normal chemically fertilized soil, another of a GE'd fruit grown in same kinda soil, and a normal fruit grown in compost and it was biggest of the three. Compost make plant nutrients more bioavailable than chemical fertilizers do. So the challenge is to have composting chambers that we feed normal clean air into and filter/sterilize the out coming air so we don't stink up the lava tube. Can we do it??? Probably so. The Zimpro system only requires tanks, pumps, valves and plumbing but compost chambers would be even simpler and make a better fertilizer to mix with regolith....Compost itself is actually sterile because the microbes generate enough heat to kil pathogens...it's the best most natural stuff going...All we need is that out coming air purification system and there's bound to be a simple way to do it. Any ideas? We should be able to just flush manure with water out of the feedlots and into the composting chambers instead of shoveling shit...though some of us love the Moon so much we'd go up there and be butchers, cooks and shit shovelers if you give us a gas mask!!! maybe we could get enough methane from the compost pile to run a flame air purifier that makes CO2 and H2O out of all the organic gases coming off the compost and feed that to the crops to convert the CO2 to plant tissues and O2...Compost will really enhance our farm yeilds....We will still want some hydroponic solution from the Zimmerman process to feed bioluminescent bacteria so both compost and the Zimpro system will be applied. The healthiest most natural diet might be the Paleolithic diet consisting of lean meat, veggies, fruits, berries, beans and nuts....but people will want their bread and flour for biscuits and gravy, donuts, and corn meal for cornbread and corn muffins and pancakes and waffles and pastries too....so how do i intend to grind the grain and corn??? Directly from the turnstyles propelled by the cattle....with a big rolling stone on an iron shaft....that will not involve any loss of energy efficiency and it will work nite as well as day...and our chefs will have old fashioned crank up egg beaters and there will be chicken coops too...and we will flush the chicken shit to the compost chambers... We won't do any carpentry up there except for sawing up plaster board made on the Moon but we will have blacksmithing and various hand tools for working stone and basalt...our muscles aren't going to atrophy...we will carve up stone statuary too...Lunans will be an artistic breed. While it makes sense to me to do robotic exploration of the Moon for the next ten years or so and eventually do most SPS and He3 mining with robots and a crew of several hundred in space...what about a lava tube town for about 10,000 tourists and 2000 workers??? It wouldn't make sense to set up a coffee pot factory that can make a million pots a year as we would on Earth. it seems that humans would be the most versatile machines for making a wide variety of products in limited quantities. One man might know how to craft 100 different products in metal. One woman might know how to sew up hundreds of different kinds of clothing. 10,000 tourists X one month stays each = 120,000 tourists a year all using the same bottles, cookware, over and over again. And if a trip to the Moon costs only a million dollars this is a $120 billion a year industry!!! When the lunar population reaches millions it will make sense to shift away from the cottage industry and small shop model to an assembly line factory based mass production system... We might also have a he3 mining machine assembliy line going in the early days...but so many other sundry products could be made in the limited numbers needed by skilled human workers and by hobbyists in their off hours...perhaps even the tourists might go to some shops and learn how to carve bone or make a harp, etc. modern washers and dryers are rather sophisticated devices and we might not have the manufacturing base to build them in the early lava tube towns....I envision a solar powered motor running a shaft and belts and gears to rotate a numer of inclined metal drums sort of like cement mixers. Clothes will be put in and they will be filled with buckets of warm water and powdered soap added. When about 15 minutes passes by the wash machine drum will be declutched from the shaft and a valve on the bottom opened to drain the soapy warm water. Then a bucket of cold water will be added for rinse. Drying will be done by hanging clothes from a line of glass fiber with metal clothes pins. We might also make it possible to tip the drums up and fill them with water from faucetts warm and cold... This might seem really primitive but one good laundromat worker in low lunar G could handle lots of clothes... Keep the technology simple and we can make it on the Moon. The washing machines described above require only a few parts compared to the many parts of an automatic washer or diryer. So we can build many laundromats to handle the clothes of 10,000 tourists and 2,000 workers.... ALSO....consider the uses of straw to make wicker baskets and other items, even furniture and the uses of bamboo for everything from curtains, to paintings, to furnishings and flooring. We could make flutes out of bamboo also... Finally, it is possile to turn animal by products and manure into oil with heat and pressure...so we can get lubricants and even crack that oil and make drugs in a laboratory...although most tourists will bring a month or two's supply of their medications up with them... I think it is important to realize that large scale factory mass production is only worthwhile when you have millions of customers. For a small market work shops and cottage industries can make a wide variety of simple products and some complex ones to for sure. Some these shops might use 3D plastic printers to make molds in plaster, cement or sand then cast metal parts. The plastic templates would be melted down and the plastic used over and over again to make other templates. On the Moon in early decades population will be limited to several thousand so it doesn't make sense to set up a factory to make one product and a million copies of it. The cottage industry/small factory shop model will be the one to follow. Small shops with spinning wheels and looms and sewing machines and some workers for instance will be able to make enuff clothing for the Lunans. Blacksmiths will cast metal and hammer things out on their solar heated forges. Artificers will make all sorts of things from sheet metal, mostly sheet iron and steel. They will also cut screws on lathes in machine shops. Versatile human craftsman instead of assembly lines...until the Lunan population reaches millions. Cast basalt brick and cement making out-vac with the aid of robots might be the first major mass production task. See what i am saying??? Any more ideas??? |
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