Space Exploration and Energy

The Evangelical Ecologist points to some interesting material on the possibility of getting fuel for energy from the moon. It seems to me that space exploration will really take off when we find an economic reason to go there. Spin-off technology is just not that likely to light up people’s life, and fundamental research is not sexy enough. A bit of helium-3 just might do it. πŸ™‚

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2 Comments

  1. If two square kilometres of the moon’s surface power a 1 gigawatt power station for a year, and since the average total power consumption of the human world (in 2001, and growing fast) is 13,500 gigawatts, how many years would it take to for us humans to completely destroy the surface of the moon? Well, the surface area of the moon is about 38 million square kilometres, so the answer is a bit more than a thousand years at 2001 consumption rates. So this power source may outlast fossil fuels on earth, but it won’t last for ever. Anyway, is it really appropriate for humanity to destroy a whole heavenly body in this way, or even to start to do so? After all, there is a lot more energy available which is truly renewable, such as the 174 million gigawatts received by the earth from the sun. So there is a lot more going for finding more economical ways of using this huge flux of solar energy, which will never run out, at least not for billions of years.

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