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corysama 13 minutes ago [-]
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 6 minutes ago [-]
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 4 minutes ago [-]
Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone’s forgotten the smell
Bender 2 minutes ago [-]
Those 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.
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.
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.
Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you, but living in an environment with background radiation levels 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry...
Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.
tim-tday 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
card_zero 33 minutes ago [-]
Since the perchlorate is generated by reaction with sunlight, it might be limited to a surface layer.
Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
kzrdude 2 minutes ago [-]
Regolith is all the loose stuff, everything that's not bedrock, even if it might be quite deep.
lukan 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
tarr11 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
lukan 1 minutes ago [-]
Both probably, but you cannot really adapt life to no water and hard radiation. (at most sustain it in stasis, but not growing)
operatingthetan 7 minutes ago [-]
If we terraform mars, isn't the dirt still toxic?
lukan 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
cduzz 13 minutes ago [-]
Venus seems like a wonderful place to live, relatively speaking.
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
MengerSponge 37 minutes ago [-]
Mars is so bad, y'all.
darknavi 22 minutes ago [-]
If this fact piques your interest, the book Delta-v by Daniel Suarez glances off this fact and uses it to justify exploring asteroid mining instead of a colony on Mars.
imglorp 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
ck2 23 minutes ago [-]
there's a great PBS Space Time for that (of course)
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/
lucasaug 8 minutes ago [-]
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade
BFV 53 minutes ago [-]
That’s such a weirdly specific detail but also kinda fascinating. Imagine going to the Moon and the first thing you notice is “huh… smells like gunpowder.
skywhopper 10 minutes ago [-]
I just had a filling replaced at the dentist yesterday and when he was grinding away at it to shape it, I would get a terrible whiff of something like gunpowder. It was quite disturbing.
But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.
we have similar problems with volcanic ash on earth
tim-tday 42 minutes ago [-]
Exactly, but the lack of a water cycle on the moon means that all the dust is sharp and always will be.
It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact.
Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.
It degrades rubber seals.
jMyles 58 minutes ago [-]
I walked up to the flows on Fagradalsfjall when it was erupting a couple of years ago, and I found the cinereous, sulfurous air to be very medicinal and clearing. I'm not sure it'd have good for me for more than a few hours, but as it was, it was great. I occasionally wish I were able to just have a chamber with that air in it.
jjmarr 1 hours ago [-]
Have any of them developed cancer from the space asbestos yet?
porphyra 45 minutes ago [-]
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]
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 54 minutes ago [-]
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 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
bdamm 35 minutes ago [-]
It definitely puts a damper on my personal enthusiasm for visiting the moon hotel, or even encouraging researchers to live there.
altmanaltman 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
jiveturkey 56 minutes ago [-]
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ButlerianJihad 1 hours ago [-]
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gunto 53 minutes ago [-]
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labelbabyjunior 43 minutes ago [-]
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smokedetector1 39 minutes ago [-]
This is a very unpleasant comment, consider deleting.
labelbabyjunior 32 minutes ago [-]
Try leaving your bubble sometime and stepping onto a construction site, you would be in awe.
ethagnawl 39 minutes ago [-]
> no PPE needed
Says you ...
labelbabyjunior 35 minutes ago [-]
Apparently you've never had drywall work done, the level of risk these guys take in stride is shocking.
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars
Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.
Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
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.
Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FqozA4IpA
> Fine like powder, but sharp like glass
Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
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/
But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.
It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.
It degrades rubber seals.
> 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...
Says you ...