Chapter 9 Chapter 4 The Call of the Moon

For a long time, human beings have dreamed of colonizing the moon. However, the surface of the moon is nothing but a large desolate desert.This barren land has all kinds of attractive conditions, which encourage human beings to explore the moon more deeply. For thousands of years, the moon has had an enormous influence on human thought.She is often thought of as a better place than Earth, and almost every ancient civilization has its own representation of the Moon.Undoubtedly; with a bright silver light, she lightly passes over the troubled world under layers of hazy dark clouds, as if telling us that the moon is pure and the earth is chaotic.This concept is vividly expressed in the epic poems of various dynasties. For example, in a work by the satirical poet Ariosto in 1532, it is mentioned that the hero Astorph loathed life on earth. Time and wealth were wasted, vows never counted, prayers never answered, tears shed are useless, ambitions often thwarted, wishes often unfulfilled, but after he flew to the moon these problems were solved; There he found riches hung on golden hooks, royal favors forgotten, and wasted superfluous talents stored in jugs.Alexander.Poppy expanded this idea even more, and in 1714 he wrote a poem to remove the bondage, and when the bondage is gone, he says:

Some think it went to the moon, Because everything that disappears on the earth is treasured there; There the hero's wit is kept in a heavy vase; And the good ones are kept in snuffboxes and tweezers boxes. It's full of dying words, A lover's heart tied with a ribbon, The courtier's oath, the sick man's prayer, The harlot's smile, the heir's tears, Nests for gnats, yokes for fleas, Butterfly specimens and rare tomes These two examples show that the moon seems to be the mysterious answer to all human troubles, and on this golden land, all wrongs become right.People also intuitively feel that the moon is a part of human life.Oscar.Verdi tells in an amusing anecdote that when he was invited to travel to Louisiana shortly after the Civil War; seeing the desolation and misery after the war, he told his host, "Look!"How beautiful the moon is tonight!As a result, the answer he got was: yes!But you should see she was more beautiful before the war.

Until recently, this dream has not come true, and we are lucky to have a moon of this size.With a diameter of about 2,160 miles, our moon is the fifth largest in the solar system, smaller than Ganymede and Callisto on Jupiter, smaller than Titan on Saturn, and smaller than Neptune's Triton Jr.But she is larger than the moon of any other planet in this system (in comparison with the planets she orbits).Ganymede and Callisto are 12,000th and 22,000th of Jupiter respectively; Titan is 1/4,000th of Saturn, Triton is 750th of Neptune One of them, while Mars is millions of times that of his satellites, our moon is actually one-eighth the size of the earth.

Many astronomers deny that the Moon is the Moon; they say that the Moon and the Earth are a binary star, meaning that the two planets orbit each other and another major orbit around the Sun, and anything else is meaningless.They say that asking if the moon is a planet or a satellite is like asking a waitress whether a customer wants a breakfast of poached eggs on toast or toast with poached eggs.No matter what the actual situation is, among these two planets, there is much more life on one than the other.The moon is of great benefit to us. The tides she causes clean our oceans every day. She influences our culture and poetry in many ages from ancient times to the present.The moon has also had her practical value for many years.As early as 8,500 years ago, people carved various shapes of the moon on animal bones to record the length of the seasons, and this method is very precise.The Sioux Indians divide the seasons by the various shapes of the moon carved on buffalo bones. They divide the dark winter season into the snowflake moon and the hunger moon. Their spring is divided into the first awakening month and the salmon moon. Their autumn includes Leaving Leaf Moon and Bison Fighting Moon, then going back to Long Night Moon for Winter.

Since then, the existence of the moon has given us a revelation of space travel, leading to a new and exponential rise in our technology, and this progress is getting faster and faster.Today, the moon is not only a driver of tides, but also not only a symbol of lovers, she provides us with a large land and environment to develop industries and technologies. The moon is really not like what people imagined, she is a continuous desert and mountains.According to Adelin, the second human being to walk on the moon, he never saw the so-called beautiful paradise.In the first three Helios missions to the moon, it took several months to engage in analysis experiments on the brought back moon rocks. The results of the experiments made us feel that she was much better than what we actually saw, more kind many.

Humans have long wanted to establish a permanent or semi-permanent territory on the moon, but one problem people often encounter is that there is no water on the moon, and it is very expensive to transport water from the earth to such a territory.This was also the case after the initial moon landing.How the Moon formed is also hotly debated, but one fact that these contentious lunar scientists agree on is that the Moon's surface is dry and barren.The lunar rocks brought back by Helios 11 in 1969 showed that the moon is a place without hydrogen, and there is no sign of water at all, and there is no trace of water in the past.After studying these stones, a geologist said that the moon appeared to be tens of millions of times drier than the Gobi desert.Hydrogen seems to be too light for the gravitational force of the moon (the gravitational force of the moon is one-sixth that of the earth). After the formation of the moon, the hydrogen escaped from the moon and spread into space.

These facts do not mean that there is no water in the interior of the moon, there may be a thick layer of ice under the moon's surface, and this may even be the case in some craters where the sun's rays do not reach.In 1971, the Helios 14 experiment showed that she would emit water vapor from time to time, sometimes from rocks or cracks in the ground.This time the mission placed a thermionic detector in the Framauro area, which was used to record and identify any released gases.At the Third Lunar Science Conference held in Houston, Texas (October 1971), two physicists John.Freemen and Kent.After Hill reported the results of the thermionic detector experiment, the number of scientists who believed that the Moon was a cold, lifeless planet suddenly decreased.Freemen claimed that the radio signals recorded by the thermionic detector had obtained a result: for twelve consecutive hours, there was a fountain-like water vapor erupting from the gap.He and Hill believe that the ejection is a natural occurrence and has nothing to do with other lunar surface properties.Freemen said: This is a very good possibility of liquid water on the moon. It can represent a very promising future. We may use this heat energy and water source.But other scientists were very skeptical of this experiment. They did not believe that Freemen said that the moon's gas contained hydrogen.

However, future lunar residents will not be afraid of the absence of hydrogen. For liquid hydrogen, its volume is a few hundredths of that of ordinary water, and it is very economical to transport liquid hydrogen to the moon.When the hydrogen reaches the moon, it can be recycled to make water.Oxygen is not lacking on the moon, and there are a lot of iron oxide and titanium oxide in the moon rocks brought back by the sun god.As soon as a group of NASA scientists discovered these things, they asked the United States for a patent to develop a hydrogen recycling process that could supply the moon's inhabitants with an unlimited amount of water. Its procedure was very simple.A piece of oxidized metal is placed in the middle of the container, with a sun-reflecting mirror underneath, which can heat the oxide to between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.Then introduce the hydrogen gas into the container, and the water vapor after the hydrogen gas and the oxygen in the oxide are combined passes through the cooling tank, and then becomes ordinary water. This kind of procedure can be carried out quite large without spending a lot of money, at least compared with the construction of this set of equipment and the input of hydrogen. Be cheap.These experimenters found that if the oxides were randomly arranged in containers, one hundred pounds of earth-rock could yield nearly a pound of water, and that with a little refining the procedure might be even more efficient.If there is a strong magnetic field outside the container to separate the remaining metals after decomposition, a minimum of fourteen pounds of water can be obtained from one hundred pounds of soil.A human being breathes three pounds of oxygen in a day (one day on Earth); this oxygen can be analyzed from water or obtained from cultivated grain.

There is not only one source of oxygen on the moon. According to the analysis of the moon rock samples brought back by the sun god, the content of oxygen on the moon is the crown of all elements, and 75% of the elements in the moon and the earth's crust are the same Yes, ten miles down there are only two elements, silicon and oxygen.Oxygen appears in the form of oxides on the lunar crust. The following is a piece of soil brought back from the deep ocean of the moon: Oxide Lunar Rock Percentage Earth Soil Percentage Silica 40.449.2 AlO 9.45.8 Iron oxide 19.38.2 Magnesium oxide 7.28.5 CaO 11.11.1

Sodium oxide 0.52.7 Potassium oxide 0.20.3 Manganese oxide 0.30.2 TiO 10.9.4 Phosphorus pentoxide 0.10.1 Other oxides (including water) 0.72.5 One ton of oxygen can be extracted from 2.6 tons of iron ore, or one ton of oxygen from 1.1 tons of aluminum ore.That's enough to feed a person for a thousand days without recycling. Just how much water is enough for lunar inhabitants?The recycling of hydrogen is not a 100% efficient process, which means that some oxygen still has to be transported from the earth every year to be sufficient.These are not too expensive.Here I can explain that hydrogen is a very light element, and we can calculate how much hydrogen is needed initially.Assuming that each person on the moon needs ten gallons of water for a day (a day on Earth); the total payload of the Helios lunar rocket is fifteen tons, fifteen tons of hydrogen plus assuming the moon has unlimited oxygen can make a One hundred and thirty-five tons of water, that is, 30,240 gallons of water. If one person consumes ten gallons a day and there are one thousand lunar residents, then these fifteen tons of hydrogen must be consumed every three days. Cycle once, if it is used by 100 people, it needs to cycle once every 30 days.If you add industrial applications, this needs much more.We add 40 times the hydrogen that was initially brought into the moon, that is, the total hydrogen carried by the 40 Helios ships is 600 earth tons, which can produce 1.2 million gallons of water.Assuming that the recycling plant is functioning properly; and that the percentage of hydrogen consumed is within acceptable limits, we can say that the lunar inhabitants need only an initial six hundred tons plus an annual replenishment of fifty tons.As for other water-making element oxygen, we can see that there is almost no limit on the moon. There are enough titanium oxide and other oxides on the moon to supply 10,000 residents and drink water for 10,000 years.

We assume that there is a lack of drinking water and oxygen on the moon, but so far, the designed machines do not need electricity to do the work of transformation.This is cheaper and better than we originally thought, so we don't need any nuclear reactors and solar cells or other kinds of solar power generators to supply it.Electricity can be generated from different systems, such as the old steam generator, there is a simple concept developed by Patrick.Moore and Anthony.Michael proposed that the four power plants are located on the four sides of the moon. During the daytime on the moon, each power plant has the opportunity to receive solar energy separately. Each power plant sends electricity to various places through covered cables or through underground transmission.In the power plant, liquid nitrogen is used as the working substance. Sunlight first heats the moon rock without air barrier to 240 degrees Fahrenheit (liquid nitrogen is the most suitable working substance, the analysis data of the moon rock brought back by the sun god shows The moon is rich in nitrogen; and the freezing point of nitrogen is minus three hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit) Then the heated nitrogen is released from the tank into the power plant, which drives the turbine and enters the second tank, which is the tank that isolates the sunlight , the nitrogen is cooled and then returned to the first tank, and then the second cycle, and so on. This cycle is very similar to the cycle procedure of hydrogen, it is very cheap and simple, does not require any fuel, except for the initial addition of liquid nitrogen, once it is running, it does not require human operation, only necessary repairs and regular maintenance.The sunlight automatically runs the whole system, and the reflective mirror under the tank can increase the heat utilization efficiency.A switching system and carefully chosen locations of the four power plants ensured that it was supplied without shortage.Moore and Michael initially envisioned two power plants that could power the entire moon at any given time, but they soon saw that for at least forty-eight hours one plant was in darkness while the sun was crossing the horizon of the other. , this time neither can receive enough sunlight to generate electricity.This very particular problem occurs on a slowly rotating sphere like the Moon, where each day and night take fourteen Earth days each, but if there are four suitably placed power plants, any one of them can Often receives the heat of the entire sun. Astorophe's pictorial adventurer finds that anything negated on Earth may become important on the Moon, and it is quite reasonable.If the time changes on the moon are carefully used, on this planet without atmospheric barriers, people can have unlimited water and electricity.People have slowed down the realization of this great asset on the moon. We go back to 1961. After President Kennedy approved the manned moon landing plan, Clark said in a magazine that in the twenty-first century, the moon will Turn into an asset worth more than a white clay in Kansas or an oil well in Oklahoma.An engineer at NASA wrote to the magazine asking if the statement was a joke, to which Clark replied seriously that if he participated in the program, there would be little hope. . By 1968, astronomer Fritz.Ricky's claim that humans will explore the moon is still a fantasy.Over the next decade, the moon seemed increasingly attractive to invaders.Its smaller mass gives us a different environment, and its weak gravity makes it easier to build houses, erect railroad tracks, and build space stations. It is also easier to build large astronomical telescopes that are fragile on Earth, and most importantly Yes, expanding the realm of our knowledge to a previously unknown extent.Within five years of landing on the moon, we could expand our event horizon to a world unobstructed by clouds, the first major event in the 350 years since Galileo looked at astronomy with the first telescope.