NASA's Self-Replicating Lunar Industry Proposal
The hidden solution to poverty, pollution and overpopulation.
In 1980, NASA proposed a complete solution to the problems of pollution and population growth. Their study cost 12 million dollars and was published in the form of a large book titled "Advanced Automation for Space Missions." It's available as a free PDF file, a printed book, and as web pages. The study was NASA's response to Jimmy Carter's directive to define a goal for the space program.
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The cover shows robots building robots.
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NASA's solution was simple: They'd build a fully automated, solar-powered factory and land it on the Moon in the year 2000 ( fig 5.32 ). Without any help from human workers, the 100 ton factory would mine the soil around it, would manufacture spare parts to maintain and repair itself, and would manufacture enough extra parts to assemble a copy of itself in one year. Each factory would build a copy of itself the following year, and so on. The factory population would increase exponentially according to the simple formula below:
factories = 2years
In 10 years there would be a thousand factories, and in 30 years there would be a billion. The billion 100-ton factories that NASA proposed would be less than one millionth of 1% of the Moon.
At any time, new software could be loaded into the factories to produce consumer goods like solar power cells, electric cars, and automated greenhouses for delivery to Earth in great numbers. The flexibility to change production is a key aspect of the factories. By definition, each factory would have the capacity to produce its own weight of hi-tech machinery annually: their combined industrial output would be 100 billion tons. That's 10 tons (about 6 mid-size cars worth) a year for each of 10 billion people. At that rate it would take more than 100 years to use-up only 0.0001% of our moon. Long before Earth's moon was harmed or depleted, industry would be moved to a large asteroid or moon in the outer solar system.
In this future scenario there would be no industrial pollution on Earth, limitless solar energy would be available, public wealth would be maximized, and the Moon would be barely touched by it. That's the recipe for utopia.
As documented in NASA's study, all the required resources are in plentiful supply on the moon. Since we already know how to make industry work, all that's really required is to replace human muscle with machine muscle. So if the payoff was thought to be only 50 years away with 1980 technology, how long starting with 2010 technology? For example, modern engineering software will cut years from the design process, and a modern design might reproduce in six months instead of a year. The full payoff could be only 25 years away.
A decade or two after the first self-replicating factory became operational we would be able to mass-produce any machines we want for the small cost of designing them. The potentials are endless, but two possibilities stand out.
(1) We could design automated, family-sized greenhouses and have them delivered to everyone. They'd be self-repairing, electrically lighted, and designed as sub-basements to our homes. Fruits, vegetables, grains, poultry and fish would be delivered automatically on demand, and toilet sewage would be processed as fertilizer to close the cycle. In addition to having the freshest possible food, there's an even better reason why we would want to do this. With food production moved underground, vast tracts of land currently used for agriculture would become available for other uses. Most could be landscaped and allowed to go wild, and the rest could be made available for spacious suburbs. Without agriculture using-up the best land, Earth would no longer seem crowded.
(2) No matter how comfortable Earth becomes, many people will want the special luxuries found in space colonies. Imagine a tin can 50 miles long and 20 miles in diameter, spinning on its axis to create pseudo-gravity. Its 3,000 square miles of inner surface would be sculpted into cities, parks, lakes and wilderness areas. With a population density of only 1,000 per square mile it would comfortably house three million people. Standing on the inside and looking up, the entire living surface would be spread across the sky (20 miles away), and at night the porch lights of a million homes would shine in the sky like stars. With panoramic skies, mild weather, zero-gravity play areas, and low-gravity housing for the elderly, space colonies would be popular among all age groups.
With ample resources available, engineers would make space colonies safe from collisions and radiation, and without earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tornadoes, or hurricanes they'd be safer than Earth. Space colonies would roll off the assembly line faster than we could fill them.
Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, is much more massive than our moon and is covered by more than one hundred miles of frozen water. In one scenario, mining Ganymede alone would provide enough space colonies for a human population of a thousand trillion wealthy people. That would delay the population crisis for another 1000 years.
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fig 5.12 Self-Replicating Lunar Factory
fig 5.19 Self-Growing Lunar Factory
