Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. Today, we're going to pull on
a thread that unravels basically everything we thought we knew
about our closest celestial neighbor. I want you to picture
the Moon, like, actually close your eyes if you have to.
What do you see?
Speaker 2: Well, if I'm going by the standard image, the one
that's been in every science textbook for the last fifty years,
it's pretty bleak, right. It is a gray, bone dry,
geologically dead world. You know, a fossil frozen in time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, museum piece exactly.
Speaker 2: The prevailing scientific consensus really, since the end of the
Apollo program, has been that the Moon's internal heat engine
turned off over three billion years ago. It's just been
sitting there static ever since.
Speaker 1: A dusty rock in the sky that influences the tides.
And you know, it looks pretty at night, but otherwise
it's done. But here is the plot twist, and it
is a massive one. That fact is no longer true.
Speaker 2: It really isn't. And I don't mean we found the
small typo in the history books. We're looking at a
complete rewrite of the chapter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we aren't talking about a minor tweak to the
day here, we're talking about a fundamental shift in our
understanding of lunar history. In a very short window of time,
new samples have completely dismantled that old consensus. We've gone
from believing the surface was completely arid, like drier than
the driest desert on Earth, to finding actual water crystals
that are stable in broad daylight.
Speaker 2: And not just water. We've moved from thinking the Moon
was chemically simple, just a bunch of basalt and dust,
to discovering natural graphene, which technically shouldn't be there.
Speaker 1: It really shouldn't.
Speaker 2: No, it shouldn't, along with exotic carbon structures that look
like they came out of a high tech.
Speaker 1: Lab and volcanoes. We cannot forget the volcanoes. We're talking
about eruptions that were happening a billion years later than
physics said was even possible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the one that really keeps geologists up at night.
It changes the timeline of the entire Solar system's evolution
in a way suggests the Moon kept its heart beating
long after we signed the death certificate.
Speaker 1: So today we're going on a journey. This isn't just
a sign, it's update for you. It is a detective
story It's a story about a forty year blind spot,
a dark side that we ignored, and how a systematic
approach to exploration has turned the Moon from a museum
into well, a construction site.
Speaker 2: A viable location for human civilization. That is the shift
we're seeing. It's gone from a place we visit to
a place we could actually use.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this because understand how we got this
so wrong for so long. We have to look at
the timeline, and specifically we have to look at the
massive gap in our resume.
Speaker 2: The forty four year gap. That is the elephant in
the room.
Speaker 1: It sounds wild when you say it out loud, forty four.
Speaker 2: Years, it's true. If you look at the history of
lunar sample returns, it just stops abruptly. The last time
humanity brought a fresh sample of lunar soil back to
Earth was in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the Soviet Union's Luna Twani four probe.
It drilled down, brought back about one hundred and seventy
grams of dirt, and that was it. The door closed.
Speaker 1: Nothing for four decades from the Disco era until the
TikTok era, we just stopped bringing rocks home.
Speaker 2: Exactly, from nineteen seventy six to twenty twenty, not a
single gram of new material was returned. And this stagnation
had a massive impact on planetary science, my bat. It
meant that for nearly half a century, our understanding of
the Moon was frozen. In the nineteen seventies, all our theories,
all our models about how the Moon formed and evolved,
were based on that specific cache of old material collected
by the Apollo astronauts and the Soviet probes.
Speaker 1: And here's where it gets really interesting and honestly a
bit frustrating, because those samples, as precious as they were,
were incredibly.
Speaker 2: Biased, extremely biased, and you know, to be fair to
the Apollo planners, they went where it was safe. Think
about where they landed. The Apollo missians and the Soviet
probes mostly landed around the equator, on the near side
of the Moon.
Speaker 1: The flat spots, the easy landings, right.
Speaker 2: But scientifically, this is the equivalent of landing a spaceship
in the middle of the Sahara Desert, taking a few
scoops of sand, flying home, and then declaring the entire
Earth is made of sand. There is no water there
are no forests, it's just dunes.
Speaker 1: That is such a great analogy, because if you only
saw the Sahara, you'd be right to assume Earth is
a dry, dead rock. So we built a global model
of a whole world based on a local biased data.
Speaker 2: Set precisely, and it's even worse than just sand. The
area where Apollo landed is chemically weird. It's a region
called the Procellarum creep terrain creep like the word creep, Yeah,
kreep stands for potassium rare earth elements and phosphorus. Okay,
it's a heat producing radioactive anomaly. So we basically landed
in the one spot on the Moon that is hotter
and weirder than the rest, and we assumed the whole
Moon was like that.
Speaker 1: We took the anomaly and made.
Speaker 2: It the standard we did. Scientists knew that the data
was biased, of course they aren't oblivious, but they had
no new rocks to test, so the models remained unchallenged.
It became dogma because there was nothing to contradict it.
Speaker 1: Right, because you can write all the papers you want,
but without a new rock to put under the mic chroscope,
it's just theory. Enter the Chinese lunar exploration program. Now
this is where the story shifts from stagnation to acceleration.
They didn't just decide to flowing a rocket up there
and see what stuck.
Speaker 2: They had a plan, a very methodical long game engineering roadmap.
It's often referred to as orbit land return. And what's
impressive is the discipline. This played out over twenty years.
Speaker 1: So let's walk through the phases. Step one is.
Speaker 2: Orbit right, this was change one and changed two back
in twenty seven and twenty ten. Their job wasn't to
touch the surface yet, it was to scan it. Okay,
they created high resolution three D maps of the entire
lunar surface. They were essentially surveying the property before trying
to build on it. They found landing sites that previous
errors of exploration had missed entirely because they just had
better eyes in the sky.
Speaker 1: Then comes phase two, the landing getting boots or wheels
on the ground.
Speaker 2: Change three and twenty thirteen put the jade rabbit rover
on the surface. That was the test to see can
we survive the lunar night? Can we communicate? But then
came change four, and that was the historic one. A
far side the first landing in history on the far
side of the Moon in the Von Carmon crater.
Speaker 1: And didn't they grow something there? I remember seeing headlines about.
Speaker 2: A leaf they did. That's a detail that often gets
overlooked in the heavy physics talk, but it's symbolically huge.
They conducted the first biological growth experiment on the Moon.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they had a sealed mini biosphere, a little canister
with air, water and soil nutrients and managed to sprout
cotton seeds.
Speaker 1: Cotton on the Moon. That is wild.
Speaker 2: Briefly didn't last long, but yes, a plant germinated on
the Moon. It proved that with the right protection, biology
is possible there. The radiation didn't kill it instantly. That's incredible,
it is. But the real game changer for our discussion
today is Phase three return.
Speaker 1: Because you can do science with a robot, but a
robot isn't a lab precisely.
Speaker 2: You cannot fit a synchrotron or a massive electron microscope
inside a rover. Those machines of the size of building.
If you want to find hydrated minerals or atomic scale
structures like graphene, you need the equipment we have here
on Earth.
Speaker 1: You have to bring the dust back to the scientists.
Speaker 2: You do, And that was changey five and twenty twenty.
This is the mission that broke the seal.
Speaker 1: It broke the forty four year drought. They targeted a
region called Oceanis Prosellum.
Speaker 2: The Ocean of Storms.
Speaker 1: Which sounds incredibly dramatic.
Speaker 2: It is dramatic. It's a vast lava plane that looked
much younger than the areas Apaula visited. They landed, drilled, scooped,
and brought back nearly two kilograms of fresh material.
Speaker 1: And that is when the surprises started coming, one after another.
Oh ye, it was like opening a time capsule and
finding out the history books were wrong exactly. Let's start
with the water, because for years the headline was the
moon is dry like bone dry. But changey five brought
back these well, these glass.
Speaker 2: Beads, impact glass beads. Wow, this is one of those
discoveries that makes you smack your forehead because they were
staring us in the face the whole time.
Speaker 1: What exactly are they?
Speaker 2: But if you look at lunarthoil under a microscope, it's
not just jagged rock. A lot of it is these tiny,
perfect spheres of glass. Some are microscopic, some are the
size of a hair.
Speaker 1: And how do they form?
Speaker 2: Violence? Pure violence? Yeah, the Moon has no atmosphere to
protect it, right, So tiny micrometeoroids dust grains, moving at
tens of thousands of miles per hour are constantly slamming
into the surface. When they hit, they generate a flash
of extreme heat. It melts the silicon dust instantly. That
molten rock flies up, cools down a midflight, and hardens
into a perfect sphere before it even lands.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's basically rain made of glass.
Speaker 2: Essentially, And Apollo found these too. We've known about the
beads since the sixties, but the Chinese researchers looked at
them differently. They analyze the chemical interaction between these beads
and the solar wind.
Speaker 1: The solar one is basically the Sun shooting particles at
us right.
Speaker 2: Yes, a stream of charged particles, mostly protons, which are
hydrogen nuclei. On Earth, our magnetic field blocks it. That's
why we aren't dead, thankfully, very thankfully. But on the Moon,
the surface takes the full brunt of it. These hydrogen
atoms have been bombarding the soil for millions of years.
Speaker 1: So you have hydrogen hitting these glass.
Speaker 2: Beads, and the beads act like a sponge. It's a
process called ion implantation. The glass is made of silicate,
so it has oxygen and its chemical structure. The high
energy hydrogen penetrates the outer layer of the glass, bonds
with the oxygen inside, and creates hydroxyl or water molecules
inside the glass matrix.
Speaker 1: Wait, let me get this straight. It's not a puddle.
It's water trapped actually inside the glass.
Speaker 2: Right, it's locked in the molecular structure. But here's the
fascinating part. It's not static. It breathes.
Speaker 1: The moon breathes in.
Speaker 2: A chemical sense. Yes, the analysis show that these beads
participate in a dynamic water cycle. The absorbed hydrogen. When
the supply is high and when the temperature fluctuates, like
during the intense heat of the lunar day, they can
release that water back into the exosphere. It just diffuses out.
Speaker 1: So that explains the mystery readings we've had have seen
signs of water moving around the moon, hopping around the surface,
but they couldn't find the reservoir exactly.
Speaker 2: We were looking for ice, but the reservoir was the
dirt itself, and the scale is staggering. Based on the
density of these beads in the samples, researchers estimate the
top soil across the entire Moon could be holding up
to two hundred and seventy billion tons of water.
Speaker 1: Two hundred and seventy billion tons. That is that's hard
to wrap my head around. That changes everything about exploration.
Speaker 2: It completely rewrites the strategy. Before this. The assumption was
if we want water, we have to go to the
South Pole. We have to go into those dangerous, permanently
shadowed craters where the sun never shines, and mine rock
hard ice in total darkness at minus two hundred degrees.
Speaker 1: Which sounds terrifying and expensive and really risky.
Speaker 2: It is. It's an engineering nightmare. But this discovery implies
you might be able to get water just by heating
up the dirt sitting right next to your landing site.
Almost anywhere on the Moon. You collect the beads, apply heat,
and release the vapor, so.
Speaker 1: Instead of a mining operation in a deep crater, you
just have a microwave on the surface.
Speaker 2: Ideally, yes, the Moon has been manufacturing its own water
supply for billions of years and storing it in little
glass batteries. We just have to tap them.
Speaker 1: That is incredible. But if the glass beads were a surprise,
the next discovery feels like a paradox because finding water
and glass is one thing. Finding a water crystal sitting
in the sun shouldn't be possible.
Speaker 2: The impossible crystal ulm one ULM one unknown lunar mineral one.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a sci fi movie title, The Mystery
of ulm one.
Speaker 2: It does, but chemically it has a proper name. Ammonium
magnesium chloride hexahydrate.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack that mouthful, because I hear hydrate in there.
Speaker 2: The keyword is indeed hexahydrate. It means that for every
single unit of this mineral, there is six full water
molecules locked into its crystalline structure. Up to forty one
percent of the mass of this crystal is water. Is
a hydrated salt.
Speaker 1: A rock made of forty percent water. But wait, this
was found in that oceanis procellar in place? Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Just sunlit, it gets hot, like boiling hot, very.
Speaker 2: Hot, up to one hundred and twenty degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: So why didn't the water just boil away. Physics says
surface water in a vacuum under the sun should sublime,
turn to gas and escape instantly. If I poured a
cup of water on the Moon, it would boil and
freeze at the same time and just vanish.
Speaker 2: That was the assumption. We thought the sunlit surface had
to be bone dry, because any water would have evaporated
billions of years ago. Ulm one proves that assumption wrong.
Speaker 1: How does it survive? Is it magic?
Speaker 2: It's the cage theory. The crystal lattice of the mineral
acts like a protective cage. Think of it like a
molecular jail cell. Okay, The magnesium and chlorine atoms form
a rigid structure and they lock the water molecules inside
so securely that they can withstand the vacuum and the
temperature spikes of the lunar day.
Speaker 1: So the water wants to leave, but the crystal won't
let it.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the bonds are too strong. It tells us that
water can survive in the mid latitudes as long as
it is chemically bound. It's hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 1: So again, we don't necessarily have to hide in the
dark polar craters, but there was a bonus in this rock,
Wasn't there You mentioned ammonia.
Speaker 2: Yes, the ammonium part of the name. Ammonia contains nitrogen.
Speaker 1: And nitrogen is a big deal.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly rare on the Moon. The Moon is
very poor in volatiles like nitrogen, but nitrogen is vital
for two things humans really need agriculture and rocket fuel.
Speaker 1: Fertilizer and fuel exactly.
Speaker 2: Finding a mineral that contains both water and nitrogen is
like stumbling upon a prepackaged survival kit. It's a resource jackpot.
Speaker 1: One rock gives you water to drink and fertilizer for
your plants.
Speaker 2: Or fuel for your return trip. It turns a single
rock type into a multipurpose resource. It also implies that
volcanic gas releases in the Moon's past were rich in
these volatiles, and they got trapped before they could escape.
It's a geological record of a much wetter, more active
history than we imagined.
Speaker 1: Speaking of active, let's talk about the factory floor. Because
finding water is one thing, find out when graphene is
something else. Entirely.
Speaker 2: This was a shock to the material science community. I
remember reading the paper and thinking, surely they made a mistake.
Speaker 1: I mean graphene is that super material, right, single layer
of carbon atoms two hundred times stronger than steel, superconductive.
We make it in high tech labs.
Speaker 2: Usually. Yes, it requires very specific, very controlled conditions to
get those carbon atoms to align perfectly. You don't expect
to find it lying in the dirt on a dead moon.
It's like walking into a desert and finding a perfectly
formed iPhone.
Speaker 1: But in twenty twenty four a team analyzed the Changy
five soil and found naturally formed few layer graphene and
carbon graphite flakes.
Speaker 2: They did they used advanced spectroscopy to confirm it. It
wasn't contamination from the lander. It was real.
Speaker 1: How just how the Moon isn't supposed to have carbon?
Speaker 2: Is it? Well, first we have to address the carbon
pre myth. The leading theory of moon formation is the
giant impact hypothesis. Earth gets hit by a Mars sized object,
debris forms the Moon. That high heat event should have
boil away all the.
Speaker 1: Carbon, so the Moon should be carbon depleted exactly.
Speaker 2: But the graphene proves otherwise. The carbon is there, and
it's organized. The atoms are arranged in that specific high
quality hexagonal lattice.
Speaker 1: So it didn't just crash land there on a meteorite. No.
Speaker 2: The researchers believe it is an autocoorthanois process.
Speaker 1: It is a scrabble word autothonus.
Speaker 2: It means it formed in situ, It formed right there.
The recipe seems to be volcanic carbon gases erupting from
the interior mixing with solar wind protons. And this is
key using iron in the soil as a catalyst.
Speaker 1: Iron is a catalyst.
Speaker 2: Yes, the soil contains iron bearing minerals. When the hot
gas hit the iron, the iron helps convert the carbon
gas into solid graphite and graphene. It basically organized the
carbon atoms.
Speaker 1: So the Moon is a chemical factory. It was literally
manufacturing advanced materials billions of years ago.
Speaker 2: It really is. And the implication is huge. Carbon is
the backbone of organic chemistry, it's the backbone of life,
but industrially is the backbone of future electronics and construction.
If there's a native carbon cycle on the Moon, if
we can mine graphite or graphene, we don't have to
ship it from Earth.
Speaker 1: We can build with it. We can make wires, we
can make structural supports exactly.
Speaker 2: We stop being importers and start being manufacturers. And speaking
of mining, we also have to mention change site.
Speaker 1: Why another new mineral.
Speaker 2: Yes, a phosphate mineral discovered in the same samples, and
this one contains trapped helium three AH.
Speaker 1: Helium three the sci Fi fuel, the stuff they were
mining in the movie Moon.
Speaker 2: It's the holy grail for fusion energy. It's rare on
Earth because our atmosphere blocks it, but the solar wind
deposits it on the Moon. Finding it trapped in a
native mineral just strengthens the economic argument. You have water,
you have nitrogen, you have graphene for construction, and you
have helium three for energy.
Speaker 1: It's like the Moon was designed for us to set
up shop. It's almost eerie how perfect the inventory is.
But everything we've talked about so far, all these discoveries
came from samples on the near.
Speaker 2: Side, correct the side that face.
Speaker 1: But the Moon has a dark side.
Speaker 2: The far side, And that brings us to change E six,
which just concluded in June twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: This was the logistical flex, wasn't it. I remember watching
the launch coverage and thinking this is getting complicated.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. It was a masterclass in orbital mechanics. Up
until change six, every gram of soil we had ever
analyzed Apollo Luna changey five came from the near side.
We had zero physical evidence from the other half of the.
Speaker 1: World because you can't talk to it right.
Speaker 2: The Moon is tidally locked. The same face always points
to Earth. If you go to the back, the Moon
itself acts as a massive shield. It blocks your radio waves.
You can't control a rover if you can't send a signal.
Speaker 1: It's a complete blackout.
Speaker 2: Lets you cheat?
Speaker 1: How did they cheat?
Speaker 2: They put a mirror in the sky, a mirror well,
a relay satellite called quick qu two. They put it
in a specialized halo orbit around a lagarage point behind
the Moon. It's a point in space where gravity balance
is out. From that vantage point, the satellite could see
both the far side of the Moon and the Earth
at the same time, so.
Speaker 1: It's a bank shot. They bounced the signal off the
saddlert to hit the rover exactly.
Speaker 2: It acted as a bridge that allowed them to maintain
constant contact with the lander on the hidden side.
Speaker 1: That is incredibly cool engineering. So they established calms and
they land. Where do they go?
Speaker 2: They went to the biggest hole in the Solar system,
the South Pole Aitken Basin.
Speaker 1: Is that the really dark spot at the bottom.
Speaker 2: It's a massive impact structure. It's twenty five hundred kilometers
wide and incredibly deep. It's so deep that the impact
likely punched through the crust and exposed the Moon's mantle.
Speaker 1: So if you want to see the guts of the Moon,
that's where you go.
Speaker 2: Precisely. It's a window into the deep interior. But it
also helps us address the lunar dichotomy.
Speaker 1: The dichotomy, that's the fancy way of saying. The two
sides look totally different.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, Why is the near side covered in dark
lava sees the man in the moon, while the far
side is just rugged, bright highlands with almost no lava.
Speaker 1: It's like two different planets glute together.
Speaker 2: It is so change. She six grabs these rocks from
the far side, brings them back, and the scientists rushed to.
Speaker 1: Date them radiometric dating.
Speaker 2: Counting the decay of radioactive isotopes, and the number they
got was a shock two point eight billion years old.
Speaker 1: Okay, help me out here, to me two point eight
billion years sounds ancient. Why is that a.
Speaker 2: Shock to a geologist? That is shockingly young for the Moon.
The standard model said the Moon died stopped erupting about
three point five or four billion years ago.
Speaker 1: So this is a billion years later than expected.
Speaker 2: Yes, now we knew the near side stayed active longer,
maybe until two billion years ago, but we had an
excuse for the near side.
Speaker 1: Remember creep the radioactive blanket.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we basically said, oh, the near side stayed hot
because it has a radioactive heater underneath it, but the
far side doesn't have that. The far side is cold,
it has no heat producing elements, and crucially, it has
a much thicker crust.
Speaker 1: So it's harder for love of to punch through.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's a thicker lid with no heater underneath. By
all the laws of physics we were using, it should
have been dead billions of years before the near sight.
It should have frozen solid almost immediately, but it wasn't.
It wasn't. The two point eight billion year date proves
that the Moon's internal engine was incredibly resilient. It stayed
active on hard mode even with the thick crust and
no radioactive boost. It managed to erupt.
Speaker 1: What does that mean for our understanding of the Moon.
Speaker 2: It forces the rewrite of thermal evolution models. The Moon
wasn't just cooling down passively. There was something else keeping
it hot or allowing magma to rise, maybe mantle overturn,
maybe convection currents we didn't account for. It transforms the
Moon from a static rock into a dynamic, evolving world
that fought to stay alive long after we thought it
had perished.
Speaker 1: It's amazing how just one sample from a different location
can break the whole model.
Speaker 2: That's the Sahara desert problem again. We finally looked at
the rainforest or the mountains and realized that the Sahara
wasn't the whole story. We're finally seeing the Moon as
a global system, not just the front yard we can
see from Earth.
Speaker 1: So let's take a breath and look at the big picture. Here.
We have water beads, we have hydrated crystals, we have graphene.
We have young volcanoes on the far side. What does
this all mean?
Speaker 2: If you connect the dots, you realize these aren't just
random science facts. They aren't just trivia. They are a catalog,
a catalog for what for construction. The Chinese Lunar roadmap
wasn't just about discovery. It was about the endgame, the ILRS.
Speaker 1: The International Lunar Research Station.
Speaker 2: The planned permanent base. When you look at the discoveries,
they map perfectly to the needs of a base. It's
almost like they were checking items off a shopping list.
Speaker 1: Walk me through that list.
Speaker 2: Okay, to survive, you need life support, water and oxygen.
Speaker 1: We have the glass beads in ULM one. We have
trillions of tons of water.
Speaker 2: You need energy to run your lights and your rover.
Speaker 1: We have helium three and solar power.
Speaker 2: You need materials to build shelter because the radiation will
kill you if you stay outside.
Speaker 1: We have graph and the regolith itself, and.
Speaker 2: You need logistics to coordinate it all.
Speaker 1: We have the relay satellite network that Change six proved
works exactly.
Speaker 2: We are transitioning from exploration to utilization. We aren't just
looking anymore. We're assessing the inventory and then next steps reflect.
Speaker 1: That what's coming next. Because the roadmap doesn't stop it
Change six.
Speaker 2: No, it accelerates. Change seven is up next around twenty
twenty six. It's hunting for the massive water ice deposits
at the south pole, not the beads, but the big
sheets of ice and the shadowed.
Speaker 1: Craters, the glaciers of the moon.
Speaker 2: Right, if they find substantial ice sheets, that's game over.
That's your reservoir. But changy eight, that's the one to watch.
Why roughly twenty twenty eight. It's a technology demonstrator. Its
mission isn't just a look at rocks. Its mission is
to three D print bricks using lunar soil.
Speaker 1: Three D printing bricks on the moon, So robots building houses.
Speaker 2: Yes, they're going to try to melt the soil and
shape it into interlocking bricks. If that works, if you
can build structures from the dirt under your feet, the
cost of a moon based drops strictly. You stop shipping
concrete from Earth, you stop shipping steel, You just ship
the printer.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate living off the land.
Speaker 2: I sru in situ resource utilization. That is the buzzword
of this century for space travel. It means you don't
bring your lunch, you grow it there. You don't bring
your house, you build it there.
Speaker 1: It really feels like we are standing on the precipice
of a new era. For my entire life, the Moon
has just been there a nice night light. But now
it feels like a destination.
Speaker 2: We are. The Moon is no longer a rock in
the sky. It's an eighth continent. It has resources, it
has history, and it has a future. It's a land
mass waiting to be developed.
Speaker 1: It's funny we started this but talking about how the
Moon was a fossil.
Speaker 2: And we ended up describing a chemical factory.
Speaker 1: A factory that has been running quietly for eons, just
waiting for us to clock in.
Speaker 2: That's a beautiful way to put it.
Speaker 1: So to wrap this up, we've gone from the Sahara
bias to a world of water cycles and carbon loops.
We've seen that looking at the dark side sheds the
most light.
Speaker 2: And we've learned that our models are only as good
as our samples. We have to keep going back.
Speaker 1: But here is the question I want to leave you
with today. We've talked about the science and we've touched
on the construction. But now that we know the resources
are there, the water, the fuel, the building blocks, it
seems inevitable that we are going back to stay.
Speaker 2: It does. The economics are starting to make sense.
Speaker 1: But if the Moon is this resource rich eighth continent.
Who actually owns these resources once we start mining them?
Speaker 2: Ah? The ultimate question, the one the lawyers love, is it.
Speaker 1: First come, first served? If you three D print a
base on a deposit of helium three? Is that yours?
Does fining the water make you the owner of the water?
Speaker 2: Space law is going to get very complicated, very fast.
The Outer Space Treaty says no one can own the Moon,
but it doesn't explicitly say you can't use the resources.
It's a gray area the size of a planet.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling we'll be doing a Thrilling Thread's
show on that topic sooner rather than later.
Speaker 2: I think you're right, the gold rush is coming.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think in the comments. Who
owns the moon and does the idea of a living
moon make you want a visit or stay safely here
on Earth? Thanks for listening to Thrilling Threads until next time.