As tech billionaires try to sell us on the idea of human colonies on the moon and beyond, a new research paper published in Frontiers in Space Technologies threw a bucket of cold, free-floating globules of water all over the idea. That research paper suggests that such a lunar city would last at most 100 years, and that’s being generous.
Scientists Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell ran the numbers on what it takes to actually keep a sci-fi metropolis alive. While space fanboys go on and on about lunar mining for water ice, farming in zero-G, and building habs that could sustain human life for years on end, the reality is closer to fantasy. The researchers found that even if you granted such plans an extremely optimistic baseline of 1 billion tons of lunar water, which is roughly equivalent to 400,000 Olympic swimming pools, a lunar metropolis of 1 million humans would drain that stash in about 2.4 years.
If things don’t improve a whole lot, you have to force those 1 million lunar citizens to ration that water. If those moon dwellers were to recycle their wastewater with the International Space Station’s extremely efficient 98 percent recovery rate that literally turns sweat and urine into delicious fresh drinking water, a city of 1 million still turns into a parched wasteland in about a century.
Scientists Say a City on the Moon Could Run Out of Water in Just 2.4 Years
If there are any earthly luxury amenities like showers and laundry machines and anything that would be needed to clean this massive fictional base, those numbers would plunge ever faster and would leave the lunar society in a desperate scramble to survive. If the actual amount of water discovered on the moon is even 30 times smaller than that billion-ton estimation, the lunar metropolis would collapse in just under four years.
There’s also the matter of common drinking water, water used for basic hygiene, and all the water that would be needed for crops, oxygen generation, and of course, rocket fuel. You don’t realize how much the human race requires constant watering until you suddenly set us on a place with no sources of fresh water. An enormous amount of innovation across a variety of fields will be needed to make even a modest 1,000-person outpost, designed like remote outposts in Antarctica, anything close to reality on the moon.
Every other scenario, according to the researchers, is just a society that’s doomed from the start.
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