Thought Experiment
Q. What is the one planetoid or planet in the solar system that shares the Earth’s comfortable niche in the Solar System?
A. The Moon.
Introduction
"The moon is
officially ranked as the Earth's satellite, but since it is relatively large
and massive with a diameter of 3476 km and a mass of 0.012 that of the
Earth, it may better be regarded as a companion planet," Moore,
Patrick and Tirion, Wil.
How is the value of real estate arrived at? The old industry adage is: Location, Location, Location or Location 3.
What if you could tell folks, 75 and over, that the Moon’s 1/6th gravity was like the Fountain of Youth and they could boogie like they were 18 again in the Moon’s fractional gravity and, furthermore, it would slow down aging processes and chronic diseases? Maybe they could live to be 125. What would people pay to have a happy, healthy lifestyle from 75 to 125?
The Colours of the Moon
What would the value of lunar real estate be under these circumstances and how would you go about realizing that value?
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Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary
Geosciences Institute at the "This is the most positive evidence so
far that the moon contains a core," said "It's huge compared to the moons we
see around other planets, so it has always been suspected that there was
something strange in its origin." The leading moon-creation theory is known
as the "giant impact" or "big whack" theory, NGN
reported. It posits an object about the size of Mars slammed into our planet
very early in its formation, with some of the debris aggregating into the
moon. The study involving rock samples from the
Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 moon missions of the early 1970s appears in the
journal Science. Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved. |
Calculating the Value
of Lunar Real Estate
Here is how I might go about giving an approximate value to Lunar real estate:
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Jan. 19,
2008 |
Lunar
Colonization-- "Live Forever" Valuation |
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Life
Expectancy |
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On Earth |
75 |
years |
Males |
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82 |
years |
Females |
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On Moon |
125 |
years |
Males |
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132 |
years |
Females |
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Trip Cost |
$750,000 |
One way |
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Monthly
Living Cost |
$15,000 |
Per month |
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Number of
Elders |
100,000,000 |
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Monthly
Revenue |
$1,500,000,000,000 |
Net, net,
net rent |
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Annual
Revenues |
$18,000,000,000,000 |
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Capitalization
rate |
5.75% |
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Value of
Lunar Real Estate |
$313,043,478,260,870.00 |
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$
13,322,600,000,000.00 |
(US
Bureau of Commerce) |
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Value of
Lunar Real Estate/USA GDP |
23.50 |
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Annual
Revenues/USA GDP |
1.35 |
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So under these assumptions, transporting 100,000,000 elders
and others to the Moon and having them live there with a rent of $15,000 per
person per month triple net (that is net of all operating costs, utilities and
property taxes) would yield a value for all lunar real estate of more than $300
trillion dollars. It would produce
net rent of $18 trillion dollars per annum or about 1.35 times the current size
of the
Now that’s big.
In addition, you, the owner of this Lunar playground for elders would make money running the concessions—places for elders to eat and play. Plus of course, there would be additional fees for travel back and forth to Earth although, one would soon find that prolonged stays in a low gravity environment would make it tough or impossible to return—the skeletal structure would adapt to the Moon’s gravity—presumably your spine would lengthen, you would have an extra spring in your step, you could fly under your own (wing) power but, on Earth, you probably couldn’t get up off the deck.
Children born on the Moon might all be the height of Shaquille O’Neill but they would be bean poles in comparison.
Lunar Day
The Lunar day is the time it would take the Moon to complete one full rotation with respect to the Sun. Since one side of the Moon always faces the Earth and the Moon rotates about the Earth in (approximately) 28 days, the lunar day is around four weeks. That means that daylight will last for 14 consecutive earth-days followed by 14 consecutive earth-days of night.
Earth Rise on the Moon
Since the Earth is moving about the Sun, the actual day/night periods are a bit longer—around 14 and a half days. So people would have plenty of time for work, play and sleep. A new cycle would arise for human circadian rhythms.
The Terminator Line on the Moon
Real Estate and Energy
Production
The diameter of the Moon is around 3,476 kilometres. That
gives it a surface area of approximately 37.8 million sq. kilometres about the
size of the
The nearside of the Moon (the side that always faces the Earth) has most of the seas (mare) which are areas of lower elevation. There are several basaltic mountain ranges presumably formed through impacts on the Lunar surface or perhaps by earlier volcanic action. The far side of the Moon is much smoother—only 2% of the far side is covered by maria versus 31% of the nearside.
The dark side of the Moon should not be confused with the far side of the Moon (i.e., the side that is never seen from earth.) The dark side is simply the night side.
Areas at the Moon’s North pole appear to be continually illuminated by the Sun at least during the northern hemisphere’s summer. There also appear to be mountains that get eternal light because of the low axial tilt of the Moon with respect to the Sun. These would presumably make good locations for solar plants producing electricity for the colony.
Bio Sphere
Water may be present on the Moon, brought there by comets and meteoroids. It may remain frozen in deep craters that never receive any direct light from the Sun.
Water is obviously important for its hydrogen and oxygen as well as its life giving properties.
Most Lunar colonization ideas suggest living in domes but why not put a ‘Mylar’ bag around the Moon and create its own biosphere?
The biosphere on Earth is around 120,000 feet high (the distance to near space) but given the smaller diameter of the Moon, perhaps a viable biosphere could be created using a ceiling height to near space of 1/6th or 20,000 feet. This would require wrapping the Moon in a Mylar balloon with a surface area of 38,041,889 sq. km.
Now one thing we know is that machines fail. So probably the only way to have a sustainable Lunar colony is to have a sustainable biosphere.
Life has probably existed on Earth for 3.5 to 4 billion years—think about how unimaginably long that is.
Make it even easier—think about a pump, say a pump that you use at your cottage to pump water out of your well. Let’s say it is a submersible pump and it only gets used for a few months each year and then is only turned on when you are washing the dishes, taking a shower, flushing the toilet, what have you. What is the life expectancy of that pump? Well, if you get 10 years out of it, you have done well.
The human pump (aka, the heart) pumps continuously (or you
better hope it does) for say 75 years at say 60 bps or 2,365,200,000 or more
than 2 billion times. For most people, it does so with very little maintenance
and a lot of abuse from stress, lack of exercise, too much exercise, drinking,
smoking, too much eating, eating the wrong stuff, what have you.
Without question, biological agents are much more reliable than mechanical ones. Nothing humans could create would rival a biosphere that can keep organisms alive for 4 billion years—that is 2.92 trillion sunrises and sunsets—and it never failed. If it had—if the chain of life had failed once—you and I wouldn’t be here.
Now how could one go about creating a biosphere that is self sustaining in the new colony?
One could support the Mylar bag surrounding the Moon with space elevators which would also serve as transportation on and off the surface.
The Space Elevator—
Moon to Near Moon Orbit
You would need to compartmentalize the bio sphere in case one part of the bag failed. It would also require multiple layers for redundancy in the vertical dimension as well.
Then you would have to fill it up with gas (oxygen and nitrogen would be nice) probably imported from the asteroid belt.
Next you would have to see if you could coax the Lunar regolith to support plants, insects an animals.
Somehow, plants would have to adapt to a circadian rhythm of 14 days of sunlight and then 14 days of darkness. And the heat balance has to somehow work—between 14 day nights and 14 day days, this will take some doing.
You would need to use the mare for seas and lakes—heat sinks. This would also remove 33% of the surface of the planetoid from human habitation.
Next you would have to contain humans in cities so the balance of the lands could be wilderness and natural ecology zones with possibly some farming (although that more than likely would be industrialized0. This would absorb, (one would guess), 95% of the balance of the lands leaving 1,266,300 sq. km. for cities, towns, spaceports, parks and other human activities.
The consolidated metropolitan area of NYC excluding its
inland waterways is around 10,500 sq. km. So the Moon could have 121
You would need to protect the biosphere from solar winds and since the Moon does not have an appreciable magnetic field (probably lacking the earth’s internal magneto generator to do that), the Mylar balloon wrapping the planetoid would have to be coated to deflect harmful solar irradiation.
Conclusion
Well, we can dream, can’t we? Did you know that pretty much every square foot of the planet Earth is owned by someone? A few thousand years ago, if you didn’t like your tribe anymore, you could collect your family and move on. Now you can’t go anywhere without armed guards asking for your passport and does that tube of toothpaste have explosives in it?
We are trapped animals on a shrinking planet with fewer freedoms every day. Bureaucrats keep themselves employed every day by thinking up new laws and new rules and new legislation to ‘protect you’ and, of course, to control you. You know, if you scratch the surface, most people don’t really like their lives and are secretly hoping for a change, maybe even a massive change.
Ever Feel Like Going Somewhere Else?
Planet Earth is ruled by the elites—big business, big media and big politics (see my essay on that at: http://www.dramatispersonae.org/PoliticsMediaBusiness.htm) and they use rules (enforced by Vogon-like entities, aka bureaucrats) to enforce them. Vogons look like this:
But they cleverly disguise themselves to look more like this:
Only Antarctica is supposedly not owned by anyone but the signatories of the Antarctic Treaty (12 countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States) would show you the door pretty quickly if you tried to move there and start your own tribe and build your own nation. They would use armed force if necessary I am sure. They are holding it in trust for all humanity but in reality, they are probably holding it ‘in trust’ for their own use some day…
So really, there just isn’t anywhere to go except maybe up.
The first to get to the Moon will own a 313 trillion dollar real estate asset which can grow to more than 3 quadrillion asset at full maturity (i.e., when the population reaches its limit). May the best person, win.
“Freedom, that is the worship word of the Yangs,” Original Star trek Episode.
Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, B.
Eng. (Civil), M. Eng.-Sci., PhD. Entrepreneur-in-Residence, University of
Ottawa, Adjunct Research Professors, School of Architecture, Carleton
University, Commercial Realtor, Metro Suburban Realty Ltd. Founder, Ottawa
Senators. January 2007.
Appendix I—Lunar
Space Elevator
A lunar space elevator (also called a moonstalk) is a proposed cable running from the surface of the Moon into space.
It is similar in concept to the better known Earth space elevator idea (a cable suspended above Earth, with its center of gravity in geostationary orbit). It would instead be constructed with its center of gravity in a stationary position above the surface of the Moon, providing a controlled means to transport people and/or materials between the surface and lunar orbit.
A lunar elevator could massively reduce the costs for reliably and cheaply soft-landing equipment on the lunar surface. For example, it permits the use of mass-efficient high impulse/low thrust drives such as Ion drives which otherwise cannot land on the Moon. Since the cable would possess a microgravity point, these and other drives can reach the cable from low Earth orbit (LEO) with very minimal launched fuel from Earth. With conventional rockets, the fuel needed to reach the lunar surface from LEO is many times the landed mass, thus the elevator can slash launch costs for payloads bound for the lunar surface by a similar factor.
Location
There are two lunar-synchronous points where the elevator could be placed that would be stable: the Lagrange points L1 and L2. L1 on the Earth side of the Moon is 56,000 km up from the surface, and L2 on the far side is 67,000 km up. In these positions, the forces of gravity and centrifugal force equalize, and as long as the system remained balanced, it would remain stationary.
Both of these positions are substantially farther up than the 36,000 km from Earth to geostationary orbit. Furthermore, the limb of the cable system extending down to the Moon would have to be balanced by the cable extending further up, and the Moon's slow rotation means the upper limb would have to be much longer than for an Earth-based system. To suspend a kilogram of cable or payload just above the surface of the Moon would require 1000 kg of counterweight, 26,000 km beyond L1. (A smaller counterweight on a longer cable, e.g. 100 kg at a distance of 230,000 km – more than halfway to Earth – would have the same balancing effect.) Without the Earth's gravity to attract it, a cable anchored at L2 would require 1000 kg of counterweight at a distance of 120,000 km from the Moon.
Fabrication
Because of the Moon's lower gravity and lack of atmosphere, a lunar elevator would have less stringent requirements for the tensile strength of the material making up its cable than an Earth-tethered cable. An Earth-based elevator would require materials at the edge of what is even theoretically possible (e.g. carbon nanotubes), whereas a lunar elevator could be constructed using high-strength commercially available materials such as Kevlar or Spectra.
Compared to Earth, there would be few geographic and no political restrictions on the location of the surface connection. Due to the lower gravity, the connection point of a lunar elevator would not necessarily have to be directly under its center of gravity, and could even be near the poles, where (some controversial evidence suggests) there might be frozen water in deep craters that never see sunlight; if so, this might be collected and converted into rocket fuel.
Jerome Pearson has proposed a cable design using M5 fiber that would weigh only 6100 tonnes including a massive counterweight, that would be capable of lifting or depositing loads of 2000 N (about 1200 kg mass) at the base. The counterweight could potentially be lifted from the lunar surface.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_space_elevator
Appendix II—FULL DATA
AND SPREADHSEET
|
Jan. 19,
2008 |
Lunar
Colonization-- "Live Forever" Valuation |
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Life
Expectancy |
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On Earth |
75 |
years |
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82 |
years |
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On Moon |
125 |
years |
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132 |
years |
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Trip Cost |
$750,000 |
One way |
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Monthly
Living Cost |
$15,000 |
Per month |
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Number of
Elders |
100,000,000 |
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Monthly
Revenue |
$1,500,000,000,000 |
Net, net,
net rent |
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Annual Revenues |
$18,000,000,000,000 |
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Capitalization
rate |
5.75% |
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Value of
Lunar Real Estate |
$313,043,478,260,870.00 |
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$ 13,322,600,000,000.00 |
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Value of
Lunar Real Estate/USA GDP |
23.50 |
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Annual
Revenues/USA GDP |
1.35 |
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Diameter
of Moon |
3476 |
kilometres |
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Circumference
of Moon |
10,864 |
kilometres |
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Surface
Area* |
37,800,000 |
sq. km. |
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* About
the size of the |
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Distance
to Near Space on the Moon |
20,000 |
feet |
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3.787878788 |
miles |
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2.348484848 |
kms. |
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Diameter
of Mylar Balloon |
3480.69697 |
kms. |
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Surface
Area of Mylar Balloon |
38,041,889.38 |
sq. km. |
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Human
heart |
75 |
years |
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60 |
bps |
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Beats per
lifetime (Male) |
2,365,200,000 |
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Life on
Earth |
4,000,000,000 |
years |
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1,460,000,000,000 |
days |
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2,920,000,000,000 |
sunrises
and sunsets |
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Mare |
33% |
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Wilderness |
64% |
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Lunar
Cities |
3% |
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1,266,300.00 |
sq. km. |
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NYC
Metropolitan Area |
10,457 |
sq. km. |
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Number of
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121 |
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Population
of NYC (2000 Census) |
8,008,000 |
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Ultimate
Population of the Lunar Colony |
969,736,100 |
9.697361002 |
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Ultimate
Real Estate Value |
$3,035,695,618,079,840.00 |
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