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Oxygen makes up approximately 48 percent by volume of the moons soil and rocks as a result there's plenty of oxygen on the moon you just have to mine it. To make water all you need is hydrogen. A way to make water economically is to carry hydrogen to the moon in place of water. Liquid hydrogen is 14 times lighter than water for example one liter of liquid hydrogen weighs only 70 grams. How to make water is to extract out the oxygen from the soil using advance mining techniques similar to the one recently published in a Nature paper as reported here.
By using the hydrogen in fuel cell's and mixing it with oxygen similar to ones in some experimental cars that produce 100 kilowatts of power then condensing it down from vapor to water we can get an average of 0.32 pounds of water per minute of operations from the exhaust resulting in over 2 gallons of water per hour. This way of producing water may be cheaper than trying to mine it directly on the moon.
The added benefit from the process of making water from the reaction of the fuel cells hydrogen with oxygen is that we are producing 100 Kilowatts of electricity.
Reclassifying the term "Habitable Zone"
Are we alone in the Universe, that’s a question that was asked since the first humans walked on the surface of the earth and still perplexes scientist today. Today other relatively new question modern humans have asked with more powerful scientific tools available is “If we look for life in our universe where would we find it?”
Currently scientists are zeroing in on a place called the habitable zone, a narrow location from a planets local star for water to form and run for billions of years similar to earth's history. The location of a rocky water world like earths would be restricted to a narrow zone away from a star. The model location of a habitable zone potential life barring planet would be dependent on several variables which include the local stars size, mass, age, radiation, organic availability and intensity for life to prosper there, or so it goes.
Jupiter and Saturn if viewed from another star system 20 light years away would be considered by us outside the habitable zone as humans has thought for hundreds of years before Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini. We now know that these planets moons have the most probable chance for life outside of earth in our solar system yet if we viewed them from 20 light years away using our current understanding of habitable zone we would dismiss them as a non-factor because of their location from our local star. Yet these potential life bearing worlds have something that all things with mass have, gravitational influences which create tidal forces on their neighboring worlds. Strong tidal forces causes friction added to the natural radioactive decay of its interior which promotes the heating of these worlds internally, in the case of these outer solar system worlds is enough heat to replace the external heating from a close stars solar energy.
What makes these outer solar system worlds so unique is that most of them don’t have much of an atmosphere or external heat source because they are far away from the suns solar influence. In the current idea of a perfect place to look for a world teaming with life is one that has an atmosphere that can support water on its surface. In our outer solar system water cant form on the surface because of the extreme cold surface temperature as a result we may only find life two of three places. Lack of a substantial atmosphere on most of these worlds restricts our search to finding life in the oceans below the ice cover and subterranean life in the muck below the ocean. On Earth life can be found everywhere we search, high mountains to the bottom of the oceans, two miles underground and even in the Antarctica.
The one ingredient we find in our outer solar system that these worlds are teaming with is organic chemistry where the inner planets other than earth barely have organic chemicals that can be traced on its surface, this is important because all life on earth are carbon base life forms. This lack of organics is partially blamed on the intense radiation coming from the sun, the earth's magnetosphere blocks most of the solar wind while it atmosphere blocks the intense UV’s, low energy neutrons, and x-rays.
Our moon and our sun tidal forces has been blamed by some scientist for keeping the earth iron core heated up. The moon is 384,000 kilometers from earth which makes its actual tidal effect on earth about ½ the gravitational field on Phobos, a relatively small moon of Mars. In fact IO the hottest localized heated world in our solar system is gravitationally locked by Jupiter but hundreds of thousands of kilometers away its other Jovian moons tidal tug of war such as Ganymede, Callisto, Europa with Jupiter have been blamed on the volcanic effect on IO through tidal heating.
In other words where there is strong enough tidal forces to cause a continuous heating of moons or planets there could be life. We may not find it on the surface but covered up under several kilometers of ice like extremophiles in the oceans below the North Pole. Tidal forces can occur anywhere even out in interstellar space between stars all it takes is one to two large objects, or two objects sufficient close enough to cause internal heating orbiting each other like Pluto and Chiron. Therefore we may find an abundance of life on other worlds on our way to these yet to find habitable zone planets and not find life on the habitable planet once we got there.…
By Ron Bennett
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