There’s water in the moon’s glass beads
That title sounds to me like the beginning of a poem.
The moon is strewn with minuscule beads of glass that have formed over billions of years as soil ejected during asteroid impacts cools and falls back to the lunar surface. An analysis of lunar samples delivered to Earth by China’s Chang’e-5 probe has now revealed that those beads contain a substantial amount of water…
The new study suggests that the glass beads could serve as a hidden reservoir, from which water is readily released into the dried-out surface soil during the cool and dark lunar night.
The new study found much more water locked in these beads than previously thought. On top of that, the analysis suggested that a substantial quantity of the liquid accumulates inside those beads within a few years and can be released even more rapidly.
The researchers estimate that up to 600 trillion pounds (270 trillion kilograms) of water may be trapped in the top 40 feet (12 meters) of the lunar surface. The chemical composition of the water in the beads is consistent with the type produced from the interaction with solar wind, as it contains isotopes of hydrogen present in the sun.
When I read the article, the term “glass beads” rang a bell – and the bell was the title of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. When Hesse won the Nobel Prize, that book was especially mentioned, and I remember trying to plow through it during the 60s for that reason. I have almost no recollection of what it’s about, but I found it intensely boring.
But back to the moon’s beads. Here’s how the water might have been created through the action of the solar wind:
While any water is blasted out of the beads by the initial force of impact, they are porous enough to absorb hydrogen delivered by the solar wind.
Hydrogen interacts with oxygen trapped in the glass to create hydroxyl (OH), an ion that can link up with more hydrogen to form water…
Cross sections of five beads revealed more hydroxyl/water was present on the outside of the glass than in the centre.
“The solar wind irradiates the outside of these beads, so you’re basically forming water on the outside and it diffuses in towards the centre.”
I tried to imagine what these beads look like, here’s a photo:
Although the mysteries of space are of vast interest to myriads of individuals, the dreams of humans living in space, obtaining water from glass beads, or terraforming Mars into a habitable planet, are pipe dreams. The discoveries trumpeted about glass beads, or potential habitable planets light years away from Earth, are simply methods to obtain more and more money from working individuals pockets in the form of taxes, and it is very similar to the continual calls for more and more money for education. Americans have been having their taxes raised for decades and decades in the name of better education. Have you noticed that nothing, and I mean nothing, has resulted from the increased budgets for education except more pliable and herdable sheep dependent on the government. Learn about space and our universe, indeed, but man will never live on another planet. It’s a pie in the sky dream.
Moon
June
Croon
Strewn
“The Moon in June
Is Strewn with Spoons”
Sung to the tune
Of “The Rain in Spain.”
John Venlet,
I don’t disagree that scads of tax payer dollars are wasted on education and I’m also not necessarily in favor of tax payer funded space exploration, but it’s certainly possible humans can live on Mars and/or the Moon. I hope to see a settlement on one of them in my life time.
There’s a wikipedia page that lists all the artificial objects that we’ve left on the moon so far. These include a bunch of probes and parts as well as 3 lunar rovers (moon buggies) left over from the Apollo program. I wonder if all this stuff can be repurposed once people start getting back there.
”…the dreams of humans living in space…are pipe dreams.”
Humans have been living in space continuously for over 22 years. There are ten humans living in space right now.
Your “pipe dream” is already reality.
“Living”.
@Rufus, any possibility of humans living in space in a self sufficient manner are exceptionally minimal. I do not think it will ever happen.
@mkent, the humans who have been in space over the past 22 years are not exactly living there. They’ve been in space on extended visits with all their needs met by earthbound humans sending them what they need to survive. It’s almost like a survivalist show, except with rockets.
John Venlet:
By that reasoning, I don’t live in Missouri, since people outside the state provide me with some of what I need to survive.
It is true that the ISS astronauts receive supplies from Earth several times a year, much the same as the Plymouth colonists received supplies from England from time to time. But as orbital infrastructure is built up, the astronauts are supplying their own needs more and more each year.
As the old saying goes, at this point we’re just haggling over the price.
Might the “price” be procreation? And do the sports at the monitors in Houston get to watch?
I loved Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” and “Demian.” though I wasn’t big on “Siddartha.”
I was excited by “The Glass Bead Game” for the idea of the Game, which somehow synthesized math, music, philosophy, science, literature and the I Ching into a deeply complex, satisfying game, played by an order of monks dedicated to the Game.
What would such a game look like? Hesse didn’t provide much in the way of specifics, mostly hand-waving.
The rest of the book was about a particular master of the game, a Magister Ludi, named Joseph Knecht, from childhood to death. That got tedious. Spiritual searching, monastic intrigues. I skimmed the second half of the book. The paperback was 520 pages long.
Ten years ago I tried the audiobook and that didn’t click either.
I wonder to what extent Hesse’s Nobel was awarded on the basis of “Demian” and “Steppenwolf” plus Hesse’s opposition to the Nazis.
huxley,
“Siddhartha” really stuck with me. I’ve read it two or three times. Over 40 years after first having read it I doubt a month goes by where I don’t think about it. I read “Demian” in the original German and read the wikipedia entry on “The Glass Bead Game” after reading neo’s post today. Hesse seemed to like to write about a boy/man’s attempted journey to enlightenment.
Of course you’d be into the I Ching. What did you think of Wolfe’s, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?”
huxley:
I read Demian and Steppenwolf in the 60s and liked them very much. I think that the first part of Demian, in which the child protagonist is a victim of extortion by another child, is especially masterful.
RE: UFOs–
I guess my concept of the size of the Universe was set way back in college when far less was known about its size.
According to the clip linked to below, current estimates are that there are two trillion galaxies in the portion of the Universe that we can currently see (and that’s just a very small part of the entire Universe, which may well be infinite) and our Milky Way galaxy–some are larger, some are smaller–is 100,000 light years across and is estimated to contain as many as 400 billion stars.*
(Current estimates are that at least one out of every six of those stars has planets.)
I expect that in the coming years those estimates will be revised very substantially upwards.
Try to wrap your head around this immensity and, as well, then maintain the view that we are likely the only intelligent entities in our Galaxy, or even in the Universe.
* https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VYVf34MUpAc
the Universe is so vast, beyond our imaginings, probably 30 trillion light years across, i’m just guessing,
large scale city or significantly larger will be hard because of all the constraints, for the foreseable future,
Given this unimaginable number of stars with planets, and given the estimated age of 13+ billion years for the Universe, there has been and is basically unlimited space and time for all sorts of evolutionary experiments to have taken place–even for intelligent beings and civilizations to have arisen, had their time in the sun, and then to have declined and disappeared, and some of them may have been space going–all this in a cycle that has likely happened over and over again.
Thus, at our present moment, it is possible that there are active, space going civilizations somewhere “out there,” even possibly in our immediate area.
Is it unreasonable, therefore, to think that such entities–being curious, restless, or whatever–might have visited or might now be visiting our solar system, either in the form of automated probes–Von Neumann machines–or even in person?
But, the speed of light!
In the grand scheme of the development and progress of the human race, our technological civilization has been a very recent development.
I think it very presumptuous of us to to think that at our present state of scientific knowledge we have a complete understanding of the structure, laws, and all the forces in the Universe, how they operate, or of what is actually possible.
So I view the speed of light limitation as more of a sign of our limited present knowledge than a hard and fast “rule.”
possibly, maybe there is alcubierre drive or some kind of contrivance, Im assuming a larger distance because the expansion of matter would be ovoid not conical
paolini, of the eragon series crafted a modern space opera using hard science, it runs about war and piece size length
to sleep in a sea of stars,
To quote Robert A. Heinlein,
“The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”
There is a reason that thinkers–men like Heinlein, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Eric Weinstein–are very keen on getting human beings off of Earth and out into the solar system, there to colonize those planets and moons which can be colonized, and/or to create and inhabit various orbiting habitats.
That is because, confined as we are currently are to Earth, a whole array of disastrous things, “mass extinction events” could happen to us which could potentially wipe out the human race—global wars, out of control AI, various natural or man-made diseases (see COVID), impacts from asteroids (see the Chicxulub impact crater), and/or massive volcanic activity poisoning the air, (as I understand it, in the far past the air on Earth used to be deadly due to massive eruptions of poisonous fumes from a huge number of the then active volcanoes) to name but a few.
P.S.–As technology improves, and the more scientists are able to look, the more impact craters are discovered here on Earth, and current thinking is that these craters are actually ten times as great in diameter and effects than previous estimates had them to be.*
* See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11887421/NASA-warns-mass-extinction-causing-asteroid-likely-hit-planet-previously-thought.html
See also https://www.livescience.com/largest-asteroids-to-hit-earth
On the subject of out of control AI, I note the petition just now circulating, and signed by the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and other tech leaders, to halt AI research for 6 months while a strict regime regulating such research is put into place.
This, I’m afraid, is just too little and too late, just spitting into the wind of the mad scramble to develop ever more powerful AIs.*
* See https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-risks-petition-elon-musk-steve-wozniak-534f0298d6304687ed080a5119a69962
well but who would trust to write the guidelines, the same people who have allowed category error into chat gbt