Large Lunar Cave

[Duddy9]

Just heard this on the radio. This was the first link I found, what do you guys think?

https://www.inverse.com/article/37493-mo...-cave-jaxa

[stevebowers]

Lava tubes would be a very useful location for early settlement. This is not the first one that has been discovered on the Moon, but it is by far the largest. There are some logistical problems with getting into such a steep, deep hole, but they should be relatively easy to solve compared with digging a comparable tunnel.

[Drashner1]

So - do we want to fold this into the history of the Moon? Either by adding it in a unique place or retconning things so that an existing lunar community is located in this cave?

Not sure what that would involve and don't have a preference either way - but it sounds like it would be a good addition to the setting.

On a related note - if we produce a dedicated article about this, we should aim to include the article link here and/or additional links in the Design Notes section to indicate this is a real thing.

Todd

[stevebowers]

It would be nice to make it a Japanese colony- we don't have much Japanese influence in the scenario, although I suspect that the Negentropy Alliance is strongly influenced by Japanese culture.

[stevebowers]

An interesting configuration, assuming the graphic is correct.

[iancampbell]

I believe there is a good amount of evidence of similar structures on Mars, as well; the main one appears to be otherwise unexplainable holes big enough to be seen from orbit.

I think this is one example of why the radiation hazard (often mentioned by anti-space campaigners, who usually prefer the idea of the money being spent on social programmes instead, and that's as political as I'm getting) is one of the least convincing arguments against colonising planets - at least once one has got there.

Far more convincing, IMHO, is the doubt that the surface of planets is the best place to live in the first place. After all, getting out of Earth's gravity well is the energy equivalent of climbing out of a 6000-kilometre-deep hole; it makes little sense to dive down another one immediately.

As far as Mars is concerned, IMHO it would be best to tackle it once there is already major space infrastructure. I suspect that I'm not the first one here to mention this.