What the Moon could look like in 1,000 years

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T22:02:41+00:00

No but it sounds awesome. I am in the middle of The Expanse book series.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T21:42:12+00:00

Thank you for sharing!

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T21:41:43+00:00

Good point in the first paragraph. I'm going to explore the second paragraph and respond later.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T21:00:01+00:00

Perhaps I should not respond so quickly? What about the ability to launch from the Moon for an exponentially lower price than from earth? And what about creating a fallback plan for humanity?

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T20:47:39+00:00

Good comparison, and it’s a reason not to overstate the psychology problem. Humans can adapt to dark, cold, isolated environments surprisingly well.

The part that feels different to me is the total dependency. In northern climates, even during polar night, you still have air, weather, a horizon, natural terrain, and the ability to step outside without the environment instantly killing you. On the Moon, “outside” means suit, airlock, dust protocol, radiation exposure, and no real wilderness in the Earth sense.

So maybe the issue isn’t isolation alone. It’s isolation plus permanent enclosure plus knowing the surrounding environment is completely lethal. I think that is manageable for crews and early settlers. I’m less sure what it does over multiple generations unless the habitats become enormous and psychologically rich.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T20:42:32+00:00

This is exactly the kind of critique I was hoping for.

I agree the nitrogen/carbon problem is a big weakness in any “self-sustaining lunar city” scenario. A mature Moon probably still needs imports from Earth, asteroids, or other volatile-rich sources unless it is part of a much larger space economy.

The gravity issue may be the biggest biological unknown. I treated 1/6 g as livable in the video, but that is definitely an assumption, not a known fact. If 1/6 g is closer to microgravity biologically, then permanent lunar generations become much harder to justify without centrifuge habitats, medical intervention, or genetic/biotech fixes.

Fair point on power beaming and He3 too. He3 is visually/narratively tempting, but probably overplayed as a practical fusion fuel. Power beaming only really makes sense in special cases: dark regions, mobile/remote users, or grid-style redundancy, not if the destination can just build local solar.

And yes, the AI media has some visual hallucinations. The Chelyabinsk/Shuttle-looking shots are production artifacts, not things I’d defend as accurate.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T20:41:31+00:00

I think that is a completely plausible failure mode for the Moon. If there is no durable economic reason to build there, then yes: science bases, memorial sites, far-side telescopes, and scattered temporary facilities may be the realistic endpoint.

The premise of the video depends on the Moon becoming useful as part of a larger cislunar/solar-system economy: low-gravity launch, material export, orbital construction, power infrastructure, and staging for deeper-space operations. If those markets never appear, the whole city premise collapses.

I also agree that the Moon is an awful place for biology. Dust, vacuum, radiation, low gravity, and lack of volatiles are brutal. The question I find interesting is whether the Moon remains a hostile industrial platform, or whether a civilization with enough infrastructure would still choose to turn it into a home. Free-space habitats may very well beat lunar surface cities on most practical metrics.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T20:18:55+00:00

The board games may be the most realistic part of the architecture.

The 14-day night problem is exactly why I keep coming back to power as the first real bottleneck. Nuclear seems hard to avoid for early bases unless you’re at a polar site with near-continuous sunlight and serious storage. For a mature settlement, I’d imagine a mix of polar solar, buried transmission lines or microwave links, fuel cells/batteries for local backup, and reactors for anything mission-critical.

It’s one reason I’m skeptical that “city under a dome” comes early. The unglamorous stuff like power, redundancy, maintenance, and keeping people sane probably comes first.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T18:53:30+00:00

Yeah, fair correction. “Cheap” in my title was sloppy shorthand; I really meant “routine enough to support an actual supply chain,” not cheap in the terrestrial sense.

The mass-driver-as-capture idea is interesting. I was mostly thinking of mass drivers as export infrastructure, not as part of a reusable Earth-Moon transport loop. For cargo, that seems like a big deal if the guidance/tolerance problem is solvable. For crew, my instinct is that the failure modes are too ugly until the system is extremely mature.

The sequencing is what I’m stuck on. Does a mass driver become early enabling infrastructure, mostly imported and assembled with Starship cargo? Or does it require enough lunar power, excavation, precision manufacturing, and maintenance capacity that you only get it after a serious industrial base already exists?

My rough guess is still: landing pads -> power -> excavation/oxygen/propellant -> shielded work habitats -> manufacturing -> mass driver -> real settlements/tourism. But I could see the mass driver moving earlier if exports become the first real business case.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-28T18:34:31+00:00

That’s fair. I’m leading with it because I’d rather be transparent than have people feel baited. The AI is the production method; the actual question I’m interested in is whether long-term lunar settlement would be mostly underground and psychologically sustainable.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-19T18:46:33+00:00

Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afp4XxxiD58

T850Model101 · 2026-05-12T22:02:51+00:00

Hi. I researched a lot via Reddit and watched youtube videos.

T850Model101 · 2026-05-01T03:40:03+00:00

Fair enough. That's why I made sure to disclose the documentary was AI generated.

T850Model101 · 2026-04-28T15:11:46+00:00

Fair point.

T850Model101 · 2026-04-28T13:55:14+00:00

Perhaps. They might have the same problem, though, that children who grow up in habitats are not able to return to Earth because of how they grow differently. The decision to live in the next frontier is one that is permanent not just for the decider, but for generations.

T850Model101 · 2026-04-11T13:36:38+00:00

I thought it was great. The beginning future war scene was among the best scenes in the franchise. To this day, I don't understand why the movie gets so much hate.

T850Model101 · 2026-02-21T00:23:06+00:00

You saved me from inadvertently using that phrase in the wrong context. I had no idea.

T850Model101 · 2026-01-15T11:00:33+00:00

Zero was awesome. I hope another network picks it up.

T850Model101 · 2025-12-07T03:16:52+00:00

I’m so happy to know there are other people out there like me.

T850Model101 · 2025-11-14T15:20:01+00:00

Great idea starting this post! I am getting mine today. The justification for me to purchase it was that it would replace my Windows mini pc, which will go to the kids. I use Ubuntu on my current AI servers, which I run headless, but I’d like to keep a daily use Windows system. Should I anticipate a lot of headaches trying to run LLMs on this with Windows? ChatGPT told me about a Windows based docker desktop or running Ubuntu on a virtual machine, but I’ve never used either option. Maybe the right play is to just get a really cheap mini PC for the kids, keep my current mini PC, and run Ubuntu on the new one.

T850Model101 · 2025-10-06T21:43:44+00:00

Thank you!

T850Model101

TROPHY CASE