RSC Blog

I’ve had a very productive morning. I worked out that, under reasonable conditions, an entire Association Football-approved pitch worth of lunar soil would need to be processed every 16 hours to provide enough water for one person to live relatively comfortably. Water-wise, that is.

The media has happily announced the scientific community’s plans to colonise the Moon, with the recent discovery of significant quantities of water hidden away in Moondust (or whatever it’s called).

A refuelling station, or a full-blown colony for lunar settlers, seems almost within grasp… sort of.

Mark Henderson wrote a great piece in today’s Times titled “Water, water everywhere, but the Moon is still drier than a desert.” I read this as I was putting the finishing touches to my incredibly nerdy spreadsheet, and it verified my own calculations that colonising the Moon is still further away than we’d all hope.

Given that water is contained only within the top few millimetres of soil on the Moon’s surface (source: The Times), that there is a litre or so of water in each metre cubed of soil (source: Science) and that the average colonist would need roughly 4 litres per day to survive in relative comfort (source: a Battlestar Galactica discussion forum), I came up with the following rather arresting stats:

• For each “colonist”, a football pitch’s worth of soil would need to be processed every 16 hours
• This is 12 metric tons of soil
• For a year this is 6510 metric tons, or 545 football pitches
• After this time, at maximum walking speed on the Moon and assuming you worked outwards from your initial location, it would take you 13.4 minutes to walk the two-thirds of a mile to the edge so you could brush your teeth that morning
• It would take 10 million years for that person to use all the water on the Moon
• By this time he would be very lonely and probably not smell very fresh

This is all based on many variables pulled from all over the net, and some I’ve just made up – for example it’s based on 75% extraction efficiency. Who knows if that’s entirely over- or under-estimating what would be realistic?

It also completely ignores other uses for that water, as suggested by the media, such as being electrolysed for use as rocket fuel.

The spreadsheet is on Google Docs so anyone can have a go. Please feel free to fiddle about, and let me know if any of it’s completely wrong or you have better ideas. Any better estimations of the variables would be welcome, but one thing’s for sure: we aren’t going to have self-sustaining colonies up there any time soon.

link to the Google Docs Spreadsheet

After some hilarious, some forthright, some insightful, and some ridiculous suggestions, we’ve picked a winner of our Scottish science competition. Full details can be found here, but the aim was to tweet or text us a solid reason why Scotland has produced so many eminent scientists. Thanks to all for the many entries we received.

A few of the favourites:

“It’s the water. The abundance of rain keeps people in and the best drinking water in the world keeps their minds refreshed and alert.” (via text).

“Scotland produces eminent scientists because claymores tend to discourage competition.” (via Twitter, @agoldson)

“Most came from working class. Learning was a commitment. Dedication & survival meant succeeding in ur chosen field.” (via text)

Praising the stoicism, intelligence or dedication of the Scottish people was a common theme. Also there were frequent references to the inclement weather – a heartfelt response from many Scots entering the competition.

So it’s only fitting that the winning entry is from a Scottish chemist, who had this to say:

“The weather keeps them in the lab during the day, whilst the whisky provides the inspiration at night.”

A poetic, succinct and quite possibly accurate submission from @littleghoti, who will soon be the proud owner of a black iPhone 3GS on O₂ Pay & Go.

O₂ is of course a chemist’s favourite mobile operator. Except maybe methyl Orange.