Somebody read and adapted Ringworld.<p>Also unless I missed it, they fudged the part where the trains transition from the static tracks to the rotating structure. If so, that speaks volumes to their level of attention to detail.<p>Did anybody pick up what the lit up pit in the middle was supposed to be?
Why does it have to be ON the moon though? An orbital station would rotate just the same, and if you are close enough to the moon you could still travel to the surface now and then for specific missions.
I feel like building this as a spinning ring (possibly inside a crater) makes more sense from a structural integrity standpoint (and possibly also a radiation shielding standpoint). Granted, lunar gravity probably makes structural integrity about ¹/₆ᵗʰ as hard to achieve as on Earth, but the spinning tower still seems a bit precarious.
I have concerns.<p>- Everything falling down and the mess on the floor when this thing has a downtime<p>- The still existing gravity towards the moon, which would be a constant additional force pulling you sideways (down) with 1/6 g
YouTuber Scott Manley has a great video on artificial gravity in space, including concepts that resemble the article's proposal:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxeMoaxUpWk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxeMoaxUpWk</a><p>Before I watched the video, I didn't know the Soviet Union tested a (small) centrifuge for artificial gravity in space back in the 70s:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_782" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_782</a>
I can't read Japanese and just watched the videos, but what they illustrate seems pretty strange. Why is it mostly water instead of human living space? If the water's meant to let in more light, that's more likely to end up boiling the water during the day and freezing it solid overnight. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Surface_conditions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Surface_conditions</a>
Why not simply build a space station instead with the same concepts? For argument's sake it would be a small O'Neil cylinder with a short shuttle or small space elevator to the moon.<p>I'd expect research or mining sites to be quite basic and not like this habitat anyway.<p>edit: I guess, if they build it in one of the moon's craters where the sun never shines, and where pockets of frozen water exist, it would make shielding from the sun a lot easier than a complex orbit.
Again, there is a very practical reason why humans will never colonize the moon.<p>And that reason is the moon dust.<p>The moon dust is quite special as it is highly abrasive and sticks to anything because of the electrostatic charges.<p>It seeps though any gap and will wear down and render any mechanical machine useless in very short time.<p>Nothing soft (clothes, plastic) will survive on moon for more than few months.<p>The dust is a nightmare for anything non-moon and there is no help.
Since were talking hundred-year timescales, wouldnt it be better to drill deep into the moon, set off a massive nuclear device inside the moons crust and build this thing in the resulting cavity? Then youre not only protected from muscle loss due to lack of gravity, but also from radiation (though probably not all).<p>At least we would have a good use for all these nukes
Does this address the Coriolis effect and other issues that make rotational "gravity" feel really weird compared to actual gravity (6:58 <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nxeMoaxUpWk" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nxeMoaxUpWk</a>)?
I find the title a little bit strange. Japan, the country, did not propose anything. Specific entities within Japan did. Perhaps I'm too post-nationalistic for this article's title.
> Kyoto University partnered with construction company, Kajima Corp,<p>So a university and a corp = Japan now. Wow.<p>So next time Facebook partners with some academics, we can say "The US proposes..." ?
Better way is to make a scientific committee, that would declare all side effects (muscle loss, bone density loss...) as totally random and uncorrelated to moon environment. Worked before...
I always wonder why is nobody considering simply introducing "heavy" weights for every person to wear on planetary body like a moon? A sort of inverse-exoskeleton if you wish.<p>For an average 75kg person, you'd need to add roughly 5x (375kg) to their weight to reach parity between Moon and Earth, which if done with iron or steel would need less than 50l of volume spread around the body. Heavier metals could be used for an even lower volume, of course (though you'd want to avoid poisonous metals like lead, mercury or osmium), though you might hit other bottlenecks (gold and platinum are 2.5x denser, and iridium even more so, but price comes into play — perhaps locally sourcing them on other "rocky" planets is more feasible).<p>This does not resolve all of the issues mentioned in the article (like the effect on our internal organs, childbirth and such), but can definitely target a bunch of externally accessible muscles to keep them from getting atrophied.<p>Perhaps this will be a cheap solution for those not living in the rotating megastructures. I should start collecting gold to be able to go sightseeing on the Moon.