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A blockchain, or distributed ledger, is mostly known for the first technology it enabled, the Bitcoin, which Satoshi Nakamoto first described in a paper in 2008.I will try to provide a general overview of the technology and its potential, from both practical and technical perspectives, which you should be able to understand without any previous knowledge on the blockchain.Today, cryptocurrencies in circulation alone have a market capitalisation of well over ten billion dollars and new start-ups relying on the blockchain are funded every day, fulfilling the thirst of venture capitalists for the technology. What blockchain promises to solve is a long-standing computer science issue discussed since the early 1970’s and generalised in 1982 as the Byzantine Generals’ Problem which essentially asks how multiple cooperating parties can reach common knowledge about a factual element when there exists some malicious actors actively trying to spread incorrect information and who have a certain likelihood of intercepting and altering every direct communication between individuals. Until now, this problem would usually be addressed by relying on a trusted central authority, but for the first time, blockchain allows any such consensus to be reached without having to place trust in any single entity. Much has been written on the societal changes blockchain will bring, the challenges governments will need to address or even how a new body of law, Lex Cryptographia, will be needed to adjust to this new paradigm.Technical OverviewBlockchain’s solution to the Byzantine Generals’ Problem is to impose to every actor who wants to share some information to also solve a very complex mathematical puzzle (called block) that proves a large amount of work has been invested. Thanks to complex mathematical properties, it is possible to design problems that are hard to compute, but easy to verify; this is actually the reverse of the popular concept of asymmetric keys encryption in the field of cryptography, which powers most modern secured communication protocols and in which we want to generate puzzles that are easy to compute (creating the key) but hard to verify (cracking the key). Each block contains a hash (a string of characters), that has to refer cryptographically to the hash of the previous block (to guarantee the chronological order). Together, this serie of blocks, up to the genesis block (the only block hardcoded into the blockchain’s core script), form the blockchain. The computational difficulty of generating a valid block mostly stems from the randomness of the process of finding a new hash that will correctly connect to the hash of the previous block.A copy of the blockchain database (of about 80 gigabytes today for the Bitcoin blockchain, but continuously growing as more blocks are appended) as well as the core script that contains the rules of what should be considered a valid blockchain are stored on every computer (called full node) that is willing to be part of the network. In addition to the hash, each block stores a large amount of information (called transactions). Anyone who wants to get information stored in the database can do so by querying from any node of the network; if some nodes disagree on what should be the correct state of the blockchain, one will always trust the longest valid blockchain (i.e. the full node that can prove his version of the blockchain required more computational effort than all the other existing versions), which honest nodes will actively be searching for to replace their own version of the chain. It is also possible that multiple blockchain temporarily have the same length, in which case one has to wait until further blocks are added to be able to distinguish which version of the blockchain one should trust. As a general rule, the older a block is in the chain, the more trustworthy it is, because an attacker would have to start and re-create a much larger fraction of the blockchain to replace it.Most individuals who want to add some transactions into the blockchain do not have the computing power or the time necessary to find a valid block. In that case, they will add their transaction into a pool of unconfirmed transactions that are waiting for a professional block generator (called a miner) to find a block for them. When a miner finds a valid block, which is a really rare event, he will include in it as many transactions as the block allows for (currently one megabyte for the bitcoin blockchain) and broadcast it to all the full nodes of the blockchain, that will append the block to the chain after having checked its validity. In most blockchains, when a miner successfully adds a block to the chain, he receives a reward from the system as well a fee perceived from the individuals whose transaction has been included (optional, normally only included when there is a congestion of unconfirmed transactions, to help miners prioritise which transaction to include first).The underlying assumption of the process is that the total effort invested by honest miners is greater than the total effort invested by those with malicious intents. By effort, one should understand money, since computational difficulty directly relates to electricity and hardware costs. Each individual involved in the process owns a public and a private key. Your public key identifies you and can be used by anyone to see what contributions you have made to the blockchain (e.g. how much money you possess in the case of a cryptocurrency blockchain). Using your private key, you can generate transactions that are cryptographically guaranteed to originate from you. By this process, even if a malicious actor were to control a majority of the blockchain’s computing power, its power, through what is called a 51% attack, would be limited to cancelling recent transactions and blocking new transactions from occurring; stealing money from other accounts is impossible without knowing the private key of the targeted individuals. That way, by limiting the incentives for malicious actors to harm the system and creating strong rewards for people to reinforce the system, we make the blockchain an extremely reliable decentralised ledger. So far, no such attack has ever been successful.Modern uses & potentialThe blockchain can be used in a large variety of applications. As of today however, the most widespread use of blockchains remains limited to cryptocurrencies, or more famously the bitcoin. It is only recently, with the introduction of the Ethereum network in July 2015, two years after being described in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin in 2013, that serious alternatives were made possible. The main innovation of the Ethereum was to introduce a Turing-complete programming language that supports all basic operations necessary to implement any algorithm, allowing to manipulate the Ethereum blockchain easily. These new kind of applications, powered by the Ethereum or similar blockchains, are what I will call the modern uses of the blockchain, as opposed to the traditional usage generally limited to digital currencies. In general, most of the value of the blockchain can be summarised in getting rid of the intermediaries, whether they are banks, lawyers or any entity, thus dramatically reducing agency and coordination costs.Digital currencies and payment systems. While traditionally done through the Bitcoin network, payment systems will probably remain the main use of the blockchain for a few more years. With the introduction of better blockchains such as the Ethereum (which also supports payment systems), distributed digital payments are increasingly made easier, faster and cheaper. Through the blockchain, businesses could get rid of transaction fees, which often consume a large fraction of the margins in the retail industry, and automate payments without depending on banks. Such payment systems would be especially valuable in developing markets or countries with unstable currenciesOnline Privacy. Today, a factor that slows down technology adoption for many individuals, corporations or governments is privacy concerns and the fear of handing out too much control to other entities. But the blockchain would allow everybody to take advantage of new technologies, such as cloud storage of personal biometric information, while maintaining complete control over their data, even from governments, due to cryptographic encryption. This would be of great value for example for corporations who focus on selling hardware or services, such as Walmart or even Apple, but of lesser value to corporations whose value creation reside in owning data, such as Google and Facebook.Smart contracts. They can be considered as the building block of modern blockchain applications. Smart contracts are self-executing agreements written in code instead of words and enforced by the blockchain instead of courts. Blockchains that support external scripting, such as Ethereum, generally make the implementation of such contracts very easy with only a few lines of code.Most traditional contracts could potentially be partially or fully implemented in a smart contract. The more objective the evaluation of the outcome is, the easier it is to draft such a contract. A classic example would be an online advertising agency selling search engine optimisation services, with the promise that the client’s website will appear on the first page of a specified search engine for a given keyword within 30 days. Such services generally appear very suspicious because they are often provided on the web by unknown companies based in a foreign country, but an example implementation of such a contract only requires a few rules:- Start contract when both parties have sent agreed bitcoin amount to account managed by the smart contract (stored in the blockchain). If no amount is received within 7 days, cancel contract and send back all money received.- After 30 days, check the search engine’s URL that corresponds to the selected keyword. If given website is in the URL’s source code, send all the money of the contract’s account to the agency; otherwise, send it all back to the customer (including the penalty for failed execution).More advanced and larger scale contracts can easily take place, especially in the financial sector where trust plays a central role and allows intermediaries to justify hefty commissions in all trades. A multisignature escrow account, futures contract, any financial derivative or commodity trading with completely eliminated counterparty risk can be implemented just as easily using a similar stratagem; here the trust would be reduced to one agent only: the stock exchange that publicly displays the stock prices on its website, used as the source of truth when the contract triggers the settlement.Smart contracts not only eliminate enforcement costs, they also get rid of ambiguity and make all business dealings instantaneous: if a specified condition is met, the blockchain immediately releases the fund and all other digital assets as specified by the contract.Smart property, also known as colored coins. Pushing the limits even further, the blockchain allows for cryptographically activated assets. Those could be either physical or digital and would take the form of a token; whoever possesses the token, which can be easily exchanged and transferred like any other digital currency, owns the asset. Those assets could be real estate (e.g. a house whose door only opens to people in possession of the token), objects (e.g. diamonds whose transactions are only recognized by governments if sold with a valid token, reducing trafficking and making it easier to verify their authenticity) or intellectual property (e.g. patent ownership that can be traced back to the entity owning the patent’s token, or music royalties that are sent automatically to the owner of the token associated with the rights to the songs).Some of these systems would require full support from the government as it currently manages most of the existing ledgers, e.g. land registries that often require a lengthy and costly administrative procedure to access or to change, often necessitating the services of a notary in case of a sale. But the private sector will play a key role in defining how those evolutions take place and, potentially, whether it can take over some of these functions that used to require the government—a trusted central authority—but can now be handed over to the blockchain.Decentralised name registration. A natural extension to smart property is decentralized name registration: the first individual to add a certain name to the blockchain, if it did not exist already, receives “ownership” of that name. This could be used to manage internet domain names, traditionally a responsibility of registry operators who owned a monopoly on a specific top level domain (e.g. Verisign for the .com). In the case of domain names, the blockchain could require from individuals to pay a yearly fee to maintain ownership, which would be used to cover mining costs or would be sent automatically to the government as a tax.We could further generalise the registration of names to more abstract concepts such as texts, images, videos or even ideas: the first to submit automatically gains ownership of intellectual property.Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). When smart contracts are bundled together, they can sometimes form what is called a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). While there is not yet a formally agreed upon definition of the concept, DAOs can be understood as regular organisations except that, instead of following the lead of human managers, they have an automated governance encoded in smart contracts. The most famous implementation of a DAO was the venture capital fund sobrely called The DAO that (despite later issues that led to its shut down) raised over a hundred million USD over a crowdfunding campaign in May 2016. Contrary to traditional funds, shareholders of The DAO do not elect a board to represent them but are directly involved in the operational activities and investment decisions.Wikipedia is a perfect example of organisation that could have benefited from the blockchain. Its organisational structure is really close to that of a DAO, with most of its content being generated by its community and all decisions being made through a democratic process. Yet, without the blockchain, the Wikimedia Foundation had to rely on a few individuals to manage the organisation, such as the executive director, vested with special powers. This creates conflicts of interest, even within a non-profit. A Wikipedia DAO could easily be implemented, thus removing the need for human representatives and making Wikipedia truly neutral and independent.Similarly to smart contracts, not even its creators can control a DAO once deployed in the blockchain (unless special provisions have been written in the initial code). Large networks of DAOs could grow to become artificially intelligent clusters of computer programmes with control over physical assets, similarly to how machine learning neural networks work, bringing us a bit closer to the technological singularity.Costs and risksReduced control. The blockchain is attractive for its unmatched level of security. You can trust it to protect the integrity of your data more than you would trust any bank or government. But it will do so indiscriminately and will not protect you from your own mistakes. Once a smart contract is released into the blockchain, no one can stop it, not even you. If by mistake you forgot to add a clause that indicates where to send the funds back when the contract is cancelled, the money will stay forever lost in the blockchain. Worse, if you design a harmful contract that incentivises illegal behavior (e.g. by automatically remunerating individuals who publish terrorist content) and equip it with large financial resources, neither remorse nor an injunction will be of any effect to stop it.Latency. The blockchain is not as reactive as traditional databases. This is the cost to pay for security: for each block and each transaction we add, the nodes need to run many time-consuming checks that insure they comply with the rules defined by the core script. In addition, many blockchains artificially adjust the level of “difficulty” of the mining to make sure the blockchain doesn’t grow too fast. In the bitcoin for example, a new block is only added about every ten minutes, which is why transactions take a few minutes on average to be confirmed. Recent blockchains such as Ethereum have been able to decrease that delay to about fifteen seconds between each block, but that remains far too slow for real-time applications.Storage costs. One of the fundamental properties of the blockchain is that it has to conserve the full history of the transactions and thus will forever grow over time. In addition, its distributed nature requires thousands of nodes to make copies of the entire blockchain, and to store it on a well connected computer with a high bandwidth. As a result, storage costs are thousands of times higher than any other solution, making it largely impractical at the moment to store more than a few bytes of text, let alone images or videos.Mining costs and risks. Mining represents the majority of the costs in traditional blockchains that rely on a Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm, such as the Bitcoin. As explained earlier, the blockchain makes it artificially difficult to create a new block (thus very costly in electricity and hardware) to protect the network from 51% attacks. The drawback is that to provide a decent level of security, indecent amounts of electricity need to be wasted, which is not only expensive but also leaves a terrible environmental footprint. At the current value of the bitcoin, a few million dollars worth of electricity are consumed every day by bitcoin miners alone.The theoretical foundations of PoW incentives stem from game theory: if the rewards for a successful attack are lower than the costs, no rational individual should attempt an attack. As we saw, the rewards for a successful attack are limited as it is impossible to steal money without also knowing the private key of individuals. As for the costs, with PoW they come from two components: the initial investment (to acquire the necessary hardware) and the electricity. The cost of controlling the network will be proportional to the duration of the attack, as the attacker has to keep finding valid blocks faster than the honest nodes to maintain its blockchain longer than the honest blockchain. But with the recent advances in cloud computing, it has become cheap to rent a large CPU capacity for a very short period of time with little upfront investment. In addition, economies of scale and geographic differences in electricity and hardware prices have created strong incentives for miners to pool their resources, making the system more vulnerable.Blockchains can remunerate miners for their effort either by generating new currency or by perceiving a fee on each transaction. The former will create inflation and is thus equivalent to a “wealth tax” (since each coin loses a fraction of its value), whereas the latter is equivalent to a “value added tax” (or “financial transaction tax”); both kinds of taxation have been active topics of research in public policy for a long time and have well-understood advantages and inconvenients. There is also a trade-off between the desired level of security and the cost of running the blockchain, thus incentive levels might have to be adjusted depending on the criticality of the infrastructure.A promising alternative to PoW is Proof-of-Stake (PoS). With PoS, the network is protected as long as honest participants own at least 51% of all the assets at stake. Here, the incentive system has to be built in a way that makes anyone who successfully carries an attack lose as much wealth as possible. Many variations of PoS have been suggested, such as the Casper algorithm —expected to replace PoW in Ethereum soon—, in which individuals can “bet” coins on which block they believe will be added to the blockchain next. In such cases, the only circumstances in which participants will make non-hedgeable losses at betting is if the network is successfully attacked: this very low probability event is similar to a “systematic risk” in finance, and the gains made on successful bets can be compared to the “risk-free” return offered by government bonds. Just as for government bonds, all participants in such a blockchain should invest all their “assets” into the “betting” to gain the “risk-free” return unless they are too risk-averse to agree to increase their exposure to the “systematic risk” (to which they are exposed anyway whether they bet or not).We can actually show that consensus-by-bet PoS can be modelled as a subset of PoW displaying similar mining incentives except that the cost of carrying a successful attack against the network is not proportional to the duration of the attack but roughly constant (since your stake is likely to lose most of its value if you attack the network). This is a desirable property as the social cost of an attack is generally better represented by a fixed value than by a linear function of time. Assuming that most cryptocurrencies owners participate in the betting process, it also makes it easy to raise the cost of an attack to billions of dollars instead of millions. PoW also practically eliminates electricity consumption and, incidentally, makes possible several improvements to raise the speed of the network.Note that if financial instruments allowing speculators to take highly leveraged short positions on the blockchain exist (for example by shorting the stock of companies that have invested heavily in the technology), attackers will start having financial incentives to take the network down.Sybil attacks. Another less discussed vulnerability of the blockchain is its full nodes. If copies of the entire blockchain are not stored on enough computers, attackers can potentially fill the network with clients controlled by them and partially take down the system through what is called a Sybil attack. Malicious nodes are only problematic if they are so prominent that finding honest nodes becomes too time consuming, thus it is required to control much more than half of the network to inflict a generalised failure.Increasing the mining incentives will not necessarily improve the protection against sybil attacks, but a certain number of measures are generally put in place to make these attacks difficult, such as limiting the number of outbound connections per ip address. So far, blockchains have never really lacked of full nodes so research efforts have been concentrated in other areas. If sybil vulnerabilities become critical (for example because hosting full becomes too costly), it might be necessary to provide financial incentives to people running full nodes.Mitigation and recovery. While vulnerability to attacks and to human mistakes are a major weakness of the blockchain, recent events have shown that possibilities of mitigation play a huge role in the credibility of the system, in particular with regards to forking, which can sometimes allow an almost full recovery of lost or stolen funds.In June 2016, a vulnerability in the smart contracts behind The DAO allowed a hacker to steal over fifty million dollars from the fund. While this was not due to a failure of the Ethereum blockchain but only to the bad implementation of The DAO, the losses were of such large scale that they would strongly affect the Ethereum and put its survival at risk if nothing was done. The DAO had become a too big to fail financial institution that Ethereum (the “State” of this microeconomy) had to bail it out. Ethereum’s core developers thus released a patch that would essentially invalidate all the stolen funds, correct the vulnerability and bring back the Ethereum to its state just before the attack.When a communication failure between nodes occurs or when only part of the nodes update their core script, the blockchain may split into two distinct versions. This is what we call a fork. Most of the time, forks are only temporary and disappear once all the nodes are synchronised. But sometimes, they come from a conscious decision from one part of the community to disregard certain changes made in the core blockchain script by the rest of the community. If both parties can rally enough support from stakeholders, both blockchains may subsist, having only in common the blocks history up to the breakup point. This is what happened when the DAO’s bailout patch was released: a significant portion of the community, against the bailout, decided to ignore it and to keep mining the old blockchain, which still exists today as Ethereum Classic, with a market capitalisation of about 10% of that of the patched Ethereum as of September 2016.They now live as competitors. Despite both blockchains’ code being roughly identical, the split allowed both communities to make a strong statement to the world: Ethereum Classic is truly immutable and will not easily tolerate forks in the future, whereas Ethereum is likely to allow them again and even advertises them as a feature, an additional protection against potential attacks. The split could certainly have been avoided if Ethereum had taken a clear stand in favor of forks when it was first created, and businesses relying on a blockchain will have to decide whether they want to favor systems whose community supports voluntary forks or not. While a forking culture improves the mitigation potential, it can also backfire and overly empower core developers or a few individuals that can more easily impose their personal agenda to all the users of the blockchain.Implementation and MonetisationBeyond the hype, businesses realize that integrating such technologies might be just as hard as the transition to Big Data, both to implement and to extract value. Massive injection of funds will not suffice and some business models might prove more compatible than others, at least initially.As decentralisation and getting rid of intermediaries are the main purpose, the blockchain is generally associated with open-source technologies and can appear as an enemy to modern capitalism. However, many successful bitcoin and blockchain startups have shown that the technology can be synergised effectively with paid services; this contrasts strongly with the traditional open-source community—in which users expect an integrally free service—in part because people are already expecting to pay fees due to mining costs necessary to guarantee the reliability of the blockchain. Consulting advice on blockchain can also be offered for governments or organisations that want to leverage the potential of blockchain, and IT consulting firms will quickly need to develop an expertise in that area to respond to the demand. Similarly, companies offering cloud computing services can include Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) into their offering. Universities will also observe a growing interest for both introductory and advanced blockchain courses in their computer science, economics and business degrees.Firms can also use blockchains to externalise data sensitive components of their applications to decrease their compliance costs and risks of legal liability. If the company does not control the blockchain and only has ownership of the front-end built on top of it, it can only be sued for building the system, not for what becomes of it. This would add a layer of protection for companies operating in an uncertain legal environment. Most of all however, the value of the blockchain for organisations resides in its ability to streamline processes and improve vertical integration of the value-chain by getting rid of costly intermediaries and by simplifying coordination. This will be especially valuable for very fragmented industries that rely heavily on external partners or for companies that trade in a market with a generally low level of trust or high level of uncertainty, such as in many developing countries.As for many modern technologies, the early business adopters will probably be start-ups, which can absorb a larger amount of risk and whose dynamism allows for better capacities to adapt to the fast-changing environment of blockchain. Businesses that will be the most at risk are those whose purpose is already to decrease coordination costs, such as banks and law firms, but are also the ones that have the most to gain by adapting. Lawyers for example could expand their services to include smart contracts drafting and bankers could design complex financial instruments living in the blockchain, offering a lot of transparency but requiring the competence of qualified financial advisors to be used appropriately.While the blockchain presents significant opportunities for economic growth, it might often represent more of a threat for individual companies than an opportunity. It will decrease the overall need for both the private and public sectors, in favor of what we call the “autonomous sector”, a complex (somewhat chaotic) network of intertwined DAOs and smart contracts living in the blockchain, over which no one has control. In such cases, the financial incentive for businesses to understand the technology will be more about how to dodge the threat and adjust the offering to remain competitive than about how to extract value out of it. In particular, key differentiation arguments over which the blockchain might win market share are privacy, security, reliability and independence: if companies can improve their products on these characteristics, they might avoid losing the customers who are the most at risk of switching to the blockchain.Most business uses of blockchain technologies will not require a dedicated blockchain. Use-cases can generally be satisfied easily through smart contracts encoded on networks supporting scripting, such as Ethereum, or by developing applications that rely on existing blockchains, such as a payment systems powered by the Bitcoin.Recently, private blockchains have been suggested as alternatives to public blockchains. Contrary to regular blockchains, private blockchains can only be modified or mined by a pre-approved network of computers, with a reading access potentially also restricted. Adding and approving transactions could for example be limited to a consortium of banks who trust each other to a certain extent, with the requirement that each transaction has to be confirmed by at least a certain percentage of the participants. With private blockchains, as the number of participants is limited and known in advance, PoW or PoS can be replaced by proof-of-membership (to a set of hard-coded authorised public keys). Obviously, such systems lose most of the desirable properties that made the blockchain so innovative in the first place (including proof-of-work itself), but they offer an original approach to partially decentralised consensus with cryptographic auditability.ConclusionMost current implementations of blockchain are unadapted for large-scale solutions. In particular, the Bitcoin community has shown great difficulties to scale and adapt its technologies. The blockchain revolution will not happen overnight, however trends are already emerging—often set by key actors quickly gaining influence—and the Ethereum system is imposing itself as the default option for modern blockchain applications. Further developments should make it highly usable and cost efficient for most business applications.Where business will play the most important role in the initial phase of this technology is in providing expertise for both private and public sectors through consultancy services and executive education, in complementing the current cloud computing offering with Blockchain-as-a-Service, in commercialising front-end applications on top of existing blockchains (e.g. e-wallet on top of the Bitcoin or smart contract drafting on top of Ethereum) for business and consumers and in leveraging private blockchains for internal uses. Blockchain should also be considered as a valid threat and direct competitor by many industries for long-term strategic planning.The blockchain by itself is of limited value, just as internet and most popular programming languages—all open-source technologies—did not benefit most to their inventors but to those who managed to create value on top of them. The key will be to identify the segments of the value chain of each industry for which the market values decentralisation from the segments for which the market values most the quality of the service and to focus on the latter. Today, practical limitations will orient which technologies we should put on a blockchain, but hopefully future developments such as proof-of-stake will make the blockchain just another database system that companies can choose from.Disclaimer: all the opinions stated here are my own and not those of my employer.

Yes it is feasible. There’s a long way from it being feasible in principle and an actual business, but plenty of possibilities to explore.The main suggestions include volatiles from the poles - supplying water and the water split into hydrogen and oxygen as fuel, to LEO - where the Moon has the advantage that export is much easier than from Earth, precious metals for export to Earth such as platinum, which may be there as a result of impacts of iron rich meteorites and giant asteroids, and many resources suggested that could be used in situ on the Moon. We could also create solar panels on the Moon. It’s useful for fabricating electronics because of the hard vacuum. There are some processes you can do on the Moon easily which would be hard to do on Earth because it is so difficult to get a sufficiently hard vacuum to do them.There are several books by Moon enthusiasts describing this in detail, how it would work. Paul Spudis is one, with his most recent book, The Value of the Moon: How to Explore, Live, and Prosper in Space Using the Moon's Resources. Another is Dennis Wingo, CEO of Skycorp, and author of Moonrush, see his recent paper, and appearance on the Space Show. Others include Madhu Thangavelu, David Schrunk, and other authors and contributors to The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement. See also David Schrunk's paper Planet Moon Philosophy , and their appearance on The Space Show.I did a summary of some of the main resources on the Moon for my Case for Moon first. The rest of this answer consists of extracts from the section The Moon is resource rich from my kindle book.VOLATILE RESOURCESWe have pretty good evidence now of ice at the poles, in permanently shadowed craters, thought to be relatively pure and at least a couple of meters thick according to radar data from a NASA instrument flying on India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter.It's not a direct detection however, so there is still room for scepticism about it, as rough material would have the same radar signature as radar transparent ice. But craters that are rough when new, are rough both inside and outside the crater rim. While these signatures are found only inside the craters and not outside the rims, which they interpret as meaning that they are caused by ice. The temperatures are also right for ice.If it is ice, it could be "fluffy ice"."We do not know the physical characteristics of this ice—solid, dense ice, or “fairy castle”—snow-like ice would have similar radar properties. In possible support of the latter, the low radar albedo and lower than typical CPR values for nonanomalous terrain near the polar craters are 0.2–0.3, somewhat lower than normal for the nonpolar highlands terrain of the Moon and are suggesting the presence of a low density, “fluffy” surface."(page 13 of Evidence for water ice on the moon: Results for anomalous polar)In either case, it is not just a little ice; if this is what they detected, there's estimated to be at least 600 million metric tons of this, and possibly much more.It also contains other volatiles. We know for sure that there is some ice on the Moon, by the LCROSS impact experiment. Relative to H2O at 100% they found H2S at 16.75%, NH3 at 6.03% SO2 at 3.19%, C2H4 at 3.12%, CO2 at 2.17%.So, if the rest of the ice at the poles has a similar constitution to the impact site that's a lot of nitrogen (in the ammonia) and CO2on the Moon at the poles.On the other hand, caution is needed as this is not direct detection. The LEND results (searching for hydrogen through reduced emissions of neutrons of a particular type) are particularly puzzling, as there is almost no resemblance between their map and the miniSAR map.LEND map - in this picture blue is reduced neutron emission and shows likely locations of hydrogen. 0 degrees longitude is at the top.They did detect hydrogen, but puzzlingly, it was not correlated with the permanently shadowed regions - there was some hydrogen in permanently shadowed regions, and some also in illuminated regions. A recent paper suggests that ice mixed in the regolith in illuminated regions may be ancient ice that survived a minor shift of the lunar axis.According to one hypothesis, this may be ancient deposits from over three billion years ago before volcanic activity, which changed the polar axis slightly by shifting material.A new LEND mission has been proposed involving low passes over the poles at altitudes as low as a few kilometers, for higher resolution results.The Moon may also have ice at lower latitudes too, as there are permanently shaded regions up to 58 degrees from the poles (only 32 degrees from the equator). Though these regions are too warm to have ice on the surface, there may be ice there underground. See Ice may lurk in shadows beyond Moon's poles (Nature, 2012).At any rate, the Moon does seem to have resources of ice at the poles (though memorably, Patrick Moore in one of the last Sky at Night programs that he did said that he'd believe there is ice at the poles when someone brought him a glass of water from the Moon). More research is needed to find out how much there is and where it is.METALSCritics often say that the Moon is undifferentiated and doesn't have any processes to concentrate ores. Although the Moon doesn't have any liquid water so all the processes involving concentration of resources through water erosion won't work, it still has many processes that can concentrate ores. Including:Fractional crystallization - as a melt cools down, some minerals crystallize out at a higher temperature than others so form first. They then settle or float, so remove the chemical components that make them up from the mix, so changing its formula, leading to new crystals to form in a sequence.Gravitational settling, lower mass material floats to the top.Volcanic outgassing can concentrate materials such as iron, sulfur, chlorine, zinc, cadmium, gold, silver and lead.The processes that lead to volatiles condensing at the poles - which it seems can also concentrate silver tooProcesses unique to the Moon (perhaps electrostatic dust levitation may concentrate materials)?Volatiles brought in as part of the solar windAsteroid and micrometeorite impacts bring materials from asteroids to the lunar surface such as iron and possibly platinum group metals etc.The Moon has many valuable ores for metals. For instance, the highland regions (probably the original crust of th Moon) consists mainly of Anorthite (a form of feldspar, formula CaAl2Si2O8) which is 20% Aluminium, compared with 25% Aluminium for Bauxite on Earth. So aluminium ores are abundant on the Moon, indeed orders of magnitude more abundant than they are in typical asteroids, but it does require a lot of energy to extract the aluminium from the ore. Either a nuclear power plant or large areas of solar panels. Crawford, in his "Lunar Resources: a Review", says this about aluminium on the Moon:"Aluminium (Al) is another potentially useful metal, with a concentration in lunar highland regoliths (typically10-18 wt%) that is orders of magnitude higher than occurs in likely asteroidal sources (i.e. ~1 wt% in carbonaceous and ordinary chondtites, and <0.01 wt% in iron meteorites; . It follows that, as for Ti, the Moon may become the preferred source for Al in cis-lunar space. Extraction of Al will require breaking down anorthitic plagioclase (CaAl2Si2O8), which is ubiquitous in the lunar highlands, but this will be energy intensive (e.g. via magma electrolysis or carbothermal reduction; Alternative, possibly less energy intensive, processes include the fluoridation process proposed by Landis , acid digestion of regolith to produce pure oxides followed by reduction of Al2O3 (Duke et al.), or a variant of the molten salt electrochemical process described by Schwandt et al."Mining this for the aluminium would create calcium as a byproduct, which is useful as a conductor in vacuum conditions, a better conductor than copper weight for weight -you need half the mass for the same amount of electricity. (Copper does better than calcium on a per volume basis because it is 5.8 times denser, it is also of course much more practical in an atmosphere because calcium reacts vigorously with air, but that's not a problem for conductors that operate in a lunar vacuum, and in space applications the reduced mass may be an advantage)."Calcium metal is not used as a conductor on Earth simply because calcium burns spontaneously when it comes in contact with oxygen (much like the pure magnesium metal in camera flashbulbs). But in vacuum environments in space, calcium becomes attractive."Calcium is a better electrical conductor than both aluminum and copper. Calcium's conductivity also holds up better against heating. A couple of figures mining engineer David Kuck pulled out of the scientific literature: "At [20C, 68F], calcium will conduct 16.7% more electricity than aluminum, and at [100C, 212F] it will conduct 21.6% more electricity through one centimeter length and one gram mass of the respective metal." Compared to copper, calcium will conduct two and a half times as much electricity at 20C, 68F, and 297% as much at 100C, 212F."Like copper, calcium metal is easy to work with. It is easily shaped and molded, machined, extruded into wire, pressed, and hammered."As would be expected of a highland element, calcium is lightweight, roughly half the density of aluminum. However, calcium is not a good construction material because it is not strong. Calcium also sublimes (evaporates) slowly in vacuum, so it may be necessary to coat calcium parts to prevent the calcium from slowly coating other important surfaces like mirrors. In fact, calcium is sometimes used to deoxidize some metal surfaces. Calcium doesn't melt until 845C (1553F)."Utilization of lunar materials will see the introduction of industrial applications of calcium metal in space."From the section on Mining the Moon in Permanent - by Mark Evan Prado, a physicist in the Washington, D.C., region working for the Pentagon in advanced planning in the space program.The Moon is deficient in copper, at least on the basis of what is known so far, but as well as calcium, aluminium is a good conductor.The LCROSS experiment found silver (a superb conductor) and mercury at the impact site, but the concentration is not known, except that it is far higher than the levels in the Apollo samples, and is probably in a layer below the surface, as the signal was delayed. See LCROSS mission may have struck silver on the moon.It has abundant iron - in addition to ores (which would need a lot of power to extract), it actually has free iron metalFrom meteorite impactsNanometer sized "blebs" released from the rock by the hydrogen in the solar wind reacting with iron oxidesParticles of iron concentrated from the source materials for the regolith.It's in powder form already, and naturally alloyed with nickel and cobalt. The blebs, or "nanophase iron" are found inside impact glass particles, so would be hard to extract. The rest though is made up of tiny particles of pure iron, so the obvious thing to try to do is to separate them out using powerful magnets. They are rather small though, most are less than a micron in diameter which could be a challenge. If we can separate them out, we can get five kilograms of iron, 300 grams of nickel and about half a gram of platinum, gold etc. (platinum group metals) in every cubic meter of regolith - as pure metal what's more. (This summarizes part of section 5, Metals from Crawford)He bases that on a paper from 1980 by Morris and particularly its conclusion, which uses a model to interpret the data. Taylor and Meeks in the section Agglutinitic Glass versus Grain Size and Maturity (page 133) in their paper suggest that perhaps most of the iron is in nanophase form, mixed up with the glass and hard to extract.However we don't need to speculate any more as Jayashree Sridhar et al of the NASA Johnson Space Center have done the experiment using actual samples of lunar regolith. See Extraction of meteoritic metals from lunar regolith, and they succeeded! The nanophase iron was a problem but they were able to work around it by varying the experimental setup. By varying on the size of particle they ground it down to, the strength of the magnets and details of the technique they could extract over 80% of the meteoritic iron in some of the tests. They conclude:"Experimental results indicate promise for the extraction of meteoritic metals from lunar regolith. However, more work is needed to refine the technique and understand more about the variables that affected our results."The iron is valuable for steel, and is also a conductor, though not nearly as good as Aluminium or Calcium. It would be useful for some applications such as electric railroads on Mars, and is a conductor easy to access in the early stages.Also nickel and iron are useful for making nickel / iron batteries. These could be useful for making batteries on the Moon with in situ resources, for instance to help last through the lunar night."Iron-nickel batteries are very rugged. Their lifetimes which can exceed 20 years are not affected by heat, cold or deep cycling. They are not easily damaged by rapid discharging or over-charging. On the downside, they have poor performance at low temperatures but they can be kept warm with insulation (e.g. simple regolith) and thermal wadis. Also, they only have a charge to discharge efficiency of 65% and will self discharge at the rate of 20% to 40% per month. Despite these shortcomings, they might be the Moon-made power storage systems of choice due to their simplicity and the availability of their component materials on the Moon. Moreover, these materials are among the easiest of materials to produce on the Moon."See Electrical Energy Storage Using Only Lunar Materials.Then, you also have titanium. This is especially interesting as it is rare in asteroids. Apollo 17 samples are 20% high purity Ilmenite, a Titanium ore which is found in the lunar mare. And better than that, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, with its spectral mapping of the Moon, discovered deposits that are up to 10% titanium, more than ten times higher than titanium ores on Earth. (Phys.org report, NASA image). Titanium is an industrially desirable metal, stronger per unit weight than Aluminium (though it is a poor conductor).Titanium is also widely used in medicine for hip replacements, dental implants, etc., as "one of the few metals human bone can grow around firmly", see also this new titanium / gold alloy four times tougher than titaniumTitanium is especially useful for medical applications because itForms an inert and stable titanium oxide layer spontaneouslyHas a high strength to weight ratioDoesn't leach into blood and other aqueous environments because of its low rate of ion formationIs one of the few materials that can integrate directly into living bone tissues (osseointegration) without any soft tissue layers in betweenCrawford writes (page 17):"Therefore, in the context of a future space economy, the Moon may have a significant advantage over asteroids as a source of Ti. The fact that oxygen is also produced as a result of Ti production from ilmenite could make combined Ti/O2 production one of the more economically attractive future industries on the Moon.For more on this, see major lunar minerals. And for an in depth study, read Crawford's review.So, yes, there are plenty of metals on the Moon, but it might take a lot of power to extract them, apart from the iron, if that can be separated out using magnets.And that's mainly based on the Apollo results which explored a small region of the lunar surface which has been found to be in some ways unrepresentative. The Moon may have many other surprises in store. Many ores on Earth would not be detected from orbit, and it seems the Moon has a fairly complex geology as well.As an example of one way the Moon could surprise us - Earth is often hit by iron meteorites, so the Moon should be also. The main question is, how Dennis Wingo has hypothesized in his Moonrush book, that the Moon may also have valuable platinum group metals which could be mined, the result of the impacts of these iron meteorites.Taking this further, there's a hypothesis by Wieczorek et al that magnetic anomalies on the Moon around the south pole Aitken basin may be from the remains of the metal core of a large 110 km diameter differentiated asteroid that hit the Moon to form the basin. If so, they could be useful sources for platinum, gold, etc.From Wieczorek et al, the North and South poles are marked N and S. Notice the magnetic anomalies clustered around part of the rim of the South Pole Aitken Basin. This is thought to be the result of an impact by a 110 km diameter asteroid. Wieczorek et al hypothesize that the magnetic anomalies trace out the remains of the metal core of this asteroid. If so these could be rich ores, including iron, nickel, also platinum and other platinum group metals (gold, rhodium etc). See page 16 of Crawford's Lunar Resources: A ReviewPlatinum is a particularly useful metal. It is heavy, soft, malleable as gold and silver, easy to draw into wires, very unreactive, and has a high melting point. Out of gold, silver, platinum and copper, platinum is the densest and the hardest and the least reactive (the others are somewhat better in terms of electrical and thermal conductivity, and malleability, but it's not too bad at those either). So, it's not just useful for catalytic converters, fuel cells, dental fillings and jewelry. We'd probably use it a fair bit in other ways too if it didn't cost so much.The platinum group metals might be valuable enough to return to Earth from the Moon, just as suggested for the asteroids, especially if there is water to split and use as fuel available on the Moon or once they set up a mass driver on the MooOf course, you can't just take the current market value of platinum, multiply by the amount of platinum available in a large meteorite - or on the Moon if Wingo and Wieczorek et al are right - and conclude that you'd get trillions of dollars by returning all that platinum to Earth and selling it here. You need to fulfill a need or eventually nobody will buy it. If it's just to replace copper, for instance, in wires, it wouldn't be worth returning unless you could reduce the transport cost back to Earth right down. Dennis Wingo suggested in Moonrush that it could be worth exporting it to Earth for use for fuel cells, as an application that could be high value and yet need a lot of platinum.The gold could be useful too, on the Moon at least. You don't normally think of gold as more decorative than useful but it is used a fair bit in electronics Also combined with the abundant titanium on the Moon you get Ti3Au, an alloy with 70% less wear, four times the hardness and increased biocompatibility compared with pure titanium (and twice as hard as titanium / silver and titanium copper alloys). It's also 70% less wear than titanium, lower friction and four times harder with a hardness of 800 HV in the Vickers hardness test. Density about the same as steel.(density of titanium: 4.43 g/cc. using the atomic masses of gold and titanium, multiplying by (196.96657+3*47.867)/(4*47.867)*4.43 = 7.88 approx. By comparison, density of steel is 7.75 g / cc).The paper focuses on its medical applications, you can alloy titanium with copper or silver, which are twice as hard as pure titanium, but this is four times as hard. It's also 70% more resistant to wear which will make it last longer and lead to less debris. And has excellent biocompatibility properties. But I wonder if it might also have lunar applications, with the hardness especially and resistance to wear.Probably only the platinum group metals would be worth returning to Earth, since it's going to be easier to mine the Near Earth Asteroids, especially the ones that consist almost entirely of pure metal. However, whether or not they are useful for Earth, they are well worth using on the lunar surface once you have industry there.The Moon has some advantages over Mars indeed for metals, such as the pure nanophase iron mixed in with the regolith, which can only exist in oxidized form on Mars except for rare metal meteorites. Also, it's unlikely it will be commercially worthwhile to return metals from Mars while there are definite possibilities of returning metals from the Moon. See Exporting materials from the Moon for future suggested low cost methods for export from the Moon. For discussion of whether anything physical could be worth the expense of export from Mars, see Commercial value for MarsLUNAR GLASSThis is a beneficial side effect of all the micrometeorite impacts on the Moon (which you don't get so much on Mars with its thin atmosphere, just enough to filter out micrometeorites). The Moon's "soil" or regolith contains large quantities of glass, created during the impacts. It also has free iron, as we saw, at half of one percent of the soil, in tiny micro beads of iron (nanophase iron) which concentrate the microwave energy. Again, you don't have this on Mars.As a result, it is really fast to melt the regolith using microwaves. It took only 30 seconds to melt small lunar sample at 250 watts (typical of a domestic microwave). You can melt the soil to glass as easily as you can boil water using the microwave in your kitchen. See lunar lawnmower. This only works with genuine lunar soil and not the simulants. We have nothing analogous to lunar soil on Earth, as Larry Taylor, principle author of this paper found: Microwave Sintering of Lunar Soil: Properties, Theory, and Practice. He says the microstructure of the genuine lunar regolith, with nanophase iron beads scattered throughout, would be almost impossible to simulate.His idea (see Products from Microwave Processing of Lunar Soil on page 194 of the paper) is to run a "lunar lawnmower" over the soil with two rows of magnetrons (such as generate microwaves in a microwave cooker). The first row would sinter it to a depth of half a meter using microwaves. Then the second row completely melts the top 3-5 cm of the soil, which then crystallizes to glass. As it does this, it will heat up and release most of the solar wind particles notably hydrogen, helium, carbon and nitrogen. So it could also capture these assets as it goes along, including the Helium 3, if this turns out to be of economic value.See also The Lunar Dust Problem: From Liability to Asset. This could also be useful, for instance, for a solar panel paving robot to make solar panels, and other applications.Then, there's Behrokh Khoshnevis' idea for making a landing pad on the Moon using tiles made of lunar glass in situ. The idea is to make the surface into lots of tiles by injecting a material that can't be sintered easily using microwaves into the soil first to outline the edges of the tiles, then use microwaves to melt the soil in between.This would make a tiled flat surface for supply vessels to land on. It would also help with the problem of lunar dust by removing dust from the landing area. You can read the details here. He used lunar regolith simulant, so presumably by Larry Taylor's results, it would work even better with genuine lunar samples.SOLAR CELLS FROM LUNAR MATERIALS - SOLAR PANEL PAVING ROBOTOnce you have glass, it might not be such a big step to make photovoltaic cells on the Moon. And here the Moon has one big advantage, the high grade vacuum so you could use vacuum deposition to make the cells in situ. To start with you'd make the cells themselves from materials sent from Earth, later on mine them on the Moon.This is a report from the Center for Advanced Materials at the University of Houston, suggesting the possibility of an autonomous solar powered lunar photovoltaic cell production roverIt would use silicon extracted from lunar materials to make the cells themselves. Of the various methods you could use, magma electrolysis may be best. He uses low efficiency silicon cells which are vacuum deposited on glass, something that is not easy to do on Earth but would be possible in the ultra high vacuum conditions on the Moon. Techy details of this suggestion are here.It would require transporting a small mass to the Moon in the form of the rover which then over several years of driving could build a 1 MW facility on the Moon.sIdea for a robot to drive over the surface of the Moon leaving solar panels in its wake wherever it goes, using only indigenous lunar materials to make the panels. The panels would be only 1% efficient, but given that there is no shortage of real estate on the Moon, that might not matter. It might be more important to make the panels in situ without any imports from Earth than to make them highly efficientStructure of the panelsFor making glass on the Moon see the section above: Lunar glassBASALT (LIKE GLASS FIBER)The basalt itself is a natural resource. If reasonably pure and consistent in composition, it's ideal for making basalt fibre, which is like glass wool, but much better in some ways. The regolith consists mainly of powdered basalt. So might well be ideal for making basalt fibre. See:Basalt Fiber PropertiesHELIUM 3I should mention this, since the topic is brought up so often in discussions of lunar settlement. However I don't see this as a major plus point for the Moon at present.The Moon is a source for helium 3, deposited in the regolith by the solar wind, and some say that helium 3 will be of value for fusion power in the future because it is not radioactive and doesn't produce radioactive waste products. If so, small amounts of helium 3 from the Moon could be worth a lot on Earth and be a useful commodity to export. Apollo 17's Harrison Schmidt is a keen advocate of helium 3 mining on at a reasonable rate at a reasonable rate the Moon.However, we don't yet have fusion power plants at all, and one able to use helium 3 is a tougher challenge. Frank Close wrote an article in 2007 describing this idea as "moonshine" saying it wouldn't work anyway. Frank Close says that in a deuterium - helium 3 tokamak, at normal temperatures for a tokamak, the deuterium helium 3 reaction proceeds so slowly that the deuterium would instead fuse with itself producing tritium and then fuse with the tritium (the original article is here, but it's behind a paywall). For a critical discussion see also the Space Review article The helium-3 incantationSee also Mining the Moon by Mark Williams Pontin. If you can use much higher temperatures, six times the temperature at the centre of the sun by some calculations, the helium 3 will fuse at a reasonable rate, but these are temperatures way beyond what is practical in a tokamak at present. The reason such high temperatures are needed for a tokamak is because the plasma is in thermal equilibrium and has a maxwellian distribution which means that to achieve a few particles at very high temperatures you have to heat up a lot of particles to lower temperatures to fill up the maxwellian distribution so that just a few will react. This is potentially feasible for the lower temperatures of DT but not feasible for the higher temperatures of 3He 3He.However if you use electrostatic confinement, a bit like a spherical cathode ray tube with the fusion happening at the center where the negatively charged "virtual cathode" is, then the particles are all at the same high energy and the result is much more feasible with lower power requirements. This is the approach of Gerald Kulcinsky who achieves helium 3 fusion in a reactor 10 cm in diameter. However though it does produce power, it produces only one milliwatt of power for each kW of power input so is a long way from break even at present.Gerald Kulcinski who has developed a small demonstration electrostatic 3He 3He reactor 10 cm in diameter. It is far from break-even at present, producing 1 milliwatt of power output for each kilowatt of input. See A fascinating hour with Gerald KulcinskiPerhaps this line of development will come to something. Perhaps one way or another we will achieve helium 3 fusion as the enthusiasts for helium 3 mining on the Moon hope. However it is early days yet, and we can't yet depend on this based on a future technology that doesn't exist yet.However even if we do achieve helium 3 fusion, it might not be such a game changer for the lunar economy as you might think. Crawford says (page 25) that to supply all of our energy from Helium 3 would mean mining 5000 square kilometers a year on the Moon, which seems ambitious (and would mean the whole Moon would only last 200 years). So, even if we develop Helium 3 based fusion, and it turns out to be a valuable export, it's probably not going to be a major part of the energy mix.Even more telling, he also calculates that covering a given area of the Moon with solar panels would generate as much energy in 7 years as you'd get from extracting all the Helium 3 from that region to a depth of three meters.Also - there are many other ideas being developed for nuclear fusion, such as laser fusion, and the polywell which has the same advantage that no significant radiation is produced when it uses fusion of boron and hydrogen. I think it is far too soon to know whether or not the helium 3 on the Moon will be an asset in the future when we achieve nuclear fusion power. For a summary, see ESA: Helium-3 mining on the lunar surface.This doesn't mean that there is no point in helium 3 mining however. As Crawford suggests (page 26), Helium 3 is useful for other things, not just for fusion power. It's used for cryogenics, neutron detection, and MRI scanners, amongst other applications, so some Helium 3 from the Moon could be a valuable export right away, even if it doesn't scale up to the huge quantities you'd need for Helium 3 based power generation on Earth. You'd get it automatically as a byproduct while extracting the more abundant volatiles from the solar wind in the regolith, so it might well be a useful side-line to help support lunar manufacturing economically as part of the mix along with everything else.THORIUM AND KREEP (POTASSIUM, PHOSPHORUS AND RARE EARTH ELEMENTS) ,AND SOME URANIUMThe Moon has some uranium, which is a bit of a surprise for such a heavy element, but when bound with oxygen it is rather lighter and can occur in the lunar crust as on Earth. It is especially rich in Thorium, in the lunar Mare. This is useful as a fuel for nuclear fission reactors, which have to be designed to burn thorium instead of uranium to use it. It's not likely to be worth returning to Earth as thorium is abundant here. But it could be very useful in space, at some point in the future.Nuclear power stations built on the Moon wouldn't have the same pollution hazards and hazardous waste issues as stations on the Earth. Perhaps this may be a way to power space colonies, and interplanetary ships fueled from the Moon, so avoiding the need to launch nuclear power plants from Earth to orbit.Thorium is a tracer for KREEP - potassium, phosphorus and rare earth elements. Also associated with chlorine, fluorine, sodium, uranium, thorium, and zirconium, so KREEP ores could be sources for all those elements on the Moon.When the Moon cooled down from the original molten state, then olivine and pyroxene crystals form first, and sink to the bottom of the magma ocean (both made of iron and/or magnesium plus silicon and oxygen). Meanwhile anorthite also forms (made of calcium, aluminum, silicon, and oxygen), which is less dense and floats to the top (forming the lunar highlands). Some of the other elements like nickel are able to squeeze into the crystal lattice and get removed at the same time. But the larger elements can't, and are left in liquid state. They are last to solidify and form the KREEP deposits. It forms in between the olivine and pyroxene deep down, and the floating anorthite on top and may have been liquid for a long time.For some reason, not fully understood, then KREEP deposits on the surface of the Moon are concentrated on the near side of the Moon near the Imbrium basin, with a small amount also in a separate concentration on the far side. The Imbrium impactor probably excavated the KREEP deposits on the near side. But it's puzzling that the much larger Aitken basin didn't lead to large deposits on the far side. Perhaps for some reason KREEP is concentrated on the near side of the Moon. For more about this see The Moon is a KREEPy place by the planetary geologist Emily Lakdwalla which I summarized here.The abundances of rare earth elements on the Moon are much less than rare earth ores on Earth, and despite the name, they aren't very rare here on Earth. So it's not likely that they'll be worth returning. However the most concentrated spots - the ones marked white in this figure - haven't been sampled on the surface and the spatial resolution is low, tens of kilometers. So it's possible we'll find more concentrated ores on the Moon.It's a similar situation for uranium and thorium. The abundances on the Moon from this map are too low to count even as a low grade ore on Earth. But with such low resolution, there could be richer ore deposits when we look at it closely. (Here I'm summarizing what Crawford says about lunar KREEP ores in his survey, see section 7, Rare earth elements and following)POSSIBILITY OF USING LUNAR SOLAR POWER FOR EARTHThis is a bit further ahead, but it is worth thinking about, whether solar power for the Moon could actually be useful for Earth also. Some scientists think it could be.The advantage of doing this on the Moon is that you can use indigenous materials to make the solar panels. For a small amount of launch mass to the Moon you could have a rover that travels over the surface leaving solar panels in its wake. See Lunar glass and Solar cells from lunar materials - solar panel paving robot (above)It's easy to see this working to supply power to the Moon, but some have suggested it could also be used to generate power on Earth. So, taking this even further, with a large scale operation of this type, using only 1% of the surface area of the Moon, you could supply 2 kilowatts of continuous power per person to a population of 10 billion on the Earth. See Solar Power via the Moon. More details here.Or, further ahead, maybe this is more interesting as a talking point than a likely near future concept, the Japanese Shingzu corporation has suggested we could build solar panels in a band around the Moon - at the equatorSee Shimizu dream - Lunar Solar Power Generation - Luna Ring.Earth would get solar power only half the day, so they send the power to satellites in orbit around Earth, which then beam it down to the other side of Earth. Of course they need large receivers to collect the power from the Moon, but only 1% of what they'd need to collect it directly from the sun - that could be worth doing if it is significantly easier to make solar panels on the Moon.On the other hand there are ideas to use large thin film solar panels in space or large thin film mirrors to concentrate the light onto solar panels or furnaces, launched from Earth to LEO. So would the lunar solar plants be a major saving compared to those?Another way that the Moon could help the Earth though, with solar power, is to make the solar cells from lunar materials, and then ship them to GEO or lower orbit. The idea of using lunar materials to make solar power satellites goes back at least to the 1970s, see Construction of Satellite Solar Power Stations from Nonterrestrial MaterialsFor more on this see the The Moon is resource rich section of my Case for Moon FirstWhether it is useful off planet depends a lot on how easy it is to export the materials from the Moon, and one of the most promising ways to do that is Hoyt’s cislunar tether system which exploits the Moon’s position as higher in the gravitational well than Earth to basically “roll the goods down hill” from the Moon to Earth through a system of rotating tethers.SeeExporting materials from the MoonBallutes - return of high value resources such as platinum to Earthin my Case For Moon First

Be sure to mark every box with the name of the room it belongs in and do it on more than one side of the box so it will be easy to see as you dig through your belongings at that other end.If you are using a mover, don’t assume that they will be gentle with your stuff. Putting ‘fragile’ on boxes just puts a smile on their face as they stack heavy boxes on the top or throw it in the corner. So be sure to either take the really fragile items by yourself or have them packed well. Dishes should be individually wrapped and dishes places upright in the box, where possible…Go on YouTube to learn how to pack everything in a proper manner. You may also want to wrap your more valuable furniture or crate them for protection.Don’t skimp on packing material. Your money saved will be lost when the items break on the ride.Get rid of any junk around the place and have a yard sale or donate items you know you have no use for anymore. Babies have grown up? Time to let another baby have the toys you have been keeping for sentimental value. If you are really going to miss an item, then take a picture of it before you send it on its way.If renting your own truck, then you have much better control over the security of valuables. Do some research on how to fill a truck to minimize breakage and maximize how much can be packed inside.If moving from an apartment with an elevator…have the elevator reserved for moving day. Be sure to have someone stay by the elevator as items are carried to it for security. I had several items of value stolen during the few seconds it took to go back to the apartment to bring more items.If you can afford it, get full-service moving where they will come in and pack up and crate all your belongings…move them to your new place and unpack them at the other end. Take pictures of everything for insurance purposes and then head to a hotel while they come in and do their thing. Most movers in this category have bonded workers, which means less worry over items being stolen. As always, things of real value you should take care of yourself, if possible.Just be sure to get moving insurance and check the credentials of the mover and ask what their insurance is… Are they are a member of the Better Business Bureau, then all the better. There are a lot of fly-by-night movers who will scam you out of your last dollar when you are not looking and hold your stuff hostage until you pay the exorbitant fees that they suddenly charged you because the weight was higher (often BS) or whatever excuse they come with to charge more than the quote you received. If they claim the weight was higher, then ask for a copy of the weigh station report. Some companies move several families at once and charge all of them for the weight of the vehicle even though your items are only a portion of the full amount.The following comes from Movers - Local & Long Distance Moving Services | Moving.com for the top 10 scams by movers…With more than 40 million moves occurring every year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, it’s a wonder most of them go smoothly.Fortunately, the majority of moves are made without incident but the number of complaints against moving companies has increased steadily over the past decade, so it’s in your best interest to find out some of the ways you can be scammed by a disreputable company.The best protection against moving scams is a well-informed consumer who does his homework every step of the way. Moving is arduous, and having someone else do it for you doesn’t mean you can leave all the details in their hands. Here are things to watch out for:Phoning it inA mover who doesn’t insist on an on-site inspection of your household goods is giving you a sight-unseen estimate — and those are usually too good to be true. Homeowners typically have considerably more belongings than they think they do, and good estimators aren’t looking at specific items as much as guesstimating their bulk and weight. (A queen-size bed with no headboard or footboard weighs far less than one with an ornate, heavy wood frame.) Moving prices are based not only on mileage but on the weight of your belongings and the amount of room your goods take up in the truck.The cursory glanceAn “estimator” who does a quick walk-through of your home without opening cabinets and taking note of exactly what you plan to move is going to be way off the mark. A good estimator will ask you questions (“Are you planning to move all the food in your pantry, or will you eat it before you go?” “Are you planning a yard sale to get rid of anything; if so, what?”).It’s incumbent upon you to give as much information as possible (“We’ll be buying a king-size bed here to take with us, so add on that cost,” or “I’ll be donating these 20 shelves of books to the library, so don’t include those.”) Thousands of people each year have their belongings held hostage by scam artists who low-ball your quote, then refuse to deliver your belongings until you’ve paid them hundreds or thousands of dollars more — in cash.The requested depositReputable movers will NOT demand cash or any large deposit before moving you. You generally pay upon delivery. If you pay upfront, you have zero control over when you’ll see your belongings again. When you do pay, use a credit card that will help you fight any fraudulent activity.The name changeSome companies get around the Better Business Bureau and other such scam busters by constantly doing business under new names. Be sure the company has a local address and information about licensing and insurance. They should answer the phone with the full name of the business, not just “moving services” or something else generic.To be safer, ask for three references — not just any references, but three who are from your area and who were moved within the past three months. Actually, call those consumers and ask pointed questions about their experience. A good one: What did you like least about your moving experience?Be sure to get all the names the company “does business as,” as well as their state and federal license numbers. Do an online search to see if you can find any complaints about the company. Call the government’s consumer complaints hotline at 1 (888) 368-7238 to inquire about the company’s history.If your friends and family don’t have recommendations, get a list of reliable movers from local or national movers association like the American Moving And Storage Association and State Associations of Movers. Also, it’s a good bet your Realtor knows the best moving companies in town.By federal law, movers are required to give you a booklet called “Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move” while in the planning stages of your move (not after you’re all packed up). If you weren’t offered one, choose another mover.Packing costsThe Catch-22 of moving is that if you pack your own belongings, the mover generally isn’t responsible for any damage to them. If you let your mover pack them, you’re forking over inflated prices for boxes and other packing material, not to mention time and labour. Ask about the packers’ experience, if you go the latter route. Most are careful, but others will just toss whatever they can into a box and seal it up – with little regard for whether something will break or bend.Other extra feesLive in a two-story house or moving to one? You’ll likely be charged extra. Moving to or from a 10th-floor apartment? Ditto. Have a narrow street that won’t fit a moving van? Expect a surcharge for the transfer of your belongings to a smaller truck for delivery.Insurance and Valuation ProtectionAll moving companies are required to assume liability for the value of the goods that they transport. However, there are two different levels of liability that apply and you should be aware of the charges that apply and the amount of protection provided by each level. The two different levels of liability that movers are required to provide are explained below and in the Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move brochure that your mover will provide to you. Be sure to read this information carefully and follow the instructions provided to declare a value on your shipment.vFULL (REPLACEMENT) VALUE PROTECTIONThis is the most comprehensive plan available for the protection of your goods. Unless you select the Alternative Level of Liability described below, your shipment will be transported under your mover’s FULL (REPLACEMENT) VALUE level of liability. If any article is lost, destroyed or damaged while in your mover’s custody, your mover will, at its option, either 1) repair the article to the extent necessary to restore it to the same condition as when it was received by your mover, or pay you for the cost of such repairs; or 2) replace the article with an article of like kind and quality, or pay you for the cost of such a replacement. An additional charge applies for this service; to avoid this additional charge, you must select the alternative level of liability described below.The exact cost for full value protection may vary by mover and may be further subject to various deductible levels of liability that may reduce your cost. Ask your mover for the details of their specific plan.Under this option, movers are permitted to limit their liability for loss or damage to articles of extraordinary value, unless you specifically list these articles on the shipping documents. An article of extraordinary value is any item whose value exceeds $100 per pound (for example, jewellery, silverware, china, furs, antiques, oriental rugs and computer software). Ask your mover for a complete explanation of this limitation before your move. It is your responsibility to study this provision carefully and to make the necessary declaration.ALTERNATIVE LEVEL OF LIABILITY – Released Value of 60 Cents Per Pound Per Article.This is the most economical protection available; however, this no-cost option provides only minimal protection. Under this option, the mover assumes liability for no more than 60 cents per pound, per article. Loss or damage claims are settled based on the pound weight of the article multiplied by 60 cents. For example, if a 10-pound stereo component, valued at $1000 were lost or destroyed, the mover would be liable for no more than $6.00 (10 pounds x 60¢). Obviously, you should think carefully before agreeing to such an arrangement. There is no extra charge for this minimal protection, but you must sign a specific statement on the bill of lading agreeing to it. If you do not select this alternative level of liability, your shipment will be transported at the full (replacement) value level of liability and you will be assessed the applicable valuation charge.These two levels of liability are not insurance agreements that are governed by state insurance laws but instead are contractual tariff levels of liability authorized under Released Rates Orders of the Surface Transportation Board of the US Department of Transportation. Some movers may also offer to sell, or procure for you, separate added liability insurance if you release your shipment for transportation at a value of 60 cents per pound per article (the Alternative Level of Liability). This is not valuation coverage governed by Federal law, but optional insurance that is regulated under state law. If you purchase this separate coverage, in the event of loss or damage which is the responsibility of the mover, the mover is liable only for an amount not exceeding 60 cents per pound per article, and the balance of the loss is recoverable from the insurance company up to the amount of insurance purchased. The mover’s representative can advise you of the availability of such liability insurance and the cost. If you purchase this separate liability insurance from or through your mover, be sure to get a copy of the policy or other documents at the time of purchase.The blank contractThis should be common sense rather than a scam — but don’t ever, ever sign a blank contract, no matter how much you like the mover. Get absolutely everything in writing. Your estimate and all extra fees should be right there, as well as your pickup and delivery dates.Read your contract from top to bottom and make sure that all your belongings are listed. Don’t be satisfied with a box that’s just inventoried as “Office supplies” unless you saw it packed up with just notepads and paperclips. If that laptop computer isn’t labelled on the inventory form you sign before the driver leaves, don’t expect it to be in the box when he arrives. You can’t file a claim for something that doesn’t appear on the inventory list.vThe “guaranteed” quoteFederal law requires one of two kinds of moving contracts. A non-binding estimate means the company cannot require payment of more than 10% above the original estimate, due within 30 days of delivery. A binding estimate is supposed to be a guaranteed price for the move and all extras and services. If additional services are requested (such as unpacking), the extra fee is due within 30 days of delivery.Think you’re getting an ironclad, binding, “not to exceed” contract? Read the fine print. It often says it won’t exceed that price unless the weight of your belongings is more than the estimate. You want to be guaranteed in writing that this is THE final price – or feel darn comfortable with the weight estimate you were given.Three different moving companies may give estimates that are as much as several thousand pounds apart, so in some instances, you may feel safer with the higher estimate. (Movers weigh their trucks empty, then weigh again with your belongings on it to figure out how heavy your possessions are.)The window of opportunityShow of hands: How many have moved to another state and still had at least a couple boxes still unpacked a year later? Pray that nothing inside is damaged, because you have only nine months — which goes by faster than you think — to report any problems to the moving company and file an insurance claim.Try to get help from friends when the movers are unloading, and open each box and sift through it to check for obvious damage. Ideally, you should note the problem on the mover’s copy of the bill of lading before signing it. Your mover then has 30 days to acknowledge receipt of your claim. Within 120 days of receiving it, he must deny your claim or make an offer to pay. It’s a lot easier for him to deny it if you don’t have before-and-after proof, or if he didn’t see the damage before he left your new house.Good luck with your move!