>>electric cars today and the Coltan to make the Tantalum for your BIG >>Win10 touch screen is in jeopardy because the DRC, about the only large >>source of Coltan, is devolving into a state of 'social unrest' and the >>US has told all it's people to split.
[snip]>We need to colonize the Moon, Mars, the asteroid >belt... Would be a massive job creator. >I liked Elon Musks little video showing his SpaceX >systems blasting off to Mars.. >https://youtu.be/0qo78R_yYFA >John I hope you're just being sarcastic. My understanding is that there are probably very few economical reasons to be on the Moon. Perhaps the potentially most important of them is to mine the lunar soil of a rare isotope of helium, specifically He-3 (helium-3), for use as a nuclear fuel. ( helium4 will be given off along with a lot of binding energy.) Helium is on the moon because it is emitted by the Sun and eventually captured, and presumably He-3 could be easily separated from the majority He-4 while on the moon using mass-spectroscopic techniques, sending only the valuable He-3 to the Earth. Curiously, a few years ago I saw a minor movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEsypRdBjcA about helium-3 mining on the moon. An added personal touch was that the main character(s) were named "Sam Bell", my late father's (and grandfather's, too) name. (the characters eventually concluded that they were actually two clones of yet another "Sam Bell".) Jim Bell
