FANTASY HIGHS AND LOWS. To the Moon and the Deep Blue Sea.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth. ~ The Buddha 

I have thought Bernie’s political programs are unalloyed fantasy. Two recent ideas put his plans to shame on the fantasy front. In one sense, they might now serve as useful antidotes for those of us who are way too immersed in mere temporal topics like, Will Bernie beat everyone on Super Tuesday?

These two notions describe a future that, in their believers’ eyes, is not only probable but eminently worthy, even necessary. And, like Bernie’s magical myth-making proposals, they aren’t blemished by their financial requirements for success nor worry about their potential adverse consequences.

Interestingly, they both share a focus on a modern-day solution to the age-old problem of how to satisfy humanity’s increasing needs for resources, despite these resources’ scarcity. They both require technology that doesn’t yet exist.

So let’s first escape to the fantasy high of moon mining. Yup, commercially extracting ore from our next-door astronomical object a mere 238,900 miles away from home. Homer Hickam’s tale, “Let the Moon Rush Begin,“ summarizes his high-flying, fervent belief in needful digging on the moon.

Homer believes the US should now start considering the moon as our “eighth continent and potentially a new source of wealth for the people of Earth. Our previous human and robotic missions discovered that the moon has abundant water and oxygen, as well as helium, platinum, thorium, rare earth metals and other minerals that may well be worth digging up and transporting back for use in thousands of earthly products.” He goes on to say, once electricians, plumbers, miners and construction workers start going to the moon, and the middle class starts using products made with lunar minerals, the US will become a true spacefaring nation.

Homer seems unable to turn off his brain’s mental screen that’s continuously projecting either old Star Trek movies or The Expanse. A spacefaring nation with far-away lunar plumbers? How about just getting one to come within three days to fix your leaking disposal.

Homer’s opinion that there’s “abundant water” on the moon requires a huge definitional stretch of the term abundant. No one now knows how much water, if any, exists on the Moon. According to NASA, the moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but water might exist in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface may hold about 32 ounces of water, the size of a Big Gulp soda. The rocks that Apollo astronauts gathered on the Moon’s surface came up “dry.” The supposed Moon water is more likely to be in its south pole craters, the globe’s very chilliest spots (-387°F). Several post-Apollo moon probes have detected wavelengths of light reflected off the craters’ surface indicating the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen — a signature, but indirect, indicator of either water or hydroxyl. Nevertheless, these analyses provided no estimates for how abundant the water/hydroxyl might be.

Let’s examine thorium and platinum from his mentioned lunar-sourced ores that the spacefaring US would ship back to Earth. Does his fantasy make any sense, and cents? Thorium is a weakly radioactive metallic element widely available in the Earth’s crust. There are between 2.6 to 2.8 million tons of thorium here on mother earth. It’s about as ordinary as lead, which is to say commonplace. The US enjoys having about 15% of the world’s thorium resources.

A small group of fervent scientists believe thorium could be the “fuel of the future” when it’s used in liquid fluoride thorium reactors to generate electricity. Such reactors don’t now exist and would require substantial government R&D funding to become commercially-available. That’s very unlikely, mostly due to the public’s continuing revulsion of all things having to do with nuclear electric power.

So Homer’s idea of somehow competitively transporting thorium from the moon to earth fails for two reasons: it’s abundant on Earth; and no one is interested in its principal use.

What about lunar platinum? Unlike thorium, platinum is a very rare metal. Only a few hundred tons are produced annually. Its scarcity is reflected in its price, that has increased from $448 ten years ago to $2,225 per troy oz. currently. It has a number of crucial uses; including in computer drives, anti-cancer drugs, catalytic converters and gasoline. Columbia remains a source of platinum, as well as the Ural Mountains in Russia. Could the colossal costs of developing lunar mining and transport technologies of the now-unknown deposits of lunar platinum allow it to compete with “local” platinum? No one knows, but at best it would likely be a loooong time before these lunar technologies, as well as the need for lunar plumbers, would be something other science fiction.

Based on the above information, I’d say for the foreseeable future moon mining remains illusory. Sorry Homer, we can continue to gaze at the man in the moon without concerns that his “skin” will be ravaged by your hoped-for excavations.

Next, instead of looking upward into the heavens for inorganic salvation, let’s head way downward to exhume the ocean sea floor. And not just any sea floor, but the deep depths of the “hadal zone,” a reference to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. This region is the absolute lowest of the Earth’s oceans which comprise 71% of its surface and 99% of our planet’s living space.

The hadal zone begins in water that is at least 20,000 feet (more than three nautical miles) beneath the sea’s waves and can extend to 36,000 feet. At these depths water pressure is unimaginably high, between 1.45 and 1.92 million pounds of pressure per square foot, that’s almost 700 to over 900 times surface pressure. To say this little-known environment is hostile is profound understatement.

Astonishingly, there is life that inhabits the hadal zone, including strange creatures like the snailfish (below), bristle worms, sea cucumber, jelly fish, bivalves, sea anemones and amphipods. Only three human expeditions have ever reached the seabed of the hadal zone’s Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth. A dozen NASA astronauts have walked on our orbiting moon, which is more than the number of folks who have dived to the very bottom of our Earth.

Swire’s snailfish

Wil Hylton’s “20,000 feet under the Sea” account describes the challenges as well as possible rewards and consequences of digging on the ocean’s densely dark depths. The prize for undersea miners is polymetallic nodules found on deep-water plains. These nodules, first discovered at the end of the 19th century, are rich in copper, cobalt, nickel and manganese; minerals crucial for battery-making. They have been found in practically every ocean. They can be as large as a grapefruit and appear abundant in the Eastern Central Pacific Ocean, specifically in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), the main area of worldwide interest for minable polymetallic nodules. The CCZ runs East-West roughly between Southern Baja Mexico and Hawaii, covering 1.7 million square miles of ocean.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN-based organization that administers the CCZ and other seabeds, believes there are over 21 billion tons of nodules in the zone. The ISA and its members have been slowly developing for over a decade its Mining Code, the rules and regulations for world-wide undersea mining. Because the US has not yet indorsed the UN’s 1994 Law of the Sea Convention, it is not a member of the ISA.

The ISA hopes to have its Mining Code ratified this year, which would legally allow deep-sea mining to commence in the dozens of CCZ permitted areas and elsewhere. What’s first needed is development of proven, reliable and environmentally-sustainable technologies for gathering deep-sea minerals at costs competitive with land-based mines. This has not stopped organizations from Russia, Korea, China, Japan, France, Germany, Nauru and Tonga from agreeing to contracts with the ISA to explore (but not mine) for polymetallic nodules. These organizations are betting the benefits they’ll receive once the Code is in force – the significant amounts of metallic treasure – will pay for the hefty expenses they’ve been incurring.

Aside from economics, there are plenty of concerns about deep-sea mining, principally environmental. Large, industrial-scale vessels will use robot-guided vacuum hoses to suck up nodules and sediment from the seafloor. The nodules will be kept in the ship, the rest will be dumped back into the ocean. The huge plumes of discarded slurry will be carried by ever-changing ocean currents at different speeds in different directions. The ISA’s current draft of its Mining Code, which many observers believe is pro-mining, does not specify the depth of the ships’ discharges, but is based on the large, untested assumption that it won’t be carried more than 62 miles from the release point.

Sometime in the future when these organizations begin operating at full capacity, they expect to suck up thousands of square miles of sea-floor each year. A Swedish study foresees that each ship will release at least two million cubic feet of discharge per day as they hoover the abyssal sea-plains.

Is that an outcome worthy of more electric vehicle batteries? I think not. But because such deep-sea devastation will be completely unwitnessed and snailfish can’t protest the contamination of their home territory, the best response won’t be coming from the oceans’ depths. It’s too bad we can’t vote in favor of the snailfish, who I expect are predominantly Democrats, and for preserving their neighborhood on Super Tuesday.