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Scientists Calculated How Long a Moon City Could Survive. The Results Aren’t Great.

A new study suggests a million-person lunar city could exhaust even an optimistic water supply within a century, despite extensive recycling.

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As tech billionaires try to sell us on the idea of human colonies on the moon and beyond, a new research paper published in Frontiers in Space Technologies threw a bucket of cold, free-floating globules of water all over the idea. That research paper suggests that such a lunar city would last at most 100 years, and that’s being generous.

Scientists Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell ran the numbers on what it takes to actually keep a sci-fi metropolis alive. While space fanboys go on and on about lunar mining for water ice, farming in zero-G, and building habs that........

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