Name: What If We Covered the Moon With Solar Panels?
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T08:20:31.000Z
Duration: 3 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Not too far from Earth is a giant space rock

Adverbs of manner

Adverbs of degree

to just twelve people in its entire history.

What would happen if we put our cosmic satellite to work

if we covered the Moon with solar panels.

Because the Moon has little to no atmosphere,

If a lunar weatherman were to tell you the forecast,

"Once again, today you're looking at a daytime high of 130°C (266°F)

Imagine how much energy we'd collect from a place

But how would we even build a solar plant on the Moon?

One Japanese company, Shimizu, already has that covered.

They want to build a so-called Luna Ring.

And yes, it would look just the way it sounds -

a ring of solar panels spanning around the Moon.

The construction would stretch for 11,000 km (6,800 miles)

and would reach 400 km (250 miles) in width.

Where on Earth would we even find enough materials

for assembling this enormous solar plant?

Well, the answer lies outside of our planet's natural budget.

Most of the building materials would come from the Moon itself.

We'd only have to launch the initial equipment over there -

just enough to start building more equipment

Then a team of robots, together with a group of astronauts,

For starters, they'd construct huge excavator

and ore processing machines to mine the Moon.

Then, they'd begin assembling solar panels from the lunar materials.

they'd make concrete, ceramics and solar cells.

would be working on building spaceports in low Earth's orbit

to ship the remaining supplies, like hydrogen,

Even with the most advanced technology we can think of,

But once it's done, we'd have a super efficient lunar powerplant,

Because there are no bad weather days on the Moon.

But what about getting that power back to Earth?

On the Moon, the lunar power plant would transmit solar power

From there, the converted power would be beamed

Potentially, it could deliver so much energy,

that we wouldn't need any other power sources at all.

Maybe building the lunar power plant would happen

that would one day grow into a fully-operational human colony.