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People have, over the decades, wondered where space explorers will find a water source. I know I have anyway.

We can all heave a sigh of relief. APM 08279+5255 is a deep-space object with, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and unless I have the detail wrong, 140 trillion times more water than all the Earth's oceans combined and without the salt.

One wonders what one should take in order to harvest it.

Awesome. with water and technology allis possible. You can crack the H2O with solar power for make oxygen and hydrogen. You can burn the hydrogen for warmth and fuel. You can breathe the oxygen. You can drink the water, and you can grow plants with it. Water = life anywhere we want to be.

How deep?

Too far out and the time and fuel load to get there becomes a problem - still, once we're there we could use some of the water as propellant to bring it closer.

Saint_;1363213 wrote: Awesome. with water and technology allis possible. You can crack the H2O with solar power for make oxygen and hydrogen. You can burn the hydrogen for warmth and fuel. You can breathe the oxygen. You can drink the water, and you can grow plants with it. Water = life anywhere we want to be.


When H is "burned" it is re-united with O and becomes water again.

So we basically are investing energy to separate the elements, and then recovering the energy when re-combining.

There is a cost to the exchange, but Solar energy is in plenteous supply. at least close to the Sun.



Of course at 12 billion light years distance, it may all be gone, by now.

LarsMac;1363227 wrote: When H is "burned" it is re-united with O and becomes water again.

So we basically are investing energy to separate the elements, and then recovering the energy when re-combining.

There is a cost to the exchange, but Solar energy is in plenteous supply. at least close to the Sun.



Of course at 12 billion light years distance, it may all be gone, by now.


OK, that will teach me to look into it before I reply - even that much water, when spread over thousands of cubic light years, is no damn'd use to us even if we could possibly reach it.

To quote The Sun... Gotcha.

One wonders what one should take in order to harvest it.


A very large Gin and Tonic, and a little lime?

(I'll leave you techies the minor detail of getting us there by the time the Sun reaches the yardarm.)