How Long Would Artifacts Last Under the Moon's Surface?
How Long?
In the 1960s, unknown to most, the United States set up a secret base on the moon manned by an "extra" aboard each Apollo lander. NASA architects decided that the base must be built into the native rock, taking advantage of lava tubes to quickly conduct themselves below the surface - granting them protection from the heat, cold, and radiation behind dozens of yards of hard rock. The station was powered by a radioisotope thermo-electric generator.
Unfortunately, the base ended in tragedy. Planners had overestimated the quality of air and water scrubbers and also badly underestimated the need for spares. Changing political fortunes at home caused the base and crew to be left for dead. By accident, towards the terrible end the pressure seal on the base was ruptured exposing the crew and structure to the void.
How far forward in the future might it be possible for a future explorer, armed with a map and old government records, to find moonbase Snoopy and still be able to find any of the technology (LED lighting? Computer systems?) still operational?
Would it be possible that anything would be left after centuries? Millenia?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/131626. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
How Long?
I concur with the other two answers in that everything could be potentialy functional if sufficientley shielded from hard radiation and strikes by macroscopic particles.
However we need to look at several potential problems:
Tectonic activity on the moon - until recentley it was thought that there hadn't been any since the moon's formation roughly 4.6 billion years ago. The current best theory however is that the most recent scars formed roughly 50 million years ago, and no further activity is expected. No worries here then.
Thermo-electric generators are potentialy going to last that long, still producing energy, depending on what they're made with:
Plutonium oxide was used in the Cassini and the Galileo mission's TEGs - but:
Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years
Which is not sufficient to provide appreciable power over a millenium. However:
Am241 (Americium) has a half-life of 432 years and could hypothetically power a device for centuries.
The equipment was left switched on:
The usual transistor failure occurs gradually over a long period of time and after thousands of hours of operation. The performance degradation generally shows up as an increasing saturation current ... the (device's) efficiency and gain suffer.
As to the monitors - I couldn't find specific figures for Cathode-Ray-Tube electron-gun life-expectancy, but the heater coils show gradual evaporation till they finaly fail - not to mention the gradual wear and tear of the phosphor - if you've ever seen an old multisync monitor you'll remember the permanent silhouette of the default screen etched there.
These are ubiquitous in electronic equipment, they rely on a water based solution inside them to work, so if they're not sealed properly it would evaporate and cause them to fail - and since any rubber seals would have degraded on this timescale... they screw things up for you.
Hot Equipment.
Any equipment that relies on fans or convection currents to keep cool is going to melt if it doesn't trip.
Conclusion.
Providing:
It had adequate shielding.
There are no catastrophic collisions from above.
There's sufficient redundancy in the generators.
The power tripped "off" when the base became abandoned.
NASA had the foresight to use rugged tantalum-bead capacitors.
I see no barrier to securing the hatch, repressurising, brushing off the thin layer of dust that's formed and booting up, one system at a time, carefull not to overload these museum pieces. Even after 1000 years in semi-hard vacuum. Difficult to test in our lifetimes though, so even if I'm wrong I can still bet the farm with impunity.
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