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Thank you for seeing through my sloppy writing, and identifying what I was getting at. I should have have said "aside from human intervention."

So, aside from the human intervention, and assuming that the materials can generally withstand radiation... let's say it's 6 sq meters, [0] I know this is not exactly how it works, but if LLMs[1] and my own lacking skills at mathematics are accurate, then ~70 million years? That sounds so much more "permanent" than anything on Earth.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Machines_Nova-C

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67c51a06-51e8-8012-9f21-c9a428551d... (it would be amazing if someone could verify this math and logic, I cannot)




Water in concert with temperature flux is really destructive causing a massive amount of erosion here on Earth.

With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.


I wonder what a structure of metal(aluminum?) would look like after hundreds of thousands of 14-day 450F cycles.

How many cycles would it take to turn into a mound? Would a coherent mound still count as "existing?"


Aluminum might be one of the worst metals to use in an application like this.

https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/technical-fa...

>Aluminum does not have a distinct fatigue or endurance limit, so its S-N graph curves down from the upper left to the right and continues to curve down lower and lower toward the lower right corner of the graph. This illustrates that it will eventually fail even from low stress applications, given enough of them.

Steel/titanium, if its fatigue tolerance is in the temperature range, would last much longer if not near indefinably until it came to impacts.




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