It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. This is wild. We could see people living and working on the moon within the next decade. I had no idea. But huge questions loom about governance, about colonialism of outer space, and the dangers of recreating the same social problems on the moon that exist

on Earth. In her TED 2020 talk, space policy researcher Jesse Kate Schingler shares what

she's learned about a new opportunity to do things better, to use the moon as a canvas to solve

our biggest challenges on Earth.

Right now, there's a lot happening with the moot.

China has announced plans for an inhabited South Pole station by the 2030s.

And the United States has an official roadmap seeking an increasing number of people

living and working in space. This will start with

NASA's Artemis program, an international program to send the first woman and the next man to the

moon this decade. Billionaires and the private sector are getting involved in unprecedented ways.

There are over 100 launch companies around the world and roughly a dozen

private lunar transportation companies readying robotic missions to the lunar surface. We have

reusable rockets for the first time in human history. This will enable the development of

infrastructure and utilization of resources. While estimates vary,

scientists think there could be up to a billion metric tons of water ice on the moon. That's greater

than the size of Lake Erie and enough water to support perhaps hundreds of thousands of people

living and working on the moon.

So although official plans are always evolving,

there's real reason to think that we could see people starting to live and work on the moon in the next decade.

However, the moon is roughly the size of the continent of Africa,

and we're starting to see that the key resources may be concentrated in small areas near the poles.

This raises important questions about coordinating access to scarce resources.

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