 The SETI Institute and the Mars Institute have announced the discovery of what could be lava tubes on the Moon's North Pole. What does this mean for space travel? This is your space pod for January 18th, 2018. In a discovery based on data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and announced on January 11th, the SETI and Mars Institutes say they have found small pits in a large crater near Luna's North Pole. Now it's possible that these pits are entrances to an underground network of lava tubes. Pits appear as small depressions with shadowed interiors, they're generally about 15 to 30 meters across. Now these pits are located along sections of winding channels that are generally thought to be collapsed underground tunnels that at one time stream flows of lava. Now this is important to possible future exploration of our Moon. If we are to colonize our rocky neighbor, we'll need access to water. We know there's water in the lunar regolith, but the process for extracting it requires we excavate a lot of said regolith. While not yet proven if ice is present in the lava tubes, it's not that it would be in massive formations just as they occur often in lava tubes here on Earth, which is what you're looking at right now. Excavation would be easy too, as sunlight would be available for solar power just outside of the tube itself. Now these discoveries are located in a place called, and forgive my pronunciation of this, I believe it's Filosius Crater, which is exciting to scientists for a couple of reasons. First it's relatively young, which would allow scientists to study some more recent parts of Luna's evolution. It's also on the near side of the Moon, allowing for direct communication back to Earth. As we gear up to go back to the Moon, that makes this discovery all the more exciting. It's something new for us to explore and could help advanced humans explore the rest of the solar system. Now if you like this story and you're excited about ice on the Moon, or any sort of space nerdery, make sure to watch our live shows every Saturday at 1800 coordinate universal time. Also don't forget to like and subscribe to this video so you get notifications of not only new space pods, but also when we're live on the air. All right, one final note after the close. Normally Jared or Space Mike do the space pods, and they have these really nifty closing statements. Jared's Keep Exploring, Space Mike is at Astra. I haven't done a space pod forever, so I don't have a close, but because I'm all about the community, I thought I would give you the community an opportunity to create my closing statement. I am most likely going to immediately regret that. I will end up with a closing statement of Bodie McBoatface, but I think it would be fun to send it to the community. So what do you the community think my closing statement should be?