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Growing Plants on the Moon May Be Feasible
Smivs writes "European scientists say that
growing plants on the moon
should be possible. Scientists in the Netherlands believe growing plants on our sister satellite would be useful as a tool to learn how life adapts to lunar conditions. It would also aid in understanding the challenges that might be faced by manned bases. 'The new step, taken in the experiments reported at the EGU, is to remove the need for bringing nutrients and soil from Earth. A team led by Natasha Kozyrovska and Iryna Zaetz from the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev planted marigolds in crushed anorthosite, a type of rock found on Earth which is very similar to much of the lunar surface. In neat anorthosite, the plants fared very badly. But adding different types of bacteria made them thrive; the bacteria appeared to draw elements from the rock that the plants needed, such as potassium.'"
I was of the understanding that plants (at least those that photosynthesize) only need water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight. Oxygen, I think, is a product of photosynthesis, not an input.
Not that there is an abundance of H2O and CO2 on the moon, though... at least... I'm not aware of there being one.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
In his trilogy beginning with Red Mars , Kim Stanley Robinson points out one of the difficulties of growing anything in a terraformed environment is the poverty of the soil. Even if you've got the right kind of rock, seeding it things such as earthworms (which are apparently vital to good crop growth) is so difficult that such soil can only be manufactured at incredibly slow speeds. It's not just air, rocks and bacteria that are necessary. It's the entire ecosystem present where the plants evolved on Earth.
Actually, you're wrong on every account.
1: The dirt "does" have enough nutrients for some variety of plants.
2: Present under a pressure dome, that the plants would have to have anyway.
3 and 4: Are satisfied by having non-acidic, non alkaline, neutral soil PH, which exists on the moon.
5: Topic of the article.
6: Water "is" speculated to be buried in pockets on the moon.
7 and 8: Both present under a pressure dome.
Growing plants on the moon, just as hard as putting up a pressure dome that people living there would need to be under anyway.
*insert annoying self-signing at the end of a post that already has my name on it at the top anyway*
I always like to point to this article: Terraforming: Human Destiny or Hubris
It argues Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's vision: that we should learn how to grow plants in Space first, and stay the hell away from all gravity sinks (such as moons, such as planets,) for a very long time.
That said, if we can grow plants on the moon, that's great!
(older article)
Predating "Red Mars" (and even predating "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress") by a few years, Robert Heinlein wrote "Farmer in the Sky". In it he went into goodly detail about what it would take to turn bare rock into fertile soil, including earthworms and composting all of your biological waste. He had the Ganymede colony under a dome, though it was at reduced pressure.
A friend who had also read "Farmer..." said that he'd been to Hawaii and seen their process of recovering lava fields to soil, and felt that Heinlein was right in the same ballpark, and least with the rock-crushing side of things. Obviously in a place like Hawaii it would be harder to keep life out than to start it up.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Not to mention that plants also have cell walls, making them more resistant to...popping than animals are.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Just like you, plants require oxygen from the air to metabolize their food (in their case the sugars they produce from photosynthesis). If they had no oxygen, they couldn't perform plant respiration. Plants don't store oxygen from photosynthesis internally so they rely on being able to pull oxygen from the air when they need it. Of course, overall plants produce more oxygen through photosynthesis than they use through respiration, so if we put these moon plants in some kind of dome they'd not die from lack of oxygen.
In other words, they can build a big terrarium.
Here's something to consider. If you have ever maintained an aquarium, you probably know that despite what common sense would tell you, the larger the aquarium is, the easier it is to keep going. True, things like water changes become logistically harder as the tank sizes get to the enormous ranges, but you build around that.
The tricky thing about small aquariums is that the chemistry can change rapidly in a small volume of water. You've got to watch a 5 gallon tank like a hawk for things like spikes in ammonia or shifts in pH. A 50 gallon tank is quite easy for a beginner to maintain, apart from having to lug buckets of water around. If you heater goes out, or worse if it get stuck on, you're fish are dead if you don't notice it right away. In a fifty gallon tank you've got some slack.
The logical end goal of growing plants on the Moon would be to set up a system in which the plants, given a carefully controlled start, establish an environment that achieves equilibrium without putting more resources into it. Naturally, the larger the environment is, the easier it would be to do this. Once you have established how much space you need to reach a moderately stable equilibrium, let's say it's a thousand cubic meters, you can build larger examples that actually resist moving away from their equilibrium point.
The thing about systems in equilibrium, as any chemical engineer will tell you, is that when you take something that is part of the equilibrium out, they respond by making more of it.
Which is just what you need to have an efficient, self sustaining environment on the Moon. Or the Earth, for that matter.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, actually majority of the plants need also oxygen, but there are some plants which don't need it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant#Growth
> Oxygen, I think, is a product of photosynthesis, not an input
Yes, but majority of the plants don't produce sugar/starch just for fun. They also use it to grow. And for that, they need oxygen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiration
Water on Moon has not yet been proven, but it is still possible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_ice
I don't see the lack of CO2 as a problem. Let's just place a few humans there to produce CO2. Or if that is not acceptable, perhaps animals.
It's earth's twin sister alright, if it was created by an asteroid impacting Earth. Just imagine they were siamese sisters and the asteroid was the scalpel
One interesting fact about earthworms -- they are an exotic invasive species in North America. In fact, if you ever use worms as bait, you should never just toss them away except where you got them.
When the North American ice sheet receded, there weren't any earthworm species in most of the continent. Nature found its own equilibrium without them, with its own unique set of preferred tree and understory species. Europeans reintroduced the earthworm, and it is gradually erasing some of the distinctiveness of North American forest from European forests.
There is no question that earthworms are beneficial in most gardens and compost heaps, and might be useful in some kind of extraterrestrial gardening experiment. Then again, they might not, depending on the design of the garden.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not entirely correct: Only 33% of the earthworm species in North America are exotic/introduced. Only two genera of Lumbricid earthworms are indigenous to North America while introduced genera have spread to areas where earthworms did not formerly exist, especially in the north where forest development relies on a large amount of undecayed leaf matter. (From wikipedia)
Northern Ireland is part of the UK but not Great Britain. The Republic of Ireland is in neither the UK or GB.
Side note: these days Polish is a pretty common first language in the UK.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions." -TP
oblig. The Great British Venn Diagram