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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.'"
sister satellite
I don't think that means what the article writer intended it to mean...
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
We may only get one chance to do this right. If we introduce a bacteria that can survive without artificial shelter (doubtful, but possible), it's there forever. Many of the problems we've had here with invasive species has been due to things introduced intentionally that ended up doing things that weren't anticipated.
Granted, the moon is a harsh enough environment that anything we do will probably only be in a pressurized man-made structure, but that might not be the case if we try it on Mars.
Why wouldn't they try a plant that grows in extremely low nutrient soil? There are plenty of plants that grow in sand along beaches and generate their own food through photosynthesis (all plants do, but some rely on it more than others).
Garden flowers are probably the worst type of plant to try to grow in nutrient-free dirt.
Sunlight is the biggest problem. Most places on the Moon go through two weeks of darkness, and providing sunlight-equivalent illumination would be energy prohibitive. Soviet scientists have experimented with keeping plants on low artificial light at low temperatures for two weeks, alternating that with two weeks of light. Apparently, peas can grow like this.
Why? If they could get CO2 from the soil, it could work.
But that would involve *going* to the moon which anyone with a brain knows is impossible.
Of COURSE they used marigolds.
Now they need to study the effect of gamma rays on these plants.
Cheech: "Sounds like the perfect place to grow some reefer, man."
Chong: "Like wow man, the pigs would never think to look on the moon, man."
So you are one of those nutcases that don't believe that we actually landed on moon? Only people with severe psychological disorders believe that crap.
Wait.. why do you have my nick?
Look, if anyone knows anything about growing plants under unfavorable conditions (soil if not legal), it would be the Dutch. Looking forward to new strains like "Even More Northern Lights", "Earthly Glow", ...
had to be said too.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
It'll grow anywhere. It don't need no stinkin' air. The Moon will be completely covered in 3 to 5 years.
You do know that people have been growing plants in mineral solutions for years don't you?
You will only need a source of Co2 which could be delivered from the earth and use a sealed glasshouse (greenhouse) to conserve the ecosystem.
After you have got "enough" oxygen from the plants you can then send some lambs and rabbits to produce more Co2 for the plants.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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*
Hmmm. Planting earthworms on the Moon... Moon Worms... After countless years, they will evolve better resistance to low pressure to a point where it can survive in a vaccume, resistant to full radiation from the sun, and collect all the materials it needs O2 and Water from the ground. Flurisning in this environment it will soon learn to use some of the excess gasses it digegest as a form or propulation, grow larger and larger until it reaches huge sizes where in order for them to survive they must eat moons and planets and fly to other systems in hibernation. To feed on other solar systems... Man you guys just doomed the galixy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...that's all I'm saying...
Moon Weed!
I'm too much of a nerd, immediately thinking that "Hey, human flesh doesn't actually have enough nutrients in it that plants need in their current form. They'd have to kill us, then plant themselves in us and get the nutrients from us as we decompose"
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)
So I guess that moon weed is some good stuff huh?
"It's all just meme meme around here"
*laugh* Oh, those wacky Dutch. Trying to start a grow-op on the moon.
I for one welcome our new lunar based, wooden shod, pot growing overlords, and anticipate the weed that is truly out of this world.
I think that's a good sign for lunar exploration -- brothels and legalized drugs will make space attractive for much more of the population.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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
"I have ridden the mighty moon worm!"
-- Al Gore, Inventor of the Environment, First Emperor of the Moon
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I love this kind of argument because it is so easy to debunk. A self sustaining moon colony would be worth the money it takes to set up, from a scientific and economic standpoint. This just makes it cheaper to do.
Consider that there are no pests on the moon. There is nothing but open space and free sunlight. The moon has a tiny gravity well. Think about bio-fuel production on Earth, and all the problems that go along with it. None of those problems exist on the moon.
If you can't see any of the reasons to have a moon colony in the first place, you are too stupid to try to explain this too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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)