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Moon Could Have Been Habitable Once, Scientists Speculate (gizmodo.com)
Scientists from Birkbeck, University of London speculate that recent results show that the moon is wetter than scientists have previously thought, increasing the possibility for it to have the necessary conditions for life. "Whether life ever arose on the Moon, or was transported to it from elsewhere, is of course highly speculative and can only be addressed by an aggressive future program of lunar exploration," they write in the article, published in the journal Astrobiology. Gizmodo summarizes: This habitability period, if it really occurred, might have happened either just after the Moon's formation from a massive collision with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, or 3.5 billion years ago, after a period of volcanism which may have resulted in a thin lunar atmosphere. Such an atmosphere would have lasted perhaps tens of millions of years. Maybe water existed on the Moon at this point. Maybe 10 million years was enough time for some rudimentary life to evolve on the Moon. Maybe Earthly life traveled over to the Moon on asteroids. Who knows.
The researchers stress that "habitability requires much more than just the presence of a significant atmosphere and liquid water." One such requirement would be the presence of organic compounds. And there are obviously not the same water-created features on the Moon that we see here on Earth or on Mars, like drainage channels -- though maybe these existed and were eroded by small meteors and solar winds. While the paper doesn't present new data, it's an interesting synthesis of lots of existing research demonstrating that, since the Moon is wetter than was initially thought, maybe it's worth wondering whether it was once habitable.
The researchers stress that "habitability requires much more than just the presence of a significant atmosphere and liquid water." One such requirement would be the presence of organic compounds. And there are obviously not the same water-created features on the Moon that we see here on Earth or on Mars, like drainage channels -- though maybe these existed and were eroded by small meteors and solar winds. While the paper doesn't present new data, it's an interesting synthesis of lots of existing research demonstrating that, since the Moon is wetter than was initially thought, maybe it's worth wondering whether it was once habitable.
An interesting topic and relevnt for science and nerdy types -- yet the first 15 or so comments are all off topic, snide remarks and the inevitable (and tiresome) ad hominem attacks.
Not a single reply which bore any relevance to the topic.
Come on Slashdot, you are better than this !!
That seems to happen a lot more often since the internet became popular.
The mention of channels on the moon reminded me of this old thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Yeah channels and canals are different. Hah.
There were also bat-men on the moon, in those days. Funny that if you showed someone from the 1800's a Batman comic they'd think he's an alien.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com...
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
It's not dead. Still around and still actively developed. Having a smaller market share does not make something "dead", you're just being a drama queen.
In the Scientific Process this is on step one hypothesis. Which is just a logical guess. This phase is no better then philosophy, where it is just logical thinking of things.
I don't call this science, or these people scientists because science hasn't been done yet.
That rant out of the way.
I am going to give my hypothesis/philosophy to approaching that idea.
Life isn't just about having the elements, they need to be arranged in the right way. While the moon has a lot of water, I don't think it is distributed well enough to have the conditions to start life.
We as humans can go there, we can probably mine the water and other life giving chemicals from the moon, but at great effort. Even the effort to scrape enough material to keep a bacteria alive, would be considerable effort. More then the random chance.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
can't we assume that every planet (except, perhaps gass planets) and/or moon was capable at a certain point in it's life to support life?
as the planet/moon ages it loses these capabilities and ends up a dead rock, remember earth will be inhabitable at a certain point as well.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
There sure is a lot of speculation about what could have been in the summary. Kinda sounds like what might happen if some astrophysicists got really, really stoned.
That said:
> This phase is no better then philosophy, where it is just logical thinking of things. I don't call this science
Einstein's work on relativity was mostly logical thinking of things. We didn't have the technology to test most of it until decades later.
I suppose there is a difference in that Einstein had more "logical thinking" and less wild speculation. He eliminated many possibilities and came up with a lot of "if X is true, then Y must also be true, which in turn implies Z through the blahblah theorem".
Why would any good scientist speculate?
Science today is about group-think and peer-approval - the scientific method can't be relied upon to "prove" what scientists "know" to be true.
Ken
True, but we've skipped over the hard parts and jumped right into publication.
Ken
...but I bet the issue was Lunar Warming, and it was triggered by the moon landings, where mean white men forced women of color smarter than them to do the math so that we could land white men on the moon!
LOL
Ken
I don't even think that life (as we know it, Jim) had even evolved on Earth by that stage
When terraforming is mentioned, it's usually Mars, or sometimes Venus, but the moon is rarely mentioned.
It's a shame, since there's a lot the moon could offer. With enough targetted impacts, we could spin it up and give it an atmosphere. Due to the moon's smaller size, it would take far less of an effort than terraforming Mars or Venus (about 100 Halley-sized comets versus an estimated 10,000 comets for Mars). While the moon's low gravity means it'll eventually lose its atmosphere, it should hold to one for tens of thousands of years, which is long compared to human lifespans.
Whenever I see any pop-science article using "could', "might", "potentially", or "possible" I automatically negate those words. If doing that doesn't change the meaning of the statement I tend to pass it by.
"The moon could have been habitable to life." reads to me "The moon could not have been habitable to life.". Well, that isn't extraordinary.
There could be some interesting details and I'll find an article that focuses on those details that doesn't use hype words.
It's possible that long ago it had a magnetic field worthy of the name. That might have helped a bit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You are perhaps a Thermian?