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.'"

Sunlight is the Biggie

[StCredZero]

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.

Re:wishful thinking

[xtracto]

You do know that people have been growing plants in mineral solutions [wikipedia.org] 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.

Repeat these experiments at home

[the_kanzure]

I drew up some plans to make what I call a "moontank" [heybryan.org]. At the moment, the design is for cyanobacteria, however adding plants would be an interesting modification. The idea is to use a vacuum chamber here on earth and to make up something that looks like the same environment as found on the moon. Sprinkle in some bacteria, do some directed selection experiments, and see what we can get out of it.

Re:wishful thinking

[jd]

The first is answered by the article and 2-6 were largely answered by Biosphere 2, so those don't seem to apply. The problem is not one-off transports, but repeat trasports. That just leaves cosmic radiation and constant temperature. These are not trivial problems. Cosmic radiation might not be too bad - the seeds that the Apollo astronauts took to the moon and brought back remained viable, and many living organisms have survived shuttle and space station missions for prolonged periods of time. You'd want something fairly hardy against radiation, due to the time factors involved, but it's possible that fairly minimal shielding would be sufficient. The temperature more complex, as a prohibition on repeat transports eliminates the carrying of fuel for generators to power temperature regulation systems. You'd want some way of capturing the heat from the "daytime" and then releasing it on an as-needed basis over a sufficient area that temperatures remain within acceptable limits. Since water is needed in the system anyway, using solar water heating (with solar-powered pumps) would seem to be an easy way to carry heat around. Spray the water into the air of the dome as a fine mist and you've a heat release mechanism (and artificial rainfall).

Would this be enough to grow plants on the moon? The only way to find out would be to do the experiment, but as Biosphee 2 demonstrated, miscalculations are expensive and easy to make. (Biosphere 2 would have needed to be two to three times the size it was to have functioned as intended, due to uninvited insects getting in.) On Earth, the miscalculation was so expensive that nobody has tried repeating the experiment with recalculated dimensions. For the moon, where the cost of transport and construction would be tens of thousands that on Earth due to the high fuel costs and short mission times, you not only get just one shot at it, but you also have to make sure that one shot produces enormous value for money. Unless you know of a tree that produces pure platinum fruit, I don't see that being possible - at least, for now. Future launch systems might become cheap enough to make this possible, but I don't think we're remotely close to the point we could even test the theory, let alone make it worth the testing.

Re:Very careful--only one chance

[crow]

Yup, they have no enemies except the environment. Whatever they do to extract nutrients would eventually be done to the entire moon if they got out. If we find a need for the material in its current form, we'll be too late. If we find that the conversion process has side effects that we didn't anticipate (like, say, breaking apart all the rocks into dust), we would be hosed.

Re:Very careful--only one chance

[tygt]

We're concerned about "invasive species" here on Earth because they displace native species, or otherwise make things difficult for humans (kudzu for instance).

If there are no native species on the moon, introducing a species which later becomes invasive may not be a bad thing at all, as you would at least have a proliferating source of organic materiel helping your efforts. However, given the extreme sparsity of the lunar atmosphere (such that you can't really call it one), I doubt you'd have much invasion of species occur.

Mars, on the other hand, may well have native species, though definitely limited compared to what we're used to, and the presence of a (slight) carbon atmosphere and some water vapor, in addition to other somewhat favorable growing conditions (eg temperatures stay somewhere near Earth-normal) means that the likelihood of an Earth species adapting to that environment and invading is much higher, and the potential for such an invasion to push aside native species shoudl give us at least some pause.

Re:Very careful--only one chance

[Belial6]

Actually, the problems of invasive species are due to the fact that we were relying on existing ecology, or felt that the prior ecology was better than the new ecology that forms after the introduction of the new species. I have never heard of a single instance where an 'invasive species' has made an environment toxic to the point that humans cannot live there. One of the joys of the moon is that we don't have to worry about wiping out native flora and fauna. If we introduce a species that takes over, we can introduce another one that feeds on the first without having to worry about it also destroying the natural flora and fauna. Even better yet, we can introduce a species that eats all of the current species, and dies without food, as leaving the moon a barren wasteland is simply not the problem that leaving, say, Australia, a barren wasteland might be.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Irish is spoken in Ireland, which is part of the UK but not of Great Britain. And if you meant to count the languages in the UK I think you missed manx, spoken in the Isle of Man, which I think it's a type of Gaelic.

Just naysay everything without understanding it

[spun]

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.

Re:Very careful--only one chance

[lazyforker]

I 'd hate to have our future options limited by dumbass decisions we make today.
Since the Moon is a harsh environment we can assume that any bacteria that flourish will be resistant to: extremes of temperature, extremes of radioactivity, lack of nutrients etc. Humans will come into contact with these badasses and we'd have a tough time defending ourselves.
I think that's the point the poster was making.

Re:Similar but Different: Grow them in Space?

[Dasher42]

I really liked how Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan closed out their book Comet: they imagined comets, with their water and mineral reserves, being seeded with highly engineered trees whose branches would extend far into the surrounding space, gathering the light to maintain themselves. The base could then be engineered into a human colony.

The best way to make it in space would be to engineer life that can sustain an ecology there, if you ask me. I think that was visionary.

Re:Huh?

[DAtkins]

Technically, it wasn't an asteroid, but the protoplanet Theia [wikipedia.org]. I'm splitting hairs, but this is Slashdot :)