https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...
In other words, the regolith served as a challenging substrate, as long as all the necessary nutrients were added. Without those additions, definitely not.
We tend to forget that the sun is an incredibly powerful and quite unshielded fusion reactor purring away, pushing 1000W/m^2 through our atmosphere. It's about 1400W/m^2 at 1AU (outside the Earth's sheltering fields and such) - and most of that difference is some really nasty, ionizing stuff. To the best of my knowledge, the moon is rather outside the Earth's magnetic shielding influence.
But things will certainly be learned in the process!
It has been suggested that some fungi can extract useful energy from radiation: https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/eating-gamma-radia...
(I feel like this must have been a Futurama plot, and mist have ended poorly)
Season 2, Episode 18
The same is true for a few other kinds of animals, which can enter a special inactive state that can survive desiccation or freezing.
When living normally, no animals can resist such conditions, even if some are much more resistant to radiations than humans.
The most radiation-resistant living beings are some kinds of bacteria, e.g. Deinococcus mentioned by another poster, which have some special mechanisms for continuously repairing the DNA molecules that are damaged by radiation, which allow them to live normally while exposed to radiation.
Don’t let any light in directly, only reflected light.
In a similar vein, several of the early stories seem convinced by the evidence for psionics...
https://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/science_fiction/jenkins/jenkins_4.....
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/It+doesn%27t+do+any+harm+...m...
There is so much corroborating evidence it's an almost certainty.
The plants survived eight days before freezing, but important questions also include things like "How does the radiation impact their seed viability in future generations?"
I'll grant that they didn't immediately die, but neither would I have expected that from an ionizing environment. Just a lot of weird quirks in lifecycle.
If it weren't for the entire reason they did the experiment in the first place?
Plants on the contrary tolerate much more damage. To the point that we develop new species by bombarding seeds with ionized radiation.
"yes, no problem, because what could go wrong!? Another slice of care-not cake, pls"
Radiation isn't evil magic, mutations don't give superpowers. Both are natural phenomena, and they're not anything like they're portrayed in comic books.
Might as well worry about watering your plants. Plants are perfectly fine, they live and grow by nature magic, no need for humans to play god and add water to the mix, what could possibly go wrong?
Plants also handle mutations differently, creating burls and cavities and whatnot instead of it taking over the entire existing plant like cancer does in animals. You're unlikely to generate a Plants vs. Zombies scenario here.
Might as well say that beating grapes into pulp without beating grapes of the consumers gives juice an opportunity for one-sided evolutionary advantage.
You can't build 100% radiation-shielded environment, anywhere. Neutrinos just don't care that much about obstacles (and interact very weakly with target, but they still do in small numbers, that's how we detect them).
I can't believe what I'm being asked to argue here, it's "environmentalism" and "public health" and "anti big X" all rolled up into one. I'm on the other sides of all those issues, so I wish you'd all get back in your lanes.
Years ago, I worked with this microbe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans).
"Deinococcus radiodurans is capable of withstanding an acute dose of 5,000 grays (Gy), or 500,000 rad, of ionizing radiation with almost no loss of viability, and an acute dose of 15,000 Gy with 37% viability.[14][15][16] A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred double-strand breaks (DSBs) into the organism's DNA (~0.005 DSB/Gy/Mbp (haploid genome)). For comparison, a chest X-ray or Apollo mission involves about 1 mGy, 5 Gy can kill a human ...."
Some enterprising researchers must have considered engineering this microbe to produce useful products in space, but I don't travel in these circles anymore.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz1334 ("First measurements of the radiation dose on the lunar surface")
- "LND measured an average dose equivalent of 1369 μSv/day on the surface of the Moon."
As you mentioned with tardigrades, there are life forms and bacteria that could possibly survive a long duration flight through the vacuum of space, then proliferate once it reaches the surface somewhere.
This is usually guarded against by various sterilization techniques applied to the spacecraft before launch, and there is a discipline dedicated to ensuring these events don't happen:
Life found in deep granite rock on Earth: https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/20/3-4/399/516507
This recent one even discusses Mars being the origin of life and seeding Earth (panspermia) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/10/241003123543.h....
Mars rocks found on Earth: https://www.space.com/mars-meteorites-on-earth-mystery Mars rocks being plausible candidates for harboring life: https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-discovers-mars-rock-...
I think reasonable caution by space agencies is wise but it also could have already happened a billion years ago. If we want to survive as a species or lineage of species beyond the Sun enveloping the Earth we will also need to deliberately establish viable life on other planets and even other solar systems at some point, previous historical records of ancestral life or present planetary sterility be damned. Life seems too rare in the universe for it to go down with the ship, we should make an effort to duplicate this experiment even if humanity doesn't make it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plants_in_space#Space_station_...
> How they will respond to intense lunar radiation is perhaps the biggest question currently—the International Space Station orbits within the Earth’s magnetic field, and so it is exposed to much lower radiation levels than the lunar surface
The Moon is tidally locked with EArth so the da/night cycle is 28 days. Anywhere other than the poles and you'll have ~2 weeks of darkness every month. This affects how you can potentially generate power (ie it complicates solar power generation) but also plant growth. Ideally you want the plants to grow with passive light (ie light from the Sun) because that's "free". So any experiment should try and find out how plants do if they get 14 days of straight sunlight followed by 14 days of straight darkness.
There are some plants you could grow in 14 days of sunlight even if nothing useful can survive the darkness (which, I believe, is unknown). You can spend energy to create light or you can use fiber optic cables to essentially passively pipe light around. I don't know if you can get the right wavelengths you need this way or if it's economically viable.
As for radiation, it's less of an issue for plants but could still be an issue. It's worth finding out. But there are ways you can reduce this. You're going to need something transparent to get sunlight in. You can filter UV rays out to some degree depending on your material. You can even put water between the plants and the sun (ie a water tank between the plants and the Sun).
Or if you can pipe sunlight around fiber optic cables you don't put your plaants on the surface at all. Your pressurize lava tubes instead.
Or if energy becomes so ridiculously cheap that none of these are any problem at all.
[1]: https://hackaday.com/2024/04/03/space-mirrors-dreams-of-turn...
It's kind of funny to me that "a hundred years ago" has finally gotten to the point that we're still talking technology/industrial age and doesn't seem so old now. When I was a kid, a hundred years ago was still cart & buggy and other low tech things as the most common which made it feel like a really long time ago.
I would think the extreme cold would be an even bigger problem than the lack of light.
A surface greenhouse would be insulated. It would still lose heat to thermal radiation. I'm not sure of the rate. It may be manageable because when the Sun is shining, not only are you heating up but the plants themselves generate heat (ie it's a greenhouse).
This may be another reason why you're better off growing plants underground because it lessens the temperature extremes.
Otherwise things can be heated with waste heat or directly if required.
I still don’t know how he’d deal with atmosphere, but I love the vision. And, I learned that there are some exothermic plants, like Skunk Cabbage, that can chemically regulate their body temperature.
Like I said, I love the vision.
Some of the carbonaceous ones have some nitrogen as well.
The big trick with smelting in space will be capturing all of the dust and smoke instead of losing the stuff and creating navigational hazards.
Rye grass can survive at 0.07 atmosphere [1], or about 1 psi.
Maybe some grid made of periodically anchored cables, covered in thin, transparent, polymer layers?
Stacked layers could be used to limit conducted heat loss, repair urgency, and layer thickness requirement (layers would see pressure difference, probably also important for permiability). At night, pull a thin IR reflective layer over that's some microns thick, that lives out in the zero pressure side, to limit radiated losses.
Once it's all going, maybe some bio plastic synthesis, to make plastics for repairs.
I guess it's a top-down vs bottom-up philosophy, or something. I mean, even starting with phytoplankton, we'll have to provide missing nutrients. So it's not like you can just genetically engineer phytoplankton into terraforming the moon on their own. Unless you can figure out how to genetically engineer in a little nuclear reactor so the plants can produce their own missing elements...