• Question: do you reckon we will ever be able to live on the moon?

    Asked by lydiamoore14 to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      I think we totally *could* if we wanted to. We have the technology and we could rise to challenge. The point is if we wanted to, we just don’t want to as a race. Far too much other pressing stuff on Earth that we need to spend our money on.

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      This is one where I have to guess a bit, so take it with a pinch of salt.

      Yes, but I am not sure it would be worth the large cost involved. You’d obviously need some sort of air filled dome, and you would have to look after the air very carefully as I think the ingredients are in very short supply on the moon (I might be wrong about this). You’d have to get the oxygen back from the CO2 you breathed out (so plants+sunlight would be good for this). One thing about the moon is it has very high temperature gradients (hot in the sun, very cold in the dark) which I can’t help feeling could be used to generate power cheaply. But there’s very little water up there, so it would be extremely difficult to sustain life of any sort without shipping it in or making it from hydrogen and oxygen trapped in moon rocks. Both of which strike me as difficult and expensive.

      Ideally you would keep a self sustaining ecosystem where all the plants, animals bacteria + sunlight provide the ingredients needed for the others. This is what we have on earth, but its quite tricky to set up balanced ecosystems on a small scale.

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Hi Lydia – yes I think that is entirely possible. It just requires the money and the political will.

      The question then is – why would we want to do that? One possibility would be for extracting natural resources. I believe that there are significant helium stores on the moon. That is an element that is in serious danger of running out on earth. Watch for the cost of helium balloons to go up in the next decade or so.

      Have you seen the movie ‘Moon’ – released last year? It’s about a man who lives on the moon by himself to operate a mine. It’s very interesting and involves more than one scientific issue…

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