Let’s say that your body was jettisoned to the moon as a last wish. ( I know, far fetched) So how long would your remains last, laying on the surface of the moon?
Are you enbalmed? If so, I would say indefinitely.
I imagine that the intense sunlight/radiation would eventually start breaking down your tissues, and micrometeorites would scrape away at your flesh… but you’d probably be no worse off than someone in a deep freeze.
If you are freshly killed (say, pushed out of the airlock with no spacesuit), I imagine the bacteria in your gut might have their way with you first.
I think the actual time would depend on the size of the person. Marlon Brando could last for a much longer time than say, Mini-Me.
Shoot, now I’m going to have to come up with another plan for disposing of the bodies…
How long? Well, that depends.
If you’re dressed as most self-respecting corpses are these days (conservative suit/dress, nice hair – heck, it’s almost as if we prepare our dead for some kind of Afterlife Job Interview!), then you’ll be freeze-dried pretty quickly. Never mind the embalming, never mind the solar radiation. The fluids in your body will boil away fairly quickly, and so will the neccesary fluids for preserving those bacteria. (Recent research has shown that the bacteria might actually survive this – but they’ll be in suspended animation, and won’t be munchin’ on your guts until somebody reconstitutes your lunar mummy.)
If you’re dressed in an EVA space suit, that’s a different matter. Assuming that the suit hasn’t been breached, your corpse be somewhat insulated and certainly will be kept at a reasonable pressure for liquid water to remain liquid – or, eventually, to freeze. It won’t be able to boil off. So the bacteria might be able to do some munchin’ before the temperature drops enough to suspend or kill them. But it’ll probably reek if any future archeologists warm up your body and then open the suit.
And then there are micrometeorites. A chunk of metal left on the lunar surface would be severely pitted within a few short centuries. And then there’s the radiation. While the Moon is sometimes protected by the powerful magnetic shielding of the Earth, it usually is not. And I’m not quite sure what that will do to dead flesh. Certainly it’s not particularily kind to living flesh.
Based on that, I’d personally say that your corpse would last a good long time if left on the Moon. Centuries, at least, before it became unrecognizable.
Good points about freezing the bacteria, too, calli.
No but I will be friday night when I get my hands on that chea…er umm asti spumanti.