Possibly true, but given the mass of hte Earth vs. mass of Luna, I imagine the atmosphere of Luna wouldn’t have the depth to “soak up” the rather intense solar radiation.
This site, though a bit dated, shows the Moon being covered, at least during part of it’s rotation, by the magnetoshpere of the Earth.
Hmmmmm…
I still don’t think you could ever truly terraform the moon, regardless of technical advancement. The best we could hope for is a permanent base there with perhaps underground shelters that would be habitable…and that would only really be feasible if we in fact found water in the form of ice in sufficient quantities.
-XT
I think it would be more likely to dig huge underground complexes and terraform those. That is, have a natural and sustainable ecosystem that produces air and water without man’s input. Then you’d have your radiation shielding in the form of 500 meters of lunar rock and you wouldn’t lose a significant amount of atmosphere to space.
Actually, the Earth’s magnetic field does not vanish entirely when it undergoes reversals. Only the dipole component becomes small. Higher order components will still be there and quite possibly be stronger, since the magnetic field energy is unlikely to go away completely. More radiation will reach the surface during a reversal, but it won’t be like there’s no field at all.
Here’s a thought I had a couple months ago (albeit about Mars, not Luna): is it possible to enrich the dirt enough to sustain plant life? If you add organic compounds to regolith, would it become proper soil?
Well, there’s no reason to believe we can’t. We probably won’t due to lack of interest though.
There’s no need for that; we can just bring in water from elsewhere ( the ice moons of the gas giants, say ). It wouldn’t even take a lot of energy, once the infrastructure is built; the Moon is small enough that a space elevator could be built with modern materials, not the theoretical stuff you’d need for a Earth space elevator; and one can use such things as rotating tethers and solar & magnetic sails for cheap interplanetary travel. Remember; for something like a chunk of ice, it doesn’t matter if the voyage takes years, as long as a continuous stream of ice keeps coming. So you don’t need high energy, high thrust engines.
Maybe it’s a dumb question, but why not turn the Moon into a smaller Dyson sphere at this point?
Because that wasn’t what the OP asked about. And the two ideas are far different; surrounding the Moon with thin shrouds isn’t at all the same as dismantling the whole Moon and turning it into a shell of habitats and such englobing the Sun.
Actually, if you put enough atmosphere on the Moon to give it Earth-standard pressure at the surface, it would have a deeper atmosphere than Earth – the lower gravity means that air pressure would fall off less rapidly with altitude. Total shielding would be six times as much, because there would have to be six times as much mass of air above any given area to provide the posited Earth-standard pressure.
I’m certain that would work. Regolith, after all, is just powdered rock. It’s already broken down, it’s just missing the organics.
One of the big unknowns, however, is what trace elements might be existant in the lunar “soil” that would make it impossible to grow human-friendly foods, or make it inhospitable, no matter how much manure you add (see also: perchlorates in Martian surface).
A good experiment, and one I might give a shot in the spring, would be to powder some stone and then try to make a fertile soil by adding “organics”.
Remember to use basalt! I bet it takes a shitload of organics. Sorry - couldn’t resist.