> Of course on the moon, water would be a good deal more expensive than any
> old raw soil just lying around. I think the only reason for needing a
> transparent dome would be if you wanted to try and do agriculture on a
> significantly large scale. The two week night might be a problem there.
> That will all depend in whether or not we can successfully get our crops to
> hibernate for two weeks and them come back.
weeks, like the ones imagined by H.G. Wells.
Or a "hybrid dome" that uses sunlight during the two-week day and panels of
red lasers at night pouring just enough light to keep plants alive.
BTW, would earthlight be of some help to the plants? I guess the answer is
"no". Earthlight would be tens of times stronger than moonlight, because
Earth has a surface area 16 times larger and a much higher albedo - even
though, it would still be zillions of times weaker than sunlight...
> Regards,
Regards,
> Mike Combs
Lucio Coelho
> Of course on the moon, water would be a good deal more expensive than any
> old raw soil just lying around. I think the only reason for needing a
> transparent dome would be if you wanted to try and do agriculture on a
> significantly large scale. The two week night might be a problem there.
> That will all depend in whether or not we can successfully get our crops to
> hibernate for two weeks and them come back.
weeks, like the ones imagined by H.G. Wells.
Or a "hybrid dome" that uses sunlight during the two-week day and panels of
red lasers at night pouring just enough light to keep plants alive.
BTW, would earthlight be of some help to the plants? I guess the answer is
"no". Earthlight would be tens of times stronger than moonlight, because
Earth has a surface area 16 times larger and a much higher albedo - even
though, it would still be zillions of times weaker than sunlight...
> Regards,
Regards,
> Mike Combs
Lucio Coelho
That's what I meant by "panels of red lasers"... Oddly, although we live
under a yellow sun, plants are more efficient at absorbing light at the red
portion of the visible spectrum. (There is still no good evolutionary
explanation for that. However, if Panspermia is right, maybe the first
seedlings came from Krypton. :-) Therefore, you only need to put red lights
on them, thus saving energy and - by using high-efficiency lasers - avoiding
waste heat problems.
Can't we manufacture daylight on the moon? Or at least a suitable
replacement, such as greenhouse bulbs available commercially today?
> That's what I meant by "panels of red lasers"... Oddly, although we live
> under a yellow sun, plants are more efficient at absorbing light at the red
> portion of the visible spectrum. (There is still no good evolutionary
efficient at red), and pretty inefficient at green given that they reflect
it back out...
Purple bacteria absorb a lot more, I think.
Plants may be green simply because their chloroplasts are blue-green algae
instead of purple bacteria.
-xx- Damien X-)