Radio observatories on the Moon

>
> I would say those sealed flasks with the shrimp, algae, and bacteria
> you can buy now give lie to that assertion. Of course they're not
> always stable forever (I was just reading Carl Sagan's account of his
> purchase of one in "Billions and Billions"; his died after a few
> months). But sometimes they are stable for quite some time. Also,
> one does not have the opportunity to make the kind of internal
> adjustments to a sealed desktop curio that one would have inside a
> space settlement.

I had an aquarium last for over a year with no input except occasional
addition of water (and sunlight). The fish were regular store-bought
"feeder fish" and a few algae eaters to keep the glass clean. Obviously
the aquarium was exposed to the room air, so the fish were getting O2
as well, but there was nothing that couldn't have easily been provided
on the moon. The only reason this experiment ended was that I grew
tired of adding water just to have a skanky tank of fish in my living
room (they were my wife's but she grew tired of them very fast).

> One of the criticisms leveled at the Biosphere II project was that
> they tried to reproduce many and varied habitats in their enclosure
> (basically tried to reproduce the Earth in microcosm), when a simpler,
> more utilitarian ecology might have functioned better.

Biosphere 2 is a sad might-have-been. I'll bet that if they just open
the divisions between all of the little sub-ecosystems, close the thing
up, and let nature to it's thing, they'd end up with a stable ecosystem
after a few years. Nature is very robust. The problem with B2 was that
they tried to engineer it, which is the wrong way to approach this type
of problem. Ecosystems very naturally come up with emergent solutions
to problems. You might have to try a few times to get it right, but
that's no big deal in the big picture. Running emergent-B2 experiments
a few times would give very useful data for a future off planet colony
- it would give a good idea of what types of species to take along, and
what initial conditions to set up for the colony ecosystem, which would
then be permitted to evolve[*] into a stable system over the course of
a decade or so.

[*] the ecosystem would evolve, not the individual species - the
timescales for species to evolve are too long to be useful, but the
timescales on which ecosystems adjust to accommodate change can be
relatively short.

......Andrew

Dr. Andrew Case, PhD.
Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics,
University of Maryland, College Park
"If the United States tries nation building, it's got to [have] at the
very top of its agenda a separation of church and state" - Pat Robertson