• Question: Can we live on the moon?

    Asked by lambrw01 to Carol, Ellie, John, Philip, Rebecca on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Rebecca Lacey

      Rebecca Lacey answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      In theory we could as long as they sorted out a supply of oxygen and water!

    • Photo: Philip Glasson

      Philip Glasson answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      This is exactly the question that the Biosphere-2 project was set up to answer.
      (the planet Earth is meant to be Biosphere-1)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

      Unfortunately the project suffered from a lot of problems including stabilising oxygen and CO2 gas levels in the Biosphere .
      but in the end it looked like they managed to solve most of the problemsthey where having, just before they went bankrupt and thr project got shut down :/

    • Photo: John Welford

      John Welford answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Not currently, but I bet the technology isn’t far off.

      Like lots of things it will take money to develop it and no-one will be willing to pay for it until they can see a market for it. The closer we get to running out of space on Earth, the more money people will spend looking at alternatives like this!

    • Photo: Carol White

      Carol White answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Oxygen is the main concern….

      I didn’t believe it at first, but apparently some scientists have managed to get oxygen out of a moon rock! This would be really useful if we ever wanted to set up a human community on the moon, as the lack of oxygen is a huge problem there.

      NASA have offered $1million to first team of scientists that can get 5kg of oxygen from a moon rock in under 8 hours… no-one has managed that yet though!

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