> ‘They said, perhaps feeling a little embarrassed, that they wanted to make use of our relay satellite when they make their own mission to the far side of the moon.’
lol to the "perhaps feeling a little embarrassed" bit - small jab.
How is this much different than growing within a space station in orbit? Didn’t the plant grow in its own mini biosphere (soil) separate from the moon surface, essentially isolated from the lunar environment other than light and heat?
Well, it's undergoing a ~1.6m/s gravitational acceleration instead of earth's ~9.8, or the microgravity of the space station. Even from the small amount of growth seen in the photo, it looks like that's enough for it to orient its stem better than space station grown plants. That strikes me as interesting.
I wonder if that part was expected or if something broke down. Strange to go to all the work of planting a seed and creating the proper environment with light routing knowing that it will last only a single lunar day.
Seems likely that the insulation or power system did not work as designed.
I'd suspect it's a "tack on" experiement. They were doing a bunch of experiments and wanted to see if a plant could even germinate in a low gravity environment. Now that they know it can germinate, it is worth the money to see if i t could last longer.
I searched google for a plant growing in actual Moon soil (regolith) and found nothing. Several labs have tried simulated Moon soil. Chang'e used a bioreactor rather than Moon soil.
I was hoping they would use lunar "dirt". I mean this experiment doesn't seem like it even had to be on the moon due to the closed-off environment. It's still cool but I feel like more could have been learned here.
Do plants grow well in microgravity/low gravity is still not well understood. Growing stuff on the moon, especially more complex plants, is still quite valuable to our understanding of whether we can sustain life off world.
I'm less familiar with Lunar "dirt" (aka regolith) than Martian regolith, but it's very likely that Lunar regolith isn't capable of supporting life. Martian regolith is a highly toxic blend of perchlorates, oxides, and extremely dry jagged minerals. The lack of a water cycle means that weathering behaves very differently, and the resulting material is considerably sharper and finer than the stuff on Earth. It also, of course, lacks any of the organic content that you'd need to make healthy soil.
Many have wound up in private hands, and others just sit uselessly in museums.
Besides, what more valuable research could be done with them than answering "can we grow crops in lunar dirt" and "what do we need to mix in the lunar dirt to get crops to grow"?
I believe most still remain in a sealed vault, stored in a nitrogen environment, and only rarely are damaged or passed to other scientists for study.
We might want to understand:
The rate at which solar radiation impacts one side of lunar rock vs another (all the specimens were sampled with their orientation photographed). The composition of different lunar materials in different places. The alignment of various internal crystal or magnetic elements to better understand the moon and Earth's history. If we get very lucky, we might pick up a rock that came from Mars, or somewhere else, and we can understand the creation of our own solar system. Solar radiation leaves its mark on the rocks, and provides us a record of our sun's history if we can learn to read it.
We might want to understand whether a lunar regolith sample was capable of sustaining life, but the way we do that is not just grab the existing samples and put a seed in them. They are far too rare and precious. Better to try and understand everything about them and their formation, then try to create as accurate a simulation as possible.
> Better to try and understand everything about them and their formation, then try to create as accurate a simulation as possible.
Why is that better? Learning if they can support life seems far, far more valuable and practical than better understanding of its geological history.
If crops can grow in it, then a moon base becomes far more practical, and with a moon base you'll have all the rocks you want for further study.
I.e. priority should go to "what do we need to know to build a sustainable moon base". Understanding solar formation history is of doubtful immediate value.
Good question. I'm guessing that solar history could inform things like the histories of other world and their compositions. We might be better able to predict where to find water, or learn why Mars has no magnetic field.
If we can manufacture lunar regolith, and it's 99.9 percent the same, why use the real stuff (which is literally priceless) ?
If we can manufacture lunar regolith, then the real thing is not needed for any other studies, either!
> which is literally priceless
The price we'll pay for not using it will be the cost of extra missions to the moon to do those experiments there. We cannot plan a moon base without knowing whether crops will grow there or not.
Yeah, it's one thing to ship a canister to the lunar surface and then witness a tiny bit of growth, it's quite another to actually grow using the base aggregates available on the moon. While I appreciate their experiment, it's really a pretty small result. And perhaps the real headline would be something like "4 out of 5 expected growths failed to occur and scientists don't know why". The fruit flies didn't hatch, the yeast didn't colonize, and the other two seedlings failed to grow at all. The theory was that all of them would grow in the artificial biozone and maybe even provide a CO2/O2 cycle. But they didn't, and that's the real science.
"The team behind a pioneering biological experiment sent to the lunar far side has released an image showing two green leaves grown on the moon."
"Image processing has now shown that two cotton leaves had grown—rather than just one as initially thought—in what was the first biological growth experiment on the moon."
Replying to the other comment on this, it's too deep for a normal reply but a hubble composite and a 3d render have very little to do with one-another outside the fact that they're both images.
"Photo" is used synonymously with "image" or "rendering" depending on the context, e.g. try searching for "Hubble photography" and you'll find plenty of examples of cool renderings from aggregated photographic source data.
Sure, Hubble images are seldom seen raw, but the resulting images are based on actual photos. This however seems to have been an outright illustration, and should have be labelled as such.
I don't maintain the IEEE site, so I guess I can't be sure, but that seems more of a CMS default label for image credits than a deliberate statement on the nature of the content.
ieee.org (and IEEE Xplore, etc) has gone downhill very fast recently accompaning their design downgrade to an all JS based website. I guess content follows form.
> The plant relied on sunlight at the moon’s surface, but as night arrived at the lunar far side and temperatures plunged as low as -170C, its short life came to an end.
Yossarian, I want you to do something for me.
[removes item from small bag]
I want to serve this to the men.
Taste it and let me know what you think.
[Yossarian takes a bite]
What is it?
Chocolate-covered cotton.
What are you, crazy?
No good, huh?
For Christ's sake, you didn't even take the seeds out!
Is it really that bad?
It's cotton!
They've got to learn to like it!
Why?
Look, I saw this great opportunity to corner the market
in Egyptian cotton. How was I supposed to know there
was going to be a glut?
I've got a hundred warehouses stacked with the stuff all
over the European theater.
I can't get rid of a penny's worth. People eat cotton
candy, don't they?
Well this stuff is better - it's made out of real cotton.
Milo, people can't eat cotton!
They've got to - it's for the Syndicate!
It will make them sick! - why don't you try it yourself
if you don't believe me?
I did - and it made me sick.
I can safely say this would not improve my experience even if it happens to fix the word-wrap issue here.
Also, this "fix" isn't sure-fire. In many cases, people who use code blocks for quoting aren't even inserting newlines, let alone in the places that match up with your screen's landscape width.
Off-topic: has anyone seen the new Catch-22 series on Hulu? Is it worth watching? I recently finished the book and happened to notice they made a miniseries of it!
It's pretty good but not amazing. I enjoyed it because I read the book a long time ago. I bet if you read the book recently you wouldn't enjoy it as much.
I stopped after a couple of episodes. Maybe it picks up, but the book is one of my most treasured reads, and it just didn't seem to fit for me. It somehow misses the absurdism of the book. I could be being overly harsh, but... it just didn't seem to hit home.
it feels like this is the 1.23E23th time I've read this - wouldn't it be time for HN to fix the css to make code-tags more readable (especially on mobile)?!
Sounds nice in theory, but the intention of code block is to capture how code looks--including where the lines break. That aspect of code blocks isn't broken.
The problem is people who use code blocks for what it wasn't intended to do-display quoted content.
Perhaps HN can add support for quotes, but even now there's nothing difficult with indicating a quote by adding a ">" to the start of the paragraph. Most, if not all, of HN readers will know what that means.
I am flexible about how wide my editor is. Pretty much all code I read bounds itself to some sort of limit around 80-120 characters. If there are a few individual lines that exceed the current editor width, I can scroll. I don't have to work with any codebases that have ridiculously long lines.
To be honest, I don't often read such code, or I try to run it through a formatter prior to reading. I guess I should have said that I _generally_ don't have soft wraps enabled. Sometimes I just have to plug my nose and soft-wrap.
We know what it means, but it’s still hard to distinguish at a glance what is quoted and what is not. It works in (plaintext) email because emails are traditionally word-wrapped and “>” is inserted at the start of each line – not once at the start of an arbitrarily long paragraph. And even then, email clients often color quoted blocks to further visually distinguish them.
Never had an issue with it on HN. 99% of quotes occur at the start of the post and the rest of the post is a reply.
Posts that interleave their content with quoted bits are rarely as constructive as they think (almost always just point-by-point bickering) that I find impossible to follow no matter what formatting they could've used for the quotes.
Also a single ">" prefix on a long wrapped line is a bit of internet convention with younger crowds probably thanks to 4chan. I doubt most people using it these days even remember seeing it in emails.
If anything, HN should post-process lines that start with ">" to indent them.
The pasted text is from the film script, which isn't really optimal for reading. The passage from the book[1] is a bit more readable. The scene does work well in the film, but it leaves a little something to be desired on the page.
The book is a classic; the film is pretty good but not groundbreaking the way the book is. The passage out of context lacks a bit of the overall flow that helps the book work. It looks like mere absurdism rather than the rigid but off-kilter logic that pervades the narrative. It's about the way the military forces you to buy into an authoritarian system as the only way to risk your own life for no reason you can see, which manifests as ridiculous incentives. And that goes well beyond military life, which is why the book is widely held as a classic.
I really can't say if you'd enjoy it or not, but if you like Monty Python and Douglas Adams you might find it reminiscent.
The quote is totally irrelevant to this thread. The slight tangential relationship to the article is they both involve cotton. I'm wearing cotton right now, but it would be silly to think that's somehow relevant to the conversation about plants growing on the moon.
What's with the obsession with keeping the moon and other planets barren?
There is an incomprehensible number of barren planets: 21.16 quadrillion in the Virgo Supercluster alone. We should be spreading life, not obsessing with keeping things 'clean'.
If we find life surviving on one of the planets that we've been exploring, and it's so similar as to be indistinguishable from Earth life, then it almost certainly came from Earth on one of our missions. Even if an asteroid transplanted something that managed to take root millions of years ago, it would have endured some pretty severe evolutionary pressure by now (and probably didn't have any competition from native life).
Still, there are plenty of other planets where we can look for life and both the moon and mars are quite large, very unlikely we will contaminate any significant portion of it.
Because Elon's success has nothing to do with cannabis. Maybe if he had taken up smoking cannabis, he wouldn't have been successful. He certainly demonstrated that he doesn't smoke cannabis.
How do you know that? What about that Carl Sagan guy? What a filthy worthless pothead, he did nothing of significance...
(Note: Carl Sagan was a huge advocate for marijuana, and credits it to the development of 'Cosmos' and some of his other scientific, spiritual, and creative endeavors. His widow, Ann Druyan, is on the boards of directors of NORML, which is a marijuana legalization/advocacy organization).
> Maybe if he had taken up smoking cannabis, he wouldn't have been successful
And maybe he would have been more successful. Maybe he also would have grown tiny little wings and horns. Who knows what could happen if he had taken it up?
This is nothing but pure speculation at this point lol
Am I the only one who thinks the scientists are a bit immoral? They wanted to send a turtle and the only thing that stopped them were the constraints of the experiment. Not the fact that they would be killing a turtle for literally no reason.
Kinda makes me think about the fact that we need stronger ethics rules in the new space race.
Is that any more unethical than going out for wings, even if you aren't really hungry? Maybe you consider both of those things immoral, which is fine, but in that case there are far more animals dying for no real reason on Earth than in space. I would worry about those first.
The difference is that turtles are cuter than chickens, and despite what many people will argue, cuteness, physical beauty etc do have inherent moral worth.
Both NASA and the soviets sent animals into space that they knew weren’t coming back alive. Read up on Laika the dog if you’d like an example. I agree that it’s cruel but it’s no more cruel than things we’ve already done.
I’d argue that just because we have done something before doesn’t mean we should be doing it again. Also during the previous space race you could argue that it was a state of war and... (unfortunately) you have casualties.
Well, besides the Soviet mission it mentioned that used tortoises in the past, I suspect the origin of the reference is in regard to the classic saying "It's tutles all the way down"
Recent article with actual photo (not just the CGI rendering)