Could We Terraform the Moon? Making the Moon a Habitable World

What would it take to transform our moon into a world we could live on?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain
Jason Harmer - @jasoncharmer
Susie Murph - @susiemmurph
Brian Koberlein - @briankoberlein
Kevin Gill - @kevinmgill

Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
In our episode about terraforming Venus, we talked about cooling the planet with a giant sunshade, and then hand-wavingly bind up all that carbon dioxide.

We did the same with Mars, filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses to warm it up, and releasing the planet’s vast stores of C02 to thicken the atmosphere. Then just crash in a few comets worth of water and upgrade them to to a 3 star resort.

We’re pitching this as a new series on the Discovery Network, called “Flip My Planet - Canada”.

Now let’s turn our imagination towards another rockball that is really more of a fixer-upper: The Moon. I know, you never even thought of the Moon as a place that we could possibly terra-renovate. Go ahead and imagine with me all the possibilities of a verdant green and blue little world hanging in the night sky. Doesn’t that sound great?

So, what does it take? Do we tear it down and just use the orbital lot space? Should we raise it up and lay a new foundation? Or could we get away with a few coats of paint and adding an atrium on the backside?

Fortunately for me, scientist and sci-fi author Gregory “Planetary Makeover” Benford has already done the math.

Let’s take a look at what we’d need to get the Moon habitable. For starters, the fact that the Moon is so close to Earth is a huge advantage. This is like living on the same block as a Home Depot, and we won’t have to travel far to get supplies and equipment to and from our project.

We’re going to need an atmosphere thick enough to breathe and trap in the Sun’s heat. This takes wild comet capture and harvest, tear them apart and smash them into the Moon.

Benford notes that you probably want be careful not to let an entire comet collide with the Moon because it might spray your primary investment home with debris and do a little damage to the resale value, or potentially annoy your tenants.

This could get bad enough that we’d have to terraform Earth to get it livable again, and you’d need to bring in Mike Holmes to publicly shame us and put our primary residence back in order.

After you’d splattered a few comets on the Moon, it would have an atmosphere almost immediately. The transfer of momentum from the comet chunks would get the Moon rotating more rapidly.

If you invest a little more in your planning stage, you could get the Moon spinning once every 24 hours, and even tilt its axis to get seasons. Benford estimates that we’d need 100 Halley’s mass comets to get the job done. This might sound like a pretty tall order, but it’s tiny compared to number of comets we’d need for your Mars or Venus real estate scheme.

The maintenance and upkeep isn’t going to be without its challenges. Low gravity on the Moon means that it can’t hold onto its atmosphere for longer than a few thousand years.

Once you got the process going, you’d need to be constantly replenishing our your orbital cottage with fresh atmosphere. Fortunately, we’ve got a whole Solar System’s worth of ice to exploit.

The benefits of a terraformed summer home on the Moon are numerous. For example, if the Moon had an atmosphere as thick as the Earth’s, you could strap on a pair of wings and fly around in the 1/6th gravity.

The enormous gravity of the Earth would pull the Moon’s oceans around the planet with 20 meter tides. You could surf the tide for kilometers as it washes across the surface in a miniature version of the shallow water scene in Interstellar.

This might be the greatest sponsorship opportunity for GoPro of all time. Look out Kiteboarding, you’re about to get more extreme.

Everyone always wants to talk about terraforming Venus or Mars. Let them be, that’s too much work. The next time someone brings it up at D&D night, you can blow their minds with your well crafted argument on why we want to start with the Moon.

[KateeAngel]

Terraforming moon would be most awesome terraforming project. It is really close, and thus it is easier to communicate

[chadvogel]

I like the idea of terraforming the moon because it would make it easier to colonize it would be like having a second earth close by.

[cortster]

0:40 Actually, I was just thinking about this a few weeks ago. I was like, "Wait, since the moon is in the habitable zone, because it orbits us, wouldn't it be easy to terraform?". But then I thought about how little the gravity is, and because of that the atmosphere would need to be 'restocked' every few centuries or so. Also, since a day on the moon is a month, the climate would be a bit funky.

[keithh]

I'd drink Moonshine of course...on a terraformed Moon.

[Ezis]

What would I do on a terraformed moon? Fly... and look back at earth.

[Rob]

I'd spend all day lying back and soaking up the cosmic rays.

[emiletard]

Too much resources. I'd rather just make city sized domes everywhere

[krislol]

Nah if you're gonna terraform you gotta be hardcore, start with the Black Hole!
ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

[Wilsmyth]

In a 100 years the Moon will be full of the 1/6 Gravity wimps, and the Supermen of Earth will go there and take all the moon babes. Kicking sand in the faces of the pitiful Mooninites. Just like in the Charles Atlas comics.

[uceid]

Imagine the new type of car modifications... GIANT spoilers, Wings?

Crazy thought, if we ever do develop a teleporter, I know, I know, far out science, but it has been done with photons. If that technology ever becomes possible, imagine teleporting atmosphere FROM Venus, TO Mars, that would possibly be the fastest way to transform both planets at the same time.

[AbdullahArRafi]

If we terraform The Moon, how would the moon look from earth?

[thetraitor]

Cant we simply build  giant greenhouses over some of the biggest craters?
And also on mars over valles maneris

[VidviewerV]

There's actually a possible alternative to constantly replenishing the Moon's atmosphere, and that would be keeping the it's atmosphere in place with a large force field, kind of like with planet Druidia in Spaceballs.

[Sparkles_VT]

my god the things I would do while flying on the moon, that's living the dream right there xD

[howFARcanUc]

By smashing asteroids into the Moon, would there be any affect on the Earth? For example, moving the moon closer, affecting tidal forces, etc?

[willemvandebeek]

You probably don't want your children to grow up on the moon either, because their bones could grow weird in that little gravity. The moon might become a cool senior citizens resort though...

[suthinscientist]

One more thing, a magnetic field is a must when terraforming any world. This magnetic field would prevent solar wind from stripping away the new atmosphere.

[geekinutopia]

How about building domes all over Luna? It's in many ways a better way to terraform. Each dome could be large enough for covering an entire crater, such domes could be connected with underground tunnels, the lunar lava tubes would be great for that, and parks and towns could be built inside the domes.

[phoule]

Are there any missions planned to map the lava tubes on the Moon and Mars by dropping some kind of sonar probe into the skylights, just as cave spelunkers do on Earth? I think the sub-surface data gained would be very beneficial for future settlements, be it for housing or mining.