Starts With A Bang!

Can the Moon Help Solve Earth’s Problems?

As we begin 2009, I’d like to take a look at one of the biggest problems facing humanity: the fact that the human presence on Earth is really affecting the planet Earth itself. We can see this by looking at the planet at night, and finding that it’s still lit up due to the human presence:

We can see this by looking at, just over the last 60 years and projected into the future, how the human population on Earth continues to rise:

But I’d like to ask a question to everybody:

How many humans can the planet support before we need to either reduce the population or expand to other worlds?

We’ve already talked about how forests and wild places are needed to remove Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere and reverse global warming, but let’s put that aside. We’ve got lots of arable land on this planet, and as the population goes up, more and more of that land is needed for farming, to feed the world. In order to do that, we need fewer forests:

And we need to take that land and turn it into farmland for production of staple foods:

The Earth currently produces staple foods (rice, grains, cereals, potatoes, etc.) in quantities of 2,264 million metric tonnes per year, enough to feed about 10 billion people assuming everyone eats a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet. One third of those grains go towards feeding animals, which is horrendously inefficient, bringing the food total down to about enough to feed 7 billion people. We’re close to that already (about 6.7 billion), and we’re already using about half of all the arable land in the world.

So assuming we want to do the following:

• Keep our forests,
• Continue reproducing, and
• Continue feeding ourselves (and eating the good food, too),

what are our options? We clearly need more land, and we clearly can’t take any more from Earth, as we need more wild places and forests to help repair the damage that’s already been done. Where should we look?

The Moon. That’s right, the Moon. You think I’m being ridiculous, but this is a reasonable, powerful long-term goal. And this is a problem that quick-fixes won’t ameliorate; we need a long-term solution. This is part of the reason why there’s such an initiative to go back to the Moon, because if we can get crops to grow on the Moon, we’ll have just as much arable land there as we have here, even though the Moon has only 7.5% of the surface area of the Earth, because not all of the Earth is land, and not all of the Earth’s land is arable.

You might think I’m talking crazy, but these aren’t my words.

“The Moon is a place where you can study how to expand life beyond Earth,” the European Space Agency’s senior scientist Bernard Foing told BBC News.

“You can take the elements needed and seed, germinate, grow and make a flower blossom on the Moon,” Professor Foing explained.

“We also have ideas about taking other types of plants that could make a first generation “mini biosphere”, from which we could grow more complex plants.

“From this, we could learn how to develop a self-sufficient life support system that could help us live off the (lunar) land.”

And the part about growing flowers on the Moon? We’ve already covered that; that’s part of something we’re able to do today. Can you imagine, by the time we’re old men and women, a world where humans live on more than one rock in our Solar System? It’s a great dream, and a great thing to be hopeful for, as a long-term vision, as we begin our new year.

And while you think about that, check out both the new Carnival of Space, done on the cheap over at Cheap Astro, and the top 100 space and astronomy blogs, in no particular order, where I come in at number 47. And finally, for a little old-school perspective on our place in the Universe, I leave you with the old Monty Python song about the Universe: