[spam][ot][crazy][crazy] growing apples on moon: xkcd aug 25 2023
my internet bubble gave me an xkcd last friday where an apple lands on the head of a stick figure like newton, they notice the moon hanging in the air, and state: “we should grow apples on the moon”. i’m sure it is a very normal response this decade for people who are not miffed when struck in the head. great stupid puzzle!! wonderful! much more normative than teleportation. how would a homeless software developer grow apples on the moon?
i guess the simplest way to do this would be to make a growable environment in an enclosure, lklely made of plastic, and grow apples within the environment kind of more familiar to existing efforts than polluting the entire moon with oxygen and soil (we would not like it if the moon came here and covered us in moondust and vacuum — although maybe air and soil are more important during these times …) still, both approaches remain on the drawing board
third email was lost, recreating part anyway i think a problem with ecobubbles is they can collapse and everything in them dies, things like - imperfectly artificing an ecosystem - engineering failures - unexpected environmental hazards like meteor fall was thinking maybe plan to send it over and over again, and learn from failures. could maybe keep a rescue ship nearby for the apple tree, unsure
problem parts might include: - sending a ton of material to the moon subparts: - lifting a ton of material from the earth into space - transferring this material across space toward the moon - landing this material onto the moon the subparts could simplify away if we can teleport the material to the moon, or if there is some system managing them for us like a runaway apple-growing AI - growing an apple tree in a vacuum environment - growing an apple tree on a moonrocks surface - getting the apple tree to fruit with healthy apples subparts: - providing the tree with necessary nutrients - providing the tree with sufficient and appropriate sunlight, water, and gasses - convincing the apple tree that it is a mature tree and it is harvest time (plant hormones track temperature and light changes and lots of other stuff)
some thoughts involving making spacesuits for trees the breathing apparatuses could go around the stomata on the leaves so they could breathe, for example
for the trees-in-spacesuits branches of imagining, we could give the trees nutritious liquid meal packs for them to absorb with roots that grew into spacesuit material — beginning designing and experimenting for this we might want a vacuum-filled environment so as to experiment within
maybe the difficulty of making a plastic environment that can repel vacuum can be double-purposed for making a vacuum-filled test chamber: we could try to design a way to do both, right off the bat. the material needs to be strong enough to withstand full air pressure, and there would be some way of holding it in to shape. then we’d figure a way to pump all the air out, to test both it and its use for making a test chamber,
honestly the challenge of traveling through space is presently hard for me to seriously plan engineering around. i have too much encouragement to do it, and too much inhibition against doing everything i do, and too little experience and knowledge in the field, to believe i might succeed. it would seem much easier to build an AI that can do it itself, or to connect with a group of other people trying to do it,
maybe also influenced by my disinterest in spacetravel associated with environmental values although i think there are energy-friendly ways to go into space!
maybe we could plan an energy-friendly way to go into space and take an apple tree and plant it on the moon !!!!! [picture of apple tree in tree-spacesuit, bearing 1 apple]
_caveat/warning_: most of the energy-friendly ways of getting into space i’ve imagined involve doing it so slowly that you’re likely to find a faster way to get there in the time it takes to do so. i think of space as a multi-generational goal because it is so different and big.
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