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Biological activity
Some things in nature follow very stable cycles. Cicadas in the US are a good example: depending on the species you will see them once evwry 13 years or once every 17 years.
It may be that your blue moon happens due to such a cycle. Maybe bacteria or some other microbe blooms every ten years.
Solar flares
It may also be that the sun ...
9
It depends entirely on how desperate the need is
Or rather, what likelihood of failure the organisers are willing to accept.
We already have a design for a machine that can take three people to the moon, allow them to stay there for 24 hours and return. We went from zero to first launch of the Saturn V in about 5 years. And the plans still exist, and are ...
7
What I'm looking for is a plausible estimate. Would one freeze to death during night time for example, or would a temperature drop to "a slight chill" be believable.
Obvious answer: do you want people to freeze to death? Then fine: they freeze to death overnight.
Personally, I'd rather not. The long nights are obviously problematic in this regard, ...
4
Comets
There are a lot of ways to measure moon cycles, but this kind of phenomenon belies an explanation on moon rotation, or the angle it hits the atmosphere. Instead, another phenomena may be at work - a comet. Under just the right condition, comet tails can be seen with naked eye - and they can sometimes be blue, like the Comet Holmes. This can easily ...
4
Something similar to a Blood Moon
Blood Moon is a total lunar eclipse happens when the Moon travels
through the Earth's umbra and blocks all direct sunlight from
illuminating the Moon's surface. However, some sunlight still reaches
the lunar surface indirectly, via the Earth's atmosphere, bathing the
Moon in a reddish, yellow, or orange glow.
We ...
3
The main time-eaters on such a projects are tests and reconnaissance mission. So the answer depends on required reliability.
1) If we can "afford" to loose mission or two - than it would take about the same as Apollo program - about 5 years for first landing (Apollo nearly lost one mission and there were deaths on tests). But by post-coldwar standards this ...
3
Pure Oxygen at 0.2 to 0.3 atm
When terraforming a planet the terraformers must make one major choice. Go for a 100% terraformed planet and pay 100% of the cost in time and resources or go 95% of the way and pay 1% of the cost. This answer assumes that the terraformers choose the second approach and that the moon will require further maintenance to remain ...
3
Most of these you probably already know, and have already done to some extent, but if someone else comes across this post who wants the very basics, here we go:
The structure of the surface.
On all the images of real planets, there are large features: jagged gashes across the surface, white spots with huge lighter and darker areas, changes between shades ...
2
So the one hard number you offered is that we are "100,000 times better at moving material around in space than we are now."
I'm going to give all the benefit of the doubt to the numbers that make your case the best. Let's use the cost it currently takes to put a kg of matter on the moon. Current costs are around 1-1.2 million per kg landed on the surface....
2
We (as a K2.something-civilisation) could make the entire surface area of Luna perfectly habitable. It would be titanic effort and have little, one might argue negative, payoff but we could certainly do it. It would take centuries unless you want to make the moons surface liquid and boil of the atmosphere you are building with the impact energy of the ...
2
The main problem of all this dome structures is not buiding them, but maintaining them. It means that size of artificial structure is maxed when all the transportation we have is spent on maintance.
Today we deliver about 100-200t of payload to orbit each year. It means that in this scenario we deliver about 10 million t of payload each year.
Project ...
2
Why not underground?
Assuming easy transport of materials as described and the technology peripheral to that, plus the incentive. Humans could riddle the whole moon with pressurised tunnels etc,.
Without terraforming the surface you could cover the surface with pressurised domes up to whatever engineering limits your high tech materials have in that ...
1
If all the nations in the world banded together and formed a public-sector agency to consider the best way to define and implement this goal, and if every person on Earth contributed to the project to the best of his ability, it would probably take about nine years from commitment to safe return.
If all the nations in the world banded together and formed a ...
1
Unity
You could easily do this in Unity in under 20 minutes. Unity has a built in sphere mesh (though for a planet you'd technically want an ellipsoid), and tools for creating materials to map onto the sphere.
You will have to keep in mind though that there is no way to map a texture onto a sphere that doesn't result in distortion. It might make more ...
1
I am curious if this would be realistically possible
Assuming this is a fairly normal moon then yes it's pretty simple.
Blue mould with a 10 year bloom cycle growing on the cheese would give the desired affect.
1
I think it would be very hard to make the atmosphere as dense as it is on Earth, because the Moon has low gravity. And you should take into account that even on Earth you can freeze to death but only on some places or in specific season. On the Moon there will be better and worse regions to live, too.
The temperature on the Earth scales from around -90 to +...
1
If your moon was captured by the planet, it could have been from further away in the orbit, even maybe a rogue (belonging to no stellar system) and had a lot of water that happened to be frozen because it's cold in space (like a comet).
Now when your moon gets too close to the star (either at your planet's orbit or before it was captured, passing nearer ...
1
How about something more indirect?
Say the world is the site of a partially successful colonization project. The "moon" is the last remaining power satellite from the constellation that powered the terraforming process, having drifted out of its geostationary orbit after losing stationkeeping but otherwise still active. When it's overhead, forgotten ...
1
Life on your planet is Feasible, you would need to consider the implication of three moons on the tide. our moon pulls the water towards it; if you have two moons the tides would be very weak when they are at the opposite ends and very strong when they are at the same. imagine the three separate moons at the same time. You would have times when the tides ...
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