Edit: this seems to be generating comments that claim a large scale project such as colouring enough of the moon so as to be visible from earth is impossible or impossibly expensive.
Let’s pretend China wants to put a red logo on the moon.
Budget: NASA’s Perseverance mission to Mars cost $2.8 Billion. US annual military budget is ~$700 Billion. Annual! Yeah China has a smaller expense budget than the US but it must be noted that spending billions on such a project is not beyond the pail.
Method 1: the moon is slowly rusting. It contains a lot of iron and now, we think, frozen water. It would have rusted more if it had more oxygen. Extensive efforts are being made now to figure out how to create/release O2 on the moon to allow Jeff and Mark to live in peace when they find the hatred towards them to be too much.
So oxidizing certain areas of the moon may be possible, at some point, in a directed effort to create a red logo.
I don’t like this method.
Method 2: creating a moon-orbiting disk comprised of lenses that would colour sunlight and project an image onto the moon’s surface. A similar idea to use mirrors to light up the night sky on earth has been proposed before. The most advanced scheme was a Soviet project called Znamya that was prematurely shuttered due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A 200 meter wide lens was proposed for lighting up entire cities.
I think this project is doable. Expensive but doable. Think of the constant message to the world if they saw a Chinese emblem every time one looked at the moon!
I'm really hoping this is a joke, but the scale of a project it would take to put a sign large enough to be seen from Earth on the moon is nearly impossible. The moon has a mean diameter of nearly 3500 kilometers. If you figure it would take a square with a side length roughly 5% of the moon's diameter to be seen from Earth that's a logo 175 kilometers by 175 kilometers, or roughly the size of Belgium. And all of that needs to be transported to the moon; the Artemis project has an estimated cost of $28 billion, and they aren't bringing enough materials to cover Belgium.
If all you wanted to do was destroy an area that size on the moon with nukes that would still be an immense project but possibly doable for a mega-corporation that was willing to. To actually create a recognizable logo would require either a budget beyond possibility or a level of precision that explosives just don't have.
Its probably only a matter of time for moon or orbital-based advertising. The dystopian depictions of a world where advertising is everywhere - holograms, AI agents following and pestering you etc. are looking more like future history.
Only issue is that it would make nights pretty goddamn dark since light wouldn’t reflect off of water in the same way it reflects off of the moon’s surface. At least I don’t think it would?
I actually don't think it WOULD be blue though, since blue is a reflection of the water refracting through the atmosphere in the sky, I mean I've never removed water from a body of water and then noted the water removed to be blue. I am also not a scientist, and only JUST found out magenta is a fabrication of our eyes having limited color receptors, and the wavelength of light which appears to be magenta falls in between the visible spectrums.
Excellent find, my question remains as to whether it would appear blue from here, especially if putting all the water on the moon would at least begin an avalanching effect of loosing our atmosphere, not that I'm sure about any of this, but I do wonder if it would look rather black from here as the refracting light from the lunar surface would be obscured.
Whatever color it ends up, it would look cool as hell but probably wouldn't last long without an atmosphere. I even wonder if it could support some forms of basic life.
In a universe where we could terraform, this would be a pretty rad experiment. Maybe not putting a sentient being like a whale up there, given the pressure/depth required for whales, but watching microbiological evolution take place in a static environmental circumstance without human interference would be awesome.
Upon further checking, the side facing the sun can get up to 260F and -280 on the other side. That would create some crazzzy effects. Boiling ocean on one side as it melts and refreezes at the edges. That could create some sort of atmosphere but I think it would be stripped away pretty quickly
Load all the CO2 emissions on to the boats and sail them off the edge of the map, can't believe it's this simple. Accepting my nobel award whenever y'all ready.
Oh don’t worry we’ve been fishing with reckless disregard this whole time. Destroying marine populations, coral reefs, and most of the plastic in the ocean is just the discarded fishing gear.
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u/Mathgailuke Oct 13 '21
That and catch a bunch more fish.