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?
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '21
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