Brightening The Moon
It sounds like the plot of a James Bond movie: There's a plan afoot to make the moon brighter in the night sky, potentially saving the world billions of dollars in power costs running street lamps.
How would such an ambitious idea even be possible? By strategically placing highly reflective material on the lunar surface. A lot of it.
The project is called Brighter Moon, and Swedish parent company Foreo says it has already secured more than $52 million in funding.
The thing is, Foreo is a cosmetics company. When asked for more information on the backers of Brighter Moon, company reps declined to name even one, citing privacy reasons. The "Foreo Institute" is also supposedly trying to crowd-fund a new kind of toothbrush — which may in fact be real — so the moon project may be an elaborate hoax created to drum up interest in that.
Still, Brighter Moon proposes an interesting, if fanciful scenario. It also makes some good points: The moon reflects only about 12% of the sunlight that impacts it. By using the right material in the right places — over an area the size of Switzerland, or about 0.1% of the lunar surface — the amount of reflected light could be increased by 80%.
See here what Newsy Science has to say on this.
A brighter night sky would mean less need for streetlights, which could potentially translate to less electricity usage and thus fewer globe-warming carbon emissions, it said. "We want to raise public awareness about the project and generate consciousness about the global energy crisis," said
Paul Peros, CEO of Foreo.
However, scientists are skeptical about the idea. "Making the Moon brighter is not something I've ever heard of in the geoengineering literature," said Ben Kravitz, a postdoctoral researcher in the atmospheric sciences and global change division of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The company said it plans to use materials already available on the surface of the Moon to brighten it, but it is not clear how that would work. Peros said the company is investigating simply smoothing over a portion of the Moon's surface to increase its reflectivity.
"Furthermore, we are looking at the surfaces and composition of the soil and materials that currently exist on the Moon and how to best utilise them," he said.
Even if such a mission were successful, it could have side effects. Light at night can disrupt sleep and has been linked to increases in several types of cancer in lab animals. Foreo suggests the brightening effect would happen gradually over 30 years, allowing humans and animals time to adjust.
No comments:
Post a Comment