Originally published at: First ever plants grown in soil from the Moon | Boing Boing
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Once they filled each “pot” with approximately a gram of lunar soil, the scientists moistened the soil with a nutrient solution and added a few seeds from the Arabidopsis plant.
So, basically hydroponics, then.
When they planted the seeds, they had no idea if they’d sprout or not.
In kindergarten we sprouted lima beans in wet paper towels. I don’t think these biologists ever had any doubt their seeds would sprout. As for the reaction to stressors, I would think that it’s pretty well-understood how various species respond to the known components of lunar regolith. This seems like a stunt to me, unless I’m missing something (which is entirely possible).
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And this is how the takeover by sentient plants begins
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Well, maybe. But this stuff is so rare and valuable it hardly seems like NASA would engineer a stunt. There must be more to it (hopefully).
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It seems to me that this is more or less just how science works. I’m sure they went into the experiment with a hypothesis that it would work, but without trying it they could know for certain exactly how it would react.
It’s not unreasonable to expect that we wouldn’t invest in establishing some sort of presence on the moon based solely on a hypothesis that we could grow plants in the soil. It would be an awfully expensive (not to mention potentially deadly) lesson to go build a moon base and only then discover that plants wouldn’t grow.
Maybe not the most groundbreaking scientific result ever, but I wouldn’t call this a stunt at all.
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Does the ripened veggie/fruit taste like cheese?
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Maybe, but if Artemis works out we’ll have plenty of opportunities for in situ agricultural science, long before we’re close to having a base on the Moon where we’d need to rely on it (if that ever even happens), which will provide orders of magnitude more information about the ability to make it work. I doubt this experiment is adding much to the corpus of knowledge regarding colonization. 
(And meanwhile it’s squandering a very limited and historically significant Apollo sample.)
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That’s a fair critique
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If so, we may have found the secret to true vegan cheese.
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That’s surprising since NASA was doing experiments with plants in lunar regolith since at least 1970. I would have thought that included sprouting seeds, but maybe not. This paper did explicitly say that seeds were germinated in the presence of the samples though, and talks about lettuce seedings:
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According to first hand reports, they taste like a big pizza pie.
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That’s amore?
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I sense a disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices of pedologists suddenly cried out in terror when they read the word “soil” in relation to the moon.
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Scientists have been conducting similar experiments with a manufactured analogue for lunar regolith dubbed “Minnesota Lunar Simulant” (so named because it was developed at the University of Minnesota) for decades now.
It’s almost indistinguishable from the real thing even at the microscopic level, but unlike actual lunar regolith you can buy the stuff by the ton if you want to figure out how to go about designing a moon-farm or manufacturing moon-bricks or whatever.
ETA: Looks like they did what any good scientists would do here and used a similar lunar simulant (JSC-1A, named after the Johnson Space Center) as a control so they probably only needed the actual regolith to confirm there weren’t any surprises when they switched from the manufactured moon dirt to the real thing.
The lunar simulant JSC-1A29,32,33 was used for the terrestrial control material. All lunar regolith samples, as well as the JSC-1A simulant used for controls, were samples sieved to <1 mm particle size.
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From the abstract:
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I’m reminded of when I worked at a company who had the U.S Army Corps of Engineers’ Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory (too many names all at once…) as a client. Apparently, if you referred to the stuff that covers the ground as “dirt” you would be instantly corrected with “soil”.
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May 12th, 3022
Lunarversity students succeed growing plants in Earth soil, a feat not seen in over five hundred years. “Human habitation may be closer than we think,” says one scientist.
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If by “corrected” you mean “liberally dusted with,” I think that might be a pretty fun workplace!
"On loan from NASA, this soil was collected during the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions to the moon. "
The linked article answered many of the points above, but did not say anything about the Uni needing to return the soil to Nasa.
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Florida Plant and Soil Science needs more climbing and coca and stuff. At least make people want to send their snail tank to the moon.
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