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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

How much energy would be required to provide a localized magnetosphere to protect the garden from cosmic rays?

When people think of radiation protection, they think of the magnetosphere. But they really need to be thinking of the atmosphere. There's a reason traveling on a plane gets you a higher dose of radiation and it's not a weaker magnetosphere.

There will never, ever be such atmosphere on Moon as its on Earth. Too low gravity for example, solar winds would scrub it pretty fast even if you would somehow create it 100% with a snap of fingers.

Its nice dreaming about options but this aint realistic.

Cover your garden with a few dozen meters of rock. In fact, build your base in a cave.

We are only talking about "fast" relative to normal planetary timescales.

My understanding is that it would still take hundreds of years for the solar wind to strip away the atmosphere. If a civilisation had the technology to quickly put an atmosphere on the moon, it has the technology to continually replenish the atmosphere as long as that civilisation lasts.

It would never be practical (or a good idea) but a post-scarcity society could pull it off as a vanity project.

Perhaps a thick shell of water suffices. In the order of meters, perhaps one to four meters. Perhaps combine it with lead, in the order of centimeters, perhaps ten centimeters, then one meter of water would suffice.

Numerous long-duration spacecraft designs incorporate water storage in the outer structure, or a high-radiation shelter within a water storage structure, for just this purpose.

Water attenuates radiation quite rapidly. And has other uses.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646990>

<https://isoe-network.net/publications/pub-proceedings/sympos...>

Plants grow in radioactive soil around Chernobyl just fine though.

Those radiation liking mushrooms could be an interesting test for the next batch of plants to the moon. :)

How tolerant are plants to cosmic rays?

This is what the test covered in the article is set to discover.

Seems like solar could easily supply?

Easily, assuming you have solar panels that could survive the temperatures of the lunar night.

You don't absolutely need to put your base somewhere it'll have a night. There's a large mountain chain on Moon's south pole that's in constant sunlight.

Yep and whoever controls that, controls the moon. It’s prime real estate.

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