Hacker News Reader

Comment by gardaani | Hacker News Reader

Chinese already did a similar experiment few years ago and the result was that "plants can grow on the moon despite the intense radiation, low gravity, and prolonged intense light"

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-china-tiny-farm-moon.html

View on HN

> Over the next eight days, this payload conducted a vital experiment where it attempted to grow the first plants on the moon.

The plants survived eight days before freezing, but important questions also include things like "How does the radiation impact their seed viability in future generations?"

I'll grant that they didn't immediately die, but neither would I have expected that from an ionizing environment. Just a lot of weird quirks in lifecycle.

Ionized radiation is dangerous to mammals because of the potential DNA damage that we are so bad at repairing.

Plants on the contrary tolerate much more damage. To the point that we develop new species by bombarding seeds with ionized radiation.

> Plants on the contrary tolerate much more damage. To the point that we develop new species by bombarding seeds with ionized radiation.

Years ago, I worked with this microbe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans).

"Deinococcus radiodurans is capable of withstanding an acute dose of 5,000 grays (Gy), or 500,000 rad, of ionizing radiation with almost no loss of viability, and an acute dose of 15,000 Gy with 37% viability.[14][15][16] A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred double-strand breaks (DSBs) into the organism's DNA (~0.005 DSB/Gy/Mbp (haploid genome)). For comparison, a chest X-ray or Apollo mission involves about 1 mGy, 5 Gy can kill a human ...."

Some enterprising researchers must have considered engineering this microbe to produce useful products in space, but I don't travel in these circles anymore.

I like how latin names for such organisms are (intentionally) so fitting: "radiodurans".

But it's just a side effect of being an extremophile with really good DNA repair machinery. The microbe isn't intentionally resistant to radiation. It's not adapted specifically to radiation environments.

The Greek half of the name is equally fitting.

I read about an effort to do this in the 1950s (IIRC, it was in Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit by Andrew Moore, but I could be wrong about that) and as I remember it, most of the radiated seeds were either sterile or produced deformed offspring.

Atomic gardens:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening

+ artificial selection by robots, could be a way to generate environment adapted organisms.

Did they expose the seeds or the plant that produced them?

>we develop new species by bombarding seeds with ionized radiation

"yes, no problem, because what could go wrong!? Another slice of care-not cake, pls"

What's the difference between atomic gardening and regular selective breeding performed under the giant ball emitting ionizing radiation that we have overhead half the day except the rate at which mutations occur? Plants with terrible nonviable mutations might be entirely sterile even if we like them, plants with viable but undesirable mutations we won't propagate into another generation. It seems akin to modern GMO efforts with a shotgun instead of a scalpel, but it did work.

Plants also handle mutations differently, creating burls and cavities and whatnot instead of it taking over the entire existing plant like cancer does in animals. You're unlikely to generate a Plants vs. Zombies scenario here.

irradiating seeds without irradiating the consumers of seeds creates an opportunity for one-sided evolutionary advantage. see Gojira

That's... literally not how any of this works.

Might as well say that beating grapes into pulp without beating grapes of the consumers gives juice an opportunity for one-sided evolutionary advantage.

While it sure sounds straight out of some 50s horror movie, I have a feeling the consequences here are pretty insignificant. The mutant tomatoes I've harvested and eaten from my garden have been quite tasty. Any particular fears in mind?

"having a feeling" plus anecdata is not a long term longitudinal study.

Right, nor scary words a threat, hence my ask for clarification.

People doing it everywhere around the world for almost a century now, effectively is. Unsurprisingly for anyone whose understanding of science extends beyond cheap comic book tropes, everything is fine.

Radiation isn't evil magic, mutations don't give superpowers. Both are natural phenomena, and they're not anything like they're portrayed in comic books.

Might as well worry about watering your plants. Plants are perfectly fine, they live and grow by nature magic, no need for humans to play god and add water to the mix, what could possibly go wrong?

This is what nature keeps doing for billions of years - we have constant background radiation, some stuff from sun which still gets through, and lets not forget about everybody's favorite cosmic rays. The most energetic particle we detected had energy of baseball ball thrown at 100kmh. I'd say this is the main fuel of whole evolution of life on Earth, on top of drastically changing environments.

You can't build 100% radiation-shielded environment, anywhere. Neutrinos just don't care that much about obstacles (and interact very weakly with target, but they still do in small numbers, that's how we detect them).

on the scale that nature does it, the consumers of plants also evolve.

I can't believe what I'm being asked to argue here, it's "environmentalism" and "public health" and "anti big X" all rolled up into one. I'm on the other sides of all those issues, so I wish you'd all get back in your lanes.

Nah, you're just arguing magical thinking based on, to put it charitably, an understanding of reality pulled from pulp sci-fi and cheap comic books.

Honesty the biggest what could go wrong is things like vegetables will stop producing the useful large fruits we eat if we're trying to grow things for food.

On the contrary: the ones that washed up on the shore of Gilligan's Island were unusually large.

Have we tried the same with animals?

yeah plants tend to be polyploid which helps with robustness to radiation damage.

You can keep something alive for a week in a terrarium basically anywhere, I'm not even sure their result is interesting if it weren't for the fact that it was on the moon.

We do need to prove basic assumptions on the fairly likely chance that they won’t pan out.

> if it weren't for the fact that it was on the moon.

If it weren't for the entire reason they did the experiment in the first place?

That same lander (Chang'e 4) also measured the radiation dose rate on the moon. It's about 2.6x that of the ISS. Doesn't account for solar particle events, which they didn't encounter any.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz1334 ("First measurements of the radiation dose on the lunar surface")

- "LND measured an average dose equivalent of 1369 μSv/day on the surface of the Moon."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com