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Asked by gracier9 to Steve, Shefali, Kevin, Katie, Floris, Delma on 14 Jan 2016. This question was also asked by chloeb.
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Steve Price answered on 14 Jan 2016:
Hi,
It depends what you mean by ‘normal life’.
A colony could be established on the moon. Let’s say there are 5000 people there. They would need all the things we need to live. They would need doctors and nurses for any medical needs and, of course, a dentist for when their teeth need repairing. Someone will have to cook the food, whether that is in a canteen type arrangement or a restaurant type place. People would need someone to cut their hair, someone would need to repair things like your tv, or the lights in your apartment, or anything else people have to ‘live’ on the moon. People would choose to live together and children would be born. They would then need teachers to have an education: and people would die. So normal, yes!
However, they would have to live a building that is filled with air. There is no naturally occurring air on the moon. The air would have to be continuously made and the waste air removed. There would be a lot of recycling going on. Temperature control would be needed in the building as the sun will make it very hot and it would be very cold in the night. (Here on Earth we have the atmosphere around us which evens out the sun. About a third of the sun reaches us on the ground. The rest is reflected away or absorbed and re-radiated back to space.) For a similar reason there would need to be a lot of radiation protection on the moon.
As a society, people could live a normal life, but there would always need to be artificial protection to allow people to survive.
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Comments
queenb07 commented on :
are there real aliens in space ???
Steve commented on :
Hi,
By aliens I assume you mean extraterrestrial life forms. We are looking for other life in our solar system at this time. On Mars there are signs that water was abundant. There might have been life in the past and possibly some microbes still living. To date life has not been found anywhere outside of the Earth.
Our galaxy has many many stars and there are a large number galaxies in the universe. In all probability, there will be life on another one of the billions of planets in the universe.
Whether we will ever meet these aliens is a different matter. They are so far away that it would takes us thousands of years to travel to them or to receive a message. Unless, of course, someone discovers another form of propulsion!