Re: Lunar vegetation?!



Dave Michelson wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote:
Now, plants on Mars looked like a real possibility in 1954, and indeed seemed almost likely... but native plants on the _Moon_?
This raises some very big questions about how they would evolve in an airless and waterless environment (they would probably not known about the radiation from the solar storms in 1954), and by 1954 one would assume that evolutionary theory would have been advanced enough to rule out lunar plants. As to the "colour changes", I have never read of major and baffling color changes on the Moon such as occur on Mars due to the dust storms.
So where did this concept of lunar plants all come from, and why was it still going in 1954? I thought the idea had died shortly after H.G. Wells had written "The First Men In The Moon".

TIME - 3 Mar 1924

"There may be life of a sort on the moon, after all, despite its admitted lack of atmosphere. Fifty-five plats or fields of something which can best be described as "vegetation" have been observed and mapped on the southern wall of the great moon crater Eratosthenes, by Dr. William H. Pickering, the Harvard astronomer, at the Mandeville (Jamaica) Observatory."

_Pickering_ thought this? I can see Percival Lowell going for it, but Pickering?
And the "plats or fields" part makes it look like he thought it was cultivated.
Here's a good overhead photo of the crater: http://www.damianpeach.com/barbados06/lunar/eratosthenes_2006_10_13red.jpg
Was he mistaking the illumination of the "terracing" of the inside walls as the sun rose over it for plant growth of some sort?
When I was looking for that photo I stumbled on this: http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/im/peak-shadows-ex.jpg
Look, actual Chesley Bonestell type lunar mountains. :-)


"The Eratosthenes region is an oasis, separated from other similar areas by enormous desert tracts. Some astronomers think that the great craters may emit steam which provides a sort of atmosphere."

This is obviously based on the old volcanic theory of the crater's formation, with steam rising from the dormant caldera.

Pat
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