The Moon's man-made problems

Arion McNicoll

December 11, 2023

Humanity is now the dominant force influencing the Moon's future, according to scientists calling for a formal declaration of a new geological epoch called the "Lunar Anthropocene".

 

In a report in the journal Nature Geoscience, the team of American geologists and anthropologists said that human debris on the lunar surface includes "discarded and abandoned spacecraft components, bags of human excreta, scientific equipment and other objects [such as] flags, golf balls, photographs and religious texts".

More than 100 spacecraft have been sent to the Moon since 1959, when a Soviet probe became the "first man-made object to disturb the lunar surface", said The Times's science reporter Kaya Burgess. And experts fear that humans are playing an increasingly "big role in shaping its landscape".

How much impact are humans having?

Plenty, according to scientists. In their report in Nature Geoscience, scientists from the University of Kansas say that the effects of spacecraft landings, lunar rovers and other human activity on the Moon's surface are becoming more impactful than natural processes such as meteoroid impacts.

With lunar missions set to "ramp up", said New Scientist, the experts claim that just like Earth, the Moon is entering an anthropocene – a new planetory era in which human activity has overtaken natural forces as the main cause of changes to the environment and the climate.

The scientists argue that so great is this impact, lunar "national parks" should be created to preserve areas for scientific study.

To date, people have caused "surface disturbances" in at least 59 locations on the Moon's surface, the magazine reported. And the frequency of human visits is increasing, with India this year becoming the fourth country to make a soft landing on the Moon, and a "range of national and private missions" planned for the near future. 

Does it matter?

The scientists hope that by officially declaring the advent of the Lunar Anthropocene, agencies and governments conducting work on its surface "will better appreciate the importance of managing the impact", said science writer Matthew Agius in Cosmos magazine.

According to study co-author Justin Holcomb, a postdoctoral researcher with the Kansas Geological Survey, "our goal is to dispel the lunar-static myth and emphasise the importance of our impact, not only in the past but ongoing and in the future".

University College London astrophysicist Ingo Waldmann agreed the Moon has entered its version of Earth's Anthropocene age. Natural changes to lunar geology are "extremely slow", he told New Scientist, with an asteroid impact every couple of million years, but not many other big events.

"Just us walking on it has a bigger environmental impact than anything that would happen to the Moon in hundreds of thousands of years," said Waldmann.

What next?

The unofficial motto of the US National Park Service here on Earth is "take only photographs, leave only footprints", noted Popular Science's Laura Baisas. A growing number of experts now "believe that a similar mindset should apply to the Moon".

The Moon is extraordinarily vulnerable to human activity, said Newsweek's science reporter Aristos Georgiou. Earth's sole natural satellite "only has a very thin and tenuous atmosphere, known as an exosphere, composed of dust and gas, which is susceptible to exhaust gases".

Given this vulnerability, Holcomb and his fellow report co-authors insist that "future missions must consider mitigating deleterious effects on lunar environments".

"We aim to initiate discussions about our impact on the lunar surface before it's too late," added Holcomb, who predicted that as the space race accelerates, the lunar landscape "will be entirely different in 50 years".

 

Why You Should Try Sitting on the Floor

RebeccaOnion

December 10, 2023

Ditching a chair when I can has made my joints and muscles feel great.

You can read advice about habits for years before finally deciding to adopt one. I knew from following mobility influencers that they’re always sitting on the floor, touting it as a way to increase flexibility. The discomfort of the hard surface forces a seated person to shift positions more often, which is supposedly good for reducing inflammation and upping metabolism. If the big message from the 2000s and 2010s was “Every office worker needs a standing desk,” then “Everyone should sit on the floor” is the 2020s-era sequel. Earlier this year, I read a book called Built to Move, by Kelly Starrett, a physical therapist, and his wife, Juliet Starrett, a former attorney and world champion white-water rafter. It has a whole chapter on the habit, recommending it as a way to “rewild” the hip joints of bodies that have been sitting in chairs too long.

Makes sense! I said to myself, and proceeded not to do it. For me, floor sitting clicked only after I finally got COVID for the first time, this year. I was off my regular exercise routine for about a month, trying to get my breath back and not push myself. In previous stretches of life when I’ve had to stop exercising, I’ve felt as if ants are crawling under my skin. But this time, I was fresh from reading Built to Move, and floor sitting saved me.

I brought a bolster and a few yoga blocks into the room where I was isolating and used the small strip of floor in there to shift into different seated positions while watching streaming shows on my laptop. Then, when I was testing negative and back to work, and readopting the habit of using my standing desk looked daunting, I began to spend stretches of the afternoon on the floor. I’d sit with my legs in a V, crisscross applesauce, or the 90/90 position, and my laptop on an ottoman, Zooming or typing away.

Like they say in Built to Move, the idea is not to never sit, but to try to sit on the floor instead of a chair. I liked it enough that when I got better I kept on using floor sitting as a “rest” from standing at my desk, rather than collapsing into my office couch. And now I try to make it my default when I watch TV, or chat novels at book club, or wait at the airport gate.

I have no idea whether I’ll live longer, or get better at my formal exercise endeavors, because of this new habit. But floor sitting—and its close cousins, squatting and kneeling—feels great. Something about the feedback between my muscles and joints, gravity, and the floor keeps things feeling smoother than they do when I arrange myself in a 90-degree angle in a traditional chair for hours on end. Maybe the best thing about this habit is that, psychologically speaking, it’s very reassuring to know that this is a type of training you can do basically for free. It takes no extra time or money and can be done at any age, even when you have no energy at all. All you have to do is keep on doing it.