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China Grew Two Cotton Leaves on the Moon
- alex_duf 7y agoIsn't the photo some bad CGI?
- interestica 7y agoIt really appears that way. Even the "earth" surrounding the leaves is odd. I'm not sure it could be attributed to any weird artificial lighting.
- karlshea 7y agoI doubt it. Similar experiments on the ISS looked exactly the same. Edit: Nevermind, the IEEE article photo is definitely a render. I was referring to the picture on the Guardian.
- Fjolsvith 7y agoCCP propaganda, perhaps?
- sgt3v 7y agois the photo real? looks like cheap cgi render.
- Reason077 7y agoI'd like to see SpaceX grow Cannabis leaves on the moon.
- csommers 7y agoSo would Elon.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> So would Elon Symbolically, a mayflower [1] would be smarter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigaea_repens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigaea_repens
- bdamm 7y agoThe smoking of cannabis on Rogen's show was a bold social statement, but he also demonstrated that he has no idea how to smoke cannabis. Personally I view Elon's action as a profound statement on why you shouldn't smoke cannabis.
- mieseratte 7y ago> Personally I view Elon's action as a profound statement on why you shouldn't smoke cannabis. I'll bite, what is your take on why you shouldn't?
- whamlastxmas 7y agoBecause space man bad
- bdamm 7y agoBecause Elon's success has nothing to do with cannabis. Maybe if he had taken up smoking cannabis, he wouldn't have been successful. He certainly demonstrated that he doesn't smoke cannabis.
- folkrav 7y ago> Maybe if he had taken up smoking cannabis, he wouldn't have been successful And maybe he would have been more successful. Maybe he also would have grown tiny little wings and horns. Who knows what could happen if he had taken it up? This is nothing but pure speculation at this point lol
- Japhy_Ryder 7y agoHow do you know that? What about that Carl Sagan guy? What a filthy worthless pothead, he did nothing of significance... (Note: Carl Sagan was a huge advocate for marijuana, and credits it to the development of 'Cosmos' and some of his other scientific, spiritual, and creative endeavors. His widow, Ann Druyan, is on the boards of directors of NORML, which is a marijuana legalization/advocacy organization).
- wavefunction 7y agoI'd rather they grew the flowers!
- 40four 7y agoThis is actually sort of a ripoff of one of Elon's ideas. One of the original concepts that eventually snowballed into Space X was very similar. He wanted to grow plants on Mars, and use the images to try to stir up interest in space exploration. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5g8k/spacex-is-because-elon-musk-wanted-to-grow-plants-on-mars https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5g8k/spacex-is-because-... (VIDEO) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjGiY8Suk9o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjGiY8Suk9o
- YayamiOmate 7y agoWhy does it say image processing? How did they record the experiment if they had to process or maybe even render the picture?
- dharmab 7y agoLink is down- heres'a an older related article with a photo of the sprout https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jan/16/china-first-cotton-plant-on-moon-dies-change-4-lander https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jan/16/china-first-...
- sp332 7y agoYours has a much more believeable photo. Here's a mirror of the original with the weird picture everyone is talking about. https://web.archive.org/web/20190930160024/https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/robotic-exploration/china-grew-these-leaves-on-the-moon https://web.archive.org/web/20190930160024/https://spectrum....
- sukilot 7y agoIs it acceptable that ieee.org posts an article with a faked photo?
- lucideer 7y agoCalling it "faked" is somewhat hyperbolic. The article refers to it as an "image" (as opposed to a raw source photo) that it clearly states is the result of "image processing". It's common practice in science to produce such representative images, e.g. in a lot of astronomy, space photgraphy, and things like SEMs
- rebuilder 7y agoThe caption for the image on the IEEE article : "Photo: Chongqing University Two cotton leaves grown in the Chang’e-4 lander on the far side of the moon."
- lucideer 7y agoI don't maintain the IEEE site, so I guess I can't be sure, but that seems more of a CMS default label for image credits than a deliberate statement on the nature of the content.
- brudgers 7y agoYossarian, I want you to do something for me. [removes item from small bag] I want to serve this to the men. Taste it and let me know what you think. [Yossarian takes a bite] What is it? Chocolate-covered cotton. What are you, crazy? No good, huh? For Christ's sake, you didn't even take the seeds out! Is it really that bad? It's cotton! They've got to learn to like it! Why? Look, I saw this great opportunity to corner the market in Egyptian cotton. How was I supposed to know there was going to be a glut? I've got a hundred warehouses stacked with the stuff all over the European theater. I can't get rid of a penny's worth. People eat cotton candy, don't they? Well this stuff is better - it's made out of real cotton. Milo, people can't eat cotton! They've got to - it's for the Syndicate! It will make them sick! - why don't you try it yourself if you don't believe me? I did - and it made me sick. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
- potta_coffee 7y agoSauce plz
- kaens 7y agocatch 22 by joeseph heller
- reportingsjr 7y agoIt is from the novel Catch-22.
- brudgers 7y agoSource is the movie. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Catch-22_(film) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Catch-22_(film)
- markJes 7y agoCatch-22 by Joseph Heller
- jihadjihad 7y ago
- kevinconroy 7y agohttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6599445/That-didnt-long-China-reveals-cotton-sprout-planted-lunar-lander-dead.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6599445/That... Recent article with actual photo (not just the CGI rendering)
- citilife 7y ago> ‘They said, perhaps feeling a little embarrassed, that they wanted to make use of our relay satellite when they make their own mission to the far side of the moon.’ lol to the "perhaps feeling a little embarrassed" bit - small jab.
- aloer 7y agoI don’t think I have ever seen such an aggressive shaking gdpr popup
- lostlogin 7y agoAnd that pop up might be the least offensive thing about that paper.
- lowatt 7y agoDoes not seem recently updated: "Updated: 13:29 EDT, 16 January 2019"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lxe 7y agoLooks like a bad 3D render... which it is?
- rch 7y agoDoesn't look like any lunar regolith was involved.
- bdamm 7y agoYeah, it's one thing to ship a canister to the lunar surface and then witness a tiny bit of growth, it's quite another to actually grow using the base aggregates available on the moon. While I appreciate their experiment, it's really a pretty small result. And perhaps the real headline would be something like "4 out of 5 expected growths failed to occur and scientists don't know why". The fruit flies didn't hatch, the yeast didn't colonize, and the other two seedlings failed to grow at all. The theory was that all of them would grow in the artificial biozone and maybe even provide a CO2/O2 cycle. But they didn't, and that's the real science.
- ryanhuff 7y agoHow is this much different than growing within a space station in orbit? Didn’t the plant grow in its own mini biosphere (soil) separate from the moon surface, essentially isolated from the lunar environment other than light and heat?
- t0mbstone 7y agoMaybe the moon's gravity? Or temperature cycle differences?
- knodi123 7y agoFrom the article, "But, the plants will not be able to survive the lunar night, when temperatures dip down to -170 degrees Celsius."
- aeternum 7y agoI wonder if that part was expected or if something broke down. Strange to go to all the work of planting a seed and creating the proper environment with light routing knowing that it will last only a single lunar day. Seems likely that the insulation or power system did not work as designed.
- WalterSear 7y agoOr this was just a propaganda play.
- kop316 7y agoI'd suspect it's a "tack on" experiement. They were doing a bunch of experiments and wanted to see if a plant could even germinate in a low gravity environment. Now that they know it can germinate, it is worth the money to see if i t could last longer.
- arbuge 7y agoPartially isolated. The article mentions that it died during the 14 day lunar night.
- zipotm 7y agoThis image is fake?
- samplatt 7y agoRe-read these comments; there's lots of links to better sources/images.
- 0xakhil 7y agoDoes this mean we have colonised moon? (in reference to The Martian movie)
- charlesju 7y agoI think the main difference at least in accordance to the movie is this wasn't activating lunar soil, it was using earth soil on the moon.
- jccooper 7y agoSo where's the planetary protection complaints on this one?
- CorruptedArc 7y agoI was hoping they would use lunar "dirt". I mean this experiment doesn't seem like it even had to be on the moon due to the closed-off environment. It's still cool but I feel like more could have been learned here.
- Pfhreak 7y agoDo plants grow well in microgravity/low gravity is still not well understood. Growing stuff on the moon, especially more complex plants, is still quite valuable to our understanding of whether we can sustain life off world. I'm less familiar with Lunar "dirt" (aka regolith) than Martian regolith, but it's very likely that Lunar regolith isn't capable of supporting life. Martian regolith is a highly toxic blend of perchlorates, oxides, and extremely dry jagged minerals. The lack of a water cycle means that weathering behaves very differently, and the resulting material is considerably sharper and finer than the stuff on Earth. It also, of course, lacks any of the organic content that you'd need to make healthy soil.
- WalterBright 7y agoWith all the lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo missions, it's sad if no researchers tried to grow things in it.
- Pfhreak 7y agoThose rocks are highly controlled, however there are scientists investigating whether soil can be made from simulated regolith.
- WalterBright 7y agoMany have wound up in private hands, and others just sit uselessly in museums. Besides, what more valuable research could be done with them than answering "can we grow crops in lunar dirt" and "what do we need to mix in the lunar dirt to get crops to grow"?
- foxhop 7y agoFirst thought, they didn't grow anything, they germinated a seed. 2nd thought, great we now left more fingerprints on the Petrie dish that is the moon.
- aeternum 7y agoWhat's with the obsession with keeping the moon and other planets barren? There is an incomprehensible number of barren planets: 21.16 quadrillion in the Virgo Supercluster alone. We should be spreading life, not obsessing with keeping things 'clean'.
- foxhop 7y agoI don't want them to stay barren, to want to know if life exists before spreading our germs, and sneezing cotton everywhere.
- aeternum 7y agoStill, there are plenty of other planets where we can look for life and both the moon and mars are quite large, very unlikely we will contaminate any significant portion of it.
- mcbits 7y agoIf we find life surviving on one of the planets that we've been exploring, and it's so similar as to be indistinguishable from Earth life, then it almost certainly came from Earth on one of our missions. Even if an asteroid transplanted something that managed to take root millions of years ago, it would have endured some pretty severe evolutionary pressure by now (and probably didn't have any competition from native life).
- martimarkov 7y agoAm I the only one who thinks the scientists are a bit immoral? They wanted to send a turtle and the only thing that stopped them were the constraints of the experiment. Not the fact that they would be killing a turtle for literally no reason. Kinda makes me think about the fact that we need stronger ethics rules in the new space race.
- GhostVII 7y agoIs that any more unethical than going out for wings, even if you aren't really hungry? Maybe you consider both of those things immoral, which is fine, but in that case there are far more animals dying for no real reason on Earth than in space. I would worry about those first.
- 20190820234322 7y agoThe difference is that turtles are cuter than chickens, and despite what many people will argue, cuteness, physical beauty etc do have inherent moral worth.
- fourthark 7y ago”it is very meaningful to choose tortoise” Can anyone explain this reference?
- 40four 7y agoWell, besides the Soviet mission it mentioned that used tortoises in the past, I suspect the origin of the reference is in regard to the classic saying "It's tutles all the way down" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down Not positive about that, but that's where my mind went :)
- kaikai 7y agoTortoises are one of the celestial animals in feng shui, and are considered lucky.
- 7y ago
- 40four 7y ago(edit: found the link to article with the real picture) Not going to lie, I'm impressed that they pulled this off, and it's really, really cool! It is interesting that something similar was the original concept for what turned into Space X. So it's not really an original idea. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5g8k/spacex-is-because-elon-musk-wanted-to-grow-plants-on-mars https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5g8k/spacex-is-because-... (VIDEO) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjGiY8Suk9o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjGiY8Suk9o
- markdown 7y agoWhy do we get titles like this? It's so weird. If this were a NASA thing I promise you the title wouldn't be "USA Grew Two Cotton Leaves on the Moon". Everything Chinese is reduced to "China".
- rrss 7y agoNASA's brand is much better known than CNSA's.
- markdown 7y agoGee... do you think maybe that's because NASA's achievements are attributed to NASA while CNSA's are attributed to "China"?
- emiliobumachar 7y agoThat's both a cause and an effect. Getting a brand off the ground is hard, and presumably CNSA is not too bothered by representing its host country.
- rrss 7y agoI think it is because NASA 1. is 30 years older 2. did that whole "men on the moon" thing 3. is featured frequently in U.S. media, which is consumed around the world. Also, the CNSA refers to everything it does as China's accomplishments: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html.
- CMCDragonkai 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference... - people see their ingroup as distinct and unique while reducing outgroups to a borg. It's basically a logical fallacy perpetuated by everybody.
- jaimex2 7y agoDid they send a seedling or did they actually grow something from a seed?