Could life have existed once on the moon?

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As places of life, the Moon seems to be a non-starter – especially given what we suspect of the circumstances of its creation. In the beginning, "our hypothetical sacred text could read," The Earth was broken by another planetary, Thea. back in the magma, may have created a melted rock atmosphere shared between Earth and Luna, and oh yeah, b Riefly has created life on one of the most barren pieces of rock in the solar system. "

It does not read exactly like a bestseller – but it could have happened.This is the conclusion of a study on lunar geology, which suggests that just after its formation, the Moon could have contained large amounts of water. Studies on lunar basalts (magmatic deposits) suggest that they retain water concentrations of several hundred parts per million, while studies on the retention of water vapor during the impact that created the Moon suggest that substantial deposits could be preserved.

It is easy to understand how the enormous heat of planetary accretion or massive volcanic activity could temporarily lead to the presence of liquid water on the surface of the moon – but in the absence of atmosphere, the liquid water would not persist long At the same time, however, the huge amount of gas released by the Moon in one or the other of these two states would effectively form a temporary atmosphere. The authors note:

Gases from lava flows may have accumulated an atmosphere of about 10 mbar, which is greater than the triple pressure of water and about 1.5 times the atmospheric pressure present on Mars (and about 3 times more like the current Martian atmosphere, given the difference in surface gravity).

the atmosphere "temporary "in geological terms can still translate an atmosphere that is horribly permanent from our point of view. The temporary shield of the Moon could have lasted 70 million years. There are 70 million years on Earth, dinosaurs were still four million years of extinction, just to give this period a sense of scale. The question is, would there have been enough time for life to evolve? And the answer, honestly, is that we do not know. Some have estimated that cyanobacteria could have appeared in the 10 million years following the appearance of building blocks – which would mean that life could have emerged on the moon regardless of the Earth and then disappear once again changed conditions. This is not a crazy concept since we have seen similar theories proposed for Venus and Mars.

Life was unambiguously present on Earth 3.8 – 3.5 billion years ago. It could have been present on Earth since 4.26B years, which would be practically as soon as our planet would have formed. But one of the problems to trace the origin of life on Earth is that the Earth's active geology excludes it. The oldest part of the seabed is only 280 million years old. Rocks on Earth have been subjected to billions of years of erosion and other shaping forces. It is not that we have no rock that goes back to the beginning of life on Earth, but we do not have many of them.

Another possibility for life on the moon is that it could have been worn there by a sufficiently large size. impact events on Earth. It's not really crazy either. The reason we know as much as we do about the internal structure of Vesta, for example, is because there are pieces of Vesta on Earth that have arrived here after being flipped over. Asteroid in a collision. Vesta is more than 150 million kilometers from Earth. The moon, in contrast, is about 240,000 miles – and that is the current distance . When it would have formed, the Moon would have been estimated at 14,000 miles from Earth, which would have made trivial transit difference as trivial.

But anyway, it's an interesting argument. Finding evidence that life has repeatedly arisen in the solar system, even temporarily, would change our understanding of how life appears and evolves. This would suggest that life should occur abundantly throughout the universe and that the reason we do not see any other advanced extraterrestrial life that we ourselves is not just because life does not exist. almost never seen the light of day. This might not seem like a big step forward given the number of huge questions that would remain unanswered, but since we currently do not know any of the answers, any step forward is an improvement.