Instant Genius - Has the Moon entered a new epoch?

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

In our short history of space exploration, humans have already changed the Moon significantly. From the cultural heritage of our first footprints to the damage caused by spacecraft crashes, our presence is almost frozen in time in the Moon’s dusty regolith. Now, researchers are arguing for the formalisation of a new epoch on the Moon: the lunar Anthropocene. This epoch, they argue, began in 1959 with Russia’s Luna 2 spacecraft becoming the first ever to land on the Moon. We spoke to one of the researchers, space archaeologist Dr Justin Holcomb at the University of Kansas in the US, to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. This is Instant Genius, a bite-size masterclass in podcast form. I'm Noah Leach, news editor at BBC Science Focus. In our short history of space exploration, humans have already changed the moon significantly.

From the cultural heritage of our first footprints to the damage caused by spacecraft crashes, evidence of our presence is almost frozen in time in the moon's dusty regalith. Now, researchers are arguing for the formalisation of a new epoch on the moon, called the Lunar Anthropocene. This epoch, they argue, began in 1959 with Russia's Lunar II spacecraft, becoming the first ever to land on the moon. We spoke to one of the researchers behind this proposal, space archaeologist Dr. Justin Holcum, at the University of Kansas in the US, to learn more. Justin tells us about where the original term Anthropocene came from, what some of the weirdest things are that we've left on the moon, and what our future impacts could look like.

So Justin, to start, please can you explain what the Anthropocene is? Sure. So in the year 2000, two scientists named Kretzen and Sturmer came up with the idea or proposed the hypothesis that the Anthropocene is a period in geologic time when humans became a dominant influence on some Earth system, whether it be atmospheric or in the lithosphere or biosphere, etc. And we're talking to you today because you and your colleagues are calling for a similar label to be given to the moon as well as here on Earth. So could you tell me a bit more about this and what inspired you to do that? Sure. So if you think about the Anthropocene, it's a complex issue because just as I said, you could measure it in so many different ways.

And so that causes a lot of discussion about what the Anthropocene is and how long it's been, when it should be. and one of the reasons why is because the Earth has an active atmosphere, an active geomorphic system, and all of this is acting in concert to kind of erode the record of human activity. So if humans became the dominant force or agent of change on the Earth, we need to have a record of that. But these systems are constantly erasing that record, which causes a lot of friction in the scientific community and contentious debates about when the Anthropocene could begin.

So the idea that the human record is being erased is because human activity in the past, currently as we speak as well, is being recorded in the earth, right? In the rock cycle. Everything is being discarded. After it's discarded, it gets cycled into the environment in various ways. It gets buried into the earth. And when it's in the earth, the environment doesn't care that it's artifactual. to Earth surface processes and Earth systems, artifacts which record our history and our activities

are just another classed or rock. It's just another thing that's being sized sorted and it's being moved around the earth. So what happens is that the environment operates in kind of three ways. Erosion, which removes that dirt and any artifacts within it. Deposition, which is where the dirt and all the artifacts within that end up and stability.

So the environment's in a ratio of those three things. When stability happens, you get plants growing and animals walking around and more things getting discarded. So the Earth is operating in this ratio of those three things at all times. And because of that one factor erosion, those evidences of human activity get moved. Now, the beauty about the moon is that it does not have these active systems, or at least it has less active systems that are serving to erase this record of human activity. What we do have on the moon is we don't have an atmosphere. We have a thin exosphere, which is not really doing much. It's just kind of a, you know, say around three meters, I believe, thick cloud of gas and dust. The main sense of or agents of change on the moon is historically just what are called meteoroid impacts. And those are happening very slowly. Instead, what we argue is the current dominant agent of what we can call geomorphic. change or force that's moving around regolith on the moon are humans. There's no atmosphere, there's no water, you know, there's no wind. What we have are radiation, solar energy,

and we have meteoroid bombardment, which is pretty slow. That's it. Except for now, we have the human component, the human variable. The human variable is quite significant. And so that's where we're coming from. The moon represents a good laboratory for the experience, of testing the lunar of an Anthropocene because of its limited systems and its ability to record the entirety of human history. You mentioned Regolith there, and I just want to pick up on it, because I understand this is really important to the definition of the Anthropocene on the Moon. So could you expand a bit more about why it's so important in this definition? Right. So Regolith is just kind of unconsolidated clasts or rocks on the lunar surface. You could use the term dirt if you wanted. On Earth,

Earth, we use the term sediments and soils. Sediments just refer to all the unaltered mineral that's moving around, and then when that becomes stable, a soil will develop on top of that. That is not necessarily happening on the moon. We do have sediments moving around, which is generally what we call regolith. So we can just refer to that as the rock cycle, right? How are things moving around on the moon? And the main ways are through meteoroid impacts that hit the lunar surface, cause impact

cratering, those impact craters will have rubly rims that through gravity will eventually fall. All of this is regolith moving. And so the general background of regolith moving on the lunar surface is quite slow. There are some estimates trying to measure how many impacts we see on the moon that are measurable. How many times do we see a meteoroid hit the moon and create a new crater? And it's really slow. It might be one every decade or something. We don't have a good handle on that because we haven't been measuring so long.

But our argument is that humans since 1959 have influenced the rock cycle on the moon by moving regalith around around one time per year. So what are some of the most significant impacts that we have made on the moon? What do you think are the worst things that we've done up there? Well, you know, I don't necessarily see them as bad things. They just are. And I don't want it to have this lunar Anthropocene to have this as a pejorative. It's not a negative thing. It just, our argument is a geological one that is trying to categorize our activity into geologic time

so that we can keep track of change and then we can study it and measure it and compare it to other eventual similar periods on other planetary bodies. So to answer your question, some of the most significant impact to the moon is when we land. That's what makes this different than just a natural background of impact is because we don't just make an impact, but then we walk around and we sample and we drive stuff around. And that's pretty impactful. I would say that if there was a negative type of impact, which there is, and that is accidental crashes, that is unplanned wrecking into the moon. And that is a significant risk that we have moving forward in this era of the new space race. Since, two, 2019, there's been, I don't know, around six accidental crashes. And those are important because they do pose a real risk to these more planned activity areas, like we just mentioned, say Tranquility Base, where we have the very first footprint. Unplanned crashes could hit those theoretically. And once those are gone, they're gone forever. And one of the things I should note is that if you want to understand the lens from where we're coming from, we are geologists, anthropologists, and geologists. You know, Neil Armstrong's first footprint on the moon at Tranquility Base represents just the extent of our species migration out of Africa. So we need that to not be destroyed. Could you tell us about some of the things that we have left behind

during missions there that aren't just footprints? Sure. There's all kinds of stuff. There's Charles Duke left a photograph of his family, which I'm sure instantly turned brown. But that's still cool. And, you know, there's golf balls and human feces and urine bags and vomit bags and all kinds of stuff like that. The Israeli Barashit private company launched a mission that had tardigrades on it that crashed into the moon. One of the cool ones is that India's rover has a seal on it, like a royal seal or their Indian seal, and that is on the wheels. And so as it drives around, it leaves this imprint on the moon. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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specialist's focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional. sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. How far could humans throw the moon systems out of balance, the systems that you talked about? We're all familiar with what the worst case scenario is here on Earth, but what are we talking about when we talk about a worst case scenario on the moon? Right. So we're discussing humans becoming the dominant influence on the rock cycle, in particular geomorphic change, which is the movement of lunar regolith around the surface.

So what's the significance of that? Well, the significance is that there are a couple of very specific reasons or implications. One is that we know that rocket fuel can potentially contaminate ice. In particular, ice is on the moon in permanently shadowed areas. and that's important because one of the three reasons why we're returning to the moon is because of ice. In particular, ice has hydrogen, which can be turned into fuel. So that's a real risk. The second one, and probably more speculative, is our potential impact on that exosphere.

I mentioned this thin cloud of dust and gas. I'm not exactly sure how we could influence it, but one of the other reasons why we're going to the moon is something called institute resource utilization, which is just mining. but what about mining tails and plumes and how's that going to influence the exosphere? I'm not quite sure. And is it going to become a bigger cloud? And is it going to become a hazy environment on the actual lunar surface? That's something to think about.

And the other risk of becoming the dominant agent of geological change on the moon is that, of course, we can't always predict where our rockets are going to land or our landers are going to land. and there is a corpus of important cultural heritage on the moon or space heritage, that can become at risk of being destroyed. So, you know, it's not necessarily that the lunar Anthropocene is going to be defined as a climate change because there's not a climate on the moon, but it is going to be defined in the rock record. And this is a geological argument that we're making, right? We want to capture what's happening on the moon now and begin recording our impact on the moon's surface, which we can measure in the rock record, which is the only way we can really measure it

on the moon, because we're going to be making similar changes across our solar system. And by creating stratigraphy, it allows us to compare and contrast these impacts in multiple different celestial bodies. Have there been previous epochs on the moon, like how we have the Holocene and the Pleistocene here on Earth? Right. Yeah. So that, you know, right now, this is the other kind of problem is, so on Earth, we're in the Holocene or we're in the Anthropocene, but let's just ignore the Anthropocene for now. We're in the Holocene. It's the last 10,000 years. All right, the equivalent on the moon is called the Copernican. We're in the Copernican on the moon, but it's the last 1.1 billion years. All right, how do you take the Copernican and then study

the last, say, 100 years of human history? There's a scalar issue there that needs to be solved. And so that's the kind of scientific argument we're making is that we need to formally separate human activity on the moon into a new geological time period. called the Anthropocene, so that we can properly begin studying it, documenting it, mapping it, et cetera. One of the things we do is that I think gives us somewhat of a superpower as archaeologists is we do study long periods of time and history. And certainly most geologists would laugh at us by saying archaeologists study long periods

of time, but we do study longer periods of time. And what that does as archaeologists is it allows us to study transitional periods. Transitional periods are very important in archaeology. right? The transition from, say, the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, the Atlattle to the Bow, the Holocene to the Pleistocene. These transition periods provide us with ways to compare and contrast points in time and history that have changed radically and then resulted in radically different outcomes. I think we're in the middle of a transitional period when it comes to space exploration in our species history. Sputnik was the first time we successfully exited our atmosphere. That was in 1957. And now we are on the cusp of drastically changing our relationship with the moon. And I do think that in 20 years, the way we see our relationship with the moon will be drastically different. We will have been on the moon. We will have boots on the moon. Generations will be born thinking it's normal to be on the moon. And I think we should talk about what that means. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I just think that,

that right now we are on this cusp of major transition. And what is the evidence for that? Well, the evidence for that is, for example, in the history of our interaction with the moon, if we take all the times we've either impacted the moon with an accidental crash or purposeful impact or landing, since 1959, it's around one per year. And if we look at the amount of launches, not to the moon, but in general, just the amount of launches on Earth, that is space activity. There are around 493 planned for next year.

Now, those aren't just going to the moon. 17 of those are to the moon, but that's 17 times the rate of our traditional impact or historical impact to the moon. This is the beginning. And I think it's not the right decision to wait until that number is exponential,

and it's not important, it's not right decision to wait until that number is something like 100 or 200, which it will be very soon. Yeah, so NASA's Artemis mission, which has been kicking off the last few years and which is aiming to start returning to the moon for the first time since 1972, or specifically returning humans to the moon. Its first mission back to the moon is planned for late 2024 this year, which will start with a lunar orbit and then humans landing on the moon again in 2025. So how do you think that humans being on the moon again will reinvigorate this move into the Anthropocene

and beyond this year and next? When you have humans on the lunar surface, that is a uniquely cultural, political, and social event that has a major implications for the space race and the support of it in the public, but also the private spheres and government funding. And, you know, all of this has always been about ideas of nations' progress and ideas. identity. And if it weren't, then we would never put humans back on the moon. You don't need to have humans on the moon. So, yeah, I think Artemis is a way that countries can signal where their priorities are. And, you know, with the new focus on in-situ resource utilization on the moon or mining, there is an argument that there is a lot of capital to be made on the moon. And that's

one of the reasons why I think we will return to the moon. I think next year there's around five countries planning on going back to the moon. But the importance here is that the new space race compared to the space race of the mid-20th century is that private companies are involved. And so that's changed the game. So far, we've been talking about these two Anthropocines, the Earths and the moons, as if they are independent from each other. But obviously they're linked. So where do they meet? How could the lunar Anthropocene affect the Earth Anthropocene? The Anthropocene idea, I think, in general, when it was first termed, was to draw attention to human influence into systems and making a call to start measuring those influences at a more higher frequency. And I think that that was successful.

I think that it resulted in so many different fields trying to test the Anthropocene hypothesis. We are actually just trying to do the same thing for the moon. We're just trying to raise the lunar Anthropocene hypothesis to call attention to our impact. And we make a formal geological argument that that impact can be measured in the geomorphic record and geological rock cycle. And we think that that influence is only going to increase in time. But I do think that because the moon has a, you know, it has recorded humans history since day one. It is a unique laboratory of study for kind of thinking about geological time, in particular how human influences it, that the Earth doesn't have because we lose that record. So one of the reasons that we would define a lunar

antipocene in this way is because it is allowing us to establish a known. We have to establish a known so that we can compare and discuss the unknown. known. How do you think we could lower our impact on the moon to make sure that the lunar Anthropocene is actually a positive rather than a negative thing in the future? I think that we need to definitely study more the impact of our influence on minerals in general on the moon that are the source of why we're going in the first place. That includes ice and water, precious resources, I should say. So our impact on ice, also what it means for our impact on the Xosphere and if that matters, that's something that

could be explored further. And finally, we need to address the space heritage problem. It is a real problem. And one of the reasons why other fields that are not traditionally involved in these discussions need to be in the discussions is because if they're not, who drives the narratives that are being discussed? Well, planetary sciences and engineers. That's important. That needs to happen. They're the ones that make it happen in the first place. So I'm not being negative. But one of the common narratives I've seen by people that aren't trained in archaeology or anthropology is that the moon has a space trash problem. That's because they see all the stuff around our solar system is trash, but it is not trash,

it's heritage, and it records our history as a species. So we don't need to solve a space trash problem. We need to solve a space heritage problem. That means there are completely different solutions about protection as opposed to removal. When you think of an archaeologist and the tools that you might take on a field trip, you think of brushes to dust things off and picks to kind of really get into what's buried beneath the surface. So if you were to go to the moon on an archaeology trip, what would you take with you? Right. Well, you know, I think it's a good question because I think one of the implications of why you would talk about these areas as archaeological sites is what that would mean for current missions, in particular something like NASA astronauts, right? One of the things we want to do is create an archaeological protocol for sampling, writing down exactly how we sample.

Because right now, if a NASA astronaut wanted to take something from Tranquility-based and bring it back to Earth, that would be pretty problematic because those missions aren't recorded that well. I mean, they're recorded and there's notes and we have transcripts. But archaeologists record everything to the exact three-dimensional point in Cartesian space, right? and that has to be done because that's called context. Once it's removed from that context,

that context is destroyed and lost forever. So one of the things we want to do is create guidelines that help aid archaeologists and how to sample why they would do that. I think that's a unique contribution archaeologist can give, and it's all about recording our history. So the things you would need to do that to answer your question as an archaeologist is you would definitely need what we call a total station, right? or what science is called total stations and geologists and everyone calls a total station,

that measures the exact point down to, say, the millimeter of XYZ. You would definitely need your bags, right, for your samples, although we would have to talk about what kind of bags you need for sampling on the moon because on Earth, you know, they're petroleum-based Ziploc bags, and I don't know if that would contaminate a, what would definitely contaminate a rock sample, right? Clearly you can't use that. That has organic molecules in it. So, yeah, the archaeological toolkit would have to look a lot different.

It would definitely be a lot more sterile. My rock hammer, which you would still, would definitely bring a rock hammer. But that would have to probably be one of those sterile astronaut rock hammers. Maybe you would need a brush, I guess. Definitely need a camera to record the footprints, right? You've got to photograph every feature. The footprints are an archaeological feature. So you would take before, during, and after photos.

So, yeah, I guess you would take a trowel because the trial is the symbol of the archaeologist. you would have it. I don't want to go up to the moon, but I do hope an archaeologist is involved in the future. And, you know, it wasn't until the very last mission that geologists were involved with missions to the moon. There's a lot of philosophy in the early days that the people that need to go to the moon need to be astronauts, even though they're not flying anything, or they need to be pilots, fighter pilots, they're in shape, but they're not flying anything. We need scientists to go to the moon. We need biologists, we need archaeologists, we need psychologists to make sure that everything's great on the journey up there. The future of space travel should be multidisciplinary. It should include scientists from a range of backgrounds, not just planetary scientists and engineers. And I do hope that that's something that happens. That was space archaeologist Dr. Justin Holcomb, talking about the past, present, and future of human impacts on the moon. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. By the latest issue of science focus in your favourite shop or visit us at sciencefocus.com.

This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music. just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.