re: Could the Moon be used as a lifeboat to avoid an extinction-level asteroid impact?

yea man, really counting on it. the anxiety is killing me

If we have the tech to reasonably put colonists on mars we could probably save a few dozen pockets of humanity in underground shelters around the world long enough for the dust to settle and nuclear winter to diminish. I mean, it’s likely that Martian settlements will end up being underground just to escape the radiation from no magnetic field. The atmosphere is pretty much a vacuum of entirely CO2 with what little it has. Changing these facts would require some extreme terraforming on the scale of centuries. So let’s consider the colony. They lose their homeworld’s constant influx of life support to an asteroid. Yeah they aren’t gonna be terraforming on any relevant scale for a very long time. Unless the asteroid was just ridiculously oversized, life has better options on earth in the long term

All those nukes sitting around still has the ability to be the worst case scenario for life on the planet. The radiation alone makes this scenario so much worse than an asteroid

The moon is smaller than mars and also has no magnetic field. So all gases that form on the surface will eventually waste away into space. This has been happening to mars now for quite a while. It’s believed it did have a strong field in the past that has since went away and let all of the atmosphere waste away. What didn’t escape is everything that is now trapped as ice under the surface(so that it isn’t allowed to sublimate into atmosphere). I think mars is partly salvageable over the next millennium, but it will be a massive undertaking and the real winners will be the massive amounts of discoveries and research done just for this undertaking