Foreo, a cosmetics company, has announced an initiative to
brighten the moon. It argues that this will provide the world with a huge savings in money spent on lights at night. And by reducing nighttime energy consumption, it will also be good for the environment.
So how exactly does Foreo intend to brighten the moon? It kind of glosses over that detail, but the basic idea will be to make the surface of the moon more reflective, so that it will reflect more of the sun's light.
Perhaps this could be done by painting sections of the moon, or by smoothing out the lunar surface. Who knows! Foreo doesn't say. However, the company claims that it already has over $52 million in investment funds that it's going to use to study the "exact methodology of the process that will transform the moon's surface."
Is all this a hoax? Of course it is.
We can surmise this simply from the fact that what Foreo is proposing is
COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE. (I don't believe for a second that it really has $52 million that it's going to use to study the issue.)
So if Foreo doesn't actually intend to brighten the moon, then what is it up to? Is this all some kind of marketing stunt? That would be my guess.
I notice that Foreo has a product called the
LUNA facial cleaner, which promises to deliver "cleaner, fresher, more radiant skin". So I assume that Foreo is hoping to position itself in people's minds as the company that makes things brighter and more radiant... things such as the moon, or your face.
A related hoax from the past is 'moonvertising' (the idea of projecting advertisements onto the surface of the moon), which has had
a couple of different incarnations over the years.
Comments
A brighter moon would upset circadian rhythms of plants, animals and humans and hence seriously upset earth's ecology.
Also, radiation pressure on a higher moon albedo surface would slightly alter the moon's orbit. The effect is very small but given enough time, things like eb and flow cycles in the ocean would start to change.