NASA Announces that It Will Be Giving Earth's Moon Its Own Moon -- Why this is spectacular news....

News Splash Unrelated to the Above but Spectacular in Itself -- 11-27-2016

NASA (re-)announces that it will be giving Earth's moon its own moon, by placing a boulder in orbit around it – I would prefer that a "proportionately" sizable and mass-to-mass ratio asteroid, relative to mass ratio of the Earth's moon to that of planet Earth, with a much more complex chemical composition be transported to our moon's orbit and used instead. 

(This mission is no longer an idea and plan but has commenced with the launch on 12-07-2016 of the spacecraft to survey and image-communicate the target asteroid Bennu for NASA to select the portion of it most useful to NASA for removal and orbiting around our moon.)

Why this is spectacular news:

Implications for terraforming for Earth species colonization other moons and planets – other worlds -- via a collaboration between reshuffling nature and human astrophysical-geophysical engineering.

II speculate that the circumstance of Earth's moon having its own moon, of sufficient size orbiting itself, will result in its own satellite moon having a geodynamic effect (like via mass, motion and gravity interactions and friction and heat build-up, [electro]magnetic and radiation exchanges, etc.) on the moon that will naturally terraform the moon, over time possibly liquefying its very large deposits of water ice both in bulk deposits in the subsurface polar regions of the moon and permeating the soil or regolith cover of the 33moon and create, with its fluid hydrology, a thickened atmosphere with weather and climate systems.  Only planet Earth and the Kuiper-Belt object Makemake (pronounced Mah-kay, mah-kay), a dwarf planet and the largest Kuiper-Belt celestial object, comparable in size to the dwarf planet Pluto of the main region of our solar system, have a solo moon, and no moon has its own moon, in our solar system, to my knowledge.  (The Kuiper belt is the vast outer region of our solar-planetary system populated internally by a solar-planetary-system semblance of a galaxy of mostly ice-and-debris celestial objects and comets.)  I conjecture that a celestial-object Goldilocks-sized solo moon is the astrophysics magic potion or such formula for the natural geodynamic terraforming of a planet or moon for externally inducing and driving geodynamics and meteorology (internal and global thermodynamic, geo-active/geodynamic, atmosphere, weather and climate processes or conditions) productive and supportive of complex biology and its evolution on a planet or moon.  Hypothetically, on the extremely frigid dwarf planet Makemake such biology would originate in and root from the deep underground and possible heat sources and output, liquid bodies and systems of water as well as geophysical cavities, including caves, there.  (Physics, since the study and theoretical work done on gravity by physicist Sir Isaac Newton of the 1600s, has determined that it is the Earth’s moon that predominately determines the Earth’s daily marine high and low tides, associated with the daily major shifts in the distance of the moon, the mass of the moon, relative to the Earth as it makes it daily orbital circle around the Earth.  Quite possibly shifts in moon distances relative to the Earth, in its luminosity phases and in its alignments with the Sun and Earth subtly, significantly and complexly affect marine wave behavior and marine weather, including fog.)  

My uneducated guess is and has been that, one, like as is the case for the dwarf planet Ceres and short of all of the H2O-bearing other moonless moons of our solar-planetary system, the surface waters of the Earth would be frozen, disaggregated and dispersed and absorbed in the regolith of the Earth’s topography in the absence of a companion moon of the Earth and the constancy of that moon’s gravitational stress on particularly this low-viscosity, fluid-state subject substance, H2O, the latter under especially the effects of heat, friction and gravitational stress, and, two, that multiple independently acting moons hosted by a planet or world may introduce clashing and chaotic energy impact effects on the host planet or world  adverse to the occurrence of biological habitability conditions, or such stable conditions, on it or its surface.  (On the contrary, in viewing as a frame of reference for hypothesizing on this no-moon scenario for Earth, that of the seeming hot-planet effect associated with the absence of a moon for Earth’s neighboring warm-zone inner-solar-planetary-system rocky planets scorching-hot Venus and Mercury, the Earth too without a moon, or a moon “without” a mass approximating that its moon does have, might be similarly hot.  Without a moon, should and  whether the Earth thereby be a frozen or broiling planet, Earth would be inhospitable to life on its surface, although subsurface hydrology and life on it, supported by the radiant heat or offshoot heat processes of its molten, inferno core, would be possible were its surface frozen.)  Scientists and other naturally and trained analytical, empirical thinkers would probably wonder why the much more massive Earth does not sublimate the water ice and drive fluid hydrology on the moon in this Earth-moon energy exchange and dynamics regime in a way that, or in a more substantial way than, the moon so acts on the Earth.  The answer to their query may be that the much larger mass and gravity, etc., of the Earth may be a far greater draw on the moon’s celestial energy resources, with the much lesser in mass and gravity, etc., moon having a negligible or substantially much weaker, or proportionally much weaker, drawing power on the Earth’s celestial energy resources in their Earth-moon relationship’s energy interaction and exchange regime, similar to the factually observed and established relationship the moon has to the Earth in its being captured and locked in as a satellite of the Earth in the Earth’s gravity well by virtue of the much more powerful gravity well of the much more massive Earth relative to the far lesser mass of the moon and its much weaker gravity well.)  Evolved technologically intelligent life, social/communal species, might be able technologically to evolve, engineer and construct a livable surface presence, a cosmologically more informative and intellectually more instructive environment for cognitive and technological evolution, on Makemake, should it be thermodynamically, geodynamically, hydrologically and meteorologically at all conducive to biodynamism, or biogenesis.  

I'm super curious about the broader implications of this project of establishing a backup, or second, moon to our planet’s natural moon, in orbit around it, as an intended insurance-policy backup moon for stand in of our original moon should we lose our original moon in a catastrophe.  It moreover is a project, to my mind, that is an unintended experiment that may inform our species as to whether the inner solar-planetary system’s rocky planets Mercury, Venus and Mars might be made habitable to humans and Earth life forms, or biology, as we know it, by their having a Goldilocks moon in size and chemical composition transferred to each of them from among the circa 800,000 asteroids in the asteroid belt between planets Mars and Jupiter for moonless Mercury and Venus, or for Mars, by the elimination of one of its, or the consolidation of both of its, two moons, in either case remaining in orbit around Mars, but with maybe the transfer of one of these two Martian moons to be the moon of  Venus or Mercury in place of an asteroid for a moon for that one planet.  We might also orbit an asteroid for a moon around the moonless dwarf planet Ceres, located in the asteroid belt and that is the largest celestial object in the asteroid belt, with an apparent subsurface frozen, or periodically liquefying, ocean and a thin atmosphere, for initial or collaborative experimental quasi-natural geoengineering and terraforming for its habitability too by our species.  Capture and use of comets to orbit as moons around moonless, uninhabitable planets, uninhabitable to Earth life forms, may do a better natural terraforming job on them to make them habitable to Earth life forms than asteroids, but until our space sci-tech has advanced to such a technical sophistication to locate, capture and steer them, our present-time recourse for this job is to use the available asteroids that our space tech in our relatively nearby celestial neighborhood can readily access and manipulate, which may require conglomerating multiple asteroids into making an adequately interactively impactful moon for a planet.   

I conjecture that an older, more technically and technologically intelligent, advanced alien species would have to be highly utopian, but supremely defensively capable, within its own species, in order for it to have survived so long and enduringly, and would not need to create stationary Dyson spheres around stars to harness and distribute a star’s energy to terraform for their habitability the planets and moons of a solar system for their settlement and colonization by such a species but rather it would, at a minimum, be able to create stars of various sizes, luminosities and heat strengths and locate them as orbiting moons to planets and satellite moons to other moons, like combinational thermo-photovoltaic solar and gravitational fuel-energy power-plant stellar batteries and furnaces, plus, for fuel-energy supplying, heating, energizing and powering their host moons and planets.  Not only would such a species be able to geo-engineer any and many existing celestial body or bodies for itself utilizing  planetary-solar system resources, such as asteroid and Kuiper-Belt celestial objects, gas planets, the ice-and-gas planets, petroleum and H2O-icy moons, and rocky and regolith moons, but it would probably be able to create planets and moons, in addition to stars, and whole solar-planetary systems to suit its needs and desires from celestial, or cosmic, gas, particulate, grist and dust nebulae, almost always far outside of formed solar-planetary systems.  Likely the stellar moons (star-moons, or moons that also are stars, maybe or maybe not better termed lunar stars) for host planets and such satellite moons for host moons it might create as well as those for a whole solar-planetary system would be modulat(e)able (subject to discretionary adjustment by the local users) in luminosity and heat amplitude.  However, giant combinational solar energy collectors and storage power-plants might be circulated in a solar-planetary system to gather existing or natural solar and celestial-system petroleum-fuel and other powering products, including cleanest, radioactive, but-waste-free, fully recyclable nuclear-power resources (such as supposedly thorium), during the initial and early stages of a celestial development project, local or system-wide, to  internally power and continually power-supply otherwise geo-physically inactive or inert celestial objects undergoing geoengineering and terraforming, etc., by such an advanced ET species until on-site and/or celestial-satellite or -core power sources are established and made permanently available for them.

Incidentally, the human astrophysics and space sciences and engineering technocracy, or community, may already be poised to operate ultimately on this conceptual path, as CERN (the European Center, aka Organization, for Nuclear Research), famous for its Large Hadron Collider quantum-particle research facility that generated, detected and confirmed the existence multiply of the once theoretical god particle, the Higgs boson, has declared that in principle it can create micro black holes that would flicker in and out of existence without growing via consumption of energy and matter in the environment and posing a danger, which it wants to do but hesitates to do in deference to public fear and objection to its so doing.  If this community can create micro black holes, it eventually can figure out how to make micro suns/stars and upscale this know-how and its technology, since black holes are imploded stars whose quantum-particle nuclear center or core becomes infinitely gravitationally compressed and an extreme gravitational object that converts (or dissolves or disintegrates) to pure gravity [energy] everything that it suctions in and consumes (supposedly apart from the indestructible purely informational aspect/s, or nature, of things or stuff), from which natural black holes continuously grow though they theoretically evaporate in billions of years -- a similar but limited gravitational compression that acting on celestial or cosmic nebulae forms celestial objects, including stars, planets, moons, asteroids, meteorites, miscellaneous Kuiperic objects, comets, etc., and gives these objects, as applicable, their inferno cores, thermodynamism and geophysical dynamism, and chemical and mineral constituents and composition, indirectly their other attributes (such as their outer-aerial magnetic field, or magnetosphere shielding, hydrology or its alternative, atmosphere, weather and climate) and behavior, also derived from the interaction of these forces and constituents.  Given that synthetic gemstone manufacturers can make synthetic, indeed real, gems by subjecting certain natural minerals or materials to extreme pressures and temperatures over given, comparatively very brief, times, a mere several or more days, condensing tremendously in time and effect the same processes nature takes millions of years to manufacture the same but natural gemstones, human space science and engineering would in practical sci-tech principle likely be able to figure out a way to leverage gravity and gravitational compression, albeit artificially induced extreme physical pressures and thermodynamics, on a celestial-object scale to terraform and remodel barren, life-forbidding and lifeless, as we can conceive of and identify life, planets and moons for comfortable habitability and life-support productivity use by our species:  human, flora and fauna.  In principle, given this sci-tech backdrop, together CERN and the national, etc., space agencies and private, major, and proven, spaceflight engineering companies of the world, in a joint undertaking, would be capable of  technologically creating/forming locally in our solar system human-made solar/stellar-nebulae, from the celestial gases, etc., of the gas planets and sun (its great quantities of stellar gas, or gas-plasma, and  dust ejecta) and dirt and debris of the other celestial objects and bodies of our solar-planetary system, for subsequently creating/forming stellar moons for orbiting around, and inferno cores, or embryo inferno cores (as well as possibly, on an interim basis, temporarily using thorium fusion-fission nuclear reactors ((thermal/electrical-energy power plants)), if absolutely safe) for emplacement and gestation and self-development in, frigid or entirely frozen host moons and planets, devoid of life but with abundant stores of H2O, to heat and assist our said sci-tech in terraforming these host moons and planets for their habitability by humans and Earth life forms.

From a practical standpoint, the primary purpose of a technology approximating Dyson spheres hovering or docking around a star, or sun, in the service of a technologically super-intelligent alien species would be for such a technology, which would have to be celestial orbs/globes or nebulae, or both, in size, to capture valuable stellar plasma gas ejecta (discharge), etc., on a grand scale for forming stellar-moon satellites and inferno cores for the frigid or frozen, or so susceptible, host planets and moons of its solar-planetary system/s or to recharge or replace these or re-supply them (the stellar-moon satellites and/or inferno cores) via such transiting transport spheres, which would likely be natural celestial objects or nebulae, or both, like comets or celestial-object-formative cosmic-gas-and-dust, electromagnetic seed nebulae, engineered for absorption of and growth from and with the stellar gas and dust ejecta as well as for directed destination travel, enabling a such species to generate locally for its host worlds externally powerful thermal-photovoltaic solar energy from fabricated stellar/solar moons and internally powerful solar/nebula-sourced nuclear-reactor fusion-fission fuel from fabricated inferno cores for the frigid or frozen natural planets or moons or so susceptible natural planets and moons.  Such an intelligent alien species would do the same thing if feasible interstellarly in its own galaxy (including in natural nebulae regions of its own galaxy, star nurseries, from which it might directly harvest budding stars and nebulae:  portable “star buds” transported in celestial placenta cocoons of feeder celestial or stellar plasma gas-ball nebulae, keeping them alive, burning and developing, or harvest nebulae in itself to bathe or cocoon-incubate frigid/frozen worlds in for terraforming them, including terraforming a magnetosphere for them, and for creating/forming entirely new worlds or celestial objects) and at a safe distance around the accretion disks of black holes that are also and more so continuously in many cases, if not most cases, ejecting gargantuan quantities of celestial gas plasma that forms giant cosmic gas and dust nebulae that in turn naturally form stars, solar-planetary systems and galaxies. (Theoretically, galactic starburst, or star-nursery, ultra-cold nebulae could be imported into our solar-planetary system or synthesized from the gas planets of our own solar-planetary system to cocoon and cool its hell-hot planets Venus and Mercury ((which weirdly has large water-ice deposits despite its overall extremely hot temperature and nearness to the sun)) to habitable and terraforming temperatures prior to affixing to each of them  one moon, [maybe suggestively potentially] stabilizing and maintaining of habitability geophysical conditions on them.  However,  as observed elsewhere in the solar system for the other planets with multiple moons, initially and temporarily affixing multiple moons in orbit around them may also cool, or freeze, them, which when cooled enough, to human preference, a change to one moon for each of them could be made the permanent situation.)  This would be such a species recycling and harnessing for its solar-planetary system’s/s’ fuel-energy needs the virtually unlimited natural throw-away or cast-off fuel energy material, or fuel-energy slough or waste product, of a star or black hole, without mining and depleting the former or endangering itself in extracting from the virtually inexhaustible latter.  All of this, in the main, would be accomplished by space-industry celestial-engineering and [task-autonomous] artificial-intelligence robotics, ultimately including laser-beam tooling and quantum and atomic-molecular resource manipulation over near and [remotely, as needed] great distances.

Should humans master rapid spaceflight travel, for short duration outer-space travel of humans over the near-Earth large distances of from Earth to our solar-planetary-system region of from Jupiter to Mercury, our species would be able to adapt survivably, functionally and reproductively in the near term at least below ground and nocturnally above ground, with respect to escaping the biologically dangerous effects of the cosmic-ray bombardment of the surface there during daylight, on Mars and possibly on Ceres (with the same cosmic-ray danger at its surface), especially were we rapidly able to induce minimal habitability conditions on Ceres by orbiting a moon of optimal mass around it for inducing such conditions. Both worlds have plenty of H2O, are rocky and mineral endowed.  From these resources artificially livable habitats can be made and upgraded in situ on a continuing basis.  They can provide humans with shelter, water, air, food, heat and electrical and gas fuel energy (human excrement and other bio waste can also be recycled and converted to these fuels and plant fertilizer via biodigesters, where there are now portable, home biogesters).  The abundant winds of Mars can provide plenty of wind-turbine generated electricity and because of its scant cloud cover Mars can provide reliable daily solar-tech generated electricity, and with the availability of the Tesla power-wall turbine-&-solar renewable-energy storage unit the daytime saved stored electricity can be supplied at night for use.

     Muscle and organ problems, like with the eyes, ears, nose and respiratory system and reproductive systems, that occur for humans in weightless space or would occur for our species on other worlds with significant differences in gravity, atmospheric thickness and pressure, sunlight, etc., compared to those of Earth, could be substantially countered by our self-directed morphing behaviorally into a functionally somewhat new species, beyond that of being a hominid (an upright standing and ambulating bipedal post-ape), in being, from birth -- just as we go through the behavioral stages of babbling to talking and prone crawling to hands and knees crawling to bipedal walking-wobbling-waddling (toddler/ing) to erect bipedal walking and running competently – a flex exercise species, wherein from birth, religiously without fail, we must be lovingly taught and learn to become habitual, automatic flex-exercise (flexercise) and self and mutual massage creatures, flex exercising our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, necks, hands and fingers, feet and toes, joints, limbs, buttock, genitalia, breasts, etc. Nevertheless, our species, especially our successive generations of other-world native-born progeny, will undergo structural biological changes on these new worlds that will starkly differentiate them phenotypically, in the least, from us, their progenitors. 

     The epigenetic biochemical impacts on our species of the prevailing configuration of local, resident, or native, general and niche geo-celestial forces and conditions of nature on other worlds our species settles, such as of gravity, the magnetosphere or its absence, ambient thermodynamics, hydrology, chemistry (including propitious and adverse), nutrients, atmosphere, air pressure, terrain-topography, etc., along with the natural selection process for breeding and its formation of an environmentally compatible and suitable gene pool or progeny on the part of a species and the individuals comprising it, largely based on sexually, reproductively preferred and survival and functionality advantaged and adequate individuals relative to the environment and competition within the species and with rival and predator species, as applicable, for survival resources, the availability of sexual and communal mates, territory and security, etc., over generations of reproduction within a species, would effect and display or express [morphological] “change in the physical characteristics” of a species “adaptive/ed and adaptively specialized to the particular local, resident environment.”  In the past also typically for humans, physically and functionally dominant individuals (not only in physical fitness, brawn and physical prowess but in learning and thinking smarts, savvy and cunning  too, in supplementary, compensatory or alternative degrees among individuals) in a social hierarchy (the pecking order) within a given territorial population of a species in the wild, most often those of the male gender in the other primates and mammals still, exercised priority for themselves in mating with their choice of available females and the number of females of their entitlement relative to their dominance rank among their peers, thus extensively spreading their heritable (genomic) and survival-related formidable, high-functionality and highly competitive traits within their local population and in those populations of their same species that they invaded, merged with, overran or brought into subordination or submission, etc. – that is, significantly embedding the presence of their genetic traits (genomes?) in the gene pools of those populations of their species.

     Environmentally adaptive and evolutionary bio-mutability of a species or a population set of a species might be most efficient and fastest with the physically pliable and developing young, such as fertile-stage adolescents (maybe with marriage and reproduction positively sanctioned between adolescents16 years old and up to 19 years old, to the psychological tolerance of our culture for adolescent marriage and procreation), and their in-situ produced offspring, where general adolescent marriage or cohabitation pairing and reproduction were largely the norm in the human species prior to the onset of the industrial revolution in the mid1700s.

     This social development of marriage being legally delayed commonly until late adolescence or the age of18 is the outcome of a logical progression stemming from the invention of the  greatly improved, European reinvention of the printing press (originally a Chinese invention), and its results of mass publications and the widespread and rapid dissemination of [written formal and official] information, learning and knowledge, initially among the literate class, the sharing and freed expression of individual thought, ideas, discoveries, innovations, inventions, teachings, literary compositions and art, etc., by written mass communication, often a source of intellectual inspiration to and influence on others, in book and pamphlet forms, culminating first in a largely-privileged-class sci-tech, engineering and economic culture and such boom in Europe and the European diaspora settlements (of particularly European peoples’ settlement by military conquest of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa) and later in mass education for the masses of people, starting in Western nations, via mass public schools and classrooms, and informally in significant part via self education by use of a proliferation of privately and publically sponsored public and publicly accessible libraries supplementing or substituting for formal institutional education, for a continuous large supply of people academically equipped with the skills in reading, writing and mathematics as well as essential technical knowledge needed to support and advance science, industry and technology.  “Ultimately, industry-based (commerce, industry and employment-based) intellectual and educational democracy precipitated the phase out of once legal and normal early adolescent, and sometimes preadolescent, marriage, rendered largely taboo and illegal in Western nations and much of the rest of human societies across the world over the centuries since -- industry that developed into an economic system of the mass production and offering of a boundless array of goods and services to the population of people on the whole and to other businesses and government (at all levels of society).

     If and when our space sci-tech is able to create a magnetosphere and breathable atmosphere for Earth life forms on other worlds in our solar-planetary system for our settlement, we can also export to them, along with members of our species, cold-climate-specialized pet dogs and animals such as penguins, artic rabbits, artic foxes, GMO-nonviolent polar bears, mud fish, edible worms, shrooms (a variety of mushroom found growing and thriving in the decommissioned, radioactively contaminated wreck Soviet-era Chernobyl nuclear reactor of Ukraine, indicating that shrooms could likewise thrive and be grown as food, if edible by humans, in transparent enclosures in the cosmic-ray bombardment surfaces or surface environments of Mars and its moons, the dwarf planet Ceres and our moon),  etc., which should be reproductive-stage young animals whose species adaption to and bio-morphology on those exo-worlds our science could scientifically monitor, study and document systematically.  We could do the same with cold-climate specialized plants of Earth -- bamboo, bamboo wood, is a durable building material that is water-damage resistant, weather resilient and basically rot and deterioration resistant. This bamboo building wood might be coated with a mixture of linseed oil, lime [powder?] and hemp [extract, powder, other?], like the wood was so coated that was used in the framing construction of centuries-old European castles, making that wood rot and deterioration proof as opposed to so resistant.  The regolith of rocky or terra-firma exo-worlds of human settlement could be used to make cold-temperature-insulated brick, concrete and glass masonry buildings, with bamboo wood framing and garnishing, above ground and habitations below ground, including natural caves, respectively, on and in those exo-worlds.  Bamboo is a very fast growing wood plant, if not the fastest growing wood plant, and has traditionally been used to build entire dwellings in rural areas of the Far East.  Initially, before geoengineering a magnetosphere and breathable atmosphere for ourselves on these other worlds, upon the start of human settlement of them, we could raise food crops hydroponically underground in them as well as in greenhouses above ground on them.  Ultimately, craters on these exo-worlds, as dictated by their size and the availability of frozen H20 in them, for utilities sublimating by humans, could be developed into steel, stone/concrete and glass domed towns, cities, parks, farms, plantations, forests, etc.               

    

The Safest and Fastest, Unfettered, Solo-Moon Scientific Experiment with a Planet, Dwarf Planet Ceres.  Let’s petition NASA et. al. to put an experimental moon, of an estimated right-size, or optimal-size, and rich chemical composition, taken from among the asteroids, in orbit around the asteroid-belt dwarf planet Ceres, with the moon bearing satellite observational study equipment in systematic imaging study of Ceres and changes and patterns of change on it, natural and potentially induced by the established presence of the moon orbiting it, or supplement that moon’s presence and possible effects on Ceres with an independently orbiting surveillance satellite performing the photo-imaging study of it, computer relaying the images to space agencies on Earth.  If indicated and feasible, we may be able to increase the mass of an insufficient-in-mass starter moon for Ceres, or any other naturally moonless world given a moon by our species, by securely binding another asteroid or other asteroids to it, in thus making it a multiple-source conglomerated moon.  

The surface of Ceres is globally permeated with water ice in concentrations of circa 10% to 20% of the surface area extending below the surface to a depth of circa three feet, or one meter, and is indicated to have a subsurface ocean of a mixture of H2O and other chemical elements of which dominate the chemical composition of its ocean, an ocean indicated to be generally frozen but that periodically thaws to largely a slush, an ocean that would be inhospitable to life, or biology, as we know it.     

     If this experiment of coupling a moonless other world in our solar-planetary system with a roughly right-size and right-mass solo moon were to prove operative in naturally habitability terraforming or initiating habitability terraforming of rocky or otherwise regolith moonless worlds with large quantities of water ice, water slush and/or a subsurface large body of water or multiple such bodies, undoubtedly our sci-tech perhaps anthropocentrically would rush to orbit such a moon around each Jovian water-world moon Europa, with a miles-thick water-ice crust, or shell, and liquid water globally beneath its water-ice shell, and Saturn’s moons Enceladus (a water world of water ice on its surface and liquid water in its subsurface) and Titan (with an indicated subsurface liquid ocean and maybe such lakes -- it has been observationally confirmed to have strong weather and climate systems and large standing and motional bodies liquid ethane and methane on its surface).  However, our space sci-tech should refrain from doing so before exercising ethical and scientifically practical caution, as these worlds may already possess complex aquatic life that terraforming these worlds for the habitability of Earth life might cause considerable or total extinction of those possible complex-life species native to these worlds (that is, result in wholesale exospecies genocide).  Moreover, in a strictly practical regard, in any biosphere there most probably would be a food chain or food web, which if our species destroyed it by changing the thermal and other environmental conditions drastically and adversely on other worlds in order to make them comfortably habitable for our species and other Earth species, we would also destroy a food ecology native to those worlds that would otherwise be there, time-tested and evolutionarily native to those other worlds, available in situ and reliably to supply us with food indefinitely.  We will consume (partake of and share in) the local biological food supply that is compatible with our biology wherever we venture on Earth and beyond, but no longer to the detriment or deprivation of the native species or to the population endangerment of any species.  Our sci-tech could test the edibility of food native to other worlds for our consumption with on-site chemical tests and test lab mice.    

     Luckily for these subsurface liquid-water other [moon] worlds and our space sci-tech, their host planets, planetary adjacent neighbors Jupiter and Saturn, gas giants and the respective largest and second largest planets in our solar-planetary system, are also each a host to tens to scores of other moon worlds without a body of liquid water covered by and near a surface-ground land mass of modest depth or a [global] ice shell, indicating that they lack the bare resources and environmental conditions conducive to life, biology, as we know it or may conceive of it.  Thus, these other moon worlds of Jupiter and Saturn nearest to Europa, Enceladus and Titan could be given their own moons for their own habitability terraforming and colonized as neighbors of their water-world moon neighbors for our sci-tech’s long-term on-the-ground and orbital study, and perhaps natural-food, water-ice and, as applicable, hydrocarbon-fuels extraction/mining, of them.    

We must heed the warning now of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and branch out beyond our one and at-risk planet and species home that, 25,000 miles in circumference and 8,000 miles in diameter in global size, does not have the long-term living-space and life-sustaining capacity for our rapidly and endlessly increasing population, for the welfare of our species and that of the biodiversity and preservation of the other species, flora and fauna, of our planet, as well as for the life-supportive and –sustaining health of our planet itself.  By the extraplanetary branching out of our species, we can relocate our agricultural and possibly forestation for logging and milling (to pest-free, virtually totally custom-engineered environments), resource-extraction, goods-production and -manufacturing industries off of our unique, wilderness and wildlife richly endowed and splendorous home planet, and spare its economics- and idiocy-based plunder, ravishing, rape, degradation, depletion, devastation, blighting and ruin, but retain it as the planetary wonder world of our solar-planetary system perpetually.  We must also come to peace with and respect for one another, across all races, ethnicities, nationalities, social-economic strata and benign individual differences (a maximally diverse and healthy human population and gene pool is the basis of our long-term evolutionary flexibility, adaptability and survivability as a species and transformational species and is of the highest priority) and learn to share with and care for one another materially, with regard to our basic and common survival, human-development and social needs, and continuously improve and advance the whole of the human condition and humane society, before it is too late….

“I’d rather be a heathen suckled in a creed outworn, so might I, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”  William Wordsworth

In broad, scientifically metaphorical language, as I define the science that is physics, physics is in a substantial sense the longitudinal -- retrospective, life-flow and prospective -- study of the anatomy and physiology of the universe over open-ended time, space-time, from its inception and through its development, evolution and potential eventuality.  Quantum physics, or quantum mechanics, its micro-realm branch, is the study of the structure, behavior and laws of the subatomic foremost-fundamental and fundamental particles and forces of nature that are the [micro-universe] antecedent structural components and energy-matter governing forces of nature, upon which the atoms, molecules and chemicals and chemistry of the universe are built, being the subject matter of the  macro-realm  branch of [the] physics [of the universe], the latter of which (the foundational macro-realm structures: atoms, molecules, etc.) in turn, together with the former, construct and compose (makeup) all other derivative phenomena of the [macro] universe.

News sources 

Recent, related to new NASA announcement of reinstatement of project:

One Page News, NASA’s Plan to Give Our Moon Its Own Moon, Asteroid Redirect Mission news and education video, 11-18-2016, Trace Dominguez, via Bing search engine

EMIN (online astronomy and fringe-science news site), NASA Hints about Asteroid It Plans to Pluck and Place in Moon’s Orbit, 11-22-2016, David Aragorn, via Bing search engine

Author’s direct source was news item listed on Juno (News), 11-27-2016

NASA, Scientists See Asteroid Through the Eyes of a Robot, Bennu, OSIRIS-REx, 12-07-2016* (Spacecraft launched on and mission under way to the asteroid belt as of 12-07-2016.)

Popular Mechanics, NASA’s Plan for Humanity’s Return to the Moon and Beyond, 12-09-2016

(NASA, in collaboration with the space agencies of other nations, etc., intends to loft into our moon’s orbit a space station and establish an astronaut outpost on the surface of the moon to interface with the lunar-orbital space station and moon-Earth outer-space environs and to prepare the moon and space sci-tech operations there as a base and foundation for eventually launching space-station and human and robotic spaceflight operations to the asteroids, the two moons of Mars and Mars.)

Old, related to previous announcement prior to cancellation of the initially proposed project:

Independent (News), UK, NASA IS Giving the Moon Its Own Moon, to Keep Earth Safe from Asteroid 

Impacts and Prepare for Mission to Mars, 03-26-2015, Andrew Griffin, via Yahoo search engine

Wired Magazine, NASA’s Plan to Give the Moon a Moon, Science, 03-26-2015, Marcus Woo, via Yahoo search engine