Wil McCarthy says the moon is too darn big. He has a plan.

I see he's got a diagram there in which some of the moon has been turned into neutronium. He might as well be talking about using fairy dust and magic spells; it would be about as realistic.

Hey, I never claimed he had a realistic plan.

He also says, "This could require a really large number of tanker ships, but if technology weren't a limiting factor, I'd personally vote for quantum teleportation, to pull down nitrogen and methane from Titan". Realism isn't the highest priority here. And considering that this is a post on scifi.com ...

If he's using fantasy science, it should be on scifantasy.com, not scifi.com. I mean, yeah, if you allow yourself to violate the laws of physics, you can do all sorts of stuff. And why exactly should we care?

I notice in another one of his articles there that he claims that the white dwarf left over after the sun dies will be made of iron. Ah, no.

Oh well. Nitpicking is a nasty hobby.

McCarthy's "programmable atoms" idea is also long on fiction and short on science. I like him more than Velikovsky disciple James P. Hogan, but I don't take him very seriously.

Anyway, there are better ways. The moon could hold a thick atmosphere for several thousand years unassisted. To improve on that, Greg Benford suggested an ultrathin layer be put on the top of the atmosphere like a world girdling balloon. With nanotechnology, you could make it self repairing and it could be stable over geologic time. The moon is geologically dead, so if you wanted to keep the ecosystem running for megayears, you would also need to introduce self repairing machinery to keep the nutrients moving or they would eventually collect in places not accessible to life.

A Nanoecology? I like it!

I several years ago postulated the use of nanobots to selectivley destroy invasive plant and animal species. I hope I live to see such pests as the Gypsy moth, Hemlok and Spruce Wooly Aldeged and Asian Snakehead Fish amongst others extinct outside their native range.

The time to spin up the Moon is now while it has a longer lever. With resonance, the Moon could be pushed and pulled. A trucking project to make the Moon more perfectly balanced might help to keep the momentum going.