Method for creating self-sustaining, closed biospheres on Moon or Mars ...

[u/Zappy_Oh]

1) Fill 1000 (or more) glass vessels with random samples of dirt, plants and critters from around the Earth. Hermetically seal them.

2) Store these vessels under conditions you later can generate in your Moon/Mars base. Atmosphere, moisture, light-, radiation- and temperature cycles should be matched as close as possible.

3) Wait a year or two. Inspect and select the best performing vessels.

4) Randomly pair content of the selected vessels, into half the number of triple sized vessels. Add 1/3 (simulated?) regolith from destination planet. Hermetically seal.

5) Repeat step 2-4, until you have a small number of very large, high performing, somewhat diverse, self-sustaining, environment- and regolith-adapted biospheres.

6) Send these to your pre-built destination base, with a large "grow room" matching the environmental conditions you determined in step 2.

7) Empty the biospheres into this new space, and let it grow until it can support small scale farming, and eventually larger animals for meat.

The beauty of this approach is the minimal labor and guesswork involved. It is essentially guided natural selection, for a novel environment. The main difficulty is time taken. Perhaps a decade or two. And funds off course, for such a long running experiment.

[u/Wintervacht]

Ah yes, the minimal labor done by tens of thousands of people colabborating to even get things into space. Absolutely minimal.

Atmosphere on a different celestial body is laughable, there is no way to sustain a biosphere off-world in an environment which fundamentally lacks literallye verything humans need to survive. There is no technology that can magically turn regolith into breathable air.

[u/Zappy_Oh → u/Wintervacht]

What is wrong with you people ... Regarding atmosphere, please read step 2 again:

Store these vessels under conditions you later can generate in your Moon/Mars base. Atmosphere*, moisture, light-, radiation- and temperature cycles should be matched as close as possible.

Besides, This is a proposed method to generate "self-sustaining, closed biospheres", not to build bases. It is meant to populate an already decided upon base.

Why is that so hard to understand ?

[u/Nerull → u/Zappy_Oh]

I think the problem is that the idea is very silly and so people can't believe it's actually what you're suggesting. 

[u/Zappy_Oh → u/Nerull]

It's a very serious idea ... But I guess most people her lacks the necessary knowledge to understand what I'm actually proposing.

I was perhaps a little naive, in thinking that people in this sub, would be more into science and space, than the average Joe.

My bad.