Human beings first disturbed moon dust on Sept. 13, 1959, when the USSR's unmanned spacecraft Luna 2 alighted on the lunar surface. In the following decades, more than a hundred other spacecraft have touched the moon -- both crewed and uncrewed, sometimes landing and sometimes crashing. The most famous of these were NASA's Apollo Lunar Modules, which transported humans to the moon's surface to the astonishment of humankind.
In the coming years, missions and projects already planned will change the face of the moon in more extreme ways. Now, according to anthropologists and geologists at the University of Kansas, it's time to acknowledge humans have become the dominant force shaping the moon's environment by declaring a new geological epoch for the moon: the Lunar Anthropocene.
In a comment published today in Nature Geoscience, they argue the new epoch may have dawned in 1959, thanks to Luna 2.
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