Water or no water, the Moon is a lifeless rock. It would also be very difficult to change its environment to support life - the gravity is too low to support an atmosphere.

@Krazy?

Things don't need an atmosphere to survive, they need the nutrients and minerals they take from the atmosphere. An underground cavern filled with gas or some other liquid could serve as an "atmosphere" just as well as the one around the earth, so long as it provides the organisms within it the material they need to survive.

Really? I hope that's sarcasm. I can't even begin to describe the cataclysmic effect that would have one Earth.

The discovery made me a little excited. Okay, really excited. But I don't think the discovery is going to speed up colonization or anything like that. I think this will push more funds to explore other moons and planets. It'd be neat if we spent more money on Europa.

It's nice, but I don't think it'll do much. Why would we ever want to colonize the moon? It'd just make our nights creepier than they already are. Hay, look at that, the moon is blue...

I say we colonize Mars instead. It's bigger, it's nicer, it has some atmosphere, and we knew it had water for quite a while.

Agreed, the atmopshere has two main features: The ability to hamper UV radiation and the ability to provide many gases essential to us such as oxygen and nitrogen. (The abundance of oxygen was created from the rise of photosynthetic bacteria and arachea though.) However, a bacteria could still exist if it was resistant to UV and had the ability to harvest some sort of gas or metal present on the Moon. The lack of an atmosphere does not mean that life cannot exist, it's just much harder.

Yeah, they're animals, but they're basically microscopic. They're the most resilient life on Earth, and they wouldn't even come close to surviving on the moon.

They're not actually blowing up the moon. They're making craters in certain parts of it to find water.

Wikipedia says they were able to survive the vacuum of space and actually lay eggs, that sounds pretty close.

Yeah, if you read the wikipedia page on them, life on the moon is a walk in the park compared to what some of them have survived. Nice cozy non-zero-kelvin rocks, maybe some water to leech off of, some shade to provide just enough protection from radiation, sounds like paradise compared to the vaccuum of space.

I did not mean entirely.