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Comment by newacct583 | Hacker News Reader

You think over a long enough time period the moon will be made up of something other than rocks? It's rocks. There are no "resources". It's ejected mantle material just like we have here right under our feet, with the added disadvantage that there's no tectonics that would have had the effect of concentrating what trace materials were there. It's rocks.

Someone who wants to imagine going to war with China over rocks on the moon is someone who wants to imagine going to war with China. That's not a serious (nor responsible) position.

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There are no "resources".

Aluminum. Silicon. Titanium. Iron. Water. (Hence hydrogen and oxygen.) Many of the other elements we need are available in the asteroid belt, and it's far less cost in energy to go there from the Moon than it takes to get off of the Earth.

It's ejected mantle material just like we have here right under our feet, with the added disadvantage that there's no tectonics that would have had the effect of concentrating what trace materials were there. It's rocks.

You're judging this by terrestrial standards. Given enough energy, rocks are still resources. Remember: the energy potentially available to a space faring civilization is literally orders of magnitude greater than that available to an Earth bound one.

Someone who wants to imagine going to war with China over rocks on the moon is someone who wants to imagine going to war with China.

I'd rather nothing like that ever happened. My wife is Chinese, for heaven's sake. However, the biggest wars are fought over energy resources. The control of lunar resources will be key in who gets to exploit vast amounts of solar energy at some point. Just as wars are now fought over oil, at some point, wars will be fought over who gets to build power satellites.

> You're judging this by terrestrial standards.

That's right! Because we have plenty of rocks right here on earth!

That's right! Because we have plenty of rocks right here on earth!

Now, work out the economics of using Earth rocks to build power satellites. Compare that to the economics of using material from the Moon. The difference is orders of magnitude. Will that take a lot of energy? Yes, but there too, the difference is orders of magnitude.

I share your hope that there will be no war, and most of your points about exploration, but am less pessimistic. Wars are fought over oil on earth because it is a limited, nonrenewable resource. Solar energy is not practically limited, is already cheaper than oil, and can be harvested directly on earth. Perhaps war will be fought for access to the asteroid belt (similar to the US’ strategic position in the Middle East regarding access to oil), but if current trends continue, I doubt - and hope - that we will never go to war again over energy itself.

Solar energy is not practically limited, is already cheaper than oil, and can be harvested directly on earth

You're making a key mistake here. You're using terrestrial standards to judge something which can grow exponentially to many times what's possible to do on Earth. If the planners of major powers recognize this exponential expansion in an early phase, wars can be fought over who gets to plant the seeds and harvest the result.

The military power embodied in the kind of energy harvesting we're talking about here, greatly dwarfs the same possible on Earth. If the great powers realize this, they will fight over it, with more ferocity than they do over access to the oceans.

The biggest wars are fought over resources? I’m don’t know.

The biggest wars the US fought are WWII, WWI, and the Civil War. None were over resources.

WWII was absolutely about resources.

The Nazis wanted the fertile lands in Eastern Europe and Russia for their own supposedly superior people. In fact, one of their most popular slogans was about "Lebensraum im Osten"("space to live in the East"), which, now that I think about it, has a similarity in sound to the slogan of "Manifest Destiny" in the US.

The first step of the "Lebensraum im Osten" plan was to invade Poland. Hitler split it with the Soviets in order to keep the Eastern border calm, since he needed all his forces on the Western front, to handle the backlash by the UK and France over the invasion of Poland. His original plan was to take on the Soviet Union only after having won the war on the Western front.

However, he backtracked on that strategy and invaded the Soviets in 1942 because the war in the West took longer than expected. Several key campaigns on the Eastern front, including the infamous Battle for Stalingrad, were specifically about securing resources like steel and oil (and, conversely, cutting off the Soviets from those supplies).

Disclaimer: I'm not a historian. All this is going off of what I would consider common knowledge as a German.

The biggest wars are fought over resources? I’m don’t know.

The biggest wars the US fought are WWII, WWI, and the Civ

In other threads, I've been decrying the degradation in History education in the US and across the western world. It's gotten so that the current generations in the work force only have a "Flintstones" understanding of how the current world got to where it is now, and what lessons can be learned from history.

The rocks under our feet are valuable in places and many wars have been fought over them. Why should the moon be any different?

Additionally the density of the moon is lower than earth, so it will have higher concentrations of kinds of elements that may be rare here. Leading to mines that might be surprisingly valuable. More important may be the fact that these resources are at the bottom of a much smaller gravity well.

On a long enough time period we'll be living on the moon in permanent colonies. You are unfortunately mistaken if you think that will all happen peacefully.

The rare ores under our feet are there because billions of years of heating/cooling cycles, water flow, and cracking events have managed to concentrate like materials. A given iron compound, say, all melts at the same temperature and pressure. So when the rock reaches that condition the iron all leaches away to a crack, where it concentrates. Then the same thing happens 20ky later, etc... Eventually you get an ore vein.

That does not happen on the moon. It's cold. The rocks are just rocks.

And I'll say it again, it sounds like you're engaging in this ridiculous fantasy not because you genuinely think the moon is a treasure chest but because you privately think war with China sounds kinda cool. You know how you get dumb wars? That's how you get dumb wars.

That does not happen on the moon. It's cold. The rocks are just rocks.

In the desert, a cup of water is a treasure. In space, even rocks are very useful as radiation shielding.

And I'll say it again, it sounds like you're engaging in this ridiculous fantasy not because you genuinely think the moon is a treasure chest

Lots of people have studied and thought about this. In relation to the environment, it is a treasure chest. It has the right materials to build the bulk of solar power satellites, much more economically than importing those materials from Earth. Again, with enough energy, even dumb rocks become ore. There is a lot more energy available in space.

You know how you get dumb wars? That's how you get dumb wars.

Here's a challenge: Name a dumb war that wasn't at least peripherally about the control of resources, especially energy. The recent ones have been at least peripherally about oil.

I've no interest in wars, and I rather doubt that it would be China and the USA fighting over the moon. They won't last long enough to see that.

This will be hundreds, if not thousands of years from now.

I don't think there will be no resources of value on the moon, but I'm not an expert in the field, so I won't die on that hill. Sadly, even if there was nothing of value there aside from the land itself, we'd probably still fight over it.

This will be hundreds, if not thousands of years from now.

It's going to happen sooner than you think. Humans are bad at exponential change. It will be under 100 years from now.

We'll definitely be there in under a hundred years, just probably not in a huge way. I just would be surprised if we're fighting wars there before then.

That said, humans are surprisingly belligerent, so maybe.

Why would we live on the moon in permanent colonies outside of scientific research? There are still tons of uncolonized places on earth that are much more hospitable than the moon.

You don't need to live somewhere to colonize it.

There could be a great many reasons to do that. I'm not talking in the next twenty years here. But can you say there's no reason to do that in the next thousand years?

Even just as a source of materials in a much smaller gravity well it could be instrumental to future human space industry and exploration.

Not that I agree or disagree with you, but ISTM there are no literal feet on the moon for resources to be under, which removes much of the need for fighting. Why would a country go to war over the discovery of resources in one location when there is literally a whole moon remaining in which to find alternative sources for those resources?

I’m not a geologist but it just seems unlikely to me that the moons natural resources will be materially constrained in the next few hundred years.

there are no literal feet on the moon for resources to be under, which removes much of the need for fighting.

By the time we have large scale industry on the moon, is this going to be the case? Probably not. Also, not all lunar resources are distributed evenly.

Maybe you're right, which would actually be a very good thing for the human race.

The moon is a lot smaller than earth for one. I seem to recall it's comparable to the size of the USA, someone correct me if that's a bad memory.

But given enough time, would it not be likely? The present lack of people there has no predictive value about the far future.

It's somewhat larger.

https://xkcd.com/1389/

I doubt that we have extracted even 1% of the valuable, accessible non fossil resources of Earth yet, and while I know that the more valuable materials are also harder to extract, the moon is currently 100% unutilised, so the idea of near term war for resources on the moon seems like an extrapolation too far for me.

That’s not to say that there is no chance of war on the moon, given enough time as you say, but “enough time” IMO is centuries, at which timescale any kind of prediction is really just a guess.

I fully agree. If you go back to my original post it was absolutely clear that's not likely in the near term.

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