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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

It's somewhat larger.

https://xkcd.com/1389/

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.

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.

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.

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

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