To Save the Deep Ocean, We Should Mine the Moon
nautil.us
nautil.us
People are attracted to mining the deep sea because there are seabed nodules and crusts that are enriched in valuable metals like cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule
"Those of greatest economic interest contain manganese (27–30 wt. %), nickel (1.25–1.5 wt. %), copper (1–1.4 wt. %) and cobalt (0.2–0.25 wt. %)."
A nodule containing 1% copper and 1% cobalt is a great ore.
These nodules are not found on the moon. As far as we know, no cobalt ore bodies of comparable richness are found on the moon. Transition metal ore bodies on Earth have been formed by Earth's geochemistry, including its hydrological cycle. The Moon does not have liquid water and its minerals are undifferentiated silicates.
Undifferentiated silicates are abundant on Earth. Trying to mine them is an exercise in getting $1 of metal from $10 of energy and chemicals. Trying to mine undifferentiated silicates on the Moon means getting $1 of metal from $10 of energy and chemicals plus $10,000 in transportation costs.
The lunar rocks have huge quantities of iron, aluminum, titanium, manganese, which would be good for building structures on the Moon, but which are too cheap to be worthwhile to be brought to Earth.
I have not seen any estimate for this but I doubt that the total mass of iron meteorites that have fallen on the Moon is great enough to provide a quantity of valuable metals that would be worthwhile to be transported back to Earth.
Moreover, the iron meteorites that have fallen on the Moon are distributed uniformly over all it surface, they are not concentrated in some place like the ores on Earth. The cost of transportation until a processing place will be very large, because I doubt that there can be more than a few grams of iron meteorites per square meter.
Even with this extremely optimistic supposition, one would need to collect all the meteorites from several hundreds square kilometers to get a ton of cobalt (the average Co content in iron meteorites is a little less than 0.3%). For less abundant elements, like the platinum-group metals, the area will be multiplied by several orders of magnitude.
It is unlikely to find places on the surface of the Moon with significantly different chemical composition than other places, because the Moon has neither volcanoes nor flowing water, to create exploitable mineral concentrations.
The only chance to find a concentrated source of valuable elements on the Moon would be in the mascons (mass concentrations that are likely to be buried asteroids that have impacted the Moon early in the history of the Solar System), if any of the mascons is close enough to the surface to be reachable by digging.
Exploiting a Lunar mascon does not seem easy as their typical burial depth is estimated between 25 km and 125 km. Nevertheless, due to the lower gravity and to the lack of a hot interior, it might be possible to dig much deeper wells on the Moon than on Earth, e.g. maybe to a depth of 20 to 30 km, where some of the mascons could be reached.
There is no guarantee that any of the mascons has a metallic core, but the fact that they have a higher density than the Lunar rocks suggests that this is a possibility.
The moon has a lower delta v to orbit than earth does.
I think the dangerous part is political: who get the wealth out of the moon? That's going to be a heated debate.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/elude-vs-allud...
I really enjoy these merriam blogs. They had one about "nonplussed" which gave me a great laugh considering how much that word is miss used.
If China goes to the moon to mine heavy metals - the international community can either get together and sanction China (they won't) - or accept that China's doing it.
If the US does it - the same thing will happen.
I can't really imagine anyone else doing it - but then they have a little less global importance and smaller guns - so maybe there would be sanctions to stop it.
They might notice the rockets going back and forth though.
'CNN - The Chinese government says its patience is running out over a lack of progress in bilateral negotiations with the United States over the sharing of Lunar mineral resources in Sector 4. The U.S. government claims that it legally acquired the mineral rights to the area after being the first nation to activate a fission reactor within the perimeter. The Chinese government, on the other hand, claims to be the rightful owner of the mineral rights since the mineral discovery by the lunar probe Xi Jinping IV. Forces from 45th Marines Regiment, the 10th Space Force, the 3rd Space Infantry Division, and the 8th Space Force are on an elevated readiness level in Sector 4. These forces number approximately 24,000 troops. The People's Liberation Space Army has approximately 13,000 troops on the Moon, with reinforcements on the way, according to a press release by the Chinese State Council. Sector 4 is currently occupied by SpaceX Mining Corporation and the U.S. military forces.'
'Sector 4 contains the richest mineral deposits known to exist on the Moon. Its economic value has been estimated at $634 trillion, and its Helium-3 deposits are a critical input of the manufacturing of quantum conductors, which power everything from personal hovercraft, holo-devices, house appliances, toothbrushes, and personal communication devices and consumer electronics.'
'The United Nations has appealed to both countries to try to keep diplomatic channels open, but both governments have so far ignored its resolutions. In a press conference at the New White House in Princeton, NJ, President Bill Gates III said all options remained on the table. When pressed about whether these options included the deployment of Cordium weapons and neutron bombs against Chinese lunar forces or military operations in the Earth Theater of Operations, President Gates declined to answer.'
Btw, have you seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Is_the_News from 1982? :-)
Natural systems are extremely complex and intertwined in ways that cannot be comprehended in the slightest. The nearsightedness and expediency of the modern engineer is criminal and should be met with the highest level of justice, his ideations with caution and skepticism.
What's disturbing is that skepticism is taboo. The move fast, break things, disrupt everything ethos is considered noble and desirable. Skeptics are "negative" and "holding us back". They're luddite deplorables who want us to remain in the stone age.
We are living with unprecedented abundance. We don't need to take desperate and risky actions because we are not living in desperate times. We don't need to mine the moon. We need to slow down, take stock, and reap what we've already sown.
I notice a lot of people operate on the unexamined assumption that there's life everywhere. This is a decent assumption for the Earth. It does not hold in space. There is no "environment" to mess up on the moon. It is already a radiation hellscape with no air, no water, and no life. It can't be turned into an ecological disaster, it already is one, of a scope beyond anything you can find on Earth. If you literally dumped a million tons of the worst radioactive waste on the moon, it would would not noticeably affect its characteristics.
If you value the ecosystems of Earth, get as much industry off of it as possible, into places where there is no "environment" to mess up.
1. How much we have mined on earth
2. Expectations on how much we expect to mine over time
Did people who started burning coal all those years ago ever think they'd have to worry about climate shift driving their descendants from their homes centuries later because of their actions? Did anyone ever consider that the mass use of disposable plastics would cause these chemicals to persist in our bodies, our water, our food supply? Did any of these people proceed slowly and with caution out of consideration of unknown unknowns?
Unfortunately, no.
It would take in the order of 10^6 years to reduce the mass of the Moon by 0.01% if we mined at the rate at which we mine(example: iron) on Earth.
Having said that, it is not about altering the mass of the moon. It is not even about deorbiting. Both of which are enormously difficult to fuck up by our puny efforts. It would also have very little effect on rotational speed or gravitational field.
But that’s not the point. At all. What is the cost of mining the moon/space mining? What is this metal that we are going to mine at astronomical costs that is alleged to magically make all our lives better and ‘save the oceans’.
I couldn’t find that information the article. I think someone simply wants grant money to build a bigger house or fund their children’s college fund. This duck isn’t flying..not walking..not even limping it’s way to the moon to mine anything.
Do you have any idea how many problems were created by good intentions?
Whether the moon and the earth are part of a natural or unnatural system is irrelevant, so we can omit the word natural for the purposes of this argument.
The moon and its interactions with the earth are part of a system. Some parts of the system are understood. For example, the moon's effect on the earth's tides.
Mao's sparrows were part of a system. Changing this variable, the sparrow population, impacted one variable that impacted another variable, that impacted another variable. Dead sparrows --> more pests --> less grain --> famine.
We can try to predict and speculate all we want, but the only way to know how a system is affected by a variable change is to change the variable and observe the effects. And it can take a very long time before effects reveal themselves, and sometimes they cannot be easily reversed.
When introducing an unprecedented change to a system, all we have is uncertainty, so before we introduce that change, it's important to proceed very slowly, and with caution.
But, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%3A_1999 said so!1!!
I also have no idea where you come up with this taboo against skepticism. Read the comments on any HN article about a new technology and you'll find skeptics front and center. It's certainly alive and well in engineering.
I agree with you that natural systems are more complex than we can accurately model. We should work on those models.
I work in research, and collaborate with two main teams. One does environmental monitoring and modelling. The other works in extraction (mining) and chemical processing. Guess which one of those collaborations covers my salary? I love working with the environmental team but if that was the only income I'd have to leave a long time ago. If you want engineers to slow down and smell the roses, you'll find most would love to. You'd better have a way to support them though, because if they can't pay for their house while doing it you won't have many takers.
This is a terribly shortsighted view. Environment is what supports us.
When sea levels rise because humanity as a whole has made a series of short sighted decisions with disastrous consequences, our little houses would have helped nail the final mail on coffin of humanity.
It’s not ‘self righteous doomsaying’ to point out we are consuming our planet to extinction and looking for other places to stuff the maw of our human needs.
The solution is to reduce world human population to carrying capacity. As a super apex predator, we need the environment and habitat to survive.
If we polish off resources meant for ecosystems that need to exist to feed us, what we are doing is akin to slicing our fingers for soup because we ran out of carrots.
Want less and no more than you can afford. That’s the idea.
So unless you are willing to give up on the things that allow you to post this very comment on HN, the the building materials most come from somewhere. Better it come from the moon that the amazonia.
The option of not mining at all exist, but the chances that it happen are so low betting on it would be like hoping to win the lottery to pay for your hospital bill.
Also, is the Moon really separate from the Earth? What will be the ecological effect on Earth if we start destroying the Moon?
Edit:
For anyone interested in understanding how the Moon affects life on Earth, following articles might help:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-does-the-moon-affect-life...
https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-does-moon-affec...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210820-the-subtle-influ...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-moonlight-...
https://sciencing.com/moon-its-effect-weather-6315413.html
https://www.space.com/55-earths-moon-formation-composition-a...
Not even close to keep destroying the Earth.
In what way would mining the moon be destroying it? It would possibly destroy our view of the Moon from Earth, but at the level of mining that we're talking about the mass of the Moon would be relatively unchanged. We're not talking about deconstructing the Moon here.
If you are concerned about us deconstructing a solar body, we could always use the Moon to springboard to the asteroid belt, where we could easily deconstruct bodies and return the valuable resources to Earth without affecting the delicate Moon-Earth system in anyway.
How do you feel about asteroid mining?
The Moon is responsible for tides and is believed to play an important role with wildlife.
Earth ~6x10^24kg, annual human resource extraction is ~10^14kg.
(Could my figures be wrong? Its bizarre!)
If it's done right you can produce pretty much everything except for semiconductors directly on the moon.
According to Wikipedia, the mass of the moon is 7.342×10^22 kg.
If we switched our entire mining infrastructure to the moon tomorrow, including stuff like sand and gravel for construction (which would be pretty crazy) it would take us 7.298 10^8 years to consume the entire mass of the moon.
It would take us 7.298 * 10^6 years to consume %1 of the moon. 7.3 million years to reduce the mass of the moon by 1% and increase the mass of the Earth some trifling percent that I don't feel like calculating right now, but you get the point.
Long story short, mining the moon at our current rates of mining would do nothing to sea life, or life in general on Earth, while mining on Earth has and continues to do immeasurable damage to life on Earth.
[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/all-tonnes-metals-ore...
The article totally disregards the lifecycle of consumer products that would use lunar metals. There's already a massive challenge dealing with historic heavy metal pollution across the globe.
Recycling is a hard problem. Not because of the technical aspects. Because a massive chunk of what we consume never ends up being recycled in a safe, secure environmental conscious manner in the first place. Just consider how much e-waste ends up in 3rd world scrapyards. There are massive economical and political hurdles to consider. Our collective behaviors need to fundamentally shift...
... and once you start thinking about that, you automatically arrive at the 5 R's which have a distinct ordering: Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Rot, Recycle.
If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place in order to stem the rate at which our planet gets polluted... then what's left of the need to scavenge metals from other heavenly bodies?
The most obvious solution there is to build things to last longer. But in the current environment, companies ate strongly incentivised to do the opposite.
It’s easy. Reduce population to carrying capacity. The math is 1/2 surviving child per human that’s a non transferable right for 150 years.(Altho at this point, it may be too late. I would like all of us to survive past 2030, but worth a shot even though the decline of our eco system began in 2000ish)
It would be better if we found a way to preserve genetic material or find a way to generate pluripotent cells for procreation. We would need diversity of genetic material and not everyone would want to be a parent. Their genetic material would ensure that we have a ‘genetic library’ of reference materials so we don’t go extinct as a species.
Changing the gravitational pull is just beyond consideration. You'll be able to take a train to the moon before that's a problem.
There are actual economic and environmental concerns with moon mining (e.g. launch/recover pollution, high costs, etc). But the sorts of concerns you linked to are not them.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/affect-vs-effe...
People writing this kind of articles just have no idea how enormous the gravity well of Earth is.
The hope is a long run situation where industrial activity is self sufficient enough up there that less stuff has to go up. And most things are just coming down into the gravity well. That's the only way it could ever be economical, or ecologically sensible.
But I'm pretty pessimistic about our ability to execute to get there from here.
Any entity capable of precisely delivering enough mass to survive reentry from lunar orbit is now in possession of a weapon of mass destruction, equivalent to a small nuke.
In the late 50s, the U.S. Air Force considered deploying "rods from God," essentially tungsten telephone pole satellites that could hit silos or other hardened targets at near-orbital velocity. Since they weren't inherently explosive, they skirted the Outer Space Treaty. Ultimately they were considered too provocative to deploy.
Imagine a man-made asteroid with several times that mass, coming in from lunar orbit. I'd guess about 10x the energy of a tungsten rod in low orbit, if it wasn't aerobraked or what not. No state which lacks the capability would be happy about it!
Not necessarily a small one.
You'd have to lob a really big rock at those speeds to get to the megaton range. (Or from interstellar distances, since energy scales with v^2.) Seems infeasible for a near-future lunar mining op. But it also demonstrates how powerful nuclear weapons are.
It all depends on how fast it can be pushed by the mass driver, but the weapon would need to ingest ~4e+15 Joules to impart a megaton of energy into something.
I wonder if there wouldn't be a point where the impactor would be squashed enough to fuse some tritium, but, then, it's no longer just a kinetic weapon.
>Trained as an MIT engineer and NASA geophysicist, with an international law degree to boot, Pinault is a partner at Airbus Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on planetary challenges.
I think he probably gets it.
Maybe, the ones pushing Helium-3 mining on Moon despite completely obvious challenges (extremely low concentration that no one ever does in terms of mining, fusion being prerequisite, plus it's on the moon) also know something about the moon, space, Helium3 but that didn't stop half the public from buying the BS.
It's like suggesting us commute by fighter jets. Can it be done for a demo? Sure, but the whole concept is total fiction that relys on the publics ignorance on the subject to propagate.
Go to the moon and harvest. Go to Mars and live there as we ruined mother earth. Mine the deep sea floor.
Why not try to recycle better instead. It's not as sexy, but how about if we could mine the old landfills and mine all the trash we collect?
Why not make more efficient cars than build the silly humongous SUVs and trucks? Less metal use means less mining.
2. More train use instead of trucks is generally a good idea; not sure about landfills though, since you would have to disassemble the train line to them after they're cleared. Might still be worth it though.
I like what I call the opposite of "death by a thousand cuts" approach, which I like to call "healing by a thousand bandaids".
This kind of naivety is pretty dangerous from my point of view. Good intentions, but completely unrealistic in expecting to actually fix an ultra massive and complex problem, makes people reject scientific discussion and dig deeper for better understanding and just say things that makes them feel good and move on.
Ie why not make more efficient cars - gee I wonder why nobody thought about that. I guess EU is regulating cars to hell killing whole product lines just for the heck of it. And its not enough, very far from it.
We need to attack problem from all possible sides, and mining in places which can't be technically more polluted and can't harm anything alive is probably the most ecological thing apart from killing whole mankind or forcing it all back to the caves. And we should do more, much more. Like keep educating people, starting from schools, its not a rocket science. Subsidize and tax.
Also, Mars is about humankind survival, it has been discussed here ad nausea. Who doesn't understand we need to diversify our location or mankind will 100% eventually die is again... dangerously naive.
1: As opposed to the steep gravity well of the moon which requires multi km/s chemical propulsion to land, for asteroids you can do a lot with much more efficient chemical propulsion and only a small kick with chemical propulsion.
* Less use of metal + switch to renewable materials where possible.
* Design metallic articles to be amenable to dissassembly for later use of the parts; also perhaps standardize more metallic parts.
* Extensive recycling of metal instead of dumping it in landfills and the ocean.
Everytime I read something about ‘mining’ space for our frivolous needs, I think of the first paragraph of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.
Of course, the Moon isn’t going to shatter because we mine with our puny little implements, but the hubris of mankind’s stupid greed is something that symbolizes destruction and I abhor it with all my heart.
Ok. So we mine space. What about air and water and other non renewable resources that we can never mine for anywhere else.
The population quadrapled from 1900 to 2000. It’s too much and too fast. It’s entirely unsustainable and unbalanced. Global warming and raising sea levels is going to be an ugly reality we will be face in our lifetime. You know what else will go under water..rocket launch sites. Just sayin’..
You are underestimating humans. Look what we have done to the Earth.
The amount of mass humans would extract from the moon through mining would not change this in any appreciable way because the moon is just too massive.
Gravity: Am I a joke to you?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_space_elevator#Fabricati...
* The moon is frequently bombarded by rocks of different sizes (most of this stuff burns up in our atmosphere). Any permanent structure needs to essentially survive being shot at by something at between mach 10-50[1], maybe just a tiny spec of dust, a pellet, or something big as a truck, happens every once in a while on the moon with no advance warning (except during meteor storms, when it's more like the battle of Somme). This probably rules out using permanent installations like catapults/mass drivers, space elevators, or similar to escape the planet.
* You still need to actually land the stuff on earth. Can't just hurl space rocks at the planet. Anything big enough to survive re-entry is going to make a big crater.
* You need to bring the stuff needed to safely bring stuff back to earth up into space for every "shipment". This is probably more costly than launching the stuff from the moon.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/overview.ht...
Since the moon has a vacuum, whatever is launched from there has no drag. Make the payload in winged form, skip-bounce on the Earth atmosphere, add some ablative shielding, and Bob's your uncle.
Just how dense are these rock showers do you reckon? After all, the moon has very old untouched features.
Another big difference is that if the ISS gets hit by anything with significant kinetic energy, it will just punch a hole clean through whatever it impacts. There is nothing that can absorb that sort of kinetic energy. This is in most scenarios good news.
If a meteorite hits the lunar surface, the surface absorbs the kinetic energy, the surface and the meteorite evaporates, causing an explosion of molten rock moving at high velocities. This means even glancing hits or near misses can be devastating in a way they aren't when you are in orbit.