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Comment by m33k44 | Hacker News Reader

This argument is like, "to save the kittens, kill the puppies".

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...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/moon-life-tides

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Mining the moon in and of itself? There's no impact on Earth. Introducing tons of extraterrestrial metals into our biosphere? There's the rub.

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?

> If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place

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.

Ironically, this is the one thing *aaS might be able to solve from a consumer standpoint.

>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... [..]

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.

The moon is a very very very large dead rock. No amount of mining by humans will effect its mass, orbit or effect on tides by any measurable amount. We would literally have to mine more each day than has been mined by all of human history and then do it for thousands of years for there to be even the tiniest measurable impact on earth's ecosystems.

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.

> The moon is a very very very large dead rock. No amount of mining by humans will effect its mass,

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/affect-vs-effe...

> What will be the ecological effect on Earth if we start destroying the Moon?

Not even close to keep destroying the Earth.

This argument isn't like that whatsoever because the Moon isn't teeming with life.

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 isn't teeming with life

The Moon is responsible for tides and is believed to play an important role with wildlife.

The moon has a mass of 7×10^22 kg. How will wildlife on earth be affected if we mine a billionth of a billionth of a percent of its mass from the side that is never visible?

Incredibly, we mine a lot more than a billionth of a billionth of earth mass !!

Earth ~6x10^24kg, annual human resource extraction is ~10^14kg.

(Could my figures be wrong? Its bizarre!)

Mining on earth has the handy benefit of not requiring huge amounts of energy to send payloads through space

The idea is to develop a a self-sufficient industry on the moon so that you can do in-situ production of the manufacturing capacity and have it highly automated or teleoperated from Earth to minimize the number of people travelling to and from.

If it's done right you can produce pretty much everything except for semiconductors directly on the moon.

According to weforum, "the world consumes 100.6 billion tonnes of materials annually."[0] 100.6 * 10^9 tonnes is 1.00610^14 kg.
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...

In what way does the moon effect the earth _other_ than its gravitational pull? Do you think that industrial mining on the moon would have a noticeable effect on the gravitational pull of the moon?

Reflected light. The environmental concerns of lunar mining would be dominated by the effects of massively scaling up the space industry on Earth. Distantly behind that would be the potential for changing how reflective the moon is.

Changing the gravitational pull is just beyond consideration. You'll be able to take a train to the moon before that's a problem.

I don't think we'd be able to mine enough minerals to literally destroy the moon... or am I misunderstanding?

By the time anyone notices, everyone will have moved to ringworlds

A universe where humanity can measurably change the orbital parameters of the moon is a universe that humanity has won, more or less.

Yes it seems like if we are able to destroy the moon, then we will be able to do a lot else fairly efficiently (asteroid capture and mining, for example), and moon mining will be something we choose not to do for preservation's sake.

This is a non argument, because the moon is just a lump of gravitating matter. Those effects you mention are independent of what happens on the moon. The moon might as well be coated with swiss cheese and nothing would change (... as long as the cheese has similar albedo to the moon as it is now)

A pound for pound exchange should do it. Might even be able to stop the Moon from moving away in a few thousand years.

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