While I understand their concerns, it seems a bit crazy to think you have any right to tell people what to do or not do on the moon.
And either nations take care of the offenders and form treaties, or it leads to war at the worst.
Have you stopped to think what happens to the earth if the moon were just outright gone? Because that's ultimately what the debate is about. If anything valuable is found there, you can be assured someone will strip mine it until every last piece of value is removed, and the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe, not their problem.
I think it's EVERYONE'S right to tell anyone trying to profit off of what is at the moon what they can and can't do.
- most of the Moon is made up of the same stuff as the Earth's crust (silica, alumina, etc) and has very little value, compared to the energy needed to get it off the Moon
- if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float off into the universe", it just stays in orbit unless it is actively pushed, which would take an insane amount of energy, something like the entire world's electricity consumption for a billion years
I'm aware of how large the moon is.
>- most of the Moon is made up of the same stuff as the Earth's crust (silica, alumina, etc) and has very little value, compared to the energy needed to get it off the Moon
CURRENTLY has very little value. Just like CURRENTLY there's very little value to water in most of the world. In 500 years, without some fairly significant changes to the way we're treating the earth, that will be a VERY different story.
>- if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float off into the universe", it just stays in orbit unless it is actively pushed, which would take an insane amount of energy
That's the point... what exactly do you think is going to happen to earth in that scenario?
>something like the entire world's electricity consumption for a billion years
What was the entire world's electricity consumption 500 years ago?
Are you? Removing from the moon a cubic kilometre of solid rock per person would be a thing you'd notice in a side-by-side comparison, while being less than the optical illusion that makes it seem bigger when close to the horizon.
30 miles down is 2-3 times the Mohorovicic discontinuity between crust and mantle; 30 miles up you're above the ozone layer and the air is too thin to breathe. That's the quantity being discussed.
> >- if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float off into the universe", it just stays in orbit unless it is actively pushed, which would take an insane amount of energy
> That's the point... what exactly do you think is going to happen to earth in that scenario?
It stays right where it is: orbiting earth.
> >something like the entire world's electricity consumption for a billion years
> What was the entire world's electricity consumption 500 years ago?
Electricity is a red herring; consider all power of all kinds combined. 500 years ago, let's assume that meant just human muscles even though windmills and watermills existed and animal muscle was also used, just to maximise the difference.
The estimated world population in 1500 was around 0.43-0.50 billion; again, let's low-ball that to 430 million.
Human calorie use is about 2500/day; multiply by 430 million gets us 52.06 GW.
Today, we are at 20 TW, which is a factor of 384.17 greater.
The kinetic energy of the moon is about 10^27 J: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1%2F2+*+moon+mass+*+%28...
which suggests it would take about 1.5 million years at current power use rates: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9.74×10%5E26+joules+%2F...
or 4016 years if I assume another 384.17 increase in the rate of human power consumption: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.543×10%5E6+average+Gr...
Things which are actually likely to get us the kind of increases to our available power such that we might do this include "build a Dyson swarm", which I wouldn't rule out happening in my lifetime, but also doing that means we can do a thing called "star lifting", and we'd want to because the sun contains more interesting elements than all the planets combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
Again, I'm aware of how large the moon is.
>It stays right where it is: orbiting earth.
Huh? You just asked if I understood how large the moon was, and then came to the conclusion the only thing that would happen should the moon not be there is that it would stay where it is? It would completely change the tilt of the earth, tides, etc. Do you think the spreading cloud of moon dust would have the same gravitational pull as the moon in one piece?
>Electricity is a red herring; consider all power of all kinds combined. 500 years ago, let's assume that meant just human muscles even though windmills and watermills existed and animal muscle was also used, just to maximise the difference.
It's very much not a red herring, and you can't have it both ways. If you're basing it on "human power" then you're going to need to calculate today's human power as well because there are endless manual labor jobs that humans still persist at today.
>or 4016 years if I assume another 384.17 increase in the rate of human power consumption: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.543×10%5E6+average+Gr...
Except power hasn't increased linearly over time, which I assume you know and at this point are just arguing for the sake of argument.
In 1900 the total yearly power consumption of humanity was 12TW. In 2022 it was 178,899TW, an increase of 14,908x in 100 years. Assuming a 384.17 increase is a great way to make some very flawed assumptions look good. But it doesn't reflect reality.
You're not demonstrating awareness.
> Huh? You just asked if I understood how large the moon was, and then came to the conclusion the only thing that would happen should the moon not be there is that it would stay where it is? It would completely change the tilt of the earth, tides, etc. Do you think the spreading cloud of moon dust would have the same gravitational pull as the moon in one piece?
You appear to be mixing different things.
You wrote this:
> Have you stopped to think what happens to the earth if the moon were just outright gone? Because that's ultimately what the debate is about. If anything valuable is found there, you can be assured someone will strip mine it until every last piece of value is removed, and the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe, not their problem.
Specifically focus on this bit: "the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe".
No: it stays in orbit of the Earth. If it's not valuable, nobody's going to move it.
> It's very much not a red herring, and you can't have it both ways. If you're basing it on "human power" then you're going to need to calculate today's human power as well because there are endless manual labor jobs that humans still persist at today.
Since the industrial revolution, everything else has grown so much, totalling about 20 TW, that human muscle power has become a rounding error, less than 5% of that: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=8+billion+*+2500+kcal%2...
Human muscle used to be relevant. And I gave that alone for 500 years ago in order to maximise the difference between then and now, to steel-man my case.
> Except power hasn't increased linearly over time, which I assume you know and at this point are just arguing for the sake of argument.
I see you don't know what "linear" means.
If I'd assumed linear growth from 50 GW to 20 TW (which is 20,000 GW) over the last 500 years, thats (20,000 - 50) GW/500 years, which is an insignificant difference from saying 20TW/500 years. Applying that forward would for another 500 years would look like "double", not "x384".
I am in fact assuming exponential growth by suggesting a further x384 growth in the next 500 years.
The exponent itself has to increase in order to get faster than this rate.
> In 1900 the total yearly power consumption of humanity was 12TW. In 2022 it was 178,899TW, an increase of 14,908x in 100 years. Assuming a 384.17 increase is a great way to make some very flawed assumptions look good. But it doesn't reflect reality.
I see you can't read the graph.
That graph says it was 12,131 TWh/year in 1900 (which is 1.385 terawatts), and 178,899 TWh/year in 2022 (which is 20.42 terawatts). This is a change of x14.75.
You might have had a hint that your claim of x14,908 growth over this period was implausible just by noticing that your monitor was less than 14,908 pixels tall and the height for the chart at 1900 was more than 1 pixel tall.
You might have also noticed that it was incompatible with your other (also false) claim that "human power" is a significant fraction of current total power use, given that the human population hasn't grown 15,000 times larger over the last 500 years, which it would have needed to for both the claim "human power is a relevant fraction today" and "x14908 growth since then" to be simultaneously true.
If we were actually using 178,899 TW (not TWh/year which is what the graph you linked to is saying), the planet earth would not be a "pale blue dot" when seen from space, because we would have had to cover 80%-103% of the planet (including oceans and clouds, not just deserts and cities and forests) in something that absorbed all incoming sunlight.
Whether you're trolling or not, what a horrible take unless you're hoping the human race just wipes itself out. With our current rate of technological progress, someone having the ability to mine the moon to nothing is at most 500 years away, maybe sooner if they find something under the surface that makes it financially attractive.
There would be an immediately noticeable harm with the genuine ability to make Earth entirely uninhabitable, and unlike with climate change, where the mechanisms at work aren't directly relatable, with an orbit change, the mechanisms are pretty relatable to everyone, in the form of seasons and their total disruption.
As such, I don't think the typical ideas of people ignoring the problem in favor of keeping the money flowing apply, as those are all cases where the harm is some unclear time in the future involving the suffering of people who are not the decision makers.
There is immediate noticeable harm to oil spills, and yet you still have people arguing that we should run pipelines next to rivers because it's easier and cheaper. I think you grossly overestimate some folks ability to have a rational discussion when they've got a financial incentive not to.
For context, at the rate at which we mine metals on Earth, it'd take tens to hundreds of millions of years to mine even 0.1% of the Moon, and that's without considering that all that mass would have to be transported elsewhere for it to be a problem (and since other destinations, mostly by definition, have their own easier to access resources, that seems unnecessary). Mining all that material on human timescales would be a very deliberate operation dwarfing all human mining from the start of civilization.
I'm not a nuclear physicist so I may be orders of magnitude off, but my gut feeling is that being constantly bombarded with the solar wind might be putting into a very slightly radioactive equilibrium? (I'm thinking more along the lines of the story of the radioactive boy scout, not Trinitite, and I don't know how radioactive "normal" steel is compared to "low-background").
If someone can melt an entire ice shelf then I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement that would be.
If someone can frack an entire country then I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement that would be.
Is that what you are saying?
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/05/world/peregrine-moon-mission-...
Who gets to own the moon? Is it just whoever has the resources to travel there and build stuff? Imagine if Space X decides to carve a portrait of Elon Musk into the face of the moon at a scale large enough it can be seen from the naked eye on earth. Would that be OK just because he had the money to do it?
The United States of America currently owns the moon as they are the only country to put a flag into it.
(In case anyone can't detect the joke - theres a treaty from 1967 that says every nation hsa equal access to the moon)
But it actually works in a fairly intuitive manner. People who get to the Moon can do as they like there. Anyone who wants to stop them is invited to go to the Moon and try. This does not mean immediately by shooting them. Talking is a classic option for many good reasons that won't be going anywhere. But if you can't get there at all, you have no stake. If you can't get to the moon, you will have no say.
On Earth it is easy to forget that enforcement of laws requires enforcers to be able to get to the location where it will be enforced, because humanity conquered the task of getting from anywhere people are to anywhere people are at a reasonable speed a while ago. But this is still a base requirement. It hasn't gone anywhere. It has just been a long time since it was in question and people forget about it.
Space exploration will modify this for some period of time because in the Age of Exploration, people could live on the land. While people living in space require an Earth footprint to maintain themselves, that will give people on Earth a mechanism for enforcing power over the moon based on that footprint. But science fiction is full unto overflowing of space colonies going to war with Earth once they are capable of being independent for a reason; it's not so much a "trope" as a plainly obvious consequence of independence. Better treatments observe that Earth will know this and take it into account as it tries to hamstring its colonies from being independent, but A: this will eventually take the form of overtly hostile acts if space colonization continues on that will provide abundant casus belli for the colonies and B: there's a huge economic incentive to make them as independent as possible because it will always be more expensive to supply space colonies from Earth than to supply them from space resources.
Getting back to the original question, what will happen is this: Anyone who can get to the moon and stay there will have a say. Anyone who can't won't. Wringing hands, abtruse philosophical arguments, having hissy fits, screaming really loudly about "rights", complaining, none of it will matter. "Power comes from the barrel of a gun" is actually downstream of "power comes from being there". If you can't be there, you will have no power.
Also, I'm not particularly celebrating or condemning this in this post. This is just how it is.
That will be long enough that by the time it happens, they may not have any connections to Earth.
Plus, back on Earth, you have all the normal limitations of the gun barrel. If Nigeria doesn't like what Brazil is doing in space, Nigeria is still going to find it challenging to threaten the Brazilians doing space work with guns.
And to the point being made here, protesters protesting out in front of SpaceX are going to find it challenging to successfully deploy gun-power against them, because the local dominant People with Guns take a very dim view of violating their monopoly... and, likely, SpaceX (here really just any space company) is already acting with their approval.
The net of the complicated web of People with Guns here on Earth still pretty much boils down to the situation I described. Space exploration isn't going to be done by voting or polling, and the Veto of the Merely Loud (among the other vetos) that is so easy on Earth is going to prove quite difficult to project into space. In space, nobody can read your Earth protest sign.
I won't say there's never been a country that has fought for independence while simultaneously needing global trade for 100% of their food and water[0], but there definitely hasn't been a case of a country needing global trade for the literal oxygen they breathe.
Two moons colonies, one that has farms and one that doesn't, I would expect to have very different prospects.
[0] Though I've never heard of such a case, my history isn't good enough to make that claim. And no, mere famine isn't a strong enough example for this, those can be monstrously catastrophic without being existential.
But, there's prices, and there's prices. Earth history can tell you all about that.
I mean, we're witnessing how this is a continuum and not a binary thing right now, as East and West are decoupling. Will they decouple fully? Doubt it. Will they perhaps recouple someday? Perhaps. Is there a price to this decoupling? Yes, on both sides, but apparently the sides consider it worth it, because it's happening.
Threaten the loonies too much, and they can throw big rocks at Earth.
They'd have plenty of brute mass up there.
I don't think the moon rabbit would let that happen.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first to the moon and they planted the US flag on it in 1969, so that technically made it US territory. But then when they took off in the lander, the blast blew the flag over. I don't know if that affected the legal status or not.
https://www.unoosa.org/res/oosadoc/data/documents/2017/stspa...
Can you point me to which international law that backs this?
In other words, ownership of the moon won't be determined by technical legal questions about Armstrong's flag, but rather by a stick-measuring contest among the interested nations.
- https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int...
- https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int....
- https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int...
- https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int...
You mean the arrogant billionaires that think they can buy everything and anything and mostly ruin them?
Cause these are the only ones that have expressed interest, instead of, you know, contributing to more menial tasks like food/water shortage, environmental protection etc.