I thought this was completely crazy. There are no ecosystems to protect, no endangered species, no green living things. Moving development from Earth into space should count as an overwhelming win for the environment.
For those that have jumped straight to the comments this isn’t the flavor of TFA:
> The moon hosts several sites of extraordinary scientific importance (SESIs) to astronomy.
> Only within the last 20 years have astronomers discovered locations on the moon where conditions are ideal for the study of the early universe. The far side of the moon, for example, is one of the most radio-silent places in our solar system, as radio transmissions and interference from Earth are blocked. From there, radio telescopes can peer into the universe’s past to a time before the stars formed—or search for evidence of technologically advanced alien life, writes the Guardian.
> But because of the far side’s mountainous terrain, scientists say the installation of telescopes is possible at only three sites—and one in particular is rich in helium-3, which space mining companies have identified as a key element in quantum computers and fusion energy.
> Another scarce resource are the moon’s “cold traps,” located along craters near the north and south poles, where sunlight hasn’t been able to reach for billions of years. Among the universe’s most frigid places, they are the perfect location for infrared telescopes, which are specifically designed to operate at extremely cold temperatures. These could potentially collect images of Earth-sized exoplanets, and seismometers placed at cold traps could measure the moon’s own movement amidst gravitational waves.
Is there anywhere else in the solar system that can claim that?
I know Mercury shares this. Not super useful, except at the boundary.
Mercury definitely isn't tidally locked to the sun, and its sidereal day isn't a whole integer fraction of Earth's year.
I'm not 100% certain without doing some algebra, but don't think it's even possible for one planet to be tidally locked to any planet in a different orbit, be that Mercury to Earth or otherwise, owing to the distance not being constant while angular momentum has to be.
(If two planets share an orbit, there are an infinite number of trivial solutions).
https://www.quora.com/Is-Mercury-tidally-locked-so-that-one-...
There is more info about what is and is not:
If you're building on this scale, why not put two on opposite sides of, say, Deimos? The delta-v between there and LEO is less than the delta-v between the lunar surface and LEO: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...
14917 ms-1 [Moon] v. 14520 ms-1 [Deimos], if I'm reading it right.
A telescope in that orbit would never see earthlight, like one on the moon.
That doesn't really matter at the moment, because even if places like these are common, the only practical ones we can reach are on the moon.
Let's not let our imaginations run away. There's a lot more that needs to happen to have a launchpad on the moon compared to an observatory.
The far side of the Moon is bigger than Russia. I have my doubts about such a categorical claim as "only three sites are suitable for telescopes".
On Earth, we build observatories in mountainous terrain regularly.
If you're worried about communication, a relay satellite is way cheaper and easier than cables or roads.
There's no need to build roads or tracks from the near side to the far side.
Just put the telescope in space. It's a lot easier, despite the difficulty.
A while ago, I saw a page that did the maths, and it worked out that the abundance of He3 was so low (at best 50 parts per billion), that even if we assumed a perfect fusion reactor (which we don't have) and noted the energy density of fusion fuel, it made slightly more sense to separate the metal and oxygen in the lunar regolith, catapult the resulting metal ingots to earth, and then generate energy from magnetically decelerating them (and even more if the ingots were shaped into liquid oxygen tanks). Likewise, one could get more energy from burning that metal as if it were coal than from fusion of the He3 in the same volume of regolith, because the particle density of He3 is so low.
I have not been able to find a link to that page since reading it, so unless someone here can remember where it is, I may have to re-do the maths and blog about it myself.
Does that sound completely crazy? Like... the fact that they want to study it before private companies destroy it for their own benefit?
> Moving development from Earth into space should count as an overwhelming win for the environment.
I don't think this is obvious at all. Actually I don't believe it at all. First because enabling development in space will not at all make us reduce it on Earth. Why would it? If we can make money in space and on Earth, it's more money than just on Earth. It's even completely possible that having development in space will make it even worse for the environment on Earth.
the CEO discourse for justifying Earth being explored for future space companies profiting +6 figures
As a tangent, have you seen that gold rush show on discovery? Taking acres of lush and beautiful Klondike Forest and bulldoze it barren so they can maybe get a few oz of gold. It's terrible.
I don't claim that that these considerations should always (or even often) be decisive. But there is more going on than just resistance to change. Development of a pristine natural space destroys something of value, even when that space is barren. But, of course, it may create something of greater value.
Another dimension may be the sense that the human touch feels, in some sense, irreversible. So one might think we should be conservative when disturbing an environment that has been formed only by natural processes over millions of years. Once humans start digging and building there, we can't truly restore it to its former state. Maybe this is closer to mere resistance to change. But I think it's worth taking more seriously whether there is more to it than that. It's a much harder argument, though, when it's an environment that no living thing will ever really experience otherwise.
Edit: I (and, I think, many others) believe that we would enjoy the experience of gazing out onto a martian or lunar landscape, generalizing from our experiences with environments on earth. But I suppose it's interesting to contemplate the possibility that we're wrong. I guess I can't rule out the possibility that some aspect of the experience on the moon or Mars could prevent it from scratching the same itch as, for example, a desert on earth.
Edit 2: I recognize that these musings have basically nothing to do with TFA, which discusses scientists' concern over the potential destruction of sites with significant scientific value. They're certainly not just talking about the pretty views.
As a justification for the rules people like, I don’t think that’s at all compatible with the frequency with which people actually partake in this, or their lack of concern with focusing on preserving the most valuable landscapes.
> Another dimension may be the sense that the human touch feels, in some sense, irreversible. So one might think we should be conservative when disturbing an environment that has been formed only by natural processes over millions of years
I think this is not meaningfully different than what I said originally: resistance to change, period. It could be different if people had any sort of quantitative model for what sort of preservation our descendants would value, and how to trade that off against our current needs. But in practice no one does this, so it just becomes “don’t change anything”.
A key theme in the trilogy was the independence (or not) of Mars from Earth. This really kicks in when the Arkady character argues that as the actual inhabitants of Mars, the colonists themselves should decide how they make their future rather than Mission Control on Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson then explores this tension from several viewpoints (including terraforming, as you say) that are held by his major characters. This also defuses the possible criticism of the plot that such an expensive mission would have been conducted while leaving the massive issue of terraforming unresolved.
> I thought this was completely crazy.
So did a lot of the characters, especially the ones who go about the terraforming anyway.
See more discussion here: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/160959/is-or-was-t...
That might be a easier problem to solve on the moon. Considering its much much lower escape velocity. Once someone builds something like a mass-driver on the moon - they can just shoot the junk into an orbit that will eventually have it fall into the sun in a few hundred years.