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This is the kind of thinking that yields DDT, PFAS, Mao's sparrow famine, dying coral reefs, etc. Natural systems are extremely complex and intertwined in ways

This is the kind of thinking that yields DDT, PFAS, Mao's sparrow famine, dying coral reefs, etc. 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.

jerf 4y ago
Sorry, what "natural system" exactly are you talking about? The moon doesn't have one in the sense you mean. 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.
- chucksta 4y ago
  I dunno, I'd say its effect on earth's tide is a pretty "natural system". Seems odd you can assert such certainty of not having unintended consequences and miss that
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    Do you have any idea how much material you'd need to remove from the Moon to change its mass enough to get a measurable effect on tides?
    - staticassertion 4y ago
      I don't. How much? I'd also be curious to compare that number to: 1. How much we have mined on earth 2. Expectations on how much we expect to mine over time
      - seti0Cha 4y ago
        According to Google, the moon's mass is 8.1 x 10^19 tons. According to some random info I found, we mined about 3 x 10^9 tons of metal ore in 2019. If we did that on the moon for a thousand years and brought it all back to earth, that's still 7 orders of magnitude less than the moon's mass, so what is that, 1 ten millionth? Is that significant? Well, the earth apparently gains 4 x 10^4 tons every year from just sucking up space dust, and presumably has been for the entire 4.5 x 10^9 years the moon has been around without obvious issues, so it seems like our moving a bit more mass between them wouldn't do much.
        staticassertion 4y ago
        Thanks. That sounds reasonable.
    - VoodooJuJu 4y ago
      But tides aside, which we kind of understand, and you may be correct about in regards to mass and mining, what other effects does this system have that we don't understand? The unknown unknowns are the important things to consider here. 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.
  - Chris2048 4y ago
    Which is a gravitational effect, and per original post: "the volume you remove is unlikely to be enough to influence moon gravity"
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    The amount of mass you'd need to move for that to happen is... well... astronomical. Besides, that's easily offset by sending things back to the moon for recycling/dumping.
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  >Sorry, what "natural system" exactly are you talking about? The moon doesn't have one in the sense you mean 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.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  > If you literally dumped a million tons of the worst radioactive waste on the moon, it would would not noticeably affect its characteristics. But, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%3A_1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%3A_1999 said so!1!!
snovv_crash 4y ago
Pulling the ladder up behind us, as wealthy nations, will not be accepted by developing nations as well as those still in abject poverty.
mecsred 4y ago
You're blaming your straw man for "nearsightedness and expediency", yet it took you 0 rational arguments to come to a conclusion about the correct outcome. 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.
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  >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.
  - mecsred 4y ago
    It's not a view, it's a fact. Most environmental projects don't have a budget to support more than a couple people. If you'd like that to be different, yeah, me too. Complaining doesn't change it though, which is why I ask for ideas instead of self-righteous doomsaying.
    - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
I'm pretty sure mining a empty rock from thousands of km away of 0.000000001 of its mass is less risky than mining the same thing in our backyard. Zero risk is impossible, but we know the risk of doing the things we do right now. 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
namlem 4y ago
The moon is a lifeless rock. What is there to disrupt? It's deep ocean mining that is risky and should be avoided.

jerf 4y ago

Sorry, what "natural system" exactly are you talking about? The moon doesn't have one in the sense you mean. 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.

chucksta 4y ago
I dunno, I'd say its effect on earth's tide is a pretty "natural system". Seems odd you can assert such certainty of not having unintended consequences and miss that
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Do you have any idea how much material you'd need to remove from the Moon to change its mass enough to get a measurable effect on tides?
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    I don't. How much? I'd also be curious to compare that number to: 1. How much we have mined on earth 2. Expectations on how much we expect to mine over time
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      According to Google, the moon's mass is 8.1 x 10^19 tons. According to some random info I found, we mined about 3 x 10^9 tons of metal ore in 2019. If we did that on the moon for a thousand years and brought it all back to earth, that's still 7 orders of magnitude less than the moon's mass, so what is that, 1 ten millionth? Is that significant? Well, the earth apparently gains 4 x 10^4 tons every year from just sucking up space dust, and presumably has been for the entire 4.5 x 10^9 years the moon has been around without obvious issues, so it seems like our moving a bit more mass between them wouldn't do much.
      - staticassertion 4y ago
        Thanks. That sounds reasonable.
  - VoodooJuJu 4y ago
    But tides aside, which we kind of understand, and you may be correct about in regards to mass and mining, what other effects does this system have that we don't understand? The unknown unknowns are the important things to consider here. 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.
- Chris2048 4y ago
  Which is a gravitational effect, and per original post: "the volume you remove is unlikely to be enough to influence moon gravity"
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  The amount of mass you'd need to move for that to happen is... well... astronomical. Besides, that's easily offset by sending things back to the moon for recycling/dumping.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>Sorry, what "natural system" exactly are you talking about? The moon doesn't have one in the sense you mean 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.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
> If you literally dumped a million tons of the worst radioactive waste on the moon, it would would not noticeably affect its characteristics. But, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%3A_1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%3A_1999 said so!1!!

snovv_crash 4y ago

Pulling the ladder up behind us, as wealthy nations, will not be accepted by developing nations as well as those still in abject poverty.

mecsred 4y ago

You're blaming your straw man for "nearsightedness and expediency", yet it took you 0 rational arguments to come to a conclusion about the correct outcome. 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.

jelliclesfarm 4y ago
>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.
- mecsred 4y ago
  It's not a view, it's a fact. Most environmental projects don't have a budget to support more than a couple people. If you'd like that to be different, yeah, me too. Complaining doesn't change it though, which is why I ask for ideas instead of self-righteous doomsaying.
  - jelliclesfarm 4y ago

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

I'm pretty sure mining a empty rock from thousands of km away of 0.000000001 of its mass is less risky than mining the same thing in our backyard. Zero risk is impossible, but we know the risk of doing the things we do right now. 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

namlem 4y ago

The moon is a lifeless rock. What is there to disrupt? It's deep ocean mining that is risky and should be avoided.