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Worried about disturbing the ecosystem?

• yellowapple 4y ago
  The lunar quesolith is a vital natural resource which must be preserved at all costs.
  • Intermernet 4y ago
    That damn Wallace, and his despicable hound are apparently trying to raid the quesolith. They Must Be Stopped!
• mongol 4y ago
  It will become so ugly once exploitation starts. You know the pristine look of a field with new snow? To compare with once there are footsteps and tire tracks everywhere? The moon's beautiful undisturbed dust will become an ugly mess and look like garbage.
  • rini17 4y ago
    It's not like pristine snow at all, but like dusty asphalt(it really does have such color) constantly churned by meteoric impacts. It's possible however, that we avoid using such a hostile environment to a bare minimum and stay and mine underground instead. I can see Mars landscape as beautiful and worth preserving, but drawing the line there.
    • mongol 4y ago
      It is like pristine snow in that it does not have traces of human activity all over it. But in contrast to snow, it changes very slowly, and no weather to smoothen out traces either.
    • fnordpiglet 4y ago
      The regolith is replete with embedded elements from the solar wind and micrometeorites etc. Most in situ resource extraction would be surface strip mining. But the percentage of the surface needed would be small. Both the moon and mars having no oceans have vast surface areas. A totally exploitive approach would only touch such an infinitesimal tiny portion of the area it’s hard to imagine conservation is a top priority.
      • rini17 4y ago
        Parent was concerned about spoiling pristine regolith by footprints and tracks. Anyway, multiply the mine areas several times, it's unlikely the raw regolith will be exported. Processing will need solar power plants and radiators to dump waste heat (can't dump it into atmosphere as we're used to).
        • fnordpiglet 4y ago
          You could conduct the heat via heat pipes into the crust. The lunar basalt has decent thermal conductivity. Using something like mercury or alcohols (which have a low freezing point, and have ok phase change temperatures), or something more exotic you should be pretty ok. Radiators are mostly useful off a surface that can act like a heat sink, especially one as cold as the moon.
          • fnordpiglet 4y ago
            Oh I’d say you wouldn’t process regolith for export at all, but for use on the moon. I think you wouldn’t process and export raw materials on the moon I think you would do heavy industry you wouldn’t do on earth in the cave systems of the moon and export manufacture goods. I don’t think you would even export them to the earth but into orbit or interplanetary. Exported materials from the moon to mars would be a lot more economical than the earth.
          • rini17 4y ago
            If you were to just heat sink underground all the time, it will be a non renewable resource. That already happened in London underground that the ground heated to uncomfortable temperatures over time. But coupled with bidirectional heat pumps and surface radiators, there's heat storage potential.
  • boc 4y ago
    There’s always Mars
  • boc 4y ago
    There’s always Mars. Or Montana.
  • gambiting 4y ago
    I think you might be underestimating how large the moon is. Also moon is receiving thousands of meteorite impacts every day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some unchanging museum exhibit - it's an always changing planetary body.
    • ChatGTP 4y ago
      “I think you might be underestimating how large the Earth is. Also Earth is receiving thousands of meteorite impacts every day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some unchanging museum exhibit - it's an always changing planetary body.”
• zhte415 4y ago
  The solifugus were getting out of hand last year, but the packs of tardigrades we released seem to have them under control.
• CSSer 4y ago
  The moon is about 1/4th the size of the Earth, or about as wide as the United States. The moon also significantly impacts our tides here on Earth. Now, the optimist in me would say there's no way little old humanity could manage to find a way to screw that up. The pessimist in me notes that in roughly a hundred years we've managed to push our planet to the brink of ecological disaster, so to answer your question: yes, a little bit (but not the ecosystem you're referencing).
  • danparsonson 4y ago
    Ah well then pardon my snark - of course we humans are very determined when it comes to exploiting our environment but a crude look at the figures might set your mind at rest: Moon's mass - about 0.7x10^23 kgs Global annual iron ore output - about 2.5x10^12 kgs (per [1]) One over the other - 2.8x10^10 years So on the order of a billion years to remove one percent of it. And that's assuming we develop the same kind of demand for moon iron as we have here on Earth - so we have some time to think about it at least. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_ore_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_or...
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      Even a second-rate H.G. Wells adaptation could imagine humanity finding a way- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odrgDzciG6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odrgDzciG6s
    • DesiLurker 4y ago
      meh.. automated mining to solar panel construction & using the metal+energy to make a mass driver in a fully closed loop system. Now you'll have a exponentially increasing mining and space habitat and/or dyson swarm construction platform. I'll bet we can shred the moon clean off in under a few 100k years.
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        How long to do Earth?
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  No. It's because there's clearly alien spaceships hiding behind the moon.