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Out of curiosity, why? I have a very different perspective and am having a hard time seeing where you're coming from. From my perspective, the Moon's just a hug

Out of curiosity, why? I have a very different perspective and am having a hard time seeing where you're coming from. From my perspective, the Moon's just a huge dead rock that makes Mars looks like a tropical paradise. 2-week long days with boiling temperatures, followed by 2-week long nights with temperatures near zero. All while getting pounded endlessly by meteorites with no real shielding. Placing ashes or souvenirs on it seem completely innocuous to me. I also just did the math, and if each human on Earth used up a square foot on the Moon with this sort of stuff, there'd be enough space for more than 400 trillion people, which is a long winded way of saying that the amount of space used up is effectively 0. So I'm just not really seeing the downside?

paxys 3y ago
Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard. The moon is also, unlike Mars and other similar bodies, immediately accessible to us (by many, many orders of magnitude of distance and effort). And "it's just one ship/urn/container" is never really a good argument because it is always going to scale up exponentially. So we need to treat it less like a trash dump and more a valuable scientific (and maybe eventually tourist) preserve.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  > Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard. This is the part we probably disagree on the most. Wherever we look on Earth, in ice, in deserts, under the crushing depths of water in trenches, even in fumeroles and volcanic ecosystems... we find life or evidence of life. All of Earth that we can access is teeming with life, the history of life, our history. It's also a dynamic system on long time-scales, a glacier today is the water in our lakes and oceans "tomorrow" so to speak. We don't know what we might contaminate or disturb with our whims, on Earth, but on the Moon we know it is literally lifeless. Not devoid of life most people care about, or are aware of, which is an important distinction compared to lifelessness.

paxys 3y ago

Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard. The moon is also, unlike Mars and other similar bodies, immediately accessible to us (by many, many orders of magnitude of distance and effort). And "it's just one ship/urn/container" is never really a good argument because it is always going to scale up exponentially. So we need to treat it less like a trash dump and more a valuable scientific (and maybe eventually tourist) preserve.

EA-3167 3y ago
> Sure the moon is barren and useless but then so is Antarctica or large chunks of the ocean floor or really most of the earth's surface. That isn't a green light to ignore the consequences and let people treat it as their backyard. This is the part we probably disagree on the most. Wherever we look on Earth, in ice, in deserts, under the crushing depths of water in trenches, even in fumeroles and volcanic ecosystems... we find life or evidence of life. All of Earth that we can access is teeming with life, the history of life, our history. It's also a dynamic system on long time-scales, a glacier today is the water in our lakes and oceans "tomorrow" so to speak. We don't know what we might contaminate or disturb with our whims, on Earth, but on the Moon we know it is literally lifeless. Not devoid of life most people care about, or are aware of, which is an important distinction compared to lifelessness.