5 ms·

>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. Have you stopped to think

by tw04 3y ago

>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. 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.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
If someone can mine the entire moon away I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement that would be
- tw04 3y ago
  "If someone can cut down the entire Amazon Rainforest, I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement." 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.
  - jasonjayr 3y ago
    If there's iron there, then there's the potential for Low-background Steel ...
    - firtoz 3y ago
      Well, until we drop some nukes on there.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      There's an unshielded nuclear reactor hanging in the sky just like bricks don't. 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").
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    A species that has the technical capability to mine and transport away ~10^23 kg of mass, is a species that has the capability to replace that mass.
    - firtoz 3y ago
      What if they invested too much into greed and not nearly enough into self preservation?
      - dotnet00 3y ago
        Removing significant percentages of the Moon's mass is a whole different ballgame from climate change on Earth, where even now people will debate if it'sreally anthropogenic. 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.
        tw04 3y ago
        >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. 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.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by immediate noticeable harm. Running pipelines next to rivers has the potential to cause an oil spill, so the harm is not immediate. There's still room for people to convince themselves that they'll make the pipeline safe and reliable. But the mass of the Moon is so high, that mining and shipping off significant portions of it has to be very deliberate and there's no question of 'potential' in causing a shift in the Earth's orbit. 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.
- suprjami 3y ago
  If someone can cut down an entire forest then I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement that would be. 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.
- dirkc 3y ago
  This makes me wonder, would "mine the entire moon away" require new physics or simply require a monumental effort?
apsec112 3y ago
- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick - 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
- tw04 3y ago
  >- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick 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?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > I'm aware of how large the moon is. 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+*+%28moon+orbital+radius+%2F+moon+orbital+period%29%5E2 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+20+TW 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+Gregorian+years+%2F+384.17 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
Greatly changing the mass of the moon seems like a bad idea, in general. Obviously it would take a lot of time and effort to change the mass in any significant way, but by the time we noticed any problems we caused it would be too late.

by tw04 3y ago

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago

If someone can mine the entire moon away I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement that would be

tw04 3y ago
"If someone can cut down the entire Amazon Rainforest, I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement." 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.
- jasonjayr 3y ago
  If there's iron there, then there's the potential for Low-background Steel ...
  - firtoz 3y ago
    Well, until we drop some nukes on there.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    There's an unshielded nuclear reactor hanging in the sky just like bricks don't. 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").
- dotnet00 3y ago
  A species that has the technical capability to mine and transport away ~10^23 kg of mass, is a species that has the capability to replace that mass.
  - firtoz 3y ago
    What if they invested too much into greed and not nearly enough into self preservation?
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      Removing significant percentages of the Moon's mass is a whole different ballgame from climate change on Earth, where even now people will debate if it'sreally anthropogenic. 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.
      - tw04 3y ago
        >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. 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.
        dotnet00 3y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by immediate noticeable harm. Running pipelines next to rivers has the potential to cause an oil spill, so the harm is not immediate. There's still room for people to convince themselves that they'll make the pipeline safe and reliable. But the mass of the Moon is so high, that mining and shipping off significant portions of it has to be very deliberate and there's no question of 'potential' in causing a shift in the Earth's orbit. 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.
suprjami 3y ago
If someone can cut down an entire forest then I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement that would be. 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.
dirkc 3y ago
This makes me wonder, would "mine the entire moon away" require new physics or simply require a monumental effort?

apsec112 3y ago

- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick - 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

tw04 3y ago
>- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick 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?
- ben_w 3y ago
  > I'm aware of how large the moon is. 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+*+%28moon+orbital+radius+%2F+moon+orbital+period%29%5E2 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+20+TW 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+Gregorian+years+%2F+384.17 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting

jsbisviewtiful 3y ago

Greatly changing the mass of the moon seems like a bad idea, in general. Obviously it would take a lot of time and effort to change the mass in any significant way, but by the time we noticed any problems we caused it would be too late.