this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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We should declare the moon like a national park (global park) and preserve it as is.
Why? I would rather have preservation on earth, than on the moon.
You can walk and chew gum.
You are kidding right? The moon is essential for life on Earth.
Not sure building a moon base to launch spaceships from is going to be the end of the world
Building a (single) moon base is no the same as focusing on mining the shit out of it.
As long as the mass stays broadly the same, I don't see the issue?
There should be some rules put in place prior to moon mining. America's national parks allow some oil drilling but there are rules and public input that is allowed.
That's to protect fauna and flora, zero of which exist on the moon.
I'd be happy to see lights from moonbased operations from earth
Yes, but mostly by it's mass, and maybe by it's albedo. Is there anything else about the moon of relevance for life on Earth?
It's mass of 7 * 10^22^ kg is so enormous, it wouldn't make a dent if we add or remove hundreds of gigatons, which is far beyond our lifting capabilities at least for the next decades.
It's surface is so huge, we cannot affect it's albedo significantly.
So even if we approached the moon as a mere profit to be exploited, maximizing output and disregarding any concerns, how could this be detrimental to life on Earth?
The moon will be fine and the earth will be fine.
But for me the idea of some private company extracting massive amounts of profit from something like the moon just sounds wrong.
We all know they’re not going up there for the good of humanity or whatever. They want to turn their billions into trillions.
Personally I think they need to give up their wealth on earth first, and then we can think about how best to extract resources from the moon so that it will be beneficial to humans rather than a few bank accounts. We couldn’t do it with oil, but maybe we can with rare moon material? One can only dream.
I know I know pie in the sky right?
Yes, and necessarily figure out and establish lunar industrialization in the process. Depending on viewpoint, this can be a big argument in favor of the good of humanity.
I agree we need to fix our economic incentives and inequalities.
Though I don't see how the Moon of all things should be spared from capitalist exploitation. It's probably the one place where they can't do much harm, no matter how hard they capitalist.
Theses worries are fully justified when it comes to rain forests, deep sea mining, child slavery, union busting and pretty much anything they touch on Earth. But on the Moon?
There is one interesting worst case scenario: A corporate monopoly exploits the Moon so ruthlessly, that it outcompetes terrestial production. Let's say certain building materials or other things of value are suddenly much cheaper to import from the Moon than they are to make on Earth. Wouldn't that end exploitation of people and animals in these industries on Earth, preserve ecosystems which would have been destroyed otherwise?
If we can replace the kind of mining that destroys the environment here on Earth with mining outside of Earth (not just the Moon, but maybe even more importantly asteroids on the Asteroid Belt) how is that a bad thing?
Even having Moon mining in addition to Earth-based mining will probably reduce the impact of the latter, if only by pushing down the prices of certain ores, making some Earth-based mining operations for those unprofitable and forcing them to close down (or never start in the first place) which will be good for people and good for Nature.
Or do you think the people doing the mining here on Earth (and more often than not leaving behind massive ecological damage) aren't "extracting massive amounts of profit" for doing it right here were they do a lot more damage?!
You really need to look at it in aggregate, not just consider only the first level effects and hence "more mining anywhere" = "bad" - "more mining way out there were it can't possibly harm people or Nature" is close to the best thing that could happen to our resource-intensive Economy (the best would be the end of Consumerism, but there are way more powerful moneyed interests align against it that against Moon mining).
That's how you know people crying for the environment aren't honest about it. Because when presented with a viable alternative, they flip out with TECHNOLOGY BAD
Maybe some, certainly not all. I'm deeply worried about the state of our environment. I'm even an activist, but welcome space industry, because it can reduce pressure down here. Also because TECHNOLOGY GOOD.
There's even a whole solar punk instance on lemmy. Not exactly my breed, just pointing out reality is and people are more diverse.
It’s also a desolate wasteland we might as well extract the resources from to jump off to better locations in the solar system.
The presence of all that material up there is essential to life on Earth (via the tides).
Its surface features are not: in fact you would need massive megastructures for people down here to even notice any change to those features.
Absolutelly, lets not remove the Moon when we get to the point of being capable of doing so, but that's an entirelly different level of preservation than making the whole thing be preserved according to the same rules as national parks.
How so? More essential than the Earth?
I assume you’re referring to the tidal forces that the moon provides. If so: We could strip-mine the dark side of the moon (to prevent any aesthetic impact to earthers) for millennia and barely even scratch the surface (hah) of the total mass of Luna. We’re not going to throw a world-eater at it.
I don't know why they are downvoting you. The only explanation would be the sheer lack of knowledge on how much larger and massive the moon is compared to everything humanity has mined and could mine for millions of years
I think my account is getting targeted by some bots. A lot of my comments lately are, a while after I post them, get an identical number of downvotes to upvotes, but all at once. I’m gonna investigate it a bit more thoroughly this weekend when I have some free time. I’ve seen posts indicating a nontrivial amount of other users may be experiencing similar things too, so this might be a coordinated effort of some sort, though I have no idea what the goal might be other than to just try to irritate people and push posts and comments down.
Yet.
Try never
An airless desert impossible to reach for and with zero impact (even indirect) on the life of for 99.999% of people, with almost as much surface are as the whole of the Americas and which is entirelly devoid of life and always will be, is the last place you need to preserve.