Wikipedia has an interesting article listing most of the moon trash:
If we go the next 1000 years without some serious resource extraction on the moon, we are probably screwed as a species.
Why? What exists on the moon that doesn’t exist in adequate quantities on earth where it’s much easier to get at?
Considering the size of the moon and the lack of atmosphere I don’t think they’ll lack for untainted places to dig.
Even if it does, the cost of traveling to the moon with an entire mining crew and their equipment, mining, and shipping the product with all its weight back to earth would boost the price astronomically. I can’t see how it could be cost effective.
The big resource on the moon that isn’t really available here is Helium‑3. Admittedly, that is mainly useful as an energy source for fusion once we get that figured out, so it isn’t practical now. The other things would be water, iron, and other basic resources for use in space. It is MUCH easier to lift resources off the moon than from Earth. Using them from the moon for construction in space would be much more efficient.
You should look into him, @burpo_the_wonder_mutt .
He was a child prodigy on guitar and mandolin.
Played with Lester Flatt and Cash.
Has had a career that has given him many awards and accolades.
Still I kinda hate him. You can tell by his demeanor he’s full of himself.
Ken Burns country music documentary featured him prominently.
(Sorry, hijack)
It’s not what the moon has that Earth does not, it’s what Earth has that the moon does not. Namely, a deep gravity well and a thick atmosphere. Reaching orbit from the moon’s surface is trivial and would be crucial in expanding our reach beyond Earth’s surface.
You certainly wouldn’t ship moon harvested resources back to Earth. The whole point is getting resources outside of a deep gravity well, dumping them back in would be stupid.
I’d much more worried about all the Starlink satellites reentering and burning up in the upper atmosphere than I would about some trash on the Moon. AIUI, roughly one satellite burns up every day and once the Starlink constellation is complete, it’ll be about 5/day. And it’s not just Starlink, there’s several other large constellations being put up there. This is all going to be some serious pollution in the upper atmosphere.
So then you’re saying that if we don’t have a major presence in space in the next 1000 years we’re “probably doomed as a species”? Because I don’t see why that would be the case. No matter how much we fuck up the ecology of earth, it’s still going to be the most habitable place we can conceivable access by several orders of magnitude.
And any plausible scale of space habitation will still make the humans in space a footnote compared to the humans on Earth.
1000 years is a very long time. If we fail to gain a foothold in space in that period, it’s almost certainly because we have devastated our civilization in some way.
Keeping all your eggs in one basket isn’t very smart; just ask the dinosaurs.
On the timescale of 1,000 years? I don’t know about that.
Sure, homo sapiens has been around for 300,000 years confined to Earth and doing just fine, but if they don’t escape before 301,000 years roll around then they’re doomed.
I do not find this position at all convincing.
We may expand significantly into space, and if we do then the moon will be a useful source of resources. It’s unlikely that the numbers of people in space will ever be more than a minuscule portion of humanity, simply due to the vast disparity of resources required to live anywhere else compared to Earth. And we might not expand significantly into space, and if we don’t we probably won’t be doomed.
Also, 1000 years is not that long a time. There are pubs in Ireland that are older than that.
The top of a gravity well, for one. If we ever want to build serious space infrastructure, we’ll need to get the raw materials from somewhere other than Earth.
Again, the claim I’m disputing isn’t that the moon’s resources would be useful for building out space infrastructure. They would be. The claim I’m disputing is that we’re “probably doomed as a species” if we aren’t making large-scale use of lunar resources within 1000 years.
And then there were THESE goofs, who, instead of feeding the hungry or housing the homeless, want to put a cross on the moon.
[hijack]
This was actually a massive mistake on my part in my senior engineering project in college. We were using a transducer to do sonar image mapping of an underwater object using a commercial digital ADC card. I did all the math to make sure that the sampling rate on the card would be sufficient to meet the Nyquist frequency to be able to accurately measure the returns from the transducer given the size of the tank we were using and the expected difference in return times.
But I forgot that the speed of sound in water is much higher than the speed of sound in air. So the echos got back much faster, requiring a much higher sampling rate.
Fortunately, we were able to complete the project using an air-filled tank and an honest assessment of the engineering failure on my (and my team’s) part got us full marks.
[/hijack]
So, what are you going to do with the harvested resources, then? Who are the resources for, the handful of people working on the moon? Are they going to build and man the smelting facilities and factories needed to extract and use the stuff? What is the purpose here?