I do not understand this. Why would any enviromentalist have a significant problem mining on the moon?! There is no “enviroment” on the moon. It is a big pile of dust and rocks. Yet he, and the people commenting on the article are saying how horrific it would be to mine the moon for minerals. I do not think it would be hyperbole to say that this stinks of some purely anti-technology mind-set.
I liked the first comment where the guy said after the moon and mars, we would consume this universe and other universes.
Dude, if we could consume another universe, we probably wouldn’t need to.
I think the point is that the moon and other extraterrestrial bodies are traditionally considered outside the realm of territorial claims or private development or resource extraction:
If nobody owns the moon, who gets to mine it?
One would think that it wouldn’t be very efficient to mine the moon, given all the rocket fuel and such that would be required.
I guess mining the moon could be a bad thing if enough mass was removed to effect the tides, but that’s pretty doubtful.
So yeah, protecting the environment of the moon seems pretty silly
It’s morons like this that make me want to dump used motor oil in the nearest storm drain.
Although I have doubts as to the author’s scholarship, this site leads to two points as to why the mining of He-3 would be an environmental disaster.
1.) If the author is correct, then the Chinese would not be strip mining the moon, but the West Texas desert where the moon landings were originally faked. We can not allow those Red Communist Bastards to strip mine the Lone Star State. Where would Bush vacation? Do we really want him spending more time in the White House? I, however, agree with NASA and find the accusations of a moon landing hoax to be insupportable. Therefore, if we assume that the photographs contained in the link were actual images captured on the lunar service, we come to possible environmental disaster #2.
2.) The images clearly show a thriving lunar ecosystem with at least two highly evolved vertebrates, one of which is showing signs of early tool use. We can not in good conscience inflict the planetary rape and pillage tactics of humanity on this fragile ecology and budding civilization.
It is our moral imperative to stop this mission before it wreaks untold damage.
Hmmm. An “environment” does not necessarily translate to an ecology. (Cf. the need to maintain a sterile environment in some medical treatments and some biological experiments.)
If the objection is that there are things we can learn from the moon about the origins and early history of the solar system which Earth’s restless wind and waves and plate tectonics have long since destroyed or made inaccessible, then it’s a reasonable objection to unregulated lunar mining. Which would mean – make a reasonable case that there’s something special about the proposed mining area that requires us to deny a mining permit, or they get the permit. Then if you need to protect part of Plato or Hadley Rille or something because it’s a unique feature that hasn’t been investigated – OK.
There’s a huge gap between “save the Giant Sequoia forest” and “Never cut down another tree” – and there’s a big gap between “preserve special features of the moon that we can learn from” and “no lunar mining.”
I know nothing of Andrew Smith (except that he seems to have missed the significance of July 2, 1776 and succeeding developments, writing for the Guardian as though the U.K. had some say over the U.S. space program), but I see something of his point.
Which of course does not mean that the Moon should be off limits to all development. There is a happy medium between anything goes and no trespassing under any circumstances.
I don’t quite see where the author comes out and states that it would be horrific to mine the moon for minerals. Rather, he says that it would be strange if future environmentalists were to organize a campaign to oppose companies mining the moon for minerals. Which would be strange, so he’s right about that.
The author also makes a variety of goofy half-claims and innuendos (holy god, the Chinese mission statement mentions mapmaking! Surely no one has ever mapped the moon before! What can this mean?) which suggests that he probably isn’t really speaking on behalf of any real environmentalist groups.
In fact, I think the moon’s environment probably should be protected to a certain extent, and if there ever is any large scale human activity there, such things should be taken into account. For example, the lunar surface doesn’t experience any atmospheric erosion, so closer study could probably tell us a lot about the history of the solar system. It would be a shame if that pristine quality were wiped out by gases from industrial activity or some uncontrollable mutant form of ringworm that learns how to survive in vacuum.
If nothing else, we all have to look at the moon, so at the very least they should keep their strip mines to the far side. But if the Chinese are able to perfect fusion technology to the point where mining the moon becomes profitable, then I say more power to them. It’s more than we’ve managed to accomplish so far.
That’s the sort of question I’m asking about so-called public property all the time.
It’s easier to answer about legally recognized public property, though; after all, there’s a body of law establishing the existence of public property and determining how decisions are to be made about its use, and so forth.
We may still have some cosmic philosophical uncertainties about what the concept of publicly owned property (or privately owned property, for that matter) “really means”, but at least we’ve got an agreed-upon way to deal with the practical issues concerning it.
In the case of the moon, though, it seems harder to know how to address the issue. If the moon is agreed by international treaty to be immune from all territorial claims, then how does a state or commercial entity establish a legal right to extract resources from it?
My understanding is that the UN is trying to establish itself as the ultimate owner and controller. Much like the Law of the Sea treaty, which would claim ownership in the name of the UN of all “International Waters”.
Of course, I could be wrong. I’m too lazy at the moment to do the research. Instead, I’m going to pour myself a shot of Balvenie Portwood.
What this would really mean is that some third world bureaucrat from Outer Buttfuckia, who is poorly educated and extremely ignorant, will be trying to manage space resources and collecting taxes in the name of the UN. Most of which would be squandered, misappropriated or outright stolen. While the regs themselves would make no sense to anyone with any education or brains and would not only be completely counter-productive, but probably would criminalize any form of commercial enterprise.
I think you are, at least in part. AFAICT, the UN Moon Treaty of 1979, nearly thirty years ago, was the last time the UN attempted to set international regulations governing the use of the moon, and the 1979 treaty was not ratified by any of the space-faring powers.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, on the other hand, has been in force since 1994 (with US compliance, although so far without US ratification; the Administration is currently pushing for ratification by the Senate, which will be voting on it shortly). AFAICT, the UNCLOS doesn’t make the UN the “owner” of international waters.
I agree that UN agencies have definitely had their share of scandals about incompetence and corruption (many of them, btw, involving bureaucrats from the US and other developed countries rather than “Outer Buttfuckia”). But it’s not clear to me that an international-law approach to moon use would be more counter-productive or wasteful than the traditional approach of going to war with one’s trade rivals.
The LAST GREAT WAR OF LIBERATION has begun!
People, wake up! It is time for our brothers, the minerals, to be granted the rights we so blithely assume for ourselves. How would you like it if some company stripped you out of your bed, chopped you up and fed you into an oven? It is unconscionable! Even baby coal, as young as 2 million years!
Won’t someone think of the mineral children?
Yes, the time has arrived for MINERAL LIBERATION! 
I expect that when the time is ripe, there’ll be a lunar equivalent of the Law of the Sea Treaty.
By force? Not trying to be a smarty pants here. Isn’t that how land is traditionally acquired? At least on the level on nation-states. The first one to the moon with mining equipment and enough guns to defend it stakes a claim, treaties be damned.
What does Al Gore, the Emperor of the Moon and a man who has ridden the mighty moon worm, think about this?
Well sure, it’s easy if you just make shit up. That’s what laws are: made up shit.
It is remarkable to me that there exits an ethical system in which a government may extract resources from human beings but not from orbiting rocks. To answer your question directly, when extraction of moon resources becomes politically expedient, rest assured that a way will be found to establish a “legal right”.
Galactus laughs at your puny reasoning.
Below is a bit of this article that pretty much says otherwise;
“Critics are also right to be concerned about the powers of direct taxation the treaty confers on the International Seabed Authority. The details of this innovation are buried in Article 13 of the treaty’s third annex, and contain a mix of “production charges” and annual million-dollar “administrative” fees. Such measures are all but unprecedented for an international organization and have a potential for corruption, especially when the taxes can run as high as 70% of net proceeds.”
There are other bits too, that in this article talk about forcing all vessels (including submarines) to sail on the surface while showing the flag in coastal waters. I’d read somewhere else about how it could potentially even require nations to “request permission” from the UN in order to send their navies into International Waters. Obviously, no one would, but that opens an entirely different can of worms.
Now tell me again how this isn’t the UN taking charge, in a bad way, of the Commons. Because I’ll bet money this would be the model of how they’ll want to deal with Space if and when we ever reached the point of commercial space activity.