Summary
The moon has been added to the World Monuments Fund’s (WMF) list of threatened heritage sites for the first time due to risks from commercial and governmental lunar activities.
The WMF highlights concerns about looting and damage to artefacts from Apollo missions, such as Neil Armstrong’s footprints and objects left on the moon.
WMF calls for international protocols to protect lunar heritage as private space tourism and missions increase.
The 2024 list also includes sites in conflict zones and areas endangered by climate change or unsustainable tourism.
Until we’ve mined so much that the ratio of mass between the Earth and the Moon causes tidal changes and eventually the Earth pulls the Moon into the Earth and all life is destroyed. How quickly do you think we can speedrun that?
The industrial revolution was about 150-200 years ago and our planet is dying because of it. Can we beat that record?
Edit: also, who gets dibs on the moon? Something tells me the vast majority of the population won’t get a say and mysteriously, somehow, it’ll be American mega-corps doing the mining
Hmm, that’s an awful lot of material to move the one way. I’d actually expect a lot of what’s built on the moon will get shipped further outward.
Right now, it’s moving a couple of centimeters away from Earth every year, so a bit of that would actually be a good thing. And depending on how they’re getting it off the surface, the effect on the orbit might be something very different.
I’ll take “Hyperbolic & Catastrophic Exaggerations” for $400, Alex.
I’m pretty sure you’re reply is tongue-in-cheek, but that did get me thinking how long it would take to actually destroy the Moon by mining.
Let’s say we used mass drivers to launch 1000kg of material from the Moon to the Earth every second, non stop, until the Moon was completely dismantled. The moon has a mass somewhere around 7.35×1022 kilograms. Dividing the Moon’s mass by the rate of removal, we get Time=7.35×1019seconds. Divide that by 35,536,000 seconds in a year, and it would take us about 2.33 trillion years to dismantle the moon.
Considering how the Earth only has, maybe, a billion years until the Sun’s natural life cycle makes life on Earth impossible, I’d wager that we’re good. Drill baby, drill.
Wouldn’t the orbit of the moon not change in height if it decreased in mass? Since it should theoretically continue to orbit at the same speed?
Uh, that’s not how orbital mechanics work
And also, let’s say we have to remove 10% of the moon’s mass to noticeably affect the tides (and it’s not enough to just mine it, you’d also need to remove it from the moon’s gravity well which is… A whole thing by itself, so let’s ignore that for funsies), which is about 7*10^21 kg. I can’t find statistics for total mining activity, but we mine about 2.6 * 10^12 kg iron each year. Let’s just take the 10x value of that to be safe, 2.6*10^13 “stuff” mined each year
In order to mine 10% of the moon’s mass, it’d take roughly 10^8 years, or written out, 100 000 000 years
And, as mentioned, this is while ignoring that you’d need to actually remove the moon’s mass from its gravitational well, which simply won’t be done at this scale
Worrying about this problem is so ridiculously out of scope that it’s laughable
What’s the point in mining the Moon if we’re just gonna leave what’s been mined there? Of course it would be removed.
Where did you get that 10% is what would be required to affect the tides? Why don’t we just say it’s 90% to back your point up even more?
The point is, if allowed, we’ll fuck it up like we fuck up every environment. Why must we insist on destroying everything just so some rich people can get richer? Climate change is upon us and instead of acting to prevent it we’re looking to do similar destruction elsewhere.
When you look up at the vastness and marvel of space and planetary bodies, are you desperate to see dump trucks, bucket excavators, and orange flashing lights looking back at you?
We might use the mined materials to build stuff on the moon. Even if we were mining to bring resources back there’ll be a lot of stuff dug up that we don’t want so we’d obviously want to leave that there. We’d need to process the ore on the moon to extract the small amount of material that we’re after.
90% would be an obviously ridiculous number to use so would undermine their argument. Assuming their numbers are correct then it would take 10,000,000 years to remove 1% of the moon. And we wouldn’t remove all of the material that we mine so we’d take even longer than that to actually remove 1%.
Having said that, I really don’t agree with the sentiment of letting people do what they want on the moon because it won’t affect us. We should be more considerate of every environment just as a matter of principle.
I bet I could destroy all life with only half an A-press.
Yea! And you also have to worry about any solar panels we install on the moon reflecting more sunlight back at the Earth and heating it up!
Oh wait, no you don’t. And if you spend even 2 seconds thinking about it, you’d realize how meaningless of a concern that is.