Yesterday, the president-elect appointed private space advocate and businessman Charles Miller to the NASA transition team.
[…]
Last year, Miller led research that concluded private and international partnerships could make it 90 percent cheaper for NASA to set up a permanent, crewed base on the moon. The lunar base could theoretically be used to mine water from the moon’s craters and split it into hydrogen and oxygen—rocket fuel—to sell to private companies. By turning the moon into a gas station, there are hopes that these mines could make space exploration cheaper and easier.
Oh, there’s an idea, let’s get busy destroying the moon while we finish killing our earth. Yep, that’s bound to work. The colonial mindset, it never dies. Like mindless termites, gnawing and chewing through everything, with destructive glee. I have nothing outside a gigantic, near-fatal eyeroll.
Via Raw Story.
It would be a shame if a permanent moon-base distracted from the plan to send lots of rich people to Mars.
The only upside I can see here is a presidential sight seeing trip to the moon, and certain persons being *cough* lost in space.
Sorry, I thought it was fairly obvious that the only way there would ever be much in the way of major movement into space was if there was something there that was profitable to exploit. If the only goal is scientific exploration, then robots will always be cheaper and better.
You can obviously make the argument that we shouldn’t be bothering with space when there are so many problems on earth. Many people do. Of course, there will always be problems on earth, so that’s pretty much the same as saying we shouldn’t explore space at all.
I’m not sure where you’re coming from here, though. If you’re arguing that space exploration is good, but there’s something bad about putting yucky mines and things and spoiling other planets, then I think that’s crazy. The moon is just a big rock. I don’t feel any responsibility towards rocks. By all means, put the mines there, as far as possible from actual ecosystems which I feel far more responsibility to protect. It’s a big place, after all — if there are any future tourists who want to get the authentic, unspoiled lunarscape, I’m sure there will still be places they can go.
Bruce:
Colonial assholes have been saying the very same thing about our earth, for ages. That worked out, right?
As for the moon being nothing more than a big rock, yeah, um, you might want to learn a bit more about that complete and utter lack of relationship with our earth and stuff.
What will mining the Moon do to the Earth?
Oh gods, never mind, I give up. I cannot deal with colonial minded assholism right now.
Hasn’t anyone seen Iron Sky? The Nazis are already on the moon.
Unless that was meant to be a prophetic movie…
Any fucking way, spending money on mining the moon is a grand idea, of course -- just think, it’ll be a great distraction from the impending nuclear winter and subsequent extinction of the human species. Money well-spent!
Them private companies have sure done a lot already to make this world a better place.
The core evil of colonialism is that it robs native life -human and otherwise- of its own land, condemning it to death.
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But what about cases where there is no native life? When life started in the sea the land and sky were dead. Then sea life colonized(!) the land and the air and now nothing on Earth is dead. Most of us like the way that turned out.
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My hope for Earth life continuing beyond this planet is probably not shared by most people. I don’t give a shit about humans, I just want cells on a comet here or there, ready to carry on evolution after we and our star are gone.
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As for the Trumpians, I am more afraid of their success in space than their failure. Once you get past the activation energy required to set up something sustainable on the Moon, unlimited free energy and materials will pretty much make you trillionaire/world dictator for eternity.
A major obstacle to mining the moon is that none of the necessary technology exists.
The linked article consists entirely of hand-waving. It is a fantasy.
like this
Heck, Native Americans became who they are because Eurasians colonized the western hemisphere. Same word, same concept. I don’t see how you can paint everything with the same brush.
Yes, because humans of the colonial mindset are just mindless organic material flittering hither and thither around the earth, haphazardly finding niches and pushing other organic material out of yet more niches without a second thought. It’s not like we can do better or anything like that.
I admit, I’m torn on this issue since I am very much in favour of exploring and utilising* space. But I also see the issue of ‘ruining’ other world(lets). Planetary protection is a big concern when missions are launched, but, for now, these missions are almost exclusively managed by space agencies. If (when) commercial missions beyond Earth orbit become commonplace, things like PP are probably among the first to go out of the window because it has no value to a business. So they’ll screw things up before long because it’s cheaper not to care and weasel out of their responsibility after the damage is done.**
I’m also not keen on spoiling world(lets) with industry if we don’t understand them. It’s like tearing up the rainforest without studying it first, or poisoning the oceans when you’ve hardly explored them at all. Which is, of course, exactly what we’re doing as I’m typing this. I don’t mean to imply that I’d be just fine with wrecking everything after the last scientific report is written up either. Like I said, I’m torn, because I think we also need space industry if we want to do more things in space.
Caine, how would you feel about asteroid mining? I think its probably the safest or least harmful way of exploiting resources in space, since you don’t have to touch placess like the Moon or Mars, where the impact (and potential loss) is practically impossible to gauge.
Re: multitool (#5):
As far as I understand the economics (and hopeful thinking) behind mining the Moon / asteroids, the resources would mainly be used where they are mined or in space. It would be comparatively easy to send everything back to Earth and use it in orbit.
Actually bringing things down to the ground for use is probably tricky enough to discourage commercial ventures of that sort for the foreseeable future. Right now recovering a returning crew is a major undertaking with lots and lots of safety hurdles. While unmanned ‘resource packages’ would probably not demand quite as high a safety margin,*** I think it would be far from easy. And there are bound to be very strict limits on package size, too, since you can’t build an arbitrarily large heatshield or parachute to recover your materials in one piece. So you’d only get small returns with each drop you set up. That’s probably only worthwhile with some rare earths and precious metals desperately needed by our earth-bound economy.
My best guess for effects on Earth:
-- Fewer rocket launches: if ‘everything’ can be manufactured in orbit only human crews have to be sent up, while robotic missions would still minimise that need.****
-- Things that do get sent back (the rare earths / precious metals) might actually reduce our reliance on the exceptionally disastrous mining practices used to extract them down here, so there could be some environmental upsides for us on the planet
-- Lots more interest in space because the cost would drop precipitously
*I’ll keep this deliberately vague because the actual ‘uses’ of space are both varied and, in many cases, hotly debated.
** c.f. any oilspill ever.
***No crew to consider, but it’s not just them you have to keep safe.
****Disposal of the unreasonably rich would also be much easier if you can set up a five star resort on some tiny rock somewhere in the Oort cloud. “Sorry, Sir, the next shuttle home doesn’t leave for another 31 years. In the meantime please enjoy your stay!”
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……
BTW just to reverse myself on everything, I have an itching suspicion that native life on the Moon is very very likely.
It has ice, minerals, eternal sunlight, and it has been blasted in the face with infected sludge from Earth for 4 billion years. There ought to be some weird offshoot archaea at least.
If such life exists, then mining the Moon would clearly be an act of planetary genocide.
Okay. The moon is just a fuckin’ rock:
Yeah, it’s not important, let’s blow it up! Or mine it to nothing at all. Won’t have the least effect, nope.
multitool:
Oh ffs. No. Indians settled in an uninhabited place. We did not show up and decide to unleash genocide on long established peoples. We also didn’t place any emphasis on destroying our environs. Colonialism is acquisition through brute force and domination, generally involving war or genocide. Britain became an empire through colonisation -- brutal colonisation. American and Canadian Indians have never recovered from the genocide. You’ll find this is the same with most indigenous peoples, all over the planet. As you seem to have little acquaintance with history, please don’t be telling me what Indians did or didn’t do, and do not mistake our settling on Turtle Island for colonisation. They are not remotely the same thing.
Indians have always have a vested responsibility towards all life (and yes, there were tribal wars, and other bad acts. There were also committed actions to change those things, frinst., the Haudenosaunee Confederation.) That responsibility is based in sustainability, and respect.
A colonial mindset is short-term, rapacious, greedy, disrespectful (it’s just a rock!) and full out destructive. The colonial mindset has been, and remains committed to filthy energy, in spite of the fact we are busy making our source of life incapable of sustaining our lives, as well as the lives of other beings.
Unlike Bruce, I do have respect for rocks. I have respect for all life, and when you have respect, it makes you mindful. A colonial mindset doesn’t allow for any of that. This particular fantasy is simply extending the colonial greed for filthy energy outward, there’s no change there. There’s zero consideration for impact, there’s simply no consideration. The Lakota oyate say Mitakuye oyasin -- we are all related. It’s a reminder that everything is connected. All life is connected. There would most likely never have been conditions for life to arise on our earth without the earth’s moon. A colonial mindset does not care about connection, refuses to see or consider the connection; it’s a mentality of disconnection.
Komarov:
I would be more comfortable with it, but the same reservations apply. If we can’t manage to change ourselves from colonial destruction to respectful sustainability, we’ll be a plague on the universe, assuming we ever get there at all.
So okay; I’m amateur astronomer and SF writer, a fan of Star Trek and a bigger fan of Babylon 5 and Carl Sagan’s visions for our future as written in his Pale Blue Dot, among other things as well as an environmentalist and I think that this idea could be done in a good way and I’m tentatively in favour of it with some provisios.
I’d like to note here that the Apollo 8 image of Earth from lunar orbit was one of things that inspired many environmentalists as well as scientists and provoked a lot of thought in a lot of people providing a new perspective and understanding. This idea of an attempt to return to and eventually mine our Moon -- which is still decades off from being realised could perhaps have similar effects in making us appreciate our planet more, understand and learn so much more and inspiring and providing people with hope, knowledge and wonder as well as new technologies for our whole pale blue dot.
I’d like to note that the money is spent on Earth on such missions* and that it develops new technologies in sometimes very surprising directions that help everyone e.g. medical technologies developed by various NASA programs noted here :
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/postsecondary/features/F_At_the_Hostipal_with_NASA.html
I think that space exploration science including ideas like this inspires people to do more science, to think more, to see things in new scientific, artistic and cultural perspectives and gives many of them hope for a better world and drives them to then making that world better.
I’m going to second (#12) Komarov’s best guesses for effects on Earth too and suggest that people look at the ideas of what such space exploration could mean for the better including progressive politics as discussed by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy which I’d highly recommend if people haven’t read it although I will admit I can get a bit info-dumpy & technical at times.
@8. Multitool :
I share that hope -- and I do give a shit about people. For all the bad about us, in our nature, in our pasts and what we’ve done I think there is also a lot of good too. A lot of potential for becoming better, for learning, for creating wonderful and good things and making the cosmos a better place.
Trump and his ilk can’t live forever. He’s clearly not a healthy young man now (whatever his clownish doctor says!) and its quite possible, even likely, that by the time people return to the Moon he’ll be dead -- perhaps long dead and that his movement will have collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, unworkability and blatant corrosive nastiness. I think and hope the Trump Presidency will be very brief. Even in a scenario where a young healthy Trumpian manages to be in that position that free energy and materials and new technologies will also be available for his opponents and potentially help them too.
That seems like a very big ‘IF’ indeed to me given what the moon-rocks show. The Moon doesn’t have “eternal” sunlight but a fortnight long day-night cycle. It also gets blasted by a lot of deadly radiation without the benefit of an dense atmosphere or strong magnetic fields and there are also reasons to think its chemistry and the nature of the lunar regolith (soil) are extremely hostile to any life.
I think the possibility of even extremophiles surviving on our Moon is remote -- and, of course, if they are there then the only way to discover this is to go and do the research which has been done to a certain extent with both robotic and human missions and turned up zilch so far. The first sets of Moon-walking Apollo astronauts up to &including Apollo 14 incidentally were kept in quarantine following their return to Earth for just that reason but this quarantine was later deemed unnecessary for later flights. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Quarantine_Facility ) So I’m going to go with the scientific consensus here and say we’re pretty sure there isn’t life on the Moon. Mars is another story of course.
* As Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer notes here :
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/11/28/why-explore-space/#.WF3Jd_l96M8
These benefits may start with people in the First World but they do help everyone on Earth ultimately -- and the amount of money spent on NASA has been, I believe, accurately described as “one half of one percent” of the USA’s federal budget. (Figure from 2010 but I don’t think it has increased any, if anything likely to have fallen.)
Well, let’s put it this way. As a species, we’ve had about a million years now of mining our own planet to hell and back. We’ve stomped around in just about every ecosystem, we’ve had effects on the planet that will go into the geologic record. But with all the damage that we’ve done, precisely how much influence has any of that had on the moon? Aside from a handful of landings, zero. We could set off every nuke we’ve got and blow the entire ecosphere to kingdom come, and I doubt the effect upon the moon would be even measurable. So yes, the moon is important — but if you’re saying that anything we could do there in the next thousand years could have the slightest influence to life on earth, then you’ve got a pretty amazing overestimation of our abilities. “Mine it to nothing” — seriously?
Look, if even a microbe gets found on another rock in the solar system, I’ll be right there with you. Hands off for the next thousand years. Life is what’s important. If aliens ever do show up, I suspect that we might get a sense of the cosmic proportionality of our solar system — on a cosmic scale, I suspect the DNA in a buttercup or a newt is more valuable than a thousand empty planets.
I think it was David Brin, the science fiction author, who had a series where he imagined that, after spreading through the solar system, we mostly abandoned earth entirely and tried to turn it into a full-scale conservation park for all the other life forms. I guess you can put me down as whatever shade of green it is that believes that, although technology was what got us into the current mess we’re in, it’s also what’s most likely to get us out — solar, wind, food vats, nanites mining landfills to recycle discarded elements, etc. The only other two realistic paths to sustainability that I can see are either a huge population crash, or a planetary return to a pre-industrial lifestyle, or both, and I don’t think either of those would be very pleasant for us as a species.
If we’re going to have energy production and mineral mining at all, then we should have it in a way that damages all earth’s ecosystems as little as possible — and the moon fits that bill. Of course, there are plenty of people who say that we shouldn’t have any dirty energy production or mining at all. I might be one of them, if I had the determination and wherewithal to live off the grid and not drive, or drive an electric car fueled by solar panels I owned. But since I don’t do these things, I’d feel like a hypocrite if I advocated a complete cessation — rather than, say, policies that I favor like a hefty tax on fossil fuels that goes to pay for development of sustainable energy sources.
Sure, on earth, you’re right that all things are connected, the living and the nonliving, in an intricate web. But if we’re ever going to achieve sustainability, which I agree needs to be our goal, then we need to understand that web, not mysticize it.
If that’s your definition of colonialism, then how do you tag settling the moon with the term? There aren’t any loonies there to kill. As I see it, there are three levels of colonialism:
1) no impact on any living creatures whatsoever,
2) some impact on local ecosystem due to hunting and agriculture (extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, perhaps?)
3) genocide and slavery.
I just don’t see how you can call 1 and 3 bad colonialism, but 2 is perfectly fine.
I think some of the point being missed here is mining the moon for corporate purposes, says so right in the article. This venture isn’t some altruistic For Humanity project they’re proposing, but a rich-get-richer scheme by sucking up a resource that rightfully belongs to no one. Can’t buy it from anyone.
So you tell me, if the moon doesn’t belong to anyone (or everyone, if you like), how will its territory be divided, and those divisions enforced? First come, first served? Richest wins? Who determines this and what right would they have to do that? The obvious answers sound pretty fucking colonial to me.
The easily accessible water on the Moon is confined to a few craters near the poles. Mining it all would not change the Moon in any significant way. If there is life, of course, that’s different. I expect we will look for life as a high priority -- it would be the discovery of the century.
StevoR, you make a good case against life on the Moon. If there *were* anything living there, it would have to be in ice a few meters underground. The only energy source would be daytime heat gradients.
Haven’t some cells surved in space before, on the outside of the ISS?
Anyway as you say the only way to know would be more exploration, preferably with robots. I’d advise against humans because of contamination and expense.
Re: Caine (#15):
Agreed! From an industrial / technological point of view we can get a lot closer towards a closed system. Reusing materials already in the loop rather than constantly gorging ourselves on fresh resources would be preferable even from a purely economic view -- unless you’re in the sales branch.
Given the scales involved (7 bn+ people) we probalby won’t ever get entirely away from needing new / more materials but if we push the efficiency far enough we might (or should) muddle through using low-impact methods. Gather resources that are readily available rather than drilling into the planet or digging up the countryside for whatever it is we need.
It’s a shame we are doing so little to invent our low-resource society, especially given that we are already experiencing the side-effects of wastefulness. But our species has a poor track-record with thinking ahead, and our economy doesn’t really reward prudence or foresight.
Re: brucegee1962 (#17):
Emphasis mine, because showing up in the geological record is not a small thing. Most things that show up in the geological record were either enduring or catastrophic. The way things are going I’m not betting humanity making the first category.
And as far as mining is concerned you can’t treat Earth and Moon remotely the same. For one, practically everything mined on Earth is used on Earth -- closed system. The whole point of mining the Moon, however, would be to take resources away from it. So it actually wouldn’t surprise me if a thousand years of heavy industry managed to noticeably whittle down the Moon.
Re: multitool (#20):
I don’t know about the ISS (probably ‘yes’), but there have been some satellites that sent up live fungi and mosses and other things into space: BIOPAN (wiki). There’s also some further reading, including a list of organisms ‘tested’ in space, but annoyingly little on the specific results.
Found some BIOPAN results, looks like some lichen can survive naked in space:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=24777
So there’s a chance we’ll find ‘natives’ in unexpected places.