Could living on/ mining the moon cause unintended consequences for Earth? e.g. changes in tide or anything else?
In: 248
The short answer is no and the long answer is also no.
Imagine the town / city / village you live in. All that land. Now think about the ants on that land. Millions perhaps billions are right now tunneling through the land. Building nets and burrows and hollowing it out.
That’s the kind of scale you are dealing with. How much impact are those ants doing? Maybe there’s some small local effects like making the ground weaker in a small area. But on the whole the scale is so massive as to be effectively zero. Maybe over thousands of years you could slightly modify the mass by an appreciative amount, but not in a human lifespan.
Now a better question would be the opposite of what you asked. How much space matter would we need to change the tides? Moving comets or asteroids into Earth/Lunar orbit would be difficult, but we are talking near-future / modern technology levels of difficult. The orbits of the major planets are perfectly predictable and modying the orbits of other celestial objects are also predictable. Building rockets with smart enough computers to change the orbit of an asteroid into an Earth orbit over a period of decades is entirely possible with enough money thrown at it.
A good idea? Eh, but still ADDING mass to the Earth Lunar system is much easier than subtracting it.
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