Could living on/ mining the moon cause unintended consequences for Earth? e.g. changes in tide or anything else?

Question

Could living on/ mining the moon cause unintended consequences for Earth? e.g. changes in tide or anything else?

In: 248

Answer 1

Each year, we mine a total of about 61 billion tons from Earth. The Moon has a mass of roughly 80 quintillion tons. That is, if we mined the Moon at the same rate as we mine the Earth currently and shipped all of that back to Earth, we’d reduce the mass of the Moon by about 10% of 1% of 1% of 1% per year, or 0.0000001%. At that rate, we might start to see effects in 100,000 years., when the Moon’s mass has been reduced by 0.01%.

I doubt we’d get even close to mining the Moon at that rate, and, even if we did, a lot of the minerals would likely be left on or around the Moon to build infrastructure. Realistically, the problem rate would take closer to a billion years to hit, and the Sun is only expected to last about 5 billion years.