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

Okey let’s see. We mine around 15 billion tonnes of material per year on Earth. Let’s say we aim for the same amount to be mined on the moon. This is of course oversimplification as the minerals are quite different , in the beginning we would mine not even a millionth, but over a long time we may mine more.
Anyways keep it simple.

Let’s assume that to have a significant change, we would need to mine and ship away 0.1% of the moon’s mass. This would take approximately 7.34*10^22/(1.5*10^10) * 0.001 years . Or roughly 4.89 billion years.

I think we are safe