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

Let’s look at some numbers – the mass of the moon is ~7.348×10^19 metric tons. It’s composed of a number of different minerals, but assuming we need a change of at least 1% in the total mass, the only ones to really look at are aluminum and silicon. On an annual basis, we’re currently extracting and using 65M and 8.5M tons of aluminum and silicon respectively. So, if we were to set up operations on the moon extracting 10 times that much every single year (so 650M tons of aluminum and 85M tons of silicon) how long would it take before we’d removed 1% of the moon’s mass?

Just under a billion years. The moon’s *way* more massive than you might think. We’ll evolve into non-human creatures before we’re able to affect the tides by mining the moon.