Could living on/ mining the moon cause unintended consequences for Earth? e.g. changes in tide or anything else?
In: 248
No the moon doesn’t have heavy stuff we can’t find in much larger abundance on earth or asteroids. Moon stuff might be useful on orbital platforms but mostly the moon is made of stuff we don’t need. The sole exception is Helium-3, but the amount we need is miniscule compared and would contribute nothing to earths mass considering the mining operation will rely heavily on transportation of earth resources to the moon, which will probably result in a net neutral mass transfer.
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.
We could store our nuclear waste there and then a freak accident would cause an explosion that would throw the moon out of orbit and it would leave the solar system at faster than light speeds, only to slow down when it passed other planets so the residents of the moon base could visit them before speeding back up again.
Like, if we take mass from the moon and move it to earth?
Well, obviously yes. Mathematically any change will impact earth. But the amount of mining that we could physically do would be super unlikely to be enough that we’d actually notice the change. It would be so small as to be undetectable.
Is it theoretically possible to move enough mass given infinite time and fuel? Totally.
If you could crack off pieces of the moon and then be able to deploy them strategically into earth you have kinetic missiles essentially
Yes. Mining could accidentally create a huge crack in the moon and after two thousand years we could enter a strange new world of savagery, super science and sorcery.
Absolutely! Nuclear blasts could blow the moon out of Earth’s orbit. Then, the inhabitants of Moon Base Alpha, led by Martin Landau, will face weekly Dr. Who type challenges.
Everybody’s going to tell you “no, it’s way too big”.
I’d just like to point out that this is basically what we’ve answered throughout all of our history.
“Is irrigation going to affect the river flow ?”
“Is cutting a few trees going to affect forests ?”
“Is dumping shit in water going to affect the quality of it and the marine life that live in it ?”
“Is burning hydrocarbons going to affect the air?”
Humans always think that big = unlimited, and were quite often surprised by the scale of our own endeavors.
I always wondered the opposite of this: due to Newton’s laws, could harvesting tidal energy cause changes in the Moon’s orbit?
Yes, there will almost always be unanticipated consequences from any activity that humans do at scale. I cannot anticipate what they will be.
Some recent examples, what could possibly go wrong if we started using CFCs at scale for refrigeration and aerosols cans? What could possibly go wrong if we put Lead in gasoline? The same guy, Thomas Midgely, was responsible for both those inventions, and very nearly destroyed the planet by depleting the ozone layer, while dumbing down several generations of children.
Predicably, industry fought against regulating these problems. The best we can do, if we start mining the moon, is to be vigilant and act rapidly if and when we do identify the problems we will inevitably create. Human hubris knows no bounds.
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