The Economic Development of the Moon

MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Smith, the author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, recently published a polemic in the British newspaper The Guardian, entitled Plundering the Moon, that argued against the economic development of the Moon. Apparently the idea of mining Helium 3, an isotope found on the Moon but not on the Earth (at least in nature) disturbs Mr. Smith from an environmentalist standpoint. An examination of the issue makes one wonder why."

Comments

Re:The moon doesn't have an "environment"

[SIGALRM]

Hey, I know you're trolling, but your comment was so full of inaccuracies I just couldn't help myself.

tides are caused by the moon

Common misperception. Tides are influenced by the moon but are caused by the rotation of the Earth and many other factors.

you don't think a bunch of *GREEDY* companies who's hunger for MORE

Companies feed the hunger of consumers. They may be greedy, but we demand the energy.

thus over time dwindling it's MASS

You do realize the moon is quite large (would fit into the Pacific ocean), correct? How very knee-jerk of you.

I won't give them the benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't cause irrevocable harm while we are still alive

I think you underestimate the difficult proposition of even getting to the moon and mining a single truckload of He3 in your lifetime, let alone a significant portion.

If you are, someone ought to fire you, out of a cannon, into the sun!

Flamebait. I'm not taking it, but isn't the "do it for the children" a pretty ridiculous argument in this (very hypothetical case)?

GPP was not a retard, examine yourself before calling others names pls.

Re:I would say his arguments are specious...

[sheepweevil]

I risk going off-topic here, but people whom most would describe as 'rock huggers' exist already. They wish to prevent rock climbers from climbing on certain rock faces.

Rock climbers use 'chalk' that prevents hands from being sweaty, but it has the unfortunate side effect of putting white patches wherever there are handholds on the rock face. Also, one method of climbing a rock wall involves having metal pitons drilled into the rock. Some groups lobby to have rock climbers stop climbing in areas, or disallow them from placing pitons.

So I guess the argument in this case with the moon isn't about lifeforms, it is more about aesthetics; similar to the 'rock huggers' I have described. But I don't see how mass mining of the moon would have a visual effect on the moon's appearance for a very very long time.

Re:Wonder and amazement

[ultranova]

Everything is non-renewable given a long enough time frame. Entropy is a bitch.

Actually, wrong. In the long run, entropy is your friend. This is because the maximum amount of entropy any given volume of space can contain is determined by the size of said area (to be exact, it is determined by the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole filling said volume). As long as entropy is less than this amount, it keeps growing, driving all kinds of interesting systems - such as yourself - as it goes.

If the universe was static, entropy would eventually reach its maximum, leading to heat death of the universe and the cessation of all interesting events. But the universe is not static, it is expanding. Consequently, the maximum amount of entropy the universe as a whole can contain is also increasing. If the expansion goes on forever, so does the growth of entropy and all that it drives.

In other words, in an expanding universe there will always be useful energy sources, by the virtue of it expanding.

Re:I would say his arguments are specious...

[Watts Martin]

While Sheepweevil makes essentially the same point, you could make the argument that restricting industry on the moon is good from the perspective of preserving natural monuments. There are a lot of sites right here on Earth that have no direct economic value, but that, it could be argued, have their own intrinsic, non-economic value. That notion of intrinsic value tends to sit very poorly with those who define all external value as economic, but conservation and preservation on purely economic measures has always been dicey. (i.e., if you tried to make an argument for restricting whaling based on the grounds that if you killed all of them, there wouldn't be a whaling industry any more, the moment someone comes along with a paper demonstrating that a higher return on investment can be achieved by killing all the whales now and sinking part of the profits into something else, you're hosed. An argument for saving whales has to assign them intrinsic value separate from their economic use.)

Of course, if I take off the devil's advocate hat, I might make the more prosaic point that there are a whole frikkin' lot of technological issues that have to be solved to get to the point where having this argument even makes sense. It's easy to pile onto Andrew Smith, the author of the anti-plundering column, but I'm not giving any kudos to Mark Whittington, the guy who wrote the response and managed to get Slashdot to put this on the front page. Smith's column is actually very short and doesn't really talk about "saving the moon's environment." Whittington is by and large using this as an excuse to trot out hoary old libertarian-crank* nonsense about how environmentalists are all anti-technology luddites who won't be happy unless we return to the Dark Ages.

*Before the libertarians leap on this, I do distinguish between "libertarian" and "libertarian-crank." Drawing the distinction is beyond the scope of this footnote.