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How To Avoid a Scramble For the Moon and Its Resources
MarkWhittington writes "With the Chang'e 3 and its rover Jade Rabbit safely ensconced on the lunar surface, the question arises: is it time to start dividing up the moon and its resources? It may well be an issue by the middle of the current century. With China expressing interest in exploiting lunar resources and a number of private companies, such Moon Express, working for the same goal, a mechanism for who gets what is something that needs looking into. Moon Daily quotes a Russian official as suggesting that it can all be done in a civilized manner, through international agreements. On the other hand, law professor and purveyor of Instapundit Glenn Reynolds suggests that China might spark a moon race by having a private company claim at least parts of the moon. 'International cooperation will certainly rule supreme while there are no economic interests, while it is not clear where commercial profits lie. Scientists can't help communicating with each other and sharing ideas.'"
slashdot is for fucking bastards who hit babies with railway sleepers.
no chance of just leaving it alone? arrogance abounds as abuse victims abuse everything
If we cannot have it no one can !!
I don't know why we Americans would even bother discussing the issue. We're never going to get back to the moon, manned or robotically. While China and India are sending spacecraft there, our government can't even build a working website, and our finest minds are squandered on ways to get people to click links. We'll be lucky if we can keep the bridges standing, the roads open, the water clean, and the electricity flowing by mid-century.
Proverbs 21:19
Property rights might come into play some day, when the moon is crowded or scarce materials are identified in limited places, but until then, good luck writing things down on paper on Earth and expecting anybody to care about that. Property on The Moon will belong to whoever gets there and defends their claim.
If any Earth Nation expects to shoot down transit flights to or from the moon to enforce their paper claim, the ramifications will be far more severe than if they simply did nothing. Perhaps the politicians will mumble and gurgle about it, but then do nothing, as is their typical pattern.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He who gets there, and stays there, first with the most wins the rights.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
No one can get to the Moon and no one has the resources to do so. Realistically this is something we'll have to figure out in a hundred years, not every time someone lands a rover on the moon.
Other than being a place to wave your flag, and maybe--and I mean maybe--a handy place to build a telescope and a base for scientific research, is it really economically viable to haul back minerals and other materials by the ton?
The UN isn't the best group all the time, but they are the largest international and best organized and most accepted international organization to do this. The moon is one of the best sources for Helium 3 IIRC.
I am me, I am the anomaly in the machine.
What's there left to discuss? If you want who is moon's owner, just check whose flag is planted on it.
There's already a framework for establishing claims and exercising rights on those claims, and for resolving disputes over those claims.
Enforcement will always be the problem - since currently, and in the future, there's really no way to enforce the rules eleventy million miles away, it's going to come down to either put up or shut up, as it should.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm no scientist here, but the moon's mass I believe would be critical to it's stability in orbit. As we take mass away, and bring it to Earth, I would speculate the moon may eventually lose the momentum keeping it from crashing back into Earth. Granted we all may be long dead by then, but it's worth a thought.
Some badguy once said that the way to win a battle was "He who gets there fustest with the mostest". That typically works pretty well for most human endeavors. We should want a scramble to get to the moon. Human innovation, powered by greed, has typically been the best catalyst for moving forward. I fail to see why this would be any different.
The UN would undoubtedly screw it up, as would any other controlling agency. So for the time being, leave it uncontrolled. It causes no harm and may do good.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Good idea. Why not the Moon after the UN did such a great job divvying up Palestine and managing any subsequent conflicts over the land/resources there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
a rough idea would be
1 land a Bot Crew to setup Moon Base Alpha (something big enough for say 24 folks)
2 when the bots have everything tested start sending people
3 the first group then builds MB Beta (big enough for 120 people)
4 after everything is tested and stable we start sending Managers
5 MB Gamma gets built
6 Congress critters get sent up (enough people should be there to "count")
Worry about which nation on Dah MudBall gets which moon rocks after we can have a conference ON THE MOON
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Whoever gets the moon get's a very nice place to station lasers and missiles pointed at earth. It's of strategic military importance. The best place to have a star wars program is from a satellite. The moon is the biggest ass satellite of them all.
The UN can't even manage things on earth.
Let the invisible hand sort things out. It is a whole lot more efficient, and less intrusive, than government.
He already owns the moon (according to him at least)
also The moon unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.
I would like to see a company sell advertising on the moon. They could use a moon bulldozer to scrape a pattern in to the lunar mare to produce a coca cola ad.
First place the moon far away.
Next introduce a large gravity well around earth. Then make sure there is a vacuum on the moon and the only source of power is the sun.
That will avoid a scramble for a long time.
without tears & innocence we will not get very far? handful of crown royal nazi psychos trashing our planet (causing the need to discover a new one) &/or populations sucks our spirits dry & deletes our genuine physical & spiritual allys all billions of us unchosens
...that's where all the good stuff is.
that this guy the other day selling me the Moon was for real?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Yes lets appoint an unelected organization with a history of institutional corruption the rulers of the moon.. makes perfect sense.
I'd be more worried about what emptying the moon from so much material (has to be a lot to even be worth the effort, logic) would do to earth. We all know how much is influenced by the moons gravity - could seriously mess up some things
The shuttle cost $10k/lb to bring things 200 miles up to the ISS. SpaceX knocks that considerably. Now lets talk about going to the moon, being able to actually mine something, and bring it back. There is nothing that values in the $1M+/lb to go and get. It's not cost effective and will be much more than 50 years until it is and there is any sort of land grab because of it. Until then the Moon is huge, and the players so limited there will be no butting heads.
First come first serve i say.
Everyone is so concerned with civility but in reality mankind is still an evolving species driven by the basics of survival. Its more important to put bodies in space than it is to waste time arguing over which bodies to put there.
Ah, but if Robotech has taught me anything it's that once you give the UN a space fleet, it can accomplish wonders... with the aid of reverse-engineered alien supertech that randomly crashes on an island near Japan.
And if Robotech has taught me two things, 75% of intelligent life in the universe is genetically compatible with humans already, and the last 25% is self-mutating towards that goal.
Its the only way to be sure.
http://www.tutorials128.blogspot.com/
Now that we're all democratic,it's OK for the old world to carve up the new world, and screw anyone who wants independence!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Treaty's work as well as you have guns to enforce them. That is the classic mistake of assuming somehow the rule of law enforces itself, ultimately it takes the rule of the gun to do so. The moon is potentially a very strategic position, the closest high ground that's capable of withstanding an attack while easy to launch kinetic weapons from.
No sir I dont like it.
The moon should be easier. They wouldn't have to worry about getting tickets for double parking. No cops. Drunk driving? No problemo?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
NASA was starved into irrelevance long ago. Both policitcal sides find reasons to starve it further. "Takes away from social programs" 'Increases the deficit"
What about Antarctica?
Never give away part of something you might want all of later.
That is all.
Good idea. Why not the Moon after the UN did such a great job divvying up Palestine and managing any subsequent conflicts over the land/resources there.
OK, so the UN made one big mistake (fuelled by Great Britain's incompetence) in their history, but the organisation as a whole works pretty well. Just wish they could take over regulation of the Internet! They might get the moon bit sorted out first though.
All that matters is Boots on the Ground.
The international "can't get there" crowd, U.S. included, can only whine and posture in the U.N. as the Chinese strip mine whatever valuable resources they find there.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Which we then generally find a cheap way to synthesize.
Why the HELL would you want to AVOID a scramble for Lunar resources? This is something to actively encourage, to get some permanent human settlements off this rock.
Every man/country for themselves, and may the best and fastest effort win.
Necron69
The Antarctic Treaty has worked pretty well so far. Something similar would work for the moon, although a Moon Treaty should have stronger controls on those pesky Japanese whalers doing "research".
The perennial argument against space exploration, especially by humans, is "There ain't nothin' up there." If a lunar resource scramble did develop, this would put an end to that line of reasoning for good. Of course, such an outcome would be immediately followed by "How arrogant of man to exploit the resources of the precious Environment..." Bite me, McKibben: the Moon has no ecosystem, and no natives for whatever equivalent of the British East India Company we set up to fear exploiting.
There's gold (and helium 3) in them thar hills.
Can we make concrete from the lunar dust?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The surface area of the moon is larger than all of Africa. I don't think there's a risk of a land shortage there any time in the near future. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
Hey!
You better get your hands off my land.
I already own a square kilometer of the moon and I've got a certificate to prove it.
Always communicating with each other and sharing their ideas. What's wrong with them!
"Scientists can't help communicating with each other and sharing ideas.'" Where the heck did that sentence even come from?
Call me crazy, but I think whoever has the resources to go to the moon and collect its resources... should get said resources.
We do have electric space motors - ion drives throw a small amount of matter out the back *very fast*. Rather that the usual rocket engine that ejects large amounts of matter at relatively slow speeds.
ROFL
not possible m8...
Anyway the only way to make a claim without an international / ONU aggreament is to place an 18 years old there with a rifle there (special magnetic / electric rail gun naturally).
uhmmm, a million dollars is not that much money, maybe ask for a little more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY
mfwright@batnet.com
It may be small as planetary bodies go, but is still really huge, its.surface area is similar to all of Asia. We are ridiculously far away from having a resource conflict on the moon. As far as environmental concerns - it already is an ugly ("sort of like a dirty beach") lifeless radioactive wasteland - what could we possibly do to make it worse?
If some country or agency really manages to use a substantial fraction of the 40 MILLION square kilometers of lunar surface, then as far as I'm concerned they can have it, I'm on their side.
In reality any attempt to regulate commercial or national exploitation of the moon is just a way for the countries that no longer have the will to explore space to discourage others from doing so.
And furthermore, an organization that gives resentful thugs from postage-stamp satrapies an inordinate amount of power.
Does anyone remember your history lesson? Spain and Portugal claimed the entire western hemisphere would be split between themselves, which is basically why most countries on South America speak Spanish, except Brazil speaks Portugese. 500 years later, what's the status of that treaty? Not much.
We'll do the same except this time it will be US vs China, and 500 years from now US and China will be nobodies.
I WANT a scramble!
We WANT a scramble!
We want autonomous. colonies, and then small nation-states, on the moon.
Central planners, please jump into Christmas tree grinders in January as they swing by. Wildcat development has done nothing but bring freedom and development to humanity on unheard-of scale.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Simply getting something to the moon is extremely difficult, if it is easy there would be all kinds of spacecraft going there (geez, I see zillions of PPT and occasional technology demonstrators). So whoever country builds up a usable infrastructure to utilize lunar resources, they can simply say piss off to everyone else.
Hmmm, this could create problems when have-nots will wage war with the haves. But at times reminds me when Ming Dynasty didn't think much of their massive navies and they were faced more with land based enemies than ocean based. But then couple hundred years later comes ocean going gun boats from Europe and dominate the region.
mfwright@batnet.com
NASA is next to useless nowadays - a massive bureaucracy that puts out only the smallest of missions in return for it's massive budget. Sure, the Mars rovers are impressive, but that is just exactly how many missions over how many years for how much money? Pournelle's iron law at work...
Far better would be to offer prizes to private industry. First company to send a lander to Mars that does X and Y: prize $100,000,000. First company that manages this on Venus: prize $500,000,000. First probe to "land" on an asteroid. First company to refine metal from an asteroid. First company to refine fuel on the moon. You get the idea...
Close fricking NASA. For $16 billion a year you can buy a lot of private innovation.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Ya, lets us import iron ore from the moon. That will work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PWnsamvE2k
Did anyone else think at first that this was some kind of sex toy?
It's one thing to send a camera on wheels that sends back radio waves, and sending a mining operation that sends back mass. There's nothing on the Moon that isn't here already. What completely delusional Space Nutterish crap.
Another day, another crude propaganda attack on those designated 'enemies' by Team Obama and Team Blair.
China is going to own the Moon, dribble, dribble. Reds under the bed, dribble, dribble. Spend even more on the US military, and find even more reasons to use History's biggest war machine to murder ever more Humans, dribble, dribble.
Tell me, sheeple, does this propaganda play really work on your sheeple minds? I mean, every day the owners of Slashdot look for propaganda articles like this to promote, so clearly THEY think you are this stupid.
You know NASA is a front for America's military options in space. You know China and Russia are the only powers on Earth left to prevent the US from applying its nation-exterminating genocides in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to dozens of other target nations across our planet. You know the war mongers of the USA, fully supported by those like the owners of Slashdot, see the 'conquest' of China and Russia as their ultimate goals.
I would also like to think you are smart enough to know that 'going to the Moon' is simply practice for any nation preparing to confront the absolute evil of the US military use of space, and that Russia and the US long ago proved the uselessness of using the Moon for any practical purpose.
Part of any space program is winning the wide-eyed enthusiasm of young people, so they are inspired to become your future generations of participants in growing, future versions of the program. So you go to the Moon, or you go to Mars, and as a consequence the following decades bring more and better people to work on your military space projects. China is engaged in a race against time- the count-down to the moment the USA decides to launch an unthinkably massive pre-emptive attack against China in order to take control of the entire planet.
Behind the US war mongers who are DUMB enough to imagine a comprehensive victory for American butchers over the forces of Russia and China are monsters like Tony Blair. Blair simply wants the World War- to manoeuvre the US into a position where it willingly triggers a fully unleashed, nuclear and biological aggressive war against every powerful non-aligned nation on the Earth, almost certainly in the name of greater zionist Christian 'glory' (Blair knows the 'religious' play is likely to be the successful one in the USA).
So Slashdot will continue to bash Russia- continue to bash China- continue to bash any nation under attack from the USA, or listed to be attacked soon. Slashdot will continue to lionise the twin depravities of Saudi Arabia and Israel, the favourite allies of 90%+ of those that serve in Congress and the Senate.
One big mistake? What about the extremely high-profile Oil-for-Food Programme? Widespread scandal, corruption, and kickbacks taking place. It kinda tells you something when most of the Wikipedia page has to be dedicated to documenting the abuses and investigations that took place. And if you read into it, you'll find that the connections reached as high as the son of the UN Secretary General at the time, who profited immensely from the business that was thrown his way as a result of the programme.
A scramble may lead to some rapid technological innovation. Sounds like a good thing.
That said, the moon is really really big and we struggle to put more then a few tons on it right now. Not too worried.
"they manage to take mostly Russian technology " by that token , the US and russian took most from the first innovator : the nazi germany.
The problem is the enrgy needed to escape the gravity well. Until you solve that problem efficiently, you are pretty much screwed and it might take hundred of year, if ever, to get colony or industrial extraction on other planetoid or moon.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Because the competent try it first.
We really need a war over the moon's resources. Especially if said war produces a gun that plays techno music.
Seriously, so what if those things are here on Earth? It would make more sense stop shitting where we eat so to speak. Same reason we use all the brown people oil before we use our own. Use your own resources only when you must.
Sure, right now costs more in terms of money to get the stuff, but "because it's cheaper" is not a real reason to fuck up the planet.
How To Avoid a Scramble For the Moon
That's a pipe dream, especially if there's a large asteroid in a direct collision course with the Earth (hint: we will be scrambling).
so is this how eq2 started? houhou
You're missing the point. Yes hauling them back is useless. They would be used in space.
For what exactly? By who? And with what technology? All I'm seeing is a bunch of ill informed hand waving about the economics and technology involved. You're just assuming everything would make economic sense and that the technology will somehow be viable. Yes, getting out of a gravity well is expensive. However it is not the only economic issue in play here.
How do you propose the person doing it get an economic return if they return no product to Earth? Even if you somehow do manage to mine and process materials in space (which is a HUGE if) you still need to return *something* to Earth in order to make it economically attractive unless you are actually engaged in a colonization project with a completely independent economy.
Getting materials to orbit is incredibly expensive.
Sure, it is expensive to get materials out of a gravity well but it is not remotely clear that it would be any cheaper to process them in space especially since essentially 100% of the technology to mine and manufacture materials in space is, for all practical purposes, science fiction. While our scientists and engineers are pretty damn clever, this is a MUCH harder problem than most people realize. Seldom do people think about the supply chains that are required for all products. You have to have mining, refining, processing, transport, engineering, assembly, and quality controls for every single product and repeat it all for every material and every subcomponent in the item being made. You don't just have to send up a single device, you have to send up an entire supply chain to make space manufacturing technologically viable.
Get there first.
The United States made claim the moon in the same manner as early explorers, by planting the nation's flag. Unless China is looking for war with the US it wouldn't seem wise to steal US resources from the moon.
Because the Earth has liquid water, and enough complex organics to start the process of evolution.
That water, and possibly the complex organic molecules, came from space. The asteroids out there are not made of different stuff than the earth. The advantage of the earth is that it provides a life support system, we don't have to take one with us.
No, I just answered his question factually. The reasons humans evolved on Earth are entirely unrelated to the reasons we might want to put humans in space. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
You are so mistaken. If anything evolution ***proves*** we need to go to space. We evolved into what we are, an intelligent species, a dominant species, because of the incredible evolutionary void created by a mass extinction created by a big 6 mile rock falling from the sky. Dinosaurs were not a failed evolutionary branch, they were wiped out by an external force.
You're not really pushing a rational business case here. You would typically find a use for the uber expensive material before you spend a lot of money going after said expensive material.
Rational business cases involve risk and reward. High risk ventures can have a rational business case, they merely require a high potential reward.
Sorry, I can't tell whether you're talking about the UN still, or have drifted onto the related topics of the failings of pretty much any modern business or political entity...
One word, nobody shall undertake commercial mining operations on the moon, anybody does, shall be killed by nuclear warheads.
Because if done wrong, we could get the moon moving more rapidly away from the earth or the other way around. Impacting masses on moon and earth also play a role, but at the moment the moon gets 5cm more distant per year.
We are in the need of Spacepeace.
Space transportation costs aren't as bad as you think, or at least they shouldn't be. Its our implementation that is horrible, we are using defense contractors, government bureaucracy and expendable spacecraft. Using even 70s tech and proper economies of scale costs could probably be brought down 100 fold. For reference the stated space shuttle cost almost 700 million per launch, but only about 2 Million of which was for fuel (Solid (~1.8 Mill), LH2, LOX (200K)). A reusable craft, even multistage, using liquid fuel would probably only cost $400k per launch in fuel. Seeing as how a 747 costs around $154k per flight its not that unreasonable even adjusting for less capacity vs more cost. Spaceflight will never be as cheap as air travel, unless some massive tech advance occurs. But its also not the "rocket science" that we are told it is to justify the massive waste.
The textbooks you read in school are the same that are taoght in India and China..their secondary school has equal calculus (may be more)...by the time their students post-graduate, more than half of Americans have dropped out anyway. The time has already shifted. It is only the said infrastructure such as clean water, electricity., roads bridges etc..that people from brilliant talent from likes of India and China keeps flowing into America. And this taleny in return keeps your rovers landing on Mars...Saturn ..wherever now and in future.
So try this - give them a place no where to go but stay in their respective countries. I say America got most 20 years before being technologically ghosted.
I give America only 5 years in case they stop maintaining their infrastructure today.
Cheers!
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
A scramble for moon real estate and mining rights would be the best news in half a century on the space front. I suggest you divvy up much like other Homestead type plans and land / mining claims in the past on earth. If you can get to a plot and do something at all to add value to it then you can claim it as yours.
Most of the world has already signed on, including the US and China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
No government is able to lay claim to any celestial resources, such as the Moon or planets, as they belong to the human race as whole.
The UN isn't the best group all the time, but they are the largest international and best organized and most accepted international organization to do this.
The UN was designed to prevent WWIII. You want to know if the UN will be good at something? Does it prevent WWIII? If yes, then yes. If no, then no. Simple as that. Bad sci-fi movies will make you believe otherwise, but in the real world, that's how it is.
Only if it involves the Gundam
Only way it will work there will still be space wars for it.
Probably more like the Moon Nazis
First it's not really a question of "if" but "when" such exploitation will occur. The US has had plenty of opportunity with 1st mover advantage to make claims and exploit the moon. They sat on their asses when it could have been financial cheap for them to do it. If other nations are ready to pick and do the job instead, I'm 100% OK with that. The US had its chance and it failed. Let someone else try.
I'm an American BTW
Nuke the Chinese
we still have NO FUCKING IDEA how to get fusion working, left alone getting He3 fusion working. I'm longing to see the solution, but my scientific estimate is it won't happen in my lifetime. also, from the scientific point of view, i would not worry about the radioactive waste from fusion that much. we're talking about a much lower amount of waste compared to fission, and it consists of mostly low half-life isotopes that are in most cases non-poisonous - whereas fission produces a lot of long half-life waste which is also often pretty poisonous apart from being radioactive.
and there is another thing - if we REALLY get He3 fusion to work, we can produce the stuff on-site - using a fission or spallation type neutron source to breed tritium from hydrogen which will then decay to He3 with a half-life of 12 years.
one thing with He3 fusion that makes me wonder if it really CAN work is how they want to extract energy from the process. doing deuterium or tritium fusion, this is trivial since most of the energy is carried away by the neutrons that He3 fusions wants to avoid - neutrons are charge-free, so they can leave the magnetic confinement. all products from He3 fusion are charged - so this won't work here. i've worked right next to Wendelstein 7-AS in garching for years, and most of the physicists there considered He3 fusion to be "neat - if it works". if ever, it will always be the second type of fusion reactor we get running, because if we can't make it with hydrogen first, we will never get it to work.
Interesting article in the UK's Guardian newspaper "Who outer space really is the final frontier for capitalism" http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/20/outer-space-final-frontier-capitalism-mine-moon
Bottom line: capiatlism is too bloody timid to take on such a risky venture and the only force that could or would is a well-funded socialist state
"Houston - the Locust has landed"
The UN should auction 15 year full property right leases, and give the money to developing countries.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
This whole thread is pointless.
Everything about space beyond high (GEOsychronous) orbit is 100% done for national pride.
When there's profit coming out of it it's from the tech developed to support said activity. Plastics, the micro processor revolution, many essential techs used in commercial aircraft came directly or indirectly from the Apollo project.
Even with the cheapest launch costs expected for the next 36 months (SpaceX Falcon Heavy) it would cost one billion dollars just to send humans back to the moon for a (useless) week long trip.
Establishing a moon colony just focused on mining would cost 50-100 billion USD.
The earth has no shortage of cheap plentiful energy, if we'd just stopped being freaky about nuclear power.
One square meter of dirty contains enough thorium (2 square centimeters) to produce as much electricity as 30000 square meters of Oil could produce.
If the same governments interested in spending those tens of billions in mining the moon would spend just 10% of that in LFTR Thorium reactors (or some other modern Thorium nuclear option) we would have enough energy (assuming current continuous exponential growth for it) for another 10000 yrs at the very least.
Without the carbon problems, or the pollution associated with massive scale space launches that would be needed to establish large moon mining infrastructure.
Nuclear fusion is a pipe dream. The reason govts keep investing on it is pretty much the same reason we want to go to Mars. It's awesome PR. We've been 20-30 yrs away from Fusion becoming viable since research on this intensified in the 1980s.
If you plot a chart with the moving target you'll see we're more likely 100 yrs away from viable fusion instead.
Won't someone please think of the moon whales!!!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Bob Park, PhD. in physics and former head of the American Physical Society, famously wrote that it's so expensive to go to LEO and return that if LEO was full of 24-carat gold chunks, you'd lose money trying to retrieve it.
What are you going to bring back from the moon and turn a profit with it?
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.