Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

hell-yeah-man t1_itdh0gt wrote

Reply to comment by Spacemanspalds in Next month, Japanese company iSpace will become the first private company to deliver a lunar lander and commercial payload to the moon's surface. Two more private companies aim to follow them in 2023. Is this the start of a lunar economy? by lughnasadh

I’m no physics expert so if someone knows better definitely reply, but I doubt we could (almost) ever affect our gravitational alignment without mining an absolute shitload off the moon. There would of course be small effects, measured mostly from precise math, but to affect everything in a way that would be problematic would involve removing a HUGE chunk from the moon. Like, bigger than we can fathom chunk.

7

Spacemanspalds t1_itdhedv wrote

Oh I'm thinking thousands of years of daily transits. But was just thinking.

2

hell-yeah-man t1_itdpehm wrote

Well with some weak google searches I got ~90 tons extracted per year from the earth in total, should be recent but didn’t check too closely. And with the moon having a mass of about 8.1^19 tons it would take us about 2 quadrillion years to mine it all, but to affect earth it would be way less so my guess with no background knowledge is 1/30th the moons weight. To remove would probably take about 68 trillion years, I don’t feel like accounting for optimization of the industry and such, but I still doubt we can do it in any timeframe that we can affect.

Edit: you would also have to account for the moons orbit in how you moved the materials from the planet. But sorry for the long reply lol, had fun with some guesses.

6

mdog73 t1_itfvhm6 wrote

At that point we could just move the moon closer to earth to counteract the weaker pull if necessary.

2

viber_in_training t1_itgyjeu wrote

I would guess that 100 years ago people would say we would need to burn a SHIT TON of fossil fuel to actually affect Earth's climate

2

hell-yeah-man t1_iti35k8 wrote

Oh no doubt, in a further comment I guessed without including that. Technological growth would definitely have a huge effect.

1