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Yogurt789 t1_j7v1bz7 wrote

Reply to comment by GiraffeAdditional299 in A solution to the climate crisis: mining the moon, researchers say. by Vucea

I think you're seriously underestimating how much mass the Moon has, anything we could do to it would have little to no effect on its gravitational interaction with the Earth.

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GiraffeAdditional299 t1_j7vgtjc wrote

I think you’re underestimating how many companies are salivating at the prospect of raping the moon. If we open the door, it’s only a matter of time before the tides, and other magnetic field properties are affected. You have never seen the amount of quarried rock on Earth huh? Or everything else we have fucked up? The whole “humans can’t impact nature” point of view is antiquated and devoid of intelligence.

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123yes1 t1_j7vhedb wrote

Bruh do you have any idea how big the moon is?

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GiraffeAdditional299 t1_j7vkbww wrote

Sorry, I’m having a shit day. I’m just sick of humanity destroying nature just for fucking money. An empty, worthless notion of the universe, where true value is ignored, like life, and balance of the universe. Let’s go after asteroids, there’s so many, and they are far enough away that no matter how many we mine, their absence won’t affect anything. Sorry again.

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94746382926 t1_j7vup82 wrote

I mean the moon is an extremely hostile lifeless rock. Technically it's nature but it's not like you're harming an ecosystem by mining there. On the contrary you could argue that you are protecting the Earth's by outsourcing mineral extraction there. Also as others have mentioned it would take an absurd amount of mining to appreciably change its mass. This is something we are nowhere near capable of.

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123yes1 t1_j7vlpc0 wrote

It's cool bro.

I was pointing out that there is no amount of mining or quarrying that will have an impact on the moon's gravitational pull (which is what affects tides and such)

While sending moon dust into space to cool earth temperatures shouldn't be plan A for dealing with climate change (that would be eliminating fossil fuels, etc.) It's not the absolute worst plan B. And in order for us to have a viable plan B, we'll need to investigate and research it.

It seems that the more progressive minded redditors have a bit of a kneejerk reaction to investigating plans other than reducing fossil fuel consumption. I'm just saying, two options are better than one. Climate change is a tricky issue, and we probably won't be able to eliminate fossil fuels fast enough, without a precipitous drop in quality of life.

Anyway, I hope your shit day improves, or at least I hope tomorrow is better

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GiraffeAdditional299 t1_j7vzq7e wrote

I think the political ramifications will cause the largest problem. The moon will become a military contested location. Plus, the fines put into orbit from the mining will be deadly.

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123yes1 t1_j7w03av wrote

Sure, those could be likely problems, but every idea starts out half baked. Some out of the box thinking is probably needed to prevent climate catastrophe. Maybe this is it, maybe something else. The only way to figure that out is by investigating ideas

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GiraffeAdditional299 t1_j7w0fcj wrote

Half baked ideas are why the world is the way it is right now. Should we take such countenance into the frontier of space?

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Yogurt789 t1_j7weund wrote

If we get to the point where our technology is advanced enough to remove a significant portion of the Moon's mass we'd be somewhere between the expanse and star trek levels of tech, it'd be like a colony of ants mining away the north face of Everest. Like we could build whatever crazy dyson swarm type thing we wanted to in space at that point and just turn the whole ass Earth into a nature reserve.

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GiraffeAdditional299 t1_j7wnipr wrote

Earth Nature reserve would be great

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Yogurt789 t1_j7wpqnq wrote

If we can move a lot of heavy industry off planet we can finally treat this planet as the jewel that it is, and leave it alone. At least that's my dream.

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