this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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Summary

The moon has been added to the World Monuments Fund's (WMF) list of threatened heritage sites for the first time due to risks from commercial and governmental lunar activities.

The WMF highlights concerns about looting and damage to artefacts from Apollo missions, such as Neil Armstrong’s footprints and objects left on the moon.

WMF calls for international protocols to protect lunar heritage as private space tourism and missions increase.

The 2024 list also includes sites in conflict zones and areas endangered by climate change or unsustainable tourism.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Uh, that's not how orbital mechanics work

And also, let's say we have to remove 10% of the moon's mass to noticeably affect the tides (and it's not enough to just mine it, you'd also need to remove it from the moon's gravity well which is... A whole thing by itself, so let's ignore that for funsies), which is about 7*10^21 kg. I can't find statistics for total mining activity, but we mine about 2.6 * 10^12 kg iron each year. Let's just take the 10x value of that to be safe, 2.6*10^13 "stuff" mined each year

In order to mine 10% of the moon's mass, it'd take roughly 10^8 years, or written out, 100 000 000 years

And, as mentioned, this is while ignoring that you'd need to actually remove the moon's mass from its gravitational well, which simply won't be done at this scale

Worrying about this problem is so ridiculously out of scope that it's laughable

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

What's the point in mining the Moon if we're just gonna leave what's been mined there? Of course it would be removed.

Where did you get that 10% is what would be required to affect the tides? Why don't we just say it's 90% to back your point up even more?

The point is, if allowed, we'll fuck it up like we fuck up every environment. Why must we insist on destroying everything just so some rich people can get richer? Climate change is upon us and instead of acting to prevent it we're looking to do similar destruction elsewhere.

When you look up at the vastness and marvel of space and planetary bodies, are you desperate to see dump trucks, bucket excavators, and orange flashing lights looking back at you?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

What's the point in mining the Moon if we're just gonna leave what's been mined there? Of course it would be removed.

We might use the mined materials to build stuff on the moon. Even if we were mining to bring resources back there’ll be a lot of stuff dug up that we don’t want so we’d obviously want to leave that there. We’d need to process the ore on the moon to extract the small amount of material that we’re after.

Where did you get that 10% is what would be required to affect the tides? Why don't we just say it's 90% to back your point up even more?

90% would be an obviously ridiculous number to use so would undermine their argument. Assuming their numbers are correct then it would take 10,000,000 years to remove 1% of the moon. And we wouldn’t remove all of the material that we mine so we’d take even longer than that to actually remove 1%.

Having said that, I really don’t agree with the sentiment of letting people do what they want on the moon because it won’t affect us. We should be more considerate of every environment just as a matter of principle.