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."

Watched "The Time Machine" too many times

[furtive_glance]

In the movie the main character is having an interesting journey through time until he hit a 'bump' at August 26th 2037, where he finds a Moon mining operation has disrupted the lunar orbit. As a result, the Moon is breaking apart and showering Earth with massive chunks of rock. His presence outside of a shelter leads to an attempt by two military personnel to arrest him, but after they draw his attention to the shattered Moon and give him a brief explanation behind its present state, there is a scuffle and he escapes. He makes it into the time machine just as the city is being destroyed, but is knocked out and fails to witness the destruction of human civilization. But that was just a movie (and a book) of course.

Re:Wonder and amazement

[cyphercell]

maybe we can dump other shit on it, sort of like trading

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

[Sta7ic]

Mod parent up. One of the big deals about mining our moon if how intimately it's tied into the climate cycles. The moon drives the tides, the tides help move hot and cold water around, leading to various cycles in marine life and in the atmosphere (such as wind, coastal weather, and precipitation) ... Sure, the moon's a "big dead rock", but it's contributing to the current balance of our bigger not-quite-so-dead rock.

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:The moon doesn't have an "environment"

[lgw]

Asteroids as a resource makes much more sense but businesses won't want to do that. Can't make money off of something that doesn't also risk the lives of everyone else on earth after all!!!

Your worries are unfounded. Let's say you push an asteroid into orbit containing a cubic mile of gold. Doesn't do you much good up there, does it? No, you have to somehow get that gold to the surface of the Earth. Sure, there's always a country somewhere we wouldn't mind turning into a crater (a crater *made of gold*!), but what if they miss? I think the businesses have the "risking the lives of everyone else on Earth" part worked out fine for asteroids!

Falacy

[femto]

The rebuttal is based on the fallacy that without life environmental protection has no merit. If an environment is devoid of life it is still an environment. The land itself is worthy of protection. It's something Australia's aborigines have been pointing out for years, that their land has intrinsic value. Most of the rest of Australia has taken the moon mining viewpoint and desecrated the land in the name of development.

From a purely selfish human point of view there might also come a day when people want to visit that untouched environment.

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

[azuredrake]

Additionally, the tidal forces of the moon are slowly robbing the Earth of its momentum. The Earth used to spin much faster, rotating as many as 400 times during a single orbit of the sun. Taking a tiny chunk out of that slowdown might not be such a bad thing, eh?

Re:Wonder and amazement

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?"

Mine the farside, who would ever know?

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

[Coniptor]

I have a problem with mining for the reasons I mentioned on top of people, companies, nations wanting to "Stake a claim."
In that case you have fighting over who has control of what. No one comes to an agreement and some say, "Well this side is ours."
"Well fine then we will take this part over here." All it would take is a couple interested parties then more all *competing* to be richer and have more influence down here. It could also lead to war and not like we have experienced in the past.
I do NOT have faith in humanity as a whole with regard to matters like this. Far more likely that humanity destroys it self through hubris and lack of foresight than for them to get something as critical as this right the first time.

I think energy and time would be better spent in mining asteroids and learning how to manage them which would help in other areas such as manging them in case we actually do find we have one coming right for us. I think mining the moon is greedy and short sighted and just humanity running from it's past mistakes without learning anything and moving on business as usual. When humanity as a whole has the chance to learn a lesson it desperately needs to learn it's likely going to be our end due to the greed and short sightedness. I simply don't want it to be too late. I also think if anyone is seriously considering mining the moon it should have to wait until years more research goes into it and the possible consequences are more greatly understood and we have a MUCH greater understanding of how it's ALL tied together. If mining the moon could have catastrophic repercussions it WILL NOT be a quick or easy fix if one can even be found.

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:Forget environmentalism-what about Int'l Relati

[tftp]

We could, for example, implement a Moon use tax, and all people on Earth would be getting an equal share from use of each square mile of Moon's surface, payable by Moon mining companies to the governments and then distributed as people of each country want. That tax would be small, compared to the costs involved in Moon mining and sales of resulting goods.

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.

Re:Wonder and amazement

[carandol]

I wasn't actually proposing or advocating a tourism industry up there (though I'd buy a ticket if I had the cash!), merely pointing out that ideals of beauty change. The previous poster was comparing the scenery of the moon to an ugly strip mine; I was saying that that won't be everyone's opinion. If NASA do manage to get a base up there, the images and movies coming back are going to be much higher quality than the Apollo films, and at least some of the people on Earth are going to see those landscapes as beautiful and pristine and genuinely untouched by humanity. People are quite capable of campaigning against the destruction of landscapes on Earth just from seeing them on TV, I'm sure the same will be true of lunar landscapes, once the serious mining starts. But of course, all those old abandoned copper mines in the Lake District are considered picturesque too now. People are funny that way :-)

Hello, Mister Anderson

[Travoltus]

We've notice you studying the moon with a certain high powered telescope.

This telescope has enabled you to see things that you are not authorized to observe, and thus it puts you in violation of certain top secret Homeland Security directives. This incurs certain... penalties, which we may have to discuss with you later.

Now, on the other hand, Mr. Anderson, we're willing to wipe your slate clean... if you tell us who sent you this telescope...

Re:space tourism and resources

[ThosLives]

...using ethanol which is renewable as a fuel source for his jets....

He can have fun with that when his jets' range gets decreased by around 40%* (or the useful payload is decreased by 40% because of the extra fuel required for the same range) because of the difference in energy content between ethanol (which is already partially oxidized) and Jet-A. There's a good reason why we use petrochemicals as vehicle fuel, and it's not simply because at one time they were less expensive.

Mass and volume energy density are important characteristics of fuel... and petrochemicals win that battle by quite a fair margin to all other fuels that are safe enough to be used in common vehicles.

* according to this [ornl.gov], petrodiesel (which is close to Jet-A) has energy content of 43.3MJ/kg, and ethanol only has 26.7 MJ/kg (using the LHV; the results are slightly different, though the trend the same, using HHV). That's a substantial difference, and mass is extremely important when it comes to aircraft fuel.

Re:space tourism and resources

[falconwolf]

Ethanol is a horrid fuel, especially when made from corn

Corn is a horrible source for ethanol, I oppose corn for ethnaol. A better is sugarcane, but even better for making ethanol is Switchgrass [wikipedia.org]. Ah, perhaps I should of finished your post before replying as I see you say sugar cane and switchgrass are better.

I don't know if Branson is concentrating on ethanol or biofuels in general. Unlike ethanol biodiesel can be made from more sources. When Rudolph Diesel designed his engine he designed it to run on vegetable oil, when he showed the engine during the World Expo in Paris he used peanut oil but he also demonstrated running it with hemp oil. And biodiesel can be made from used cooking oil, instead of used oil being a waste biodiesel could be made from it. Wllie Nelson [wikipedia.org] started, invested in, a plant making biodiesel [wikipedia.org] and formed Willie Nelson Biodiesel [wikipedia.org]. In the 1930s Henry Ford designed and build a vehicle on his Iron Mountain Estate using a hemp, aka marijuana, based fuel.

Actually this was part of the reason hemp was made illegal via the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act [wikipedia.org]. Prior to the passage of the act scientific research showed hemp was an excellent industrial plant. Besides fuel hemp was good for making plastics and paper. MIT published a study showing an acre of hemp could produce more fiber for paper than an acre of forest. The use of hemp for fuel interfered with Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Using hemp for paper meant William Hearst's, a big California newspaper publisher who owned thousands of acres of forest, would see a loss in clear cutting forest for paper pulp. Then in the mid '30s Du Pont received a patent on making plastics from petroleum, so again hemp was seen as another threat. Andrew Mellon, a major funder of Du Pont, had his nephew-in-law Harry J Anslinger [wikipedia.org] appointed as the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics [wikipedia.org] where they were able to push to have hemp made illegal.

Falcon

D + He3 fusion

[Liquid Len]

As much as I like the idea, there are very serious obstacles to the concept of He3 fusion, besides the obvious issue of finding He3. Remember that the advantage of the D+He3->p+He4 reaction is that it does not produce neutrons. Well, even this isn't absolutely true because Tritium is also produced in the process and interacts with D to produce neutrons.
1) At first aneutronic fusion looks good, because the vessel doesn't have to withstand the dreadful 14MeV neutrons of "standard" D+T fusion reactions (which is a very serious issue for a potential future reactor). On the other hand, neutrons have the advantage that they penetrate the metals, so that the energy gets actually deposited in the volume of the metal surrounding the plasma. In D+He3 fusion, the wall surface has to be able to handle all the energy and as of today, there are no materials able to withstand such a thermal load, not by a long shot.
2) The cross section of the D+He3 reaction peaks at fuel temperatures much higher than the D+T reaction. This means that the ions will have to be much hotter (about 100keV, IIRC). Heating the fuel at these temperatures wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the plasma is going to radiate like crazy, through bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation essentially. Calculations indicate that it's actually gonna immediately radiate all of its energy, a phenomenon known as thermal collapse.
There are other objections as well, but quite frankly, these two are nasty enough to keep looking at D+T for the moment, even though it's less clean and comes with problems of its own.

Re:Wonder and amazement

[ultranova]

If we suppose that some super-science could allow them to split regular atoms for energy, maybe reverse the charges of the subatomic particles and create antimatter, there's still only so much matter left to annihilate. At the end, all will be nothing.

If we assume superscience, we can get energy from the expansion of space itself.

The expansion of space means that any two objects occupying a different location will be pushed apart since the space between them is expanding. They experience a force identical to gravitational acceleration. If you could somehow connect a particle far away into a generator, you could extract energy from the acceleration it experiences; not unlike tying a rope to a rock and letting it fall and pull the rope, turning a wheel and through that a generator as it does. Actually, exactly like that, except in implementation details.

Of course, if you do this, the expansion will slow, and you might end up collapsing the whole thing. But that's why we have environmental regulations :).