Scottish Academic: Mining the Moon For Helium 3 Is Evil 462
MarkWhittington writes "Tony Milligan is a teaching fellow of philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and is apparently concerned about helium 3 mining on the moon. In a recent paper he suggested that it should not be allowed for a number of reasons which include environmental objections, his belief that the moon is a cultural artifact, and that too much access to energy would be bad for the human race."
Re:Useless academic is useless. (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks. Two good paragraphs.
Current global power consumption, 15 TW, is enough to raise the surface temperature by something the order of a hundredth of a degree. So if we used 10,000 times as much energy as we do now, it could be bad.
Agreed, that's not an immediate prospect; and there are five and a half billion people who need more cheap energy.
Re:Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
Taking into account assorted opportunity costs as well (including reduced productivity from pollution-related illnesses from other sources), I would say the correct answer is "yes".
Re:Useless academic is useless. (Score:5, Informative)
Too much access to energy would be bad...
And even this is ignoring that fact that we have no idea how get net energy from fusing He3. Fusing deuterium and tritium is orders of magnitude easier, and we are decades away from achieving even that. I don't think we really need to worry about a massive moon based industry mining something that is more or less useless. Someday the Sun will supernova. Maybe he should worry about that instead. It is a more immediate concern.
Re:Useless academic is useless. (Score:5, Informative)
No the consumption of 15tw has raised the Global land temperatures by 1.5 degrees C over the past 250 years. (http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings)
And most of, if not all of that effect has been due to the (at the time) unavoidable pollution, not the simple expenditure of energy.
Helium 3 (fusion) suggests an energy approach that eliminates all of the green-house gas and pollution, leaving us with just the heat byproduct of using electrical energy. As our energy use becomes more and more efficient, even this is reduced.
However, with lower greenhouse emissions the excess heat would just dissipate into space, with no measurable ill effect. (Well some say it will balloon the gas envelop a tiny bit).
Re: Useless academic is useless. (Score:0, Informative)
Watts don't have a time component. You're thinking of Watt-hours.
It's not Evil it is Stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
Mining the moon for helium-3 is merely stupid. (1) there are no fusion power plants, (2) helium-3 is crap fuel, and (3) there is hardly any helium-3 on the moon anyway.
Oh and Hanlon's Razor [wikipedia.org] comes to mind: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.