[Teever]

This argument isn't like that whatsoever because the Moon isn't teeming with life.

In what way would mining the moon be destroying it? It would possibly destroy our view of the Moon from Earth, but at the level of mining that we're talking about the mass of the Moon would be relatively unchanged. We're not talking about deconstructing the Moon here.

If you are concerned about us deconstructing a solar body, we could always use the Moon to springboard to the asteroid belt, where we could easily deconstruct bodies and return the valuable resources to Earth without affecting the delicate Moon-Earth system in anyway.

How do you feel about asteroid mining?

[pil0u]

> the Moon isn't teeming with life

The Moon is responsible for tides and is believed to play an important role with wildlife.

[TakeBlaster16]

The moon has a mass of 7×10^22 kg. How will wildlife on earth be affected if we mine a billionth of a billionth of a percent of its mass from the side that is never visible?

[algo_trader]

Incredibly, we mine a lot more than a billionth of a billionth of earth mass !!

Earth ~6x10^24kg, annual human resource extraction is ~10^14kg.

(Could my figures be wrong? Its bizarre!)

[TakeBlaster16]

Mining on earth has the handy benefit of not requiring huge amounts of energy to send payloads through space

[Teever]

The idea is to develop a a self-sufficient industry on the moon so that you can do in-situ production of the manufacturing capacity and have it highly automated or teleoperated from Earth to minimize the number of people travelling to and from.

If it's done right you can produce pretty much everything except for semiconductors directly on the moon.

[Teever]

According to weforum, "the world consumes 100.6 billion tonnes of materials annually."[0] 100.6 * 10^9 tonnes is 1.00610^14 kg.

According to Wikipedia, the mass of the moon is 7.342×10^22 kg.

If we switched our entire mining infrastructure to the moon tomorrow, including stuff like sand and gravel for construction (which would be pretty crazy) it would take us 7.298 10^8 years to consume the entire mass of the moon.

It would take us 7.298 * 10^6 years to consume %1 of the moon. 7.3 million years to reduce the mass of the moon by 1% and increase the mass of the Earth some trifling percent that I don't feel like calculating right now, but you get the point.

Long story short, mining the moon at our current rates of mining would do nothing to sea life, or life in general on Earth, while mining on Earth has and continues to do immeasurable damage to life on Earth.

[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/all-tonnes-metals-ore...