[CaptArmchair]

Mining the moon in and of itself? There's no impact on Earth. Introducing tons of extraterrestrial metals into our biosphere? There's the rub.

The article totally disregards the lifecycle of consumer products that would use lunar metals. There's already a massive challenge dealing with historic heavy metal pollution across the globe.

Recycling is a hard problem. Not because of the technical aspects. Because a massive chunk of what we consume never ends up being recycled in a safe, secure environmental conscious manner in the first place. Just consider how much e-waste ends up in 3rd world scrapyards. There are massive economical and political hurdles to consider. Our collective behaviors need to fundamentally shift...

... and once you start thinking about that, you automatically arrive at the 5 R's which have a distinct ordering: Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Rot, Recycle.

If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place in order to stem the rate at which our planet gets polluted... then what's left of the need to scavenge metals from other heavenly bodies?

[thayne]

> If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place

The most obvious solution there is to build things to last longer. But in the current environment, companies ate strongly incentivised to do the opposite.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

Ironically, this is the one thing *aaS might be able to solve from a consumer standpoint.

[jelliclesfarm]

>If we could figure out how to reduce global consumption of resources in the first place in order to stem the rate at which our planet gets polluted... [..]

It’s easy. Reduce population to carrying capacity. The math is 1/2 surviving child per human that’s a non transferable right for 150 years.(Altho at this point, it may be too late. I would like all of us to survive past 2030, but worth a shot even though the decline of our eco system began in 2000ish)

It would be better if we found a way to preserve genetic material or find a way to generate pluripotent cells for procreation. We would need diversity of genetic material and not everyone would want to be a parent. Their genetic material would ensure that we have a ‘genetic library’ of reference materials so we don’t go extinct as a species.