[itishappy]

I personally think it would be amazing to visit the stars, but I'm also disappointed that human development currently makes it hard to even see them. My children will be unable to view the Milky Way with their eyes like I have. Is it "hating humanity" to mourn this loss a little, to want to preserve something like it for future generations?

It feels a bit like natural parks to me. Of course they contain resources! We can tear all the trees out and strip mine the land, but I'm glad we don't! They're pretty in ways the lit Coca-Cola billboard that replaces them can't imitate. I'm honestly a bit depressed to hear this preservation framed as "self-hatred" and "loathing."

Also, we should be super freakin' sure that these rocks are actually devoid of life before we start moving all our stuff in (and the recent asteroid sample contamination shows we move in hard and fast). I don't think we're anywhere near as certain about this as you imply, and it would suck to burry the evidence for abiogenesis before we understand it.

> There is no environment to pollute.

The moon has an environment. "We towed it outside the environment" was a joke!

[JumpCrisscross]

> Is it "hating humanity" to mourn this loss a little, to want to preserve something like it for future generations?

It strikes me as naively presumptuous more than hateful. We don't have the capability, today, to ruin a celestial body by any reasonable defintion of those terms. Maybe we figure out what we can do and what's over there before we loop in the space NIMBYs.

> it would suck to burry the evidence for abiogenesis before we understand it

What threshold of sureness would you propose for what amount of activity? Even massive (1mm+) colonisation wouldn't ruin evidence planet-wide.

[itishappy]

> We don't have the capability, today, to ruin a celestial body by any reasonable definition of those terms.

I don't think we all agree here. The author seems to think that lights would be inappropriate, and Native American tribes have claimed that burials and even human waste desecrates the moon. I'm of a somewhat different mind, I think seeing lights would be neat, but I can't justify blasting the eye off the man-in-the-moon to make it easier to roll the lunar megatrucks in easier.

> What threshold of sureness would you propose for what amount of activity?

Great question. I see this as an argument for cautious incremental progress rather than immediate resource extraction. I'd actually agree that a small human settlement focused on samples and surveys is a logical next step here. We're just so much more efficient than single-purpose robots. I would just urge caution.

[JumpCrisscross]

> author seems to think that lights would be inappropriate

If they're "visible with the naked eye from Earth." From what we can tell, no lights on Earth are visible from the Moon. So sure, when MGM is developing the Luxor Mare Imbrium, we can talk.

> Native American tribes have claimed that burials and even human waste desecrates the moon

With all due respect to the Navajo Nation, I'm putting this one the wrong side of reasonable. (It's remarkably close to the extraterritorial projection of ownership and demand for control that cost them their lands in the first place.)

[itishappy]

> From what we can tell, no lights on Earth are visible from the Moon.

Wait, really? That's surprising to me!

> With all due respect to the Navajo Nation, I'm putting this one the wrong side of reasonable.

Totally fair, and I tend to agree. My point is that not everyone does. I'm sure there's reasonable compromise. To bring it back to my earlier example, we do actually mine national parks (at least the UK does), we're just careful with our approach. I hope this type of approach would suit the author.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodsmith_Mine

[JumpCrisscross]

> Wait, really? That's surprising to me!

Yup [1]! (To put it in context, Earthlight on the Moon [apparent magnitude -17.7] is brighter than the full Moon on Earth [-11s]. Maybe during a lunar eclipse?)

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/38922/could-apollo...

[itishappy]

Fascinating, thanks! The author's standards may be more permissive than expected... We might be able to build whole cities without impacting the view from Earth!