Quote:
Originally Posted by JonClarke
Even sterile rock still has beauty and value.
The Moon is highly visible everywhere in the world and has great cultural significance.
Uncontrolled lunar development will impact on other potential lunar activities - such as astronomy.
Space advocates dismissing people with environmental concerns as yuppies, wounded bleeding hearts, and other epithets is utterly unhelpful. It is reminiscent of the worst rape and pillage mentality of the 19th century of of for former Soviet Union. You want to win people over, not drive therm away.
Furthermore it is utterly unrealistic to expect there to be no controls over lunar development. There will be. There will be a need to reserve common resources (vacuum, solar power), not impinge on other users (astromers for example), and preserve natural beauty.
Jon
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Heh, you'd think by taking mare regolith and covering the bright parts of it, you'd be doing them a favor.
However, lets be realistic. I am NOT talking about strip mining the surface here. That's not even practically possible to the extent that vast swaths of Lunar surface will be defaced, simply because its A) beyond the scope of modern technology even if we threw 100% effort into it, and B) not likely netting them anything useful anyway.
What I am talking about is if they do find something useful, turn them loose to get it. There's no water table to pollute, there's no atmosphere to choke, nor is there any native life to kill off. At worst, you end up with some localized devastation of the scenery, but you're talking about an astronomical body with several times the surface area of Eurasia. Most of what human technology is capable of doing won't be evident from anything other than a dedicated Moonsat like Clementine for decades or centuries at best. If its largely underground, we may never see it.
So spare me, poets, you're precious man on the moon has a long life ahead of him, even if we do industrialize it. If your panties are going to bunch up that much, there's the other 45% of the Moon you never get to see because of tidal locking, so we can always go crazy on the farside.
Heck, that might be worth doing, since it'll change the face of the New Moon phase as seen from Earth forever. To be able to look up at an otherwise dark patch in the sky, see a string of lights, and know we're out there, and out there to stay.