No no, it’s beyond the environment. We took the mining operations and moved them outside the environment.
pimento64@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Less harmful to Earth’s environment, anyway. The environment on those asteroids is going to be all kinds of fucked up, hard luck for any giant space slugs that might be living there.
LordGimp@lemm.ee 1 year ago
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
It’s all fun and games until the front falls off.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 1 year ago
I hope you’re aren’t serious. I’ve seen people who legit believe in extra-terrestrial environmentalism and that we shouldn’t ever mine asteroids because it might “mess up the ecosystem”.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean this is kind of a ridiculous take. There is no environment there. They are asteroids. The asteroid belt represents ~3% the mass of the moon.. There are plenty. Enough with the hand wringing.
It would be great if we could move this environmentally destructive practice to a place where there is no environment. Its one of the few justifications that really makes sense for investment in space travel. Not because it could be profitable, but because it could help us preserve literally the only habitable place in the universe we know of. That alone should be justification for investment.
Its just another implication of how hard it is for humans to understand that “space is big”.
pimento64@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I don’t think it was ridiculous at all, and I wholeheartedly believe this would negatively impact the giant space slugs from Empire Strikes Back. Can’t you tell how serious I am?
CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Plus what about the giant space potato bugs that live under these rocks? They’ll die without shelter.
otter@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I think it was a joke
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
I’ve legit read articles from people unironically saying we shouldn’t ruin the environment of the moon with mining. The moon. The place that we often compare bombed cities to. They were worried we would look up to the moon and see big dust clouds, which doesn’t even work without an atmosphere.
Zron@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There is no atmosphere on the moon, but the moon is composed of rock which is very responsive to vibrations.
The lunar impactors from the 60s and 70s made detectable vibrations on the other side of the moon when they struck. We know this because one of the Apollo missions left a surface experiment running when they left. That experiment also picked up the vibrations of the descent module as it expanded and contracted due to the sun. Vibrations on the order of millimeters being picked up from a 70s era instrument placed several meters away from the descent stage.
I do wonder if large scale mining on the moon could negatively impact any human settlements, as the vibration from the mining would certainly propagate to them eventually.