mining the moon

[polywideblock]

 discovery has had "space month" all this month, kicked off with a doco about what the earth would be like without the moons influence. painted a bleak picture    
 last one today was " mining the moon " about NASA helping people put together space missions to the moon for mineral exploration/mining  

              I live in the hunter valley and we have huge open cut coal mines . read ton's and ton's taken every swipe of the excavator, the  largest export of coal in the world    I've seen the holes      
              if they mine the moon  and take all the minerals from it won't that decrease its mass and therefore its gravitational pull on the earth  

                                                                             e.g. tides seasons  etc. will be affected  like the moon was smaller/father away  


                                   just an idle thought  

[Mike DC]

   
That's an interesting idea to ponder.  


But IMO it's not a practical threat.  It would take a HUGE amount of mass removed from the Moon to affect us like that.  We probably wouldn't ever remove that much of the Moon's mass unless we were on a mission to specifically do it.  Even then, I don't see it happening with any current science/methods.  

Perhaps if we found a big heavy asteroid in a near-Moon orbit.  Then maybe we could divert its course just a little bit using a whole bunch of hydrogen bombs or something, and crash it into the Moon.   That's about the only way I could imagine harnessing enough energy to affect the Earth/Moon gravity relationship.  Even then it would probably do more to change the course/location of the Moon than remove chunks of it.    

[4cruzin]

The gravity produced by the moon comes from the core of the planet and would not be affected from holes dug in the surface . . . . We are safe!

[Mike DC]

Holes dug in the surface wouldn't do much to move the center-of-gravity of the Moon, but the total lost mass makes a difference.  Just not a very big one.

[Dino]

Nah this is easy, build big spaceship thingie, fill thingie with garbage (we've got plenty of it), fill holes on moon with garbage, fill spaceship thingies with mined ore, fly thingie back home.

There.   

[polywideblock]

calling them holes is an understatement     do you know how big those tiny little trucks really are

[DAY CLONA]

Eventually the moon will be harvested, but not in our lifetime, when the human race can get it's proverbial head out of it's ass, the moon could yield a supply of Helium 3, which it has in greater abundance than the planet Earth, a clean, non radioactive Nuclear fuel source for second generation nuclear reactors...but humans have too many issues to overcome before we're at that stage, hopefully a cataclysmic event kulls the human race down to the "fittest", cleanse the slate so to speak, and rebuilds itself with an eye towards species development rather than it's current stagnant path of destruction

[Mopar Nut]

Nah this is easy, build big spaceship thingie, fill thingie with garbage (we've got plenty of it), fill holes on moon with garbage, fill spaceship thingies with mined ore, fly thingie back home.

There.   

They could send the criminals from here (to mine the moon and offset the weight) like England did back in the day to that island. Where was that again? 

[polywideblock]

if I'm not mistaken the one you live on up until the revolution   

[XH29N0G]

I saw a talk about 20 years ago by Harrison Schmidt (senator/astronaut) about this and the main target he described for mining of the moon is energy related rather than material related.  Because of billions of years of accumulation time, the moon has a lot of accumulated Helium 3 (which is good for nuclear energy).  Schmidt's talk was an argument for making a push to do this as a business to make money by providing fuel. 

I hear talk of them shuttling Helium back and forth to Earth, and I also hear of plans to beam energy back to Earth. (Don't want them to have something go wrong and accidentally hit my house.) 

[Mopar Nut]

if I'm not mistaken the one you live on up until the revolution   

 

[draftingmonkey]

In the case of the moon, it is moving away from us at a rate of 3.78 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year. In addition, the moon also exerts a tiny pull on the tidal bulge and because the moon is slightly behind the bulge, it slows the rotation of the Earth by about 4 hours every billion years.