US Officially Out of the Space Program

[RGBVideo]

Assume extreme scarcity of materials on Earth. Iron is priceless.

What portion of the moon is metal or useful for fuel?

where does that iron "disappear" from earth?

this is a fun thread

[FrostyBoy]

What the **** does people breathing oxygen have to do with reducing the Moon's mass?

I'm just assuming something terrible will happen when the Moon turns entirely into a fine powder after crushing all the rocks.

[Elok]

If this is a troll, it's pretty good. "Space air...leaking in! We need goggles, people!"

[KrazyHorse]

The goggles do nothing!

[MikeH]

no no, I am serious about that, look how quickly we remove/shift stuff on Earth. I know the Moon is big, but do you honestly have doubts we are capable of mining so much of it, that it would effect Earth?

[chequita guevara]

The goggles do nothing!

[KrazyHorse]

I'm just assuming something terrible will happen when the Moon turns entirely into a fine powder after crushing all the rocks.

IIRC the average person breathes ~200 kg of O2 a year. If the moon had the population of the Earth and they used lunar soil O2 (without reclaiming CO2) then they would need 1.2*10^12 kg of O2 a year. The moon is almost half (?) oxygen, so it has ~2.5*10^22 kg of oxygen available. In order to use up 1% of the available oxygen this colony of 6 billion people would need to be there for 200 million years

[MikeH]

What if those 6 billion people stayed on earth and we mined 10 million metric tons of material per person? We'd have mined 1% of the mass of the moon

[KrazyHorse]

I'd certainly enjoy living in my cube of concrete 126 meters on a side!

[MikeH]

When I posted my I nearly started to calculate what the effect on the moon's orbit would be if we mined a million tons of material per person for 7.36 billion people (to make the arithmetic a bit easier). But I couldn't be arsed. I would still be interested in the answer though.

[DirtyMartini]

I'm just assuming something terrible will happen when the Moon turns entirely into a fine powder after crushing all the rocks.

I'm more concerned what the hell all the moon colonists will eat and stand on after they consume all of the green cheese of which the moon is composed. The last dude will be like "I'm pretty hungry, but it's a pretty long fall. Do I eat this last little chunk of cheese or keep standing on it?"

[KrazyHorse]

Cartoon orbital dynamics

[DirtyMartini]

OK, now you've got me thinking that all the moon colonists are some sort of strange, long-nosed man-coyote hybrid that chases freakishly long limbed southwestern ground birds.

[Elok]

Actually, IIRC we're close to seven billion people now. The moon would only last about 171 million years. And the earth's population is growing!

[KrazyHorse]

It can still last 200 million as long as we can use 1.167% of the available oxygen.