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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 02 2020, @01:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the loonie-bin dept.

Can the moon be a person? As lunar mining looms, a change of perspective could protect Earth's ancient companion:

Everyone is planning to return to the moon. At least 10 missions by half a dozen nations are scheduled before the end of 2021, and that's only the beginning.

Even though there are international treaties governing outer space, ambiguity remains about how individuals, nations and corporations can use lunar resources.

In all of this, the moon is seen as an inert object with no value in its own right.

But should we treat this celestial object, which has been part of the culture of every hominin for millions of years, as just another resource?

[...] As a thought experiment in how we might regulate lunar exploitation, some have asked whether the moon should be granted legal personhood, which would give it the right to enter into contracts, own property, and sue other persons.

Legal personhood is already extended to many non-human entities: certain rivers, deities in some parts of India, and corporations worldwide. Environmental features can't speak for themselves, so trustees are appointed to act on their behalf, as is the case for the Whanganui River in New Zealand. One proposal is to apply the New Zealand model to the moon.

[...] Can we support the legal concept of personhood for the moon with actual features of personhood?

Journal Reference:
Eytan Tepper, Christopher Whitehead. Moon, Inc.: The New Zealand Model of Granting Legal Personality to Natural Resources Applied to Space, New Space (DOI: 10.1089/space.2018.0025)


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 02 2020, @10:32PM (4 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday September 02 2020, @10:32PM (#1045624)

    >I'm naturally extremely skeptical of anyone claiming to project further out
    That's reasonable, and the timeline will be extremely hard to predict - but Starship is really promising to completely change the economic landscape of the space industry, and while the details may be hard to predict, the value of the gold, platinum, etc. in the asteroids is not. At least not for the first several decades of the "gold-rush".

    >However, the part we really don't have a good plan for is sending the stuff we mine from the moon to Earth

    Why would you want to do that? There's nothing (easily mineable) on the moon that'd be worth sending back to Earth. We've got plenty of rocks here already. The good stuff is out in the asteroid belt, but an orbital supply depot would making getting there much easier.

    Early on we'd mine the moon for rocket fuel and raw materials for orbital construction - stuff that will never go anywhere near Earth. Cheap "concrete" in orbit would be a wonderful building material for all sorts of things. And lunar dirt is 42% oxygen by mass - great for refueling rockets and restocking space stations. And as industrial capacity improves all the left-behind silicon is ripe for making solar panels. Not to mention there's a combined 26% of iron, aluminum, and magnesium, all of which would eventually make valuable construction materials.

    >in such a way as to not have it burn up in the atmosphere, not create a crater or tsunami wherever it lands, and doesn't cost so much to get down here that it's not worth it to bother.

    Not really. Getting into orbit is expensive because chemical rockets are incredibly inefficient, especially when fighting gravity and air resistance, but nothing else has the power to reach orbit. Getting down again is actually cheap and easy, and thanks to aerobraking doesn't even require much energy. Figure it currently costs ~$1000/kg to get to orbit - returning something to Earth, even from the asteroid belt, is going to be far cheaper than that because you can use far more efficient propulsion systems. And at $65,000/kg for gold, the sub-$1,000 shipping costs really aren't going to matter much.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 03 2020, @06:44PM (3 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday September 03 2020, @06:44PM (#1045974)

    I think, in your cost calculations, you're leaving out something important: If you have an efficient propulsion system that can carry, say, 300kg of stuff back from the moon, and that efficient propulsion system is 50kg worth of equipment and fuel, then you have to add in the $50K required to get your return system to the Moon to your cost calculation. I'm not saying it's *never* worth it, but it's going to have to be very valuable stuff in order to be worth it.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday September 03 2020, @11:18PM (2 children)

      by Immerman (3985) on Thursday September 03 2020, @11:18PM (#1046107)

      Again, there's nothing on the moon worth bringing to Earth - it's all going into orbit or out into the rest of the solar system. Well, aside from _possibly_ refueling for the landing if it needs to be gentle - but that's so little fuel it's mostly irrelevant.

      As for the cost - gold is $65,000/kg. A single kg would pay for your 50kg reentry package with plenty left over.

      Moreover, $1000/kg is the *current* price to reach orbit - Starhsip promises to bring the price down to $100/kg, and eventually possibly even $10. That's why reusability is such a big deal.

      • (Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday September 04 2020, @12:59PM (1 child)

        by pdfernhout (5984) on Friday September 04 2020, @12:59PM (#1046294) Homepage

        From something I posted on the green site in 2003 (the SN lameness filter won't let me post the whole thing): https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178 [slashdot.org]

        So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical prototypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossiped about by academics.)

        Almost everything proposed as a reason to launch into space doesn't make sense, as much as people have touted various suggestions. The closest might be He3 mining for aneutronic fusion if we otherwise had that technology, but even that issues (energy) is probably more easily solved through conservation, energy efficiency (e.g. R60+ home insulation), and photovoltaic and wind etc. alternate energy modes (which are rapidly proving cost effective for many applications, and will be only more so with new processes and materials over the next twenty years). Asteroid mining turns out to not be that useful, since recycling is a much better idea. Zero gravity turns out to not be so valuable after all for manufacturing, since most of the processes can be done on earth, or alternative materials used. And so on for various other issues.

        Exploration is noble and important as a long-term spiritual quest, but it is a dubious priority in the short term considering how much ground based telescopes can do quickly on earth, how valuable cheap robot probes are, and how we [in the USA] are already slaughtering the other terrestrial intelligences (Muslims, Aborigines, elephants) and extraterrestrial intelligences (whales, octopods, etc.) we know of without much concern or attempt to communicate and pursue any sort of cosmic brotherhood.

        The only really sensible thing to do in space is to live there under various social and technical systems. People like Freeman Dyson, Gerard K. O'Neill, and Marshall T. Savage and many others have discussed these issues. We aren't able to pursue this because we don't know much about how to support human life on earth. We have little understanding of the Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science Buckminster Fuller proposed back in the 1930s or so. Economics is a multi-trillion dollar joke, with economists having about zero knowledge on how technical economies really work or develop (otherwise, why have no developing nations left that category in one hundred years?) We need to better understand how life is supported on earth both biologically and technically so that we can replicate it out there, and so we can then use asteroid resources, sunlight, and empty space to support quadrillions of conscious souls pursuing diverse ends in some sorts of diverse collaborations (such as J.D. Bernal proposed in the 1920s.).

        As a bonus, once some people live in space, mine asteroids for their own purposes, capture solar energy for their own purposes, use self-replicating manufacturing systems for their own purposes, then CATS really becomes CATE (Cheap Access To Earth) and for spacers who might be 1000X more wealthy than groundhogs in terms of materials and energy and innovation and cooperation, CATE would be easy, and CATS then piggybacks as a slight imbalance in CATE tourism (although why most spacers would want to go anywhere near a gravity well would probably be a deep psychological question with profound moral overtones like "spacer's burden" and all that rot).

        So, while it is great to see all these billionaires pursuing CATS, it would be great to see more people pursuing DOGS (Design Of Great Settlements). Since NASA is stuck running an obsolete space ferry it has little attention left over for DOGS. Since Billionaries are doing the sexy CATS stuff, that leaves the rest of us to go to the DOGS.

        ... And, I find, when you pursue such a space settlement design science in the right spirit, the work is also immediately applicable on Earth as sustainable technology (such as our garden simulator -- intended to help people grow food wherever in the cosmos they live). My wife and I published a paper on how an open source / free software collaboration style approaches could be used to make DOGS happen in the 2001 Space Studies Institute symposium on Space Manufacturing and Space Settlement. ...

        --
        The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday September 04 2020, @02:04PM

          by Immerman (3985) on Friday September 04 2020, @02:04PM (#1046305)

          I've already provided you with a reason - the same reason people spent fortunes sending armies across the Atlantic to the Americas, eventually colonizing when it proved lacking, and then resurging when it was discovered in California: vast quantities of gold (and other precious metals).

          Huge habitats exploring alternate forms of governance and economy are a nice idea - but the leading edge of colonization has always been driven almost entirely by by money, not ideology. Probably because it's effing dangerous and expensive even on Earth, and the promise of great wealth is one of the few ways to reliably motivate people into risking their life and wallets.

          And of course we know how to support people in space - the ISS has been doing it for years. Current practice involves a supply line from Earth, but with enough gold on the line that's acceptable. Meanwhile the raw materials for oxygen, water, and rocket fuel are plentiful almost everywhere in the asteroid belt, so with just a little infrastructure they can be eliminated from the supply line, reducing it to a tiny fraction. Moreover NASA's old hydrogen-eating microbe research for quickly growing food is now being commercially developed for use on Earth to produce things resembling palm oil, protein powder, flour, and sugar. All the staples needed to eliminate dietary staples from the supply line, drastically reducing it even further.

          And of course - we don't actually need a lot of people up there to get the money flowing. Most of the physical labor can be done by machines, and the logistics can all be managed from Earth. All you really need people out there for is to maintain and troubleshoot the machines. Which dramatically reduces the cost of the supply line necessary for each kg of gold, etc. returned to Earth. Eventually the price of "rare" elements will fall through the floor as the market is saturated by the vast quantities returned, but by then the infrastructure will be well established and optimized, and people who just want to get away and create their own "micro-countries" will probably be well into developing more permanent and self-sufficient settlements.

          Meanwhile, we already have cheap access to Earth. Getting into space is hard - the combination of high gravity and a thick atmosphere make rockets insanely inefficient, and the only viable alternatives seem to involve massive infrastructure projects. Getting back down again only requires heat shielding and a powerful catapult. Or cheap rockets with a little fuel. And a parachute or space-plane if you want a gentle landing.

          >(otherwise, why have no developing nations left that categoy in one hundred years?)
          I'd say China, India, parts of Africa, etc,etc prove you wrong. As for the rest - colonialism is a huge contributor. It's hard to get ahead when your country has been, and is continuing to be, strip-mined by powerful foreign interests who profit from keeping you powerless. Europe and the U.S. have really dialed back the open military conquest, but international corporations have taken up the slack, and the military is still likely to intervene on their behalf (see - Banana Republics, decades of war in the Middle East, etc.)