The moon is about 1/4th the size of the Earth, or about as wide as the United States. The moon also significantly impacts our tides here on Earth. Now, the optimist in me would say there's no way little old humanity could manage to find a way to screw that up. The pessimist in me notes that in roughly a hundred years we've managed to push our planet to the brink of ecological disaster, so to answer your question: yes, a little bit (but not the ecosystem you're referencing).
Ah well then pardon my snark - of course we humans are very determined when it comes to exploiting our environment but a crude look at the figures might set your mind at rest:
Moon's mass - about 0.7x10^23 kgs
Global annual iron ore output - about 2.5x10^12 kgs (per [1])
One over the other - 2.8x10^10 years
So on the order of a billion years to remove one percent of it. And that's assuming we develop the same kind of demand for moon iron as we have here on Earth - so we have some time to think about it at least.
Humans have a way of supply creating demand. And tech will evolve. Tell the chatbot you want a USS Enterprise kind of thing and use your free startup credits to fund it. Might be possible within next say 10k years? Much less than a hundred
billion.
meh.. automated mining to solar panel construction & using the metal+energy to make a mass driver in a fully closed loop system. Now you'll have a exponentially increasing mining and space habitat and/or dyson swarm construction platform. I'll bet we can shred the moon clean off in under a few 100k years.
It will become so ugly once exploitation starts. You know the pristine look of a field with new snow? To compare with once there are footsteps and tire tracks everywhere? The moon's beautiful undisturbed dust will become an ugly mess and look like garbage.
I think you might be underestimating how large the moon is. Also moon is receiving thousands of meteorite impacts every day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some unchanging museum exhibit - it's an always changing planetary body.
“I think you might be underestimating how large the Earth is. Also Earth is receiving thousands of meteorite impacts every day, it's hardly undisturbed. It's not some unchanging museum exhibit - it's an always changing planetary body.”
It's not like pristine snow at all, but like dusty asphalt(it really does have such color) constantly churned by meteoric impacts. It's possible however, that we avoid using such a hostile environment to a bare minimum and stay and mine underground instead.
I can see Mars landscape as beautiful and worth preserving, but drawing the line there.
The regolith is replete with embedded elements from the solar wind and micrometeorites etc. Most in situ resource extraction would be surface strip mining. But the percentage of the surface needed would be small. Both the moon and mars having no oceans have vast surface areas. A totally exploitive approach would only touch such an infinitesimal tiny portion of the area it’s hard to imagine conservation is a top priority.
Parent was concerned about spoiling pristine regolith by footprints and tracks.
Anyway, multiply the mine areas several times, it's unlikely the raw regolith will be exported. Processing will need solar power plants and radiators to dump waste heat (can't dump it into atmosphere as we're used to).
You could conduct the heat via heat pipes into the crust. The lunar basalt has decent thermal conductivity. Using something like mercury or alcohols (which have a low freezing point, and have ok phase change temperatures), or something more exotic you should be pretty ok. Radiators are mostly useful off a surface that can act like a heat sink, especially one as cold as the moon.
Oh I’d say you wouldn’t process regolith for export at all, but for use on the moon. I think you wouldn’t process and export raw materials on the moon I think you would do heavy industry you wouldn’t do on earth in the cave systems of the moon and export manufacture goods. I don’t think you would even export them to the earth but into orbit or interplanetary. Exported materials from the moon to mars would be a lot more economical than the earth.
If you were to just heat sink underground all the time, it will be a non renewable resource. That already happened in London underground that the ground heated to uncomfortable temperatures over time. But coupled with bidirectional heat pumps and surface radiators, there's heat storage potential.
It is like pristine snow in that it does not have traces of human activity all over it. But in contrast to snow, it changes very slowly, and no weather to smoothen out traces either.
