Summary
The moon has been added to the World Monuments Fund’s (WMF) list of threatened heritage sites for the first time due to risks from commercial and governmental lunar activities.
The WMF highlights concerns about looting and damage to artefacts from Apollo missions, such as Neil Armstrong’s footprints and objects left on the moon.
WMF calls for international protocols to protect lunar heritage as private space tourism and missions increase.
The 2024 list also includes sites in conflict zones and areas endangered by climate change or unsustainable tourism.
We might use the mined materials to build stuff on the moon. Even if we were mining to bring resources back there’ll be a lot of stuff dug up that we don’t want so we’d obviously want to leave that there. We’d need to process the ore on the moon to extract the small amount of material that we’re after.
90% would be an obviously ridiculous number to use so would undermine their argument. Assuming their numbers are correct then it would take 10,000,000 years to remove 1% of the moon. And we wouldn’t remove all of the material that we mine so we’d take even longer than that to actually remove 1%.
Having said that, I really don’t agree with the sentiment of letting people do what they want on the moon because it won’t affect us. We should be more considerate of every environment just as a matter of principle.