I have always wondered about the environmental impact of both planet-side and asteroid mining. Now with the advent of moon fracturing, this concern is higher than ever.
We need an independent scientific inquiry into ramifications of limitless drilling of natural bodies for both private commercial profit and benefit of military-industrial complexes around the cluster.
Well, eventually weâll run out of resources. I suppose this inquiry should be tasked to study for how long can we recklessly waste natural resources until we need to find another part of space to pillage until weâve consumed it all.
You lot really underestimate how much sheer mass there is to even a tiny moon.
Was about to say. Given the amount of systems we have access to in New Eden, and the amount of moonsâŚ
⌠I just tried to do napkin math on how long itâd take to actually spend all these resources at the rate of current periodical mining yields in New Eden and I ran out of napkin rather quickly. Iâm not sure humanity could possibly exist that long and still be even remotely close to⌠well, human.
You get to order-of-magnitude calculations like âSure, I could exhaust this moon, by producing a few dozen Raven-class battleships. Per second. If Iâd started in YC 0. And only a modest few parts-per-million of the moonâs mass were useful elements for their construction.â
Jev, when you put it that way, it sounds like a daunting task, however. Fracking would tear chunks out of the moon. Meaning useless elements would also get dragged into space. Enough fracking and the effects of gravity would eventually tear the moon apart.
Granted I am no geologist, but how much of that mass is actually usable as raw materials? And at what cost, is it feasible to consume entire moons without a dire need where costs are irrelevant? And while Iâm no ecological bleeding heart either, there is an ethical question on how badly should we ravage celestials under our control. If you have no qualms about leaving barely-held-together husks of moons and planets after you, well, then I guess there is no problem.
Had a look at the closest moon to me - a fairly small one - and even if it was just one part per million were useful, itâd still come out at 7.35e13 kg of usable material. Thatâs a LOT of zeroes. This is the absolute lowest end of estimates Iâm willing to make as the more likely amount of useful material extracted would probably be one if not several orders of magnitude greater.
Weâre talking billions of tons of usable material on that low end estimate. On a relatively small moon at that.
I havenât checked what the average amount of moons per system in New Eden is, but thereâs roughly five thousand systems in New Eden and as I understand it roughly half that in w-space. A very very lowball estimate of moon averages translates to an extremely conservative forty thousand moons. Now remove all that are tied to inhabited planets in order to avoid tidal issues etc and youâd still probably sit comfortable with the majority of these.
Another set of zeroes to add to our number then.
The tl;dr here is basically that we can churn through moons as fast as we possibly can and itâd still be like the proverbial bird sharpening its beak on a mountain once a day, then wondering how long itâd take to turn the mountain into dust.
Gravity is what keeps moons and planetary bodies together, not the structural strength of the materials involved. Dump your waste rock back onto the moon after pulling out aforementioned parts per million, youâll be fine.
And again, on any kind of human scale, youâre barely making a dent in the thing, unless youâre at it for millennia. By that time weâll probably have all died out, or advanced sufficiently to be directly peeling stars for usable mass.
Except it doesnât work like that. Iâve flown against DED and other governmental ships for my associates in Curse.
Catagorically, the baseline invaders had a very bad day.
As said already even when considering very, very long time scales we have a practically limitless amount of resources to access even before considering future expansion. There are only two truly unsustainable things about which to worry: humankindâs desire and ability to engage in increasingly destructive forms of warfare and pension programs.
Lowsec is still very sparsely colonized, and cities in the core high sec systems are being built in ever-increasing layers to accomodate population growth. If CONCORD ever did try to assert direct control over nullsec, it wouldnât be profitable for them, for quite a long time. And in order to do it, theyâd have to put the leash back on capsuleers in a way that would make us much less useful to them. I donât see it happening unless the political structure of the empires change a lot.
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