this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
654 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59562 readers
1773 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Let's not make dirty industrial activity clean, let's move it off world (destroying another different planet). Because, you know, that's apparently easier than actually solving the problem.
No, that is literally solving the problem. You can't make it clean. What exactly would we need to protect out in space or say the moon? The space whales, or moon frogs? You're protecting nothing but the vacuum of space and some rocks.
My oil stocks say keep it here. I won’t be alive to find out what happens. /s
Didn't we originally think the same ("you're protecting nothing") when it came to the ocean, the Rain Forests, lakes, streams, the Arctic, etc? Until we learned otherwise. By that time, the profit motive was too entrenched to ever allow things to change.
By way of example, what if the moon were mined to such an extreme that it changed its orbit? Wouldn't that impact it or the earth itself? What if the moon were no longer there at all because that suited a future trillionaire's aim to add another billion to their bank account?
No, the environmental movement has been happening since the industrial revolution caused air pollution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_movement
Mining the moon for rocket fuel won't affect its orbit, and I'm not sure how a trillionaire could remove the moon
Bet if Elon was in charge he’d find a way to crash it.
"wahhhh, Twitter, wahhhh"
At worst it'd be a new crater and debris thrown into orbit. The very largest asteroid thrown at the moon, even like Ceres, would be a peashooter at a barge.
I must have an overactive imagination because I can think of plenty of problems that unregulated space industry could cause.
Industry requires infrastructure and support, when speaking space terms everything is way more expensive so cost cutting will be rampant on all systems. Centralized space communication hub? No, we're gonna be bombarded with signals since maintaining the equipment on ground is cheaper (astrology sciences would suffer). Way to many objects in an orbital plane? Not their problem till eventually it becomes a catastrophic event as our own planet can become (Kessler Syndrome). More mass requires more fuel? Dump all the junk at every opportunity clogging space lanes (micro meteors and radiation will no longer be the main safety concern for travel).
I could go on and on, think about the current state of shipping and logistics. We already have events where ships were forced to sit for weeks outside of docks waiting to be unloaded (source). The space faring ships will only increase in size. What do you do with the useless containers they ship the contents back to earth with? The cost would be too high for re-usability getting it back into space. What about the workers who are at an unregulated site and their conditions?
I agree it's a conundrum of how do we advance when advancement causes destruction. It's something I've wrestled with when considering the Fermi paradox. Either you live harmoniously with the planet and die when it's environment changes, or you use that sucker up and get out of dodge before the next mass extinction takes you and nearly all of the living creatures out. I'm hoping in the future we meet some neighbors that can show a middle ground works well to persuade out current trajectory.
That's a contradiction in terms, no?
lmao, I didn't catch that so thank you. I was in a stupor when I wrote that and meant astronomy lol. I added the sciences in because there's a plethora of different fields that require clear observations and wasn't sure what the best terminology was to include all of the possibilities. Instead I completely missed the mark with the wrong base word.
What a mixup to make! 😂
But yeah, I see what you're getting at
I don't think you quite grasp how enormously big space is.
I agree, it's difficult for anyone to truly grasp how big space is. The problem is we're not interested in 99.9999999...% of space, we're interested in key points. You can drop one grain of bright pink sand on a mountain and no one would care or notice. If you only concentrate that on one path up the mountain and back down, eventually the infinite number of people traversing/dropping on that path will be noticeable and have an effect.
We really need to hold corporations accountable for solar radiation. Our star spits out so much radiation that it can cause a significant increase in skin cancers. This is a proven fact that we've known for a long time, yet no one does anything about it. Why? Well, why don't you look at who the sun really benefits. Corporations, that's who. Many of our inventions were created to protect us from the sun, reduce its effects or power the things that do. They profit off our misery while neglecting to solve the base issue: that the sun is a dirty fusion ball that threatens our well-being. Take a stand against dirty solar and let's hold big agriculture, big solar, big a/c and big beach accountable for their role in climate change and proliferation of skin cancers! We can do this together, but only if we stand together and force them to switch to clean solar energy today!
Edit: don't even get me started on that ring of trash around Saturn. Seriously, stop allowing corpos to profit off the pollution of our stellar environment.
Edit 2: yo, this was supposed to be a joke about how I think complaining about pollution on the Moon or whatever is silly. Maybe it's not a good one, but yeah.
Honestly? You can't collapse the moon's ecosystem because the moon doesn't have an ecosystem.
Yeah, the moon doesn't have an ecosystem.
It's important to note that we know for sure that the moon has no ecosystem, because every ecosystem is based on plants/solar irradiation as a source for energy, and therefore it would have to be on the surface.
There's no "hidden" ecosystems or underground oceans with life in them.
I never said anything specific to an eco system
Remember when William Shatner was nearly moved to tears by the beauty of the world after his experience on Bezos’s rocket? And then Bezos talked about moving production into space.
Then Bezos proceeded to spray champagne over him while he was trying to make a quick speech.
Imagine being the biggest asshole on a stage with William Shatner.