<Admittedly, the moon is a rock. But bear in mind that anything we do to it will last a long time. There's no erosion to speak of and no bio-degradation going on.

If I go outside right now and break a ten-pound rock in half, that rock will still be broken, barring a major geological upheaval, a million years from now. Is this pollution? Would it still be pollution if the rock had been broken by an earthquake? What's your point?

The Moon is a dead, lifeless, radiation-bathed, rock. A ROCK. It's not even a pretty rock, like jade, or opal. It's a gray, dirty, dust-covered, battered rock. It's appearance right now from the Earth, man-in-the-moon, jumping rabbit, and all, is a coincidental result of the constant and relentless bombardments and upheavals that happened (and are still going on) up there.

So what? Bear in mind that there's even less in leo and geo than there is on the moon (except that thankfully there is erosion of a sort, as in radiation, and colliding gas and junk). But still we've managed to pollute those environments, and continue to do so. When we first started throwing junk up there, we could not conceive of orbit as an environment deserving of protection. Now we know otherwise.

Orbit is not an "environment." It is a vacuum. Orbital "pollution" is a traffic-control problem, not an environmental issue. Let's not muddy the term "environment" any more than we already have. I have heard people seriously discussing lunar "ecology."

What's to keep a lunar colony from bulldozing radioactive waste a mile from their base and leaving it there for posterity? Why even bother to seal it? What happens when you dump barrels of human sewage on the moon or waste chemicals (if we are ever so unwise as to define anything on the moon as "waste")?

Use your head. Who the hell is going to be killed by radioactive waste on the Moon? Moon sparrows? Bury it under a couple of feet of dirt and mark it. Is it going to leak into the ground water? The Moon is already steadily bathed in radiation, including deadly solar storms. Human sewage dumped on the Moon would be so much colored sterile dust in about a week, assuming anyone was idiotic enough to dump that much recyclable water and plant nutrients out on the surface. I'm not sure where one would come up with any kind of a chemical industry on the Moon, unless one struck oil somewhere. Io, maybe.

Are there sites on the moon that should be preserved for esthetic reasons? Historical, certainly: I'd be pissed if the Chinese drove a tractor over Armstrong's footprints.



Our kids could hate us for screwing up the moon if we go in with the attitude that there's nothing we can do to it that matters.



I agree with you on preserving historical sites. There's an awful lot of Moon to go around without having to mess up Tranquility base.

You are falling into a perception trap that has been laid by the environmental movement. When the movement first started, "pollution" was things that harmed people and animals, damaged ecosystems, or created unsightly eyesores like wrecked automobiles dumped in national parks.

Gradually, this "evolved" until any change whatsoever made by humanity on any part of nature became "pollution." Building a house, however beautiful. Cutting down a tree, whether one replanted or not. And doing anything at all to change the current appearance of any part of nature. This is what the "don't pollute the Moon" people are screaming about. Change made in any natural object by human beings is evil. Since, of course, this is exactly the main survival mode of the human being, we can see what their real goal is.

Any reasonable person could see that, assuming there was any reason to, one could stripmine the hell out of the Moon long before any visible change from Earth would be there. One good large meteor hitting the surface changes the Moon more than fifty years of human activity ever could. There may be real pollution issues some day: if there are isolated ice deposits, one would certainly not want to bury radioactive waste in them. Astronomers may be concerned about processes that dump large amounts of gases that over many years could actually create enough of an "atmosphere" to affect sensitive optical systems. But these issues are few and far between.

Outer space is the ideal place for an industrial revolution. We have a chance to move some of our major industries away from Earth and out where they will finally be harmless. Don't let the nihilists define your parameters for you.