Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Moon Mining

I found it very interesting in class on Monday how it hard it was to make a moral argument against mining the moon. So, here is an article by Andrew Smith

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/27/comment.comment

He argues against lunar mining from an environmentalist standpoint. The last line of his articles is perhaps the most hard hitting:

 "Earth's sister has played a role in teaching us to value our environment: how extraordinary to think that the next giant leap for the environmental movement might be a campaign to stop state-sponsored mining companies chomping her up in glorious privacy, a quarter of a million miles from our ravaged home."

We have a hard time protecting the Earth's environment, how are we going to protect the moon too ?

3 comments:

  1. I read the article. Actually, he did not seem to provide any argument per se. Rather, he pointed out - like you said, Sierra - that this is an opportunity for an environmentalist Renaissance. I'm not sure the answer is that simple though.

    Unless we say - like Godlovitch - that all rocks have a sacred quality to them similar to our concept of innate human "rights" (they cannot be rights exactly since rights imply obligations and understanding the moral law), the environmentalist position does not hold well as an absolute moral objection. Although preservation should be the general rule, there are circumstances where interplanetary colonization or exploitation may be necessary.

    Actually, there is an excellent novel written by Kim Stanley Robinson called RED MARS which posits this moral question. In the novel, colonists travel to Mars and quickly split into two camps over whether Mars should be terraformed or not.

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  2. This moon mining topic reminds me of the movie Avatar: a civilization has nearly destroyed their planet, so why not move onto another (planet or moon)? We can be so greedy...

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