Helium 3

[dark]

I was watching a show on the Science channel, and they were talking about mining the moon for Helium 3. This is a bad idea, reason one, we don't know what the moon is doing to actaully help the earth, two, this could destroy the earth, three, bad idea for earth.

I know these are not great reason, but I know I am not the only person that thinks mining the moon is a bad idea. The said NASA, China, and Russia are all planning on mining it soon, with the closest time being 2017. I can not let this happen, so I am going to write a paper to some science magazine, first I would like to see what you all think about this.

 

[Glordag]

I think we are at far greater risk doing whatever we are doing to the Earth as a compensatory measure for not having the Helium 3 that we might gather from the moon. I doubt we will really alter the properties of the moon enough anytime soon to warrant paranoia.

Maybe I'm just an optimist...

 

[dark]

Yes but if fullscale mining happened, wouldnt that change the weight of the moon a slight bit, the surface will be altered, mining facilities would take everything until there was nothing left. One must ask this question, what would happen if the moon were to loose 5-10% of its mass? What about 1%? We don't yet know what effect the moon really has.

 

[Latro]

Yes but if fullscale mining happened, wouldnt that change the weight of the moon a slight bit, the surface will be altered, mining facilities would take everything until there was nothing left. One must ask this question, what would happen if the moon were to loose 5-10% of its mass? What about 1%? We don't yet know what effect the moon really has.

Helium 3 is really scarce. Wikipedia says 0.01 to 0.05 ppm on the moon. That means if we extracted every last drop of it, we'd be reducing the mass of the moon by a few millionths of a percent. If we had to extract helium 4 in situ and separate it on Earth, that'd be more like 30 ppm, which would be on the order of a few thousandths of a percent. The effect of actually trying to do the extraction (things we don't want being shifted) would probably be very small. So yeah, I wouldn't be all that worried about it.

 

[dark]

Ah so would they be extracting the Helium 3 on the moon or just shipping it to earth to be refined?

They also mentioned that they could get millions of tons of the stuff off the moon. That sounds like a lot to me. I don't remember the exact number they estimated, but it was huge, big enough to go to the moon for.

 

[Latro]

Ah so would they be extracting the Helium 3 on the moon or just shipping it to earth to be refined?

I don't know the answer to that. I would imagine that they could separate helium from everything else before leaving the moon, but I don't know if they would be able to do the separation of helium 3 from helium 4 on the moon. In either case, though, you're talking about at most a few thousandths of a percent of the moon's total mass.

They also mentioned that they could get millions of tons of the stuff off the moon. That sounds like a lot to me. I don't remember the exact number they estimated, but it was huge, big enough to go to the moon for.

Yeah, except it's a tiny tiny fraction of the entire mass of the moon, which weighs like 7*10^22 kg. 1 million metric tons is only 10^9 kg.

Edit: Actually, I didn't realize that the regolith is actually much less of the entire mass than I thought. It's not even really comparable to the mass of the moon. A million metric tons would not even be 10^-13, or ten trillionths of a percent, of the mass of the moon. Even 100 million metric tons is not even a billionth of a percent of the mass of the moon.

 

[The Journey]

I was watching a show on the Science channel, and they were talking about mining the moon for Helium 3. This is a bad idea, reason one, we don't know what the moon is doing to actaully help the earth, two, this could destroy the earth, three, bad idea for earth.

I know these are not great reason, but I know I am not the only person that thinks mining the moon is a bad idea. The said NASA, China, and Russia are all planning on mining it soon, with the closest time being 2017. I can not let this happen, so I am going to write a paper to some science magazine, first I would like to see what you all think about this.

Your fears are unfounded, if we let people like you control the world, there would be no advancements in science and technology.

 

[dark]

Haha, I find that offensive, I am all about human advancement, that is all I care about, but even a crazy entp wouldn't want to destroy the moon. But I realize how misinformed I was. And now I am all for this, really asking this question has given me more insight.

I also learned some really cool things, we could easily make H-3 factories, but it would take about 30 years to produce the products.

And what kind of person are you generalizing me as?

 

[Vrecknidj]

Mining Helium-3 from the Moon would be far more cost-effective than obtaining it from the Sun.



But seriously, the posts above which allay your fears are what I would have posted had others not beaten me to it. But, there are other issues to consider as well. The Earth, for example, gains a lot of mass every day (consider that meteors, etc. are actually rather common, and much smaller material is rather continually striking the atmosphere, burning up, and contributing mass). The Earth radiates heat (which is energy, which is equivalent to mass in important respects). The Moon doesn't gain or lose as much energy/mass as the Earth, but it does go through changes (albeit hard to notice and slow changes).

Mining the Moon's Helium-3, if it can be done profitably, will probably happen before the 22nd century.

Dave