You view the Moon as the Earth’s nightlight. Astrophysicist Jayanth Chennamangalam looks at it the way in old-timey California prospector viewed them thar hills—a gold mine.
Well, not literally a gold mine. More like a platinum mine. $1 trillion worth of platinum, and other valuable metals, like iridium, palladium, and several others you remember hearing when you played Mass Effect, and all hiding in around 6,500 of the Moon’s craters.
In a paper published in the journal Planetary and Space Science, Chennamangalam and his team dug into the math of over 1.3 million lunar craters wider than half a mile and concluded that metal-rich asteroids formed a surprising number of them.
Chennamangalam argues that monetizing space could finally pry open the doors of private investment into the rest of the solar system. The way he phrases it in his paper, space research was mostly done for all these years to “satiate curiosity” and seems to heavily suggest that space exploration will only be legitimized, in his eyes at least, once private investors can get up there and start making money off of it.
Because all that research was conducted with taxpayer money, meaning it was “at the mercy of governmental policy.”
How Much Platinum is on the Moon?
You can hear the underlying nihilistic philosophy running through that, can’t you? That something isn’t worth doing if you’re not making trillions of dollars off of it? Doing something for the sake of knowledge, experience, and a greater understanding of life and the universe, and our place in it, makes you a loser.
Only winners make trillions of dollars blowing up the moon for its pretty rocks. If that’s not what he meant, then he shouldn’t have written all that stuff that made it sound like that’s exactly what he was saying.
Legally, nobody owns the Moon. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 made sure of that. It’s kind of a big cosmic public park. It belongs to everyone and no one. But not everyone is playing by those rules.
The Artemis Accords, spearheaded by the United States and signed by several nations, is a non-binding agreement that attempts to establish guidelines for any potential lunar land grabs in the future. That was a kind of gentlemen’s agreement stating that the nations that signed it can’t just go up there, plant a flag, and called dibs on a chunk of it or even the whole damn thing.
But, of course, Russia and China certainly did not sign the accords, so they wouldn’t be playing by the same rules as 55 other nations, including all of North America, most of South America, and nearly all of Europe.
Take one last good look at the moon tonight. Really soak in its glow and admire its beauty because one day, when the space mineral race really ramps up, and several major nations along with dozens of corporate mining outfits race up there to wring it of every last bit of resources it’s got, there might be a time when the moon and it’s not so innocent and pretty anymore, and you only see cynical corporate greed.
The post Is There a Trillion Dollars’ Worth of Platinum on the Moon? appeared first on VICE.
