Why now is the time to address humanity’s impact on the moon

By Christine Daigle, Jennifer Ellen Good, Liette Vasseur, Brock University

Humans have always looked at the sky, using the stars as navigation guides or for spiritual storytelling. Every human civilization has looked to the stars and used celestial movements to measure time and find meaning.

This insatiable thirst for knowledge combined with technological advancements have made it possible for us to dream of travelling in space. These dreams became more and more real after the Second World War, the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War and the large-scale exploitation of the Earth’s resources.

Dreams of space travel started small with the launch of Sputnik-1 by the Soviet Union, and escalated with the U.S. Apollo landing on the moon in 1969.

Six decades later, plans are ramping up for space tourism, missions to the moon and Mars, and mining on the moon.

The Lunar Resources Registry, a private business that locates valuable resources on the moon and helps investors conduct the required exploration and extraction operations, notes: “The space race is evolving into space industrialization.”

According to NASA, “the moon holds hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources,” including water, helium-3 and rare earth metals used in electronics.

The dawn of the Anthropocene

As a group of academics researching various aspects of environmental sustainability on Earth, we are alarmed at the speed of these developments and the impacts resource exploitation will have on lunar and space environments.

There is a movement among the international geologic scientific community calling for a new epoch — the Anthropocene — reflecting the enormous extent to which human activity has altered the planet since the end of the Second World War.

Stratigraphers — geologists who study the layers of rock and sediment — look for measurable global impact of human activities in the geologic record. According to their research, the starting point for the Anthropocene has been identified as beginning in the 1950s, and the fallout from nuclear testing.

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