The “rocks have rights” crowd are worried again about vandalizing space:
Edward O Wilson has suggested that biophilia, our appreciation of Earth’s biosphere, is a by-product of evolving in this environment. If he’s right, we might find we don’t care about other worlds in the same way. This raises the alarming prospect of rapacious lunar mining altering the view from Earth.
Maybe our biophilia will kick in here: after all, our view of the Moon is one of Earth’s natural vistas. Surely we can agree that we don’t want that changed? It is an awesome thing to look up and remember that human footprints once marked the Moon’s surface. It’s quite another to imagine the moon looking like an abandoned quarry.
No, we can’t agree. Note that this was in the context of a discussion on “eco issues” on the moon.
Here’s the “eco issue” on the moon (and in the rest of the universe, as far as we know right now). There is no “eco” there. There is also no “bio” for our “biophilia” to kick in about. Ecology and biology are about life, something that exists only on earth. It’s one thing to want to preserve an ecosystem, but when one simply wants to preserve the entire universe in its current “pristine” state, there’s something unsettling and misanthropic going on.
Why is it all right for a meteroid to slam into the lunar surface and leave a crater (which has happened billions of times throughout history, and continues today) which is how the moon got to look the way it is, but a pit for mining is verboten? Would he object to seeing the lights of a lunar city up there? Does he have any idea how far away it is and how much mining one would have to do to see it from earth, even with a telescope?
What is this worship of entropy? What is this loathing of humanity? What is this apparent loathing of life itself?