Our relationship with the world is broken, let’s fix it before our pristine moon becomes a landfill
By Sneha Uplekar
Illustration - Sneha Uplekar
‘Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon’s reflection’ said the mystic-poet Rumi, sometime in the 13th century CE. Many centuries later, the thirst for vast tracts of ice, material resources, and the possibility of setting up a base for deeper space exploration has driven humans to fly to the moon rather than gaze at it ruminatively.
Space exploration in the 20th century was largely limited to competing missions between the USA and erstwhile USSR. Several more countries and private companies have joined in since, with over a 100 lunar missions planned in the next decade alone. The moon contains valuable material resources, including Helium 3, speculated to be a future energy source. It’s a reservoir of scientific knowledge, and a potential site for a future human outpost. No surprise then that it is the next frontier of serious exploration.
The 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty proclaims that the moon cannot be owned any state, but it makes no mention of commercial exploitation. The UN Moon Agreement of 1979 states that lunar resources are shared human heritage, but the USA, China and Russia are not signatories. NASA aims to start mining on the moon within the next decade, and the USA led Artemis Accords seek to establish best practices for space exploration, but China and Russia haven’t signed it. No environmental regulations currently apply to space missions.
Many failed missions crash on the lunar surface. Unpeopled missions are deliberately crash-landed as a way to conclude them. Successful missions leave behind landers, rovers and other inoperative objects. As a result, there are currently more than 187,400 kilograms of waste on the moon. This includes mission parts, food packaging, wet wipes, 100 bags of bodily waste, golf balls and various national flags.
This is not to discourage humankind’s spirit of exploration, or the desire to solve problems. It’s what got us from walking on all fours to where we are now. But we seem incapable of thinking long term enough to treat our surroundings with care, if only to preserve them for our own future, and short term enough to not want to appropriate and hoard every available resource that might exist in our vicinity.
The consequences of this are clear on earth. Consider plastic as just one example, the invention of plastics revolutionised some aspects of human existence, not least healthcare. But their unfettered manufacturing, marketing and use has meant that microplastics are now everywhere, from Mount Everest to the Mariana trench. Over 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans every year, where they have dire consequences for marine ecosystems and enter our food chain. Alarmingly, studies have found microplastics in human placenta, arteries, blood and breast milk.
It’s not unreasonable to imagine that as lunar resources become more sought after and technology becomes cheaper and more advanced, that commercial and national competition will eclipse any concerns for sustainability.
Rumi’s exhortation to ‘escape from the dark clouds, see your own light as radiant as the moon’, might then have to become, 'look hard through the mission debris and see your own reflection in a giant space landfill’. Unless of course, our indomitable spirit of progress somehow gets tempered with an instinctual urge to tread lightly and carefully upon this universe we inexplicably find ourselves in.