Visual Selenic Aspect for Geocentric Expectations. One part of several (I would hope) voluntary codes to follow when exploiting the Moon's resources[1]. and that being to define maximum optical changes to the near-side surface of the Moon (around ±90° lunar longitude, though libration or obliquity-of-surface might mean slightly greater/lesser zoning would be chosen) within which any future exploitation or construction work would be expected to mitigate their impact.
One could imagine that (over time) the Man(/Rabbit) In The Moon could be despoiled, otherwise, by widespread damage. Or something like "Pepsi Is The
Real Real Thing" being deliberately induced by a sufficiently driven private enterprise. By agreeing certain visual acuities[3] that should not be breached by developments upon the Moon. This would not
bar strip-mining various maria/craters, but would require that the operation should preserve their relative luminosity (perhaps by saving and re-laying the topmost regolith, perhaps by dusting the most recently worked areas with a carefully mixed 'adjustment' mixture to revert to a historically acceptable norm.
It'd be a thing that the whole world could keep an eye on, anybody who wants to taking and keeping reference images at any cloudless time when the Moon is risen. If any significant scar appears upon the Moon (whether that's from mining, the hyperexpansion of an initially small 'city of domes' or merely the churning up of the surface along the length of 'Lunar Highway One" by all the surface transports that are using it) then the responsible party will be asked to mitigate the situation (and why they hadn't already tried to do, as clearly they could keep a closer and more critical eye on their own domains so that the threshold for a legistlative complaint should not even be reached), under pain of... well, whatever actual 'pain' applies.
With effectively zero cultural capital invested in the far-side (though with possibly other localised protections, such as the below-mentioned 'quiet zone', fair-distributiion and moderating of ice-containing polar resources and reserved areas placed around notable landing/crashing-zones of various historic lunar missions) it still gives a potential surface area for exploitation with an area somewhere between theat occupied by North American and that across which South America spreads.
[1] Another is that an area around the antipodal lunar point (i.e. centred essentially around
Lipsky Crater but far larger anyway) be designated a 'radio quiet zone' along the lines of
terrestrial ones, within which deep-space radiotelescopes (perhaps arecebo-like, in craters) can be insulated from most of[2] the anthropogenic radio-chatter as they point out to 'the rest of the universe'. The issues of power generation/transmission are probably going to be the greatest issues, though data volumes (incoming and outgoing) can probably be dealt with by a
web-work of fibre-optics laid out to beyond the boundaries of the area.
[2] Seleno-orbital resources might still be an issue, especially the systems being used to mediate efficient communications from the far-side near-side/Earth(-orbit) relays, but you're going to want constellations of orbiters which can go quiet (or resort only to the directionally oblique aerials) as and when they enter the stipulated 'cone of quiet'...
[3] One each for day-side and night-side. Lit aspects of the Moon would be dominated by the reflective appearance of the local regolith (the dangers of leaving a passive 'image pollution') whilst currently unlit ones
could asked not to use so much illumination. Although I'd probably allow the presence of something like the "Armstrong City" settlement to be clearly visible upon its bit of unlit disc of the Moon, even whilst I'd discourage too much by-eye visibility as part of a sunlit area.
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Topic: Space Thread (Read 284720 times)