> There is nothing there to abuse, no "environment" to foul, no natives to exploit, nothing, not even bacteria.
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but this is incorrect. The Moon is a uniquely pristine environment that holds irreplaceable evidence regarding the formation of both our and other solar systems. It may even contain bacteria, trapped long-dead within meteorites, that could tell us more about the development of life on Earth or elsewhere.
It is of huge importance that we are able to extract as much of this information as possible before we start tearing it up.
There is a planet full of it. An entire planet. If we made a conscious effort to deliberately go forth and destroy all evidence, it would take us millennia... with generous technological assumptions.
Also an entire solar system and indeed an entire universe full of further such stuff.
Complete bollocks. This is a planet. You are talking about taking a shovel to an entire planet. This is not something that's going to just, whoops, accidentally happen in a couple of hours, sorry, didn't think about all that science lying around. We haven't even done that level of "damage" to Earth, by orders of magnitude, with the entire history of human civilization, on a much larger planet, and you're sitting there worrying about bespoiling a dead rock.
By the time we've "wrecked" all that precious precious data about the formation of the solar system we'll have better recording equipment than we can even dream of now anyhow, since we're talking centuries and centuries from now in the "best" case. Not to mention we'll have visited a few other places in this case.
There's no need for the aggression. We're two grown-ups here, having a discussion about a subject we both find fascinating.
That aside, here's some elaboration.
Trillions of meteorites have landed on the Moon's surface since its formation. Some of these may be remnants from violent collisions between other planetary bodies. A few of these events may have happened at a time where life was starting on Earth. An tiny portion of these pieces of rock may actually contain fossil evidence of early life, in the form of bacteria or complex biochemistry. Similar evidence that once existed on Earth is likely to have been destroyed by our active geology, or by more recent biological processes.
The likelihood of life being preserved in this manner is so vanishingly small that, out of the trillions of meteorites on the Moon's surface (an area around 20% larger than that of Africa), only a minute number of them are likely to contain anything like it.
It would be a shame if the key to understanding abiogenesis was lost in an industrial rock-grinder.
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but this is incorrect. The Moon is a uniquely pristine environment that holds irreplaceable evidence regarding the formation of both our and other solar systems. It may even contain bacteria, trapped long-dead within meteorites, that could tell us more about the development of life on Earth or elsewhere.
It is of huge importance that we are able to extract as much of this information as possible before we start tearing it up.