> Again, I'm aware of how large the moon is.

You're not demonstrating awareness.

> Huh? You just asked if I understood how large the moon was, and then came to the conclusion the only thing that would happen should the moon not be there is that it would stay where it is? It would completely change the tilt of the earth, tides, etc. Do you think the spreading cloud of moon dust would have the same gravitational pull as the moon in one piece?

You appear to be mixing different things.

You wrote this:

> Have you stopped to think what happens to the earth if the moon were just outright gone? Because that's ultimately what the debate is about. If anything valuable is found there, you can be assured someone will strip mine it until every last piece of value is removed, and the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe, not their problem.

Specifically focus on this bit: "the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe".

No: it stays in orbit of the Earth. If it's not valuable, nobody's going to move it.

> It's very much not a red herring, and you can't have it both ways. If you're basing it on "human power" then you're going to need to calculate today's human power as well because there are endless manual labor jobs that humans still persist at today.

Since the industrial revolution, everything else has grown so much, totalling about 20 TW, that human muscle power has become a rounding error, less than 5% of that: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=8+billion+*+2500+kcal%2...

Human muscle used to be relevant. And I gave that alone for 500 years ago in order to maximise the difference between then and now, to steel-man my case.

> Except power hasn't increased linearly over time, which I assume you know and at this point are just arguing for the sake of argument.

I see you don't know what "linear" means.

If I'd assumed linear growth from 50 GW to 20 TW (which is 20,000 GW) over the last 500 years, thats (20,000 - 50) GW/500 years, which is an insignificant difference from saying 20TW/500 years. Applying that forward would for another 500 years would look like "double", not "x384".

I am in fact assuming exponential growth by suggesting a further x384 growth in the next 500 years.

The exponent itself has to increase in order to get faster than this rate.

> In 1900 the total yearly power consumption of humanity was 12TW. In 2022 it was 178,899TW, an increase of 14,908x in 100 years. Assuming a 384.17 increase is a great way to make some very flawed assumptions look good. But it doesn't reflect reality.

I see you can't read the graph.

That graph says it was 12,131 TWh/year in 1900 (which is 1.385 terawatts), and 178,899 TWh/year in 2022 (which is 20.42 terawatts). This is a change of x14.75.

You might have had a hint that your claim of x14,908 growth over this period was implausible just by noticing that your monitor was less than 14,908 pixels tall and the height for the chart at 1900 was more than 1 pixel tall.

You might have also noticed that it was incompatible with your other (also false) claim that "human power" is a significant fraction of current total power use, given that the human population hasn't grown 15,000 times larger over the last 500 years, which it would have needed to for both the claim "human power is a relevant fraction today" and "x14908 growth since then" to be simultaneously true.

If we were actually using 178,899 TW (not TWh/year which is what the graph you linked to is saying), the planet earth would not be a "pale blue dot" when seen from space, because we would have had to cover 80%-103% of the planet (including oceans and clouds, not just deserts and cities and forests) in something that absorbed all incoming sunlight.