What effect will mining on the Moon have long term?

Mining on the moon would remove some mass, but I don't think you'd notice.
First mining on the moon probably won't involve strip mining and hauling all of the material away. Instead rock will be dug out, the ore poor rock will be discarded back on the moon as slag (no mass loss), and the ore will be processed (slight mass loss).
Mined material would likely be smelted on the moon which means more slag being left behind. The amount of actual material that would be removed is so small that it won't have any affect on the moon or on Earth.

Edit:
To give a little perspective, here is a Reddit post that asks the opposite question: How much mass could we add before it would affect the moons orbit

And since it's not long, here is the post text in case it disappears in the future:

If humans colonize the moon, at what point would the amount of mass we add to the moon (buildings, people, etc.) be enough to significantly change it's orbit around earth?

A lot.

I'm going to do some calculations here aiming for a .001% change, which I don't think would make a whole lot of difference in terms of effect on Earth, but should illustrate the scale of the issue.

The mass of the Moon is 7.35 x 10²² kg. That's...that's such a huge number it's crazy. If we wanted to make a difference of a thousandth of a percent, we'd have to put 7,350,000,000,000,000 people on the Moon (average of 100kg each). Let's make that a little more accessible, since 7.35 quadrillion isn't a very easy number to wrap your head around (thanks to those who pointed out that I got the label wrong. Even after I thought I got it right again).

The Empire State Building weighs approximately 350,000 tons. That's 317,514,659 kg. If we wanted to change the mass of the Moon by 0.001%, it would take 2,314,853,752 Empire State Buildings added to the Moon. In other words, you'd have to build an entire Empire State Building for every 3 men, women and children currently on Earth to make even that small change.

And then there's the question - why would we add that much mass to the Moon instead of using the materials already there to build what we need? It's extremely inefficient to take anything on Earth and put it on the Moon, so we'll probably just move people and a bit of initial material, and then build what we need with the rock and other materials on the Moon.

And I think we're safe...the number of people above? That's enough people to cover the entire moon with over 190 people per square meter of Moon surface, so it'd be pretty crowded.

posted over 6 years ago

AndyD273‭

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