Alex McColgan

However, separating the metals will often also produce useful by-products like oxygen and hydrogen.

They are super basic and not rare on Earth at all, but unlocking these elements on the moon itself will allow for a colony to be self-sustaining, as oxygen means breathable air, hydrogen can be converted to fuel, and combining the two will produce water.

Unprocessed regolith could also prove useful, as it could potentially be turned into lunacrete, useful for building infrastructure on the moon without having to transport the materials from Earth.

Black glass could also easily be produced from lunar regolith.

And, as I mentioned in a previous video, while it's not super ideal, some plants can grow in lunar regolith, helping any lunar base to be self-sufficient in growing its own food, short of using hydroponics.

But perhaps the most important resource found on the moon are, ironically enough, metals known as rare earths.

Interestingly, rare earths, which consist of this section of the periodic table, are not actually super rare on Earth.

However, the difficulty in mining them is that they have not really collected into big deposits, rather they are dispersed through the Earth's crust.

This means that they are exceptionally hard to mine on Earth.

and there are only a few countries worldwide that have deposits large enough to do anything about it.

Even then, most countries don't bother at all because of the massive environmental and human damages that come from the pollution of mining them.

The only country that did not waver from these problems is China, as China has around 30% of the planet's rare earth supply, and because it is one of the only countries mining for them, they have a 95% control of the market.

However, just as a side note, one of its big mines was actually found in Myanmar.

and with the military coup that just took place, there might have been a shift in that mine's control.

In any case, 95% control of the market puts China in a powerful position worldwide, especially seeing as these minerals are so valuable to our society, being components of various electronics and batteries.

Because of the massive push recently to switch to electric vehicles with their huge battery packs, demand for these materials will only increase.

So it's worthwhile considering where the minerals building these batteries come from.

Are countries with somewhat sizeable deposits like the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa going to start digging up their backyard to extract them?

Or rather than pollute the earth further in our attempt to go green, is it actually more feasible to get these rare earths off the moon instead?

Rare Earths aren't any more common on the Moon than on Earth, however some deposits have already been identified, and pollution on the Moon would certainly not have any of the devastating environmental and human consequences attached to doing it here.