In the next twenty years, not likely.

Someone who wants to imagine going to war with China over rocks on the moon is someone who wants to imagine going to war with China. That's not a serious (nor responsible) position.

Aluminum. Silicon. Titanium. Iron. Water. (Hence hydrogen and oxygen.) Many of the other elements we need are available in the asteroid belt, and it's far less cost in energy to go there from the Moon than it takes to get off of the Earth.

It's ejected mantle material just like we have here right under our feet, with the added disadvantage that there's no tectonics that would have had the effect of concentrating what trace materials were there. It's rocks.

You're judging this by terrestrial standards. Given enough energy, rocks are still resources. Remember: the energy potentially available to a space faring civilization is literally orders of magnitude greater than that available to an Earth bound one.

Someone who wants to imagine going to war with China over rocks on the moon is someone who wants to imagine going to war with China.

I'd rather nothing like that ever happened. My wife is Chinese, for heaven's sake. However, the biggest wars are fought over energy resources. The control of lunar resources will be key in who gets to exploit vast amounts of solar energy at some point. Just as wars are now fought over oil, at some point, wars will be fought over who gets to build power satellites.

You're making a key mistake here. You're using terrestrial standards to judge something which can grow exponentially to many times what's possible to do on Earth. If the planners of major powers recognize this exponential expansion in an early phase, wars can be fought over who gets to plant the seeds and harvest the result.

The military power embodied in the kind of energy harvesting we're talking about here, greatly dwarfs the same possible on Earth. If the great powers realize this, they will fight over it, with more ferocity than they do over access to the oceans.

That's right! Because we have plenty of rocks right here on earth!

Now, work out the economics of using Earth rocks to build power satellites. Compare that to the economics of using material from the Moon. The difference is orders of magnitude. Will that take a lot of energy? Yes, but there too, the difference is orders of magnitude.

The biggest wars the US fought are WWII, WWI, and the Civil War. None were over resources.

The Nazis wanted the fertile lands in Eastern Europe and Russia for their own supposedly superior people. In fact, one of their most popular slogans was about "Lebensraum im Osten"("space to live in the East"), which, now that I think about it, has a similarity in sound to the slogan of "Manifest Destiny" in the US.

The first step of the "Lebensraum im Osten" plan was to invade Poland. Hitler split it with the Soviets in order to keep the Eastern border calm, since he needed all his forces on the Western front, to handle the backlash by the UK and France over the invasion of Poland. His original plan was to take on the Soviet Union only after having won the war on the Western front.

However, he backtracked on that strategy and invaded the Soviets in 1942 because the war in the West took longer than expected. Several key campaigns on the Eastern front, including the infamous Battle for Stalingrad, were specifically about securing resources like steel and oil (and, conversely, cutting off the Soviets from those supplies).

Disclaimer: I'm not a historian. All this is going off of what I would consider common knowledge as a German.

The biggest wars the US fought are WWII, WWI, and the Civ

In other threads, I've been decrying the degradation in History education in the US and across the western world. It's gotten so that the current generations in the work force only have a "Flintstones" understanding of how the current world got to where it is now, and what lessons can be learned from history.

Additionally the density of the moon is lower than earth, so it will have higher concentrations of kinds of elements that may be rare here. Leading to mines that might be surprisingly valuable. More important may be the fact that these resources are at the bottom of a much smaller gravity well.

On a long enough time period we'll be living on the moon in permanent colonies. You are unfortunately mistaken if you think that will all happen peacefully.

That does not happen on the moon. It's cold. The rocks are just rocks.

And I'll say it again, it sounds like you're engaging in this ridiculous fantasy not because you genuinely think the moon is a treasure chest but because you privately think war with China sounds kinda cool. You know how you get dumb wars? That's how you get dumb wars.

In the desert, a cup of water is a treasure. In space, even rocks are very useful as radiation shielding.

And I'll say it again, it sounds like you're engaging in this ridiculous fantasy not because you genuinely think the moon is a treasure chest

Lots of people have studied and thought about this. In relation to the environment, it is a treasure chest. It has the right materials to build the bulk of solar power satellites, much more economically than importing those materials from Earth. Again, with enough energy, even dumb rocks become ore. There is a lot more energy available in space.

You know how you get dumb wars? That's how you get dumb wars.

Here's a challenge: Name a dumb war that wasn't at least peripherally about the control of resources, especially energy. The recent ones have been at least peripherally about oil.

This will be hundreds, if not thousands of years from now.

I don't think there will be no resources of value on the moon, but I'm not an expert in the field, so I won't die on that hill. Sadly, even if there was nothing of value there aside from the land itself, we'd probably still fight over it.

It's going to happen sooner than you think. Humans are bad at exponential change. It will be under 100 years from now.

That said, humans are surprisingly belligerent, so maybe.

I’m not a geologist but it just seems unlikely to me that the moons natural resources will be materially constrained in the next few hundred years.

But given enough time, would it not be likely? The present lack of people there has no predictive value about the far future.

That’s not to say that there is no chance of war on the moon, given enough time as you say, but “enough time” IMO is centuries, at which timescale any kind of prediction is really just a guess.

https://xkcd.com/1389/

By the time we have large scale industry on the moon, is this going to be the case? Probably not. Also, not all lunar resources are distributed evenly.

Maybe you're right, which would actually be a very good thing for the human race.

Even just as a source of materials in a much smaller gravity well it could be instrumental to future human space industry and exploration.

Did you know that the US just paid approaching 6 billion dollars to buy Italian warships? Basically, the US Navy feels like it's going to need blue water forces, while it has instead been concentrating on littoral craft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buA4ajpCtpQ

This does have something to do with China.

China wants to have a dominant blue water Navy and become a world power. They can't viably do this without Taiwan. Considering how big China is economically, and how it's growing, it may be just a matter of time before mounting an invasion goes from uncertain and dicey, to something they can easily afford.

this is just satire, right?

No. The biggest wars of the 20th century had a lot to do with control over energy resources. Whoever can operate industrial infrastructure on the moon will be able to build space solar power. At large enough scales, this basically is fusion power. Whoever controls this energy can eventually dwarf the energy resources available on Earth by multiple orders of magnitude. At long enough time scales, this will blow away even turning the Sahara into one big solar farm, even with regards to incremental cost.

It may be a long ways out, but it's inevitable if we don't first bomb ourselves back to being earthbound.

Issac Arthur: The Moon Industrial Complex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y47MMNqKGxE

It takes a lot more energy resources to exploit many space resources. However, note that this is subject to exponential growth. The more energy one can produce in space, the more resources can be converted to generate more energy to convert more resources. Planners of major powers may be able to forsee this exponential growth, and go to war over its potential.

I completely agree about space being a viable new frontier. People don't seem to get that with effectively unlimited energy, habitats throughout the Solar System and even out to the Oort cloud can be arbitrarily luxurious and enjoyable.

Advances in spacecraft design and propulsion will only accelerate things... heh