Maybe it is desperation, rather than fix and look after the lovely blue/green planet you live on get somewhere else ready for when the Earth becomes a toxic version of the moon at which point the moon becomes desirable. A much better use for the moon would be to take all the nuclear and radioactive material including everyones stockpiles of weapons and dump them there which would be a huge step towards cleaning up the planet.
If you're going to spend the trillions of dollars it would cost to build an orbital rail gun, being about the cheapest reusable option, you'd be better off aiming it at the sun, seeing as it's already a nuclear fusion reactor, it would actually appreciate the extra fuel.
Still extremely shortsighted though.
You know that stuff that gets put on roofs - you know the grey stuff used as flashing to keep the rain out - generally referred to as "lead" - do you know what it actually is?
Most people don't.
I didn't google this I already knew it.
Another name for lead would very accurately be...... Depleted URANIUM.
Uranium, along with two (three?) other isotopes has a very interesting half life decay path and changes into different elements on the way to losing it's radioactive properties - with the final end result after a very, very, very,
very long time is... lead.
There's a reason it has the highest atomic number of the non radioactive elements, because it used to be one of them.
Master Oaks, my physics teacher would be proud
I don't remember much but that always stuck in my head.
Someone intelligent in the future will learn to either how to do this quicker or deal with the stockpiles of radiactive material and make it "useful" again, and seeing as the earth has only a limited and quite small supply, it would be quite short sighted to fire it off someplace we can't get at easily again, or at all.
Sure dealing with it is a problem for US and will continue to be for a while yet, but the future will be quite happy to have access to it for other technological uses.