The master creator of supreme adventures then has one of the characters predict that the same fate could be in store for Earth. “And so,” asked Michel Ardan, “humanity has disappeared from the moon?”
“Yes,” replied Barbicane, “after having doubtless remained persistently for millions of centuries; by degrees, the atmosphere becoming rarified, the disc became uninhabitable, as the terrestrial globe will one day become by cooling.”
“By cooling?”
“Certainly,” replied Barbicane; “as the internal fires became extinguished, and the incandescent matter concentrated itself, the lunar crust cooled. By degrees, the consequences of these phenomena showed themselves in the disappearance of organized beings, and by the disappearance of vegetation. Soon, the atmosphere was rarified, probably withdrawn by terrestrial attraction; then aerial departure of respirable air, and the disappearance of water by means of evaporation. At this period the moon, becoming uninhabitable, was no longer inhabited. It was a dead world, such as we see it today.”
“And you say that the same fate is in store for the earth?”
“Most probably.”6
How Earth succumbs to the destructive universe that engulfs it is less important than the fact that Verne addressed its vulnerability and also its relationship with its solitary companion, which circles close by. The home planet and its moon have always had a special relationship. Indeed, the fact that the Moon is as large as it is relative to Earth and goes through predictable phases has made it the subject of veneration and worship throughout history. The oldest written records from ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India, and China tell of disparate societies that were convinced that the Moon had supreme power. It has been and still is worshipped because its phases have been associated with life and death: with the growth and decline of plant, animal, and human life, all of which are intimately related and mutually dependent. In Chinese mythology, the goddess Chang'e is stranded on the Moon after committing the sin and drinking a double dose of an immortality potion.
The Moon's supreme power has manifested itself in evil, too, which is why it has been venerated by witches since medieval times. The Moon's size, closeness, composition, and effect on Earth have led some to think of it not as a moon at all, which connotes its being an attendant body, but as another, smaller planet; that the Earth-Moon relationship is in fact that of a double planet. That carries the clear implication that humans and other creatures could live on it.
In Edward Everett Hale's opinion, they could also live on a moon that is made of bricks. The author of the short story “The Man without a Country” also wrote “The Brick Moon” as a three-part serial that was published in the Atlantic Monthly in October, November, and December 1869. It and was followed by “Life in the Brick Moon” in February 1870. They are serious adventure stories about people living in a manmade structure, and, understandably, they contain both errors in science and some excellent insights. But they are far more important as prophesy than literature because they describe people living harmoniously and productively in a space station that was made of bricks and was a precursor to one that is made of metal and called the International Space Station. It established the notion in nineteenth-century America that humans could fare well living in a structure that was not on Earth and, in doing that, it set the basis for an idea that would germinate into the concept of self-contained communities in space, including on the Moon.
Arthur C. Clarke was all in favor of establishing a permanent base on the Moon, not as a refuge from some calamity on Earth, but as the logical first step in humankind's inevitable expansion into space that he thought should include establishing colonies on Mars and beyond. He believed without question that it is humanity's destiny to spread throughout the Solar System and adapt to new environments as necessary. “Only little minds are impressed by size and number. The importance of planetary colonization will lie in the variety and diversity of culture which it will make possible—cultures as different in some respects as those of the Eskimos and the Pacific Islanders. They will, of course, have one thing in common, for they will all be based on a very advanced technology. Yet though the interior of a colony on Pluto might be just like that of one on Mercury, the different external environments would inevitably shape the minds and outlooks of the inhabitants. It will be fascinating to see what effects this will have on human character, thought and artistic creativeness,” he wrote in The Exploration of Space, which was published in 1951, the third of about a hundred or so books he would write in his extraordinarily productive career.7
And, logically, the exploration was to start on the Moon, which he declared should be a self-sustaining colony to be developed as a thriving, productive enterprise—a lunar base, as he put it—not as a refuge. The idea, though he would not have put it this way, was to homestead the Moon and then extend the homesteading ever deeper into space the way Americans did when they moved west in wagon trains in the nineteenth century. (The size, safety, and creature comforts of spaceships being what they undoubtedly will be, trains of them will not be necessary unless aliens—“greenskins,” as they might be called in politically incorrect space jargon—are encountered wearing feathers and are armed with bows that shoot laser arrows. Then the spaceships will have to be formed in circles with the Earthlings making certain to shoot their lasers to the outside…) “Today we can no more predict what use mankind may make of the Moon than could Columbus have imagined the future of the continent he had discovered…. Nevertheless, it is possible to foresee certain lines of development which appear likely as soon as we have reached the Moon, and we can also discuss, in general terms, the problem of making it habitable,” Clarke continued.8
The problem, understandably, was to make the Moon like Earth, in that it would have air, water, vegetation, and all else that is necessary to sustain human life. A full-page color illustration in The Exploration of Space shows the lunar base consisting of four domed structures, one of them quite large, built into a rock formation with a large communication antenna close by and several others off in the distance, cultivated land, excavation underway, a rocket being launched in the distance, and a small truck carrying something in the foreground. The point was obviously to show the lunar base as a thriving metropolis that gets its energy from a solar power plant, a source of clean and relatively inexpensive energy that would also have a place on Earth. Yet Clarke also mentioned a subterranean enclave. “There is a good deal to be said for moving the lunar base underground at the earliest opportunity, if it proves possible to excavate the moon's surface rocks without too much difficulty. An underground settlement would be easy to air- and temperature-condition, and its construction would not involve carrying materials from Earth. Possibly suitable caves or clefts might be found which could be adapted.”9 The Martian base is set in a green countryside with vehicles on roads, looks like Philadelphia or Detroit, and is set under a colossal Plexiglas dome.
Writing when he did, Clarke had no way of knowing that getting to the Moon was going to be motivated by Cold War politics, not by the desire to invigorate the human spirit, to mine the lunar landscape for precious metals to supplement those on Earth, or to spread out for safety's sake. The Soviet Union had tried, without success at first, to send probes to Mars and Venus and dispatched robotic Luna spacecraft to the Moon in evident preparation to send cosmonauts there, so President John F. Kennedy's advisers convinced him that landing astronauts on the Moon would be a feat of supreme and lasting importance because it would prove conclusively to the world in the most dramatic and unchallengeable way that the United States could land Americans on another world and get them safely home again because its system was economically, technologically, and politically superior to that of a totalitarian union of socialist republics. And it worked. The landing of the Eagle on the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, was a historic triumph of immense proportion. But it was done for bragging rights, for expediency, not for the long-term benefit of civilization in any capacity.
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sp; Yet Clarke was a scientist, not a politician, so he saw the Moon as both a scientific asset and one that contained abundant natural resources that could help nourish Earth. “Within a few years of the first landing, it should be possible to establish a small camp on a permanent basis, keeping it supplied by a regular service of ships from Earth. A great effort would be made to set up an observatory with a telescope of moderate size: in fact it would be worthwhile building a spaceship for no other purpose than to carry a reflecting telescope of, say, twenty-inch aperture to the Moon…. The Moon has so many advantages as an observatory that future generations may well wonder how we discovered anything about the heavens while we were still ‘earthbound.’”10
An observatory on the Moon could be used to find and track asteroids, a fact that Clarke did not address. In common with many other scientists and others in the space community, he thought that asteroids are loaded with natural resources that can be exploited to help Earth, and he minimized the potential danger they pose. Former astronaut Tom Jones, a veteran of four space-shuttle missions and whose memoir, Sky Walking, predicts that near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) offer advantages for commercialization as well as exploration of NEAs, agrees. “The water and other mineral resources that we know are present on some NEAs could help reduce the long-term costs of exploring the Moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system. And in the course of exploring them, we can test the technology needed to divert any asteroid on a collision course with Earth…. From my spacefarer's perspective,” he continued, “the most attractive idea about ‘astronauts to asteroids’ is that such voyages represent a natural progression in difficulty, more challenging than the dash-for-the-Moon Apollo missions but less daunting than the multiyear duration of a Mars landing expedition.”11
John W. Young is concerned about the asteroid threat and about humanity's survival in general, which is why he has become a strong advocate for colonizing the Moon, a place he knows firsthand. In 1981, he commanded the space shuttle Columbia on the first flight that orbited Earth; in total, he spent forty-two years with NASA, during which he became very familiar with the asteroid situation. He also became intimately familiar with the Moon, since he has been there twice. He orbited it during the Apollo 10 mission in late May 1969 in a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 landing in July, and he was the ninth person to walk on the lunar surface when he commanded the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972 and spent seventy-one hours there, including a romp with Charles Duke in a lunar roving vehicle.
“I started advocating [colonizing the Moon], so as to enable humankind to survive even if Earth gets hit hard by an asteroid, we must continue exploring the Solar System,” he wrote in Forever Young, his autobiography. “Specifically, we need to build a permanent human base on the Moon where people from different nations can live and work. If we can learn how to terra-form on the Moon, the same technology could save Earth inhabitants from the long nuclear winter that would be caused by an asteroid impact.” The reference to a nuclear winter, in which debris would cloud the sky for months, blocking sunlight, implies that the impactor he had in mind was quite a bit larger than the one that grazed Chelyabinsk.
Young is respectful of NASA for much of what it has accomplished, certainly including the Apollo program and Solar System exploration, but he nonetheless faults it for not making a strong case for a return to the Moon, not for glory, but for the safety of the world in the broadest sense: planetary defense:
In trying to persuade the public why we need to go back to do more human exploration of the Moon, has NASA chosen to explain that such exploration will provide us with much of the advanced technologies that are badly needed to ensure the long-term survival of our threatened and endangered species on Earth? No. Has NASA made a powerful enough case that the Moon is the very best place to establish the first human bases for living, working and supporting Earth's people in this, the twenty-first century? No. It's no doubt because NASA's bureaucracy sees no political advantage in scaring people. But I see it differently. The human race is at war. Our biggest enemy, pure and simple, is ignorance. The bottom line of all human exploration is to preserve our species over the long haul. We have no idea how much time we have left. The Solar System and Planet Earth are talking to us. But no one is listening. There are major events that can “do in” our civilization. And in time they most certainly will.12
Clarke not only envisioned the Moon as an observatory that would not be impeded by an atmosphere—and therefore a superior vantage point to search for threatening asteroids, though he did not mention that—but, far more important, he saw it as the logical first place for people and other creatures to settle and homestead as they migrated inevitably toward Mars and the other outer planets. Although he probably would not have put it this way, for Clarke, the need to explore and migrate to worlds beyond this one—wanting to see what is beyond the horizon and venture there—is as embedded in the human genome as romantic love, protection of family, and seeking safety from the extremes of nature. The last is what impelled Osepok to get out of town, and it, together with the migration impulse, is probably what got Clarke to decide that colonizing the Moon would be the logical first step in the great expansion to other worlds.
The greatest technical achievements of the next few centuries may well be in the field of what could be called “planetary engineering”—the reshaping of other worlds to suit human needs. Given power and knowledge (wisdom is rather useful, too) nothing that does not infringe on the laws of Nature need be regarded as impossible. We will return to this theme when we discuss the other planets, but it will already be apparent that the conquest of the Moon will be the necessary and inevitable prelude to remoter and still more ambitious projects. Upon our own satellite with Earth close at hand to help, we will learn the skills and techniques which may one day bring life to worlds as far apart as Mercury and Pluto.13
Scientists will be among the first to say that social generalizations are dangerous. But they will also say, without stigmatizing biology or chemistry in the slightest, that physicists are known to be the most imaginative of the breed. Clarke was primarily a physicist, though his degree was in both physics and chemistry. Hans Bethe was a physicist, and so were Theodore Taylor, Edward Teller, and the exuberant and irrepressible Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist from one of New York City's earthier neighborhoods, who taught at Caltech (including freshmen) and proudly boasted that he was first and foremost an intellectual “explorer,” knowing that exploration in its many forms contributes so much to the glory and nobility of the human spirit.
To that extraordinarily imaginative group of notables, add Gerard K. O’Neill, who was a professor of physics at Princeton University, and a prophet who decided that spreading out by creating a self-sustaining colony in space was unarguably imperative, given Earth's finite capacity to nourish the creatures that live off it and the multiple dangers out there. He got that out in a landmark work, “The Colonization of Space,” which appeared in Physics Today in 1974 and was expanded into the book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, which was published two years later and immediately became the bible of the migration to space movement. (Osepok undoubtedly would have loved it, even though her reasons for abandoning Earth were cynical, not curious and adventurous in the tradition of exploration.)
“How can colonization take place?” O’Neill asked, rhetorically in “The Colonization of Space.” He continued:
It is possible even with existing technology, if done in the most efficient ways. New methods are needed, but none goes beyond the range of present-day knowledge. The challenge is to bring the goal of space colonization into economic feasibility now, and the key is to treat the region beyond Earth not as a void but as a culture medium, rich in matter and energy. To live normally, people need energy, air, water, land and gravity. In space, solar energy is dependable and convenient to use; the Moon and asteroid belt can supply the needed materials, and rotational acceleration can substitute for earth's gravity.
Space
exploration so far, like Antarctic exploration before it, has consisted of short-term scientific expeditions, wholly dependent for survival on supplies brought from home. If, in contrast, we use the matter and energy available in space to colonize and build, we can achieve great productivity of food and material goods. Then, in a time short enough to be useful, the exponential growth of colonies can reach the point at which the colonies can be of great benefit to the entire human race.14
What O’Neill had in mind for the human habitat was a pair of cylinders that would be between sixteen and twenty miles long and four miles in diameter. They would be self-contained worlds that are copies of the most attractive and hospitable parts of the home planet, including dwellings, parklands and forests, lakes, rivers, grass, trees, animals, and even birds (but not farmland; agriculture would take place somewhere else).15 “Birds and animal species that are endangered on Earth by agricultural and industrial chemical residues may find havens for growth in the space colonies, where insecticides are unnecessary, agricultural areas are physically separate from living areas, and industry has unlimited energy for recycling.” He emphasized that each space colony would be a complete, self-contained ecosystem that could thrive independently of Earth.
“With an abundance of food and clean electrical energy, controlled climates and temperate weather, living conditions in the colonies should be much more pleasant than in most places on Earth,” he continued. “For the 20-mile distances of the cylinder interiors, bicycles and low speed electric vehicles are adequate. Fuel-burning cars, powered aircraft and combustion heating are not needed; therefore, no smog. For external travel, the simplicity of engineless, pilotless vehicles probably means that individuals and families will be easily able to afford private space vehicles for low-cost travel to far distant communities with diverse cultures and languages.”
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