The Moon

by Oliver Morton

  In the presence of such a structure, control of the facts on the ground would still matter—but it would do so all the more in the absence of such frameworks. That is an argument for landing early crewed missions, perhaps even the first crewed missions of the Return, at one of the most appealing polar sites and for building some sort of base there, rather than sitting in an orbital Gateway plopping down landers for short stays now and then. And it is as much an argument for private corporations to do so as it is for the Chinese or American governments. Such a rush does not preclude an international agreement at a later stage—the Antarctic Treaty recognises, in its way, the claims of states that had bases on the continent before it came into force. It also allows for commercial development of the continent’s natural resources, if the parties all agree, in 2048, on the terms under which that could go ahead.

  But the possibility of a rush for property does provide a further argument for not being a prick, whether at a personal, corporate or national level. Scrappy entrepreneurs giving the finger to the UN to get rich Moon mining will sound good to many. A multi-billionaire getting a stranglehold on a planet’s worth of resources that should be a common heritage for all humankind plays less well.

  Perhaps it is of little significance. Lunar resources are a big issue if you want to make a moonbase permanent. At the scale of national economies they hardly move the dial. Disputes over who has the right to go where in the South China Sea could escalate into a real concern very quickly; rights of passage across Shackleton Crater seem less likely to.

  But in this respect the Moon does not exist in a vacuum, responding only to the solar wind. The political climate on Earth—and thus, in the Anthropocene, the Earth’s own climate—will buffet it, shake it, reshape it. The way people treat each other in Shackleton Crater will depend on what happens in the South China Sea. The extent of any future development of the Moon will depend in part on what is found there, in part on ingenuity, in part on luck. But it will depend much more on how the rest of the world develops, both politically and economically; what its wants are and what its conflicts. Again, space is an extension of the Earth, not an exemption from its strictures. An antagonistic world will create a Moon to match.

  A VITAL PART OF WHAT THE ORPHANS OF APOLLO, AND YOUNGER space enthusiasts, want from the Return is that this time it should be permanent. If there is a line they quote even more than the one about eggs and baskets, or the one about not because it is easy but because it is hard, it is one from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky himself: “The earth is the cradle of the mind; but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.” Expansion into space is a transition from which one should no more turn back than the transition to toddlerhood.

  Hence the interest in whether law stifles or enables commerce and investment, and what sort of legal environment, if any, limits conflict while allowing growth; those are the sorts of things that might make settlement sustainable. Hence the driving interest in making space pay. If people profit from space, they will stay in space. If the world depends on there being people in space, it will arrange to keep people in space. If Moonpeople can sell rocket fuel to satellite operators, or rock to L5-ers or helium-3 to fusioneers, then they can stay up there strip mining the regolith and rooting out the polar ice to their hearts’ content while serving the needs of human destiny.

  Leaving aside, for the time being, whether those are reasonable business propositions, the idea of extractive industry as a route to sustainability may sound historically ill-informed, or indeed self-servingly deceitful. But in space, say O’Neillians like Mr Bezos, the Earthly contradiction between exploitation and sustainability need not apply. When you are through digging up the four billion years of history at the Moon’s poles, why not move on to one of the icy moons of Jupiter? It’s all just a matter of delta-v. Space cannot be depleted of its resources. The frontier is endless.

  There is more than one problem with this, though. Humans are not just minds. They are bodies. This means that they require carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and dozens of other elements if they are to eat and stay healthy. All these elements can be found in space. But some, including carbon and nitrogen, are in very short supply on the Moon. This means either that recycling on a moonbase has to be very good indeed (which will be challenging, especially in a small base) or that such bases remain continuously supplied from elsewhere.

  It also means humans need protection from their environment, as well as by their environment. Take moondust. The fine grains of the regolith are largely composed of shards of glass a few microns across—not quite the last stuff you would want in your lungs on a regular basis, but not far off. It damages mechanisms, too. By the time Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan got back to the Challenger after their third sortie onto the surface, the seals between their suits and their gloves were sufficiently damaged by the dust that a fourth might have been too dangerous. And the dust will get into the base on clothes, on vehicle tracks and whatever. Systems to deal with this through air baths, multiple airlocks and the cunning use of the dust’s magnetic properties should allow a multi-layered defence-in-depth capable of keeping the living areas of a hab comparatively dust free. But keeping them that way may require eternal vigilance, and as in most pursuits with such requirements, standards may lapse over time.

  Perhaps most profoundly, human bodies have been shaped by evolution to and in an Earthly environment. Take them out of it and they change. Experience on the International Space Station has shown how, in microgravity, fluids redistribute themselves through the body, with pressure in the skull flattening the eyeball and compressing the optic nerve. Blood volume is reduced; the heart weakens, as do other muscles; bones demineralize. Most of this seems reversible, and some of it can be forestalled through prophylactic exercise and possibly with drugs. But it is not a minor thing.

  No one knows what long-term effects lunar gravity has. No Apollo astronaut stayed on the surface longer than three days and three hours. No non-human animal has spent any time on the Moon at all. One might assume that the Moon’s effects are less severe than the effects of microgravity, maybe much less severe. But no one knows.

  Science fiction has long speculated that the effects of living on the Moon might be damaging for those who start off well, but good for those who are ill. A body in which the heart has less work to do and the muscles and skeleton have less weight to support will weaken from lack of challenge; a body not up to the challenges of its weight or of pumping its blood might get a new lease on life under the same circumstances. Thus the Moon, or a low-gravity space station, might be a bad place for fit young astronauts but an ideal place for people who are elderly or infirm.

  This seems more than a little optimistic—why should the depredations of low gravity not diminish the capacities of the unwell as much as they do those of the healthy, and to their greater detriment? But I suppose it is a possibility. It is also conceivable, as Clarke speculated in “The Secret” (1963), that the healthy could benefit from having bodies overspecified for the environment they find themselves in, and that life-spans might be greatly increased on the Moon. That would clearly be a transformative discovery, especially if it led to an exodus of the wealthy, thus reinforcing their prickishness in the minds of the left-behind. Again, though, it seems unlikely. That cardiovascular systems might stay intact for longer with less to do is perhaps plausible. But why should cancer, or dementia, be lesser threats to lighter people?

  Going in the other direction, people used to the Moon tend not, in science fiction, to do well on the Earth. They are oppressed by six times the weight that they usually carry. They are assailed by pollutants and diseases that their carefully managed environments have excluded. The cost the spindly emissaries from the sky pay for their return is portrayed as a sacrifice, sometimes the ultimate one. Ben Bova’s “Millennium” becomes a passion play in which the exoskeleton Chet Kinsman wears as he returns to Earth is effectively the cross on which he dies.

  And what of the nativity? In 1962 Clarke pub
lished a short story under a title which mixed Tsiolkovsky with Walt Whitman. It ends with the narrator, in charge of building spaceships on the Moon, listening to the radio:

  And then, over all the Moon and half the Earth, came the noise I promised to tell you about—the most awe inspiring sound I have heard in my life. It was the thin cry of a newborn baby, the first child in all the history of mankind to be brought forth on another world than Earth.

  We looked at each other in the suddenly silenced blockhouse and then at the ships we were building out there on the blazing lunar plain. They had seemed so important a few minutes ago. They still were. But not as important as what had happened over in Medical Centre, and would happen again billions of times on countless worlds down all the ages to come.

  For that was the moment, gentlemen, when I knew that Man had really conquered space.

  Leaving aside the “Really? ‘Man’?” that comes immediately to the 21st-century mind, Clarke’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting” is one of those bits of science fiction which hits on a question of real and practical importance. Whether human pregnancies can come to healthy term on the Moon—or, for that matter, Mars—is a fundamental question. It is also one that space agencies, Moon enthusiasts, science fiction writers and billionaire visionaries have treated with little more than lip service, and frequently not even with that. Clarke’s use of “Man” points to something fundamentally gendered about a search for the future of the species which depends on BFRs plunging into space. Satirising this in his story “The Big Space Fuck” (1972), Kurt Vonnegut imagined a rocket devoted entirely to the launching of freeze-dried human sperm. It was called the Arthur C. Clarke.

  All people ever born have grown, first in the womb then out of it, in Earth gravity. Evolution has undoubtedly built that amount of gravity into processes, such as the way that the head engages with the cervix as birth begins. It may not be a vital piece of the process of growing a baby. The unfolding of pregnancy can adapt itself on the fly to a wide range of conditions; the same programme, after all, works in women of many sizes and shapes, and a wide range of babies too, including those which come two or three at a time. But there is no reason for evolution to have built in a flexibility that extends to the conditions on the Moon. If low gravity, like microgravity, leads to changes in internal pressure and the redistribution of fluids throughout the body, why should the amniotic fluid be an exception? What difference might changed stresses and strains make to growing bones and muscle, either in the womb or in the months and years that follow. Such effects may be much less pronounced in a sixth of the Earth’s gravity than in microgravity. Still, will they really mean nothing to a fetus, or to a growing toddler leaving the non-metaphorical cradle?

  Walter Miller’s “The Linesman” (1957) is one of the earliest tales of a blue-collar Moon where infrastructure is built by the same sort of men who laid the railway tracks and built the bridges of Earth. The routine of the men stringing power lines and tramways from Crater City in Copernicus to an isolated mine is disrupted by the arrival of a spaceship full of prostitutes responding to the market opportunity provided by the Moon’s lack of women. They are absent because, as Novotny, the foreman, reminds one of the horny men on his work crew:

  You can’t raise kids in low gravity. There are five graves back in Crater City to prove it. Kid’s graves. Six feet long. They grow themselves to death.

  Biology is not destiny. If women cannot bear children in low gravity, or if children cannot grow up healthily in such conditions, perhaps confinement and childrearing will in the end take place in orbiting space stations spun up to provide enough gravity—or back on Earth. Perhaps there can be a stable Moon settlement even if pregnancy, labour and childhood have no role there. Perhaps biological science could, with the sacrifice of enough experimental primates on the Moon, solve the problem, if problem there is.

  But it may well be a problem, and so far it has been one almost universally ignored in speculations of a lunar future. Whatever the technologies of the Return, whatever the priorities which press for it and the laws which govern it, whatever the property rights which permit it, it may yet be the case that no one will ever be a natural-born Moonperson.

  * And not just because Arthur C. Clarke used a magnetic anomaly to signal the existence of an alien artifact in Tycho in “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

  * In “The Man Who Sold the Moon”, Harriman gets that song back into the charts through a payola scheme in order to smooth the way for the UN to claim sovereignty over the Moon, having arranged in advance for it to license the actions and claims of his own Moon company.

  STORIES

  THE STORIES THEY TELL OF IT IN DIFFERENT PLACES HAVE LITTLE IF anything in common; they frequently go against one another. Indeed, even in one place, or among a single people, they may vary, or even contradict each other. Its power may be feminine, but its face the image of a man; it may both impregnate and give birth, tell lies and tell truth. Some of its stories may be the sort of stories that you tell to strangers just to see what foolishness they are gullible enough to believe—we scare it away with sticks during the eclipses, lest it steal our animal skins! Other stories of the Moon may be of the secret sort which can never be told to anyone who does not already know them—which sounds impossible to those who know no such stories, but is something at which others just nod, and keep silent.

  It is believed by some—and here is a story about stories—that the first tales of sky gods were tales of the Moon. The Moon, after all, is a character, with a storyline; it counts the days; it is a friend to the hunter and the raider, providing light to see by and dark when the dark of the Moon is needed. The Sun is more powerful, and its seasons matter more to the farmer. But its power is less that of a person. And the farmer came later.

  Some stories of the Moon’s influence are baked into language—in words like mania, and lunacy, and menstruation. This does not make those stories true. Women’s monthly cycles are close to the duration of the Moon’s, but they are not synchronised to it. Nor is madness, at least as measured today, which shows no relation to the phase of the Moon. That said, is there anything madder than a light that makes things look different and only comes in darkness? And if there is a cycle of the womb and a cycle of the sky, do they have to be in lock-step to be some sort of same? Stories can be true and untrue at the same time; they can mean one thing and also its opposite. Think of the little story engraved on a metal plaque in the Sea of Tranquility: “We came in peace for all mankind.”

  There is nothing constant in Moon stories, except perhaps change. For example, despite its cycling, the Moon is not, as some believe, a universal symbol of the womanly or feminine. In some places the Moon is male, in others female—it is not obvious that either gender predominates. And, yes, the Moon is often canine, or lupine. But it can be feline, too. Freyja, the Norse Moon goddess, has her chariot pulled by cats.

  It is generally true that, when the Moon is male, the Sun is female, and vice versa—“Brother Sun, Sister Moon”, as the Franciscans have it. Often the two are siblings. That said, they are also often lovers, and not infrequently both. But even this binary is not universal. For the Tukano of the upper Amazon they are both men, one of whom has taken the headdress from the other. In Dahomey, Mahu and Lisa, the married children of Nana Buluku, who made all things, share jurisdiction over both Sun and Moon.

  The incest of Sun and Moon, when it occurs, may or may not be consensual. In a story from Greenland, Anningan, the Moon, assaults his sister Malina, the Sun, in the dark of her chambers. Malina, to find out who is attacking her, rubs soot on his unseen face without him noticing. That is why the Moon is mottled, and how Malina learned of her brother’s guilt. There are other accounts of this matter, though, as of all matters.

  There always needs to be some story for the cycling of the Moon. Anningan regularly wastes away until eventually he must leave the sky to hunt for seals. On his return he fattens himself up. The Bantu, or at least some of them, say t
hat the Moon’s thinning and fattening is down to his two wives, who are the evening and morning stars. One of them—I know not which—is a poor wife; when the Moon is with her, she does not feed him and he fades away. The other is a good wife; when he visits her, she feeds him back up to full again. It is said that those who tell this story do not know that the morning and evening star are the same body. I am not so sure. I think two people behaving according to their individual natures can easily be one person behaving according to more than one of hers. I would be surprised if others do not think this too.

  A sadder story of the Moon’s departure and return is told by the Masai. Le-eyo, the first man, was taught that at the time of someone’s death, he must dispose of the body while saying, “Man, die, and come back again; Moon, die, and remain away” so that the dead can be reborn. But when the first death came, that of his neighbour’s child, he misspoke, saying, “Man, die and remain away; Moon, die and come back.” And that set the way of things for all dead children, including Le-eyo’s. The Moon is reborn, month after month—but the dead have, ever since, stayed dead.

  Sometimes married to other planets, the Moon may also be allied with them more subtly—particularly with Venus and Mercury, planets which often leave the sky, as the Moon does. Moon goddesses renowned for beauty are quite often goddesses of Venus, too; Ishtar of Babylon, with her crescent headdress, is one such. So is Frejya of the cat-pulled wagon; her day is Friday or Freitag in northern Europe, Vendredi, Venerdi and Viernes—days of Venus—in the south. But it is the same day, regardless. Trickster Moon gods, of whom there are many, are for their part often linked to Mercury. Like him, they have a habit of appearing at the crossroads—moonlit and multifarious, places of choice and divergence