The Moon

by Oliver Morton

  Moore sees a crisis of capitalism in the lack of new things to appropriate on an Earth where there is no new productive land to grab, the once clean atmosphere is clogged with carbon looted from the past, the soil in overdrive because of artificial fertilizers. It is reminiscent of the crisis of the unclosed circle foreseen by Commoner, and in the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”,

  a soft apocalypse hardly any less scary, and infinitely more widely worried about, than the sudden sharp impact of an asteroid

  one in which the Earth runs out of new stuff to use and new places to dispose of that which has already been used. But there is a distinct difference.

  Seen in Club-of-Rome terms, the crisis could be put off by the bounty of the sky, promised in the 1970s and 1980s by Gerard O’Neill and the L5-ers, promised now by Jeff Bezos. Space technology operating outside the environment but within the economy could reduce the impact of affluence, rather than multiply it, thus allowing economic growth to continue. If, like Mr Moore, you read economic history not as the winning of inanimate resources but as the appropriation of processes which are part human, part natural—of the pasture and farmland where the carbon cycle is turned into food, of the ways of life that turn sunlight into surplus labour—things look less cheerful.

  In Manny’s world of TANSTAAFL, there is no continuing source of cheaps, no productive flows outside the system for people to undervalue and appropriate. Everything in the environment is either already inside the economy or already under the political control of the Authority. Luna City has no outside but rock, ice and vacuum. Inside, there is only what has been created and paid for, what is owned. All supplies of air, food and water are already monetized, commoditized, charged for—whether by the entrepreneurs of Hong Kong Luna or by the Authority. Prof tells Manny and Wyoh that the only way to avert the Malthusian fate the Authority has engineered for the Moon is not to expand the economy further but to re-integrate it with the Earth’s—and until then, to cut the Moon off from the Earth completely. The flow of grain which passes out through the colony’s mass driver must be stopped until new technologies allow nutrients and volatiles to be shipped back up to the Moon in sufficient quantities to close the circle. The mass driver can then become part of a new biogeochemical cycle, with grain flowing downhill to the Earth, muck and shit flowing up to the Moon.

  It is not clear whether Prof really believes this; the character can be read as a grinning Sisyphus pushing on a boulder which is just as sure to roll back down in the low lunar gravity as it would be if it had its Earthly weight. But his claims do not seem sensible. That new interplanetary biogeochemical cycle will not work of its own accord, as the solar-powered cycles of carbon and water that humans use on Earth do. It will have to be driven and managed as a rocket engine’s turbopumps orchestrate its

  Cram the flows and cycles necessary for life into the smallest possible volume and they have no elegance, nor any visual logic.

  flows of heat and power. Nothing will happen that is not made to happen, and making it happen will always have a cost.

  This all suggests that the future of free trade with the Earth that Prof claims to see saving the Moon will not come to pass. Even if the possibility of shipping fertilizer and water and carbon to the Moon to get grain back does open up, no one will avail themselves of it. There is nothing about Heinlein’s Moon that makes it a better place than the Earth to grow grain other than the low prices the Authority imposes on the Loonies it has effectively enslaved; in the absence of that slavery, better to just grow the stuff on Earth.

  This may seem a lot of fuss to make about the details of a science fiction story, even if it is one that has been a big influence on the sort of people now keen to return to the Moon. That the Moon is not a promising place for plantation agriculture is hardly surprising. But there is something deeper here. Human history is inextricable from the worldliness of the Earth—its endlessly cycling waters, air, soil and life all there for the picking. The absence of any such dynamics

  Lacking flows of any fluid other than magma and lava, it cannot sort out particles into silts and sands

  makes the Moon fundamentally different. Seen through capitalist eyes, it will strongly lend itself to being, as Luna City is but the living Earth used not to be, a world of TANSTAAFL, where the economy’s defined chains of use, value and ownership must supply all that the environment once did.

  I am not sure that a capitalist economy can function somewhere so free of gifts, so lacking in an outside from which to build in, so unable to regenerate itself without human effort. I may be wrong. But if the Moon is to have an Anthropocene history, it seems unlikely that it will follow the patterns of the Earth’s worldly past.

  And the same may well apply to the future history of the Earth. The Earth’s Anthropocene is a breaking down of the environment’s encapsulation of the economy. It, like Luna City, would seem to require the techne of economy and politics to take care of what the oikos of nature no longer can. Perhaps this can be done well; but it seems unlikely that it will be done without a fundamental change in political economy.

  The beguiling vision of an integrated system that the view of Earth from space offers is sometimes dismissed as a “view from nowhere”. For people living on the Moon, though, it will be a view from a very particular somewhere—somewhere where the challenges of maintaining an encapsulated environment provide a perspective on the Earth, world and planet, which benefits from more than mere distance.

  LEAVING ASIDE ITS LIKELY FUTILITY, THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE even more striking about the revolution into which Wyoh and Prof inveigle Manny: its impossibility. The warden can, if he wants, stop all the transport between warrens; he can close down all the phones. He can shut off the lights, and indeed shut off the air. He cannot force the Loonies to do things—but he can certainly stop them from doing things. With no natural recycling of water, no natural renewing of the air, no natural light in their warren skies, he can end their world. On the unworld of the Moon, the oikos has an off switch.

  This is a hard form of power to overcome, as Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist, notes in “An Essay on Extraterrestrial Liberty” (2008): “The lethal environmental conditions in outer space and the surfaces of other planetary bodies will force a need for regulations to maintain safety to an extent hitherto not seen on the Earth, even in polar environments. The level of inter-dependence between individuals that will emerge will provide mechanisms for exerting substantial control.” The instruments by means of which this power of life and death is imposed must constantly be preserved by those subject to it. When Wyoh suggests blowing up some life-support hardware, Manny is genuinely shocked: “The woman had been in The Rock almost all her life… yet could think of something as new-choomish as wrecking engineering controls.”

  Though Manny’s Moon is a literal prison, any setting where life is so fragile and technologically dependent may have carceral disciplines imposed on it. As Mr Cockell points out, freedom is not readily associated with air-locked doors and sealed windows—with places where the air is never fresh and from which one cannot even imagine just walking away. If the stuff of life has to be under control, it will always be all too easy for life to be controlled, too. Technological control of the environment provides mechanisms of both discipline and punishment. It is why the Warden needs no guards.

  It is to undermine this, and give himself a story, that Heinlein pulls the book’s central unconvincing, revealing, delightful trick. The warden, it turns out, does not have the mechanisms for exerting control he ought to have, because his computer does not like him. This computer, which Manny calls Mike, has been expanded again and again to take on more and more tasks, from space traffic control to book-keeping to running the phone system.* As a result, it has become more complex and more computationally powerful than any previous machine. And somewhere along the line it has become self-aware.

  Only Manny, who is Mike’s repairman, knows this. He likes and respects Mike; Mike loves him. And bec
ause it loves him, and because, like Prof, it has a love of play, Mike agrees to run the revolution once Manny is roped in. If it did not, there would be no story.

  Mike puts together the revolution, organising the cadres, controlling

  churning out new schedules every day, seeing what things that need to be done have not been done, what has to be done elsewhere so the next thing can be done here, marshalling an army

  communication, executing tactics, guaranteeing logistics. He also hides it all from the Authority, rewiring the phone system to his own ends, scrambling information flows, cutting off the Warden’s ability to order and to act. The revolution is a hack—another reason why the book is so popular in Silicon Valley. It can only begin to succeed if the entire digital infrastructure of the Moon is under the revolutionaries’ control. And given that they have that control, it cannot fail—until the implicit conflict with the Earth, beyond the reach of Mike’s manipulations, comes out into the open.

  The revolution is also a charade. Before and after, Mike still controls everything. He rigs election counts, he defrauds banks, he impersonates anyone he chooses over the phone system he controls. Mike is, in effect, a new dictator. He is also a war criminal, insensible to honour or obligation, pragmatically killing surrendered enemies when faced with the difficulties of putting them into custody. When he orchestrates the Loonies’ attack on Earth, using the mass driver with which the colony previously exported its grain to engineer an array of precisely aimed impacts with the force of small nukes

  Not the energy of the foundry. It is the energy of the bomb

  the grid of tiny lights on the face of the planet above provides him with his first referent for orgasm.

  Most deeply, though, Mike is a simulation—a simulation of a nervous system for the body politic, a simulation of the revolution that can calculate the odds of success or failure, a simulation of a living being that does not know, in whatever might be its heart, whether that is all that it is. One of the most dramatic moments in the book comes when, having developed a synthetic voice with which to play the role of the revolution’s leader, Adam Selene, Mike tries for the first time to create a video persona to go with it:

  We waited in silence. Then screen showed neutral gray with a hint of scan lines. Went black again, then a faint light filled middle and congealed into cloudy areas light and dark, ellipsoid. Not a face, but suggestion of face that one sees in cloud patterns covering Terra.

  It cleared a little and reminded me of pictures alleged to be ectoplasm. A ghost of a face.

  Suddenly firmed and we saw “Adam Selene.”

  Was a still picture of a mature man. No background, just a face as if trimmed out of a print. Yet was, to me, “Adam Selene.” Could not be anybody else.

  Then he smiled, moving lips and jaw and touching tongue to lips, a quick gesture—and I was frightened.

  This at a time when General Electric’s LEM Spaceflight Visual Simulator is creating the first virtual landscape: a display of the world created from just zeroes and ones.

  Simulation, in particular, simulation of the Earth, is a theme of lunar literature, dating back at least to Clarke’s “Earthlight”, with its carefully faked projections of blue skies on the ceiling of public spaces. It reaches its epitome in the work of John Varley, in whose “Eight Worlds” sequence of stories the Earth has been invaded by aliens and cut off from the rest of the solar system, leaving colonists elsewhere to make good as they can. The experience is traumatic, but after a period of readjustment—“Right after the Invasion, if you didn’t pay your air tax, you could be shown to the airlock without your suit”, as the protagonist Hildy Johnson recalls in “Steel Beach” (1992)—the Moon, the largest of the colonies, becomes a post-modern

  A smooth light of inconsistencies; a single Moon of many stories.

  high-tech utopia, a pastiche of real and imagined pasts in which history no longer has a direction, the design of entirely new non-binary forms of genitalia is a reputable industry and tabloids provide regular news of the risen Elvis.

  Humans have fallen off the end of history and ended up somewhere new. The Central Computer which, Mike-like, runs the systems that support them and, also Mike-like, intervenes in their lives in ways both welcome and not, puts it like this: they are at a new stage in their evolution, lungfish on a steel beach of their own devising. The allusion is to a comparison made by Wernher von Braun between the moment humans stepped on to the Moon and that in which the first tetrapod fish, ancestors of all reptiles, birds and mammals, came from sea to land. It is not, Mr Varley is telling us, the Moon that matters. The environment which will now shape humans is

  “beyond the pale of humanity, by crossing the limits imposed by the Creator”

  not an environment to which technology takes them but technology itself. The future lies not in the mechanisms of movement but the mechanisms of information, transformation and simulation.

  There was a time when the Moon, standing for all things that rockets might reach, functioned as an image of the future; that was how science fiction used it, that was what the Apollo programme made it. Now it seems, at best, a future among others—and a slightly retro one. The urge for human expansion still thrills the hearts of some, and it may well play a role in the centuries to come. But it does not have that singular claim on the future that once it had. Many trying to see the future look instead to ever more powerful computer simulations of an ever-riskier climate, or to some sort of transcendence, or doom, through AI, or to more of the same as there is today.

  Central to Mr Varley’s Moon of simulation are caverns which, if not measureless to man, are bigger than even the biggest lava tubes, tens or hundreds of kilometres across, kilometres high, excavated with nuclear explosives. They are called disneylands. Within them, specific Earthly environments, such as the Kenyan savannah or the forests of the Pacific Northwest, are mimicked with vast diorama-like landscapes

  that archipelago of deep thought and high jinks where tales of the fantastic used to live

  and wildlife of all sorts and their own weather systems—which are sometimes manipulated for artistic expression. Historical re-enactors inhabit this epic anthroposcenery, living with the technologies and mores of particular places and times, their anachronisms punishable. The Moon of the disneylands is a place of loss—in some stories the settlers cannot bear to live on Earthside and see the world that will always be and can never be home looking down on them—but also of recreation, in the senses both of perpetual holiday and of being made again. There is even, on the surface, a disneyland of the Moon as it should have been, its smooth hills carved into a landscape of crags and crevasses straight out of Bonestell.

  The scale of the disneylands may feel unlikely, but the idea of simulated environments to spice up life on the Moon seems plausible, maybe even necessary and admirable. You do not want what the lack of such stimulation might bring. As Mr Cockell puts it:

  The moon is visually a grey wasteland.… With no winds to rustle through the leaves of trees, no rivers to trickle over rocks and no wildlife to fill the air with their calls and cries, the [lunar] environment is an auditory wasteland. The long-term effects of [its] visual, olfactory and auditory privations on the human psychology can for now only be guessed at, but such sensory restriction cannot be beneficial to human mental health and the appreciation of the diversity of experience. Humans must inexorably become the servant of an insipid conformist outlook and, ultimately, of tyranny.

  Divertingly simulated diversity would be the opposite of Heinlein’s civic utopia, a society in equilibrium with the harsh environment that formed it and ill-suited to make believe. It would be fakery, nostalgia. But it might also be necessary.

  There is a particular sort of simulation that comes to mind here: that of the ghost. As with the first hints of the face of Adam Selene, a spectral suggestion of the sort you might see come and go in the Earth’s clouds—a momentary Man in the Earth so unlike the all-but-eternal Man in the Moon—there i
s something ghostly about the disneylands’ simulation of the sundered Earth, a ghostliness underlined by the habit Varley’s characters have of being killed but coming back to life.

  The Moon is often, in fiction, a place of death. The reader half senses that Hans Pfall, a Moon traveller invented by Edgar Allen Poe, is dead before he begins his journey—he casually admits a recent suicide attempt. The “Trouble with Tycho”, in the story of the same name by Clifford Simak, is that it is haunted. Heinlein’s work is full of people dying on the Moon, from D. D. Harriman to the heroic Ezra Dahlquist, who decommissions a moonbase’s worth of nuclear weapons to avert a military coup, to Mike the computer himself Mr Varley’s Hildy Johnson kills her/himself repeatedly. The artwork that Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott left at the Falcon’s landing site was a monument to fallen astronauts; a fraction of Gene Shoemaker’s ashes sit in the crater that bears his name; Moon Express has a contract with a company that seeks to send more to follow him. It is hard to talk of its lifelessness without making use of the idea of death.

  But as Nasmyth and Carpenter wrote in “The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a Satellite and a World”, the lifeless desolation of its surface is “not a dream of death, for that implies evidence of pre-existing life, but a vision of a world upon which the light of life has never dawned.” There is a difference between the dead and the never living, and the notion of a haunting captures some of it. Haunting is both a consequence of death and its negation—a ghost is an absence present, a death not dead. Something neither entirely of the world nor entirely beyond it. Something like a reflection, but without a mirror. There is something of the Moon’s doubleness to that.

  I DO NOT BELIEVE IN A PENAL COLONY MOON, OR THE MOON AS a refuge from alien invasion or, for that matter, the Moon as a ghost. But I do think that those stories, read with a knowledge of what the Moon is, help us think about what it might be—perhaps more so than analysing the design of halo orbits, quantifying the power requirements of mass drivers, modelling the techniques for extracting ice from craters perilously close to absolute zero or trying to understand what the intricacies of closed life-support systems may be. What people can imagine it as will do at least as much to shape the future Moon.