Heinlein’s insight of the Moon not offering anything for free, or even for cheap, is a strong one. There is nothing already in use there to appropriate. Nevertheless, it might perhaps counterfeit some sort of cheapness, for a time. The idea of mining ice and volatiles at the lunar poles is not unlike the idea of exploiting fossil fuels on Earth, running down in double-quick time a resource accumulated very slowly. If the resource is large enough (or the draw on it small enough) and it is more profitably exploited than equivalent resources elsewhere, this could come to matter—hence the importance of a governance regime and of establishing facts on the ground.
It is worth noting that, when it comes to exploitation, there are advantages to the Moon’s unworldliness, or at least so it might seem. For all that it would destroy something literally irreplaceable, if not necessarily all that
their hearts are beating, their reserves depleting
valuable, eating through the fossil ice and volatiles at the poles would have far less impact on the Moon than the exploitation of fossil fuels has had on the Earth. The Moon’s lack of worldliness makes it in some ways immune to environmental harm. Substances are much more able to get to where they can do harm when there are unplanned flows to move them. Where there are no flows, there are no flows to go wrong; no groundwater into which toxins can leak, no transport of pollutants by wind. And there are no meshing gears like those which mean, on the Earth, that carbon flowing more thickly through the atmosphere slows the streaming of heat from the surface out to space. There is no proper place for matter on the Moon. It is simply there where it has been thrown and thus now sits; such matter cannot be out of place.
This suggests, to some, that the Moon is a good place to do things which in the world would be too dangerous. Risky experimental nuclear reactors? Potentially dangerous nanotechnology? Biological experiments that must never be allowed near the living biosphere? Attempts to make baby black holes? Find an isolated crater and have at it. No need for shielding—just stay on the other side of the rim, over the horizon, and no radiation can get to you. Stay insulated by vacuum, your suit baked in ultraviolet light, and no bugs will trouble you. If things go wrong, bury the mistakes with robot bulldozers.* If worse comes to worst, and it’s the only way to be sure, take off and nuke the site from orbit. There’ll be no air or water to contaminate, and the Moon is bathed in lethal amounts of radiation on a daily basis anyway.
This is the world, more or less, of Michael Swanwick’s novella “Griffin’s Egg”, in which one of the technologies being developed in such isolation changes the way humans think, allowing them a terrifying clarity
a beginning come quietly, or with the rushing of great winds?
in the perception of their own motivations. Greg Bear’s “Heads” also features a sort of cognitive breakthrough as the result of an isolated lunar experiment gone awry and provides a chilling haunting for the Moon to boot. There are few happy transcendences in lunar literature.
I do not think this amalgam of one science fiction staple—the inhabited Moon—with another—the Faustian experiment seeking forbidden knowledge—would make very wise R&D strategy. But then there is probably quite a lot in the future that I will find unwise, or irrational—to this extent, at least, it may reasonably be seen as a continuation of the present. Take the idea that humankind, its knowledge and some of its culture needs to be backed up beyond the confines of Earth. The much-cited risk of a truly cataclysmic asteroid impact in the next few centuries is remarkably low because most of the asteroids large enough to be responsible for such a thing have been discovered, and none are headed our way. A pandemic so serious that only those on Mars could survive is similarly unlikely. A war might surely spread. And a malevolent AI capable of razing the Earth but happy to leave the Martians alone would be a malevolent AI significantly underperforming its potential. Despite all this, though, there seems a real chance of a Martian settlement driven at least in part by the perceived need to change the baskets-to-eggs ratio, either by Mr Musk or one of the many who seem to think like him. The Moon becoming a site for capitalist moneymaking seems, for various reasons sketched above, far-fetched; so does amok experimentation. But in an age where superempowered billionaires are able to open new futures for the world—or at least for some small part of it—why would the Moon not become a site for the unprofitable and far-fetched?
Experimentation need not be scientific or technological. Pete Worden’s career has seen him earn a PhD in astronomy at the University of Arizona, direct the technology side of America’s Star Wars programme, rise to the rank of general in the US Air Force, run NASA’s Ames Research Center and, most recently, become chief space fixer for Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire
“No longer can the defeatists tell us that mankind must settle down to the uninspiring prospect of making the most of our little world”
with astrobiological ambitions. He is one of those who talks of the Moon providing a place for dangerous physical and biological experiments. And he thinks lunar settlements might provide scope for social experimentation, too—possibly in tandem. There is a sense among many who talk of settlements in space, as among many who don’t, that the Earth which some find increasingly diverse is in fact increasingly the same. A sense that there is no longer room for different thoughts or different communities to develop in isolation, and then show the world something new.
This is part of Robert Zubrin’s case for a Martian frontier—that humankind needs such a challenge because frontiers drive radical innovations at the same time as fostering a spirit of which he approves. My own suspicion is that space in general, and the Moon in particular, will be a technology adopter more than a technology originator. It is possible that strange new robots, intelligences, nanotechnologies and unnatural biologies will spill out from unregulated crater-labs on the Moon. I think that they are more likely to come from the Earth, with its far greater reserves of capital and human giftedness. But the isolations of the Moon may still have roles to play, for good or ill, in everything from social experiment to speciation.
The Moon’s unworldly lack of cohesion, after all, might suit it to the cultivation of diversity. To get from A to B requires, quite literally, a space journey, even if the spacecraft involved is one with wheels or mounted on an electromagnetic track. Everything on the Moon is isolated until a connection is made or an impact happens. It is thus well set up for those who want to withdraw, to keep themselves to themselves in new sorts of sovereignty. The finest recent novel of the Moon, John Kessel’s “The Moon and the Other” (2016), deals with a Moon of many cultures in different places, strangers to each other. Its particular focus is the “Society of Cousins”, which is trying to maintain a radical, humane matriarchy in an isolated crater city. Though the novel has its speculative science, it is in the details of its societies and the people who make them up that it excels.
If space travel were cheap, the Moon might be a place not just for the encouragement of the new but simply for respite from—and for—the old. If the inverted relationship of the environment and the economy makes it an implausible place for capitalist production, it could surely be put to work as a site for consumption—as a place to take what has been made elsewhere and exchange it rather than a workshop of its own account. Or perhaps not even for consumption, but for giving. Cory Doctorow’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (2015) provides a magnificent 21st-century response to Heinlein’s original. Instead of a lone visionary trying to get himself to the Moon by taking advantage of others, it envisages an Earth-bound team of visionaries, hangers-on and the somewhat interested deciding to make it easier for other people to do things on the Moon by building a robot 3D printer that will turn regolith into bricks for future colonists to use. This Moon is not a capitalist escape hatch. It is a gift economy, a place to throw an act of generosity towards the future.
Not everyone will spend on others’ Moon adventures; some will spend on their own. A place, then, for tourism. Hiking across the surface or climbing
the few young mountains rugged enough to look like fun, such as the jutting central peak of Tycho, might offer replenishment and novelty. In a lava tube
Moon as always was, Moon longed for and Moon happened upon
big enough, or a roofed crater—or even a disneyland—you might indulge in the long-imagined science-fictional sport of lunar flying, either darting around on something like a flapping bicycle or with wings like a bird. A high perch to start from and a weight only a sixth of your Earthly one could have you soaring like a gull—or working out like a hummingbird.
There might be a place for restful resorts as well as more adventurous pursuits, a place to sit and watch the world turn in the sky without having to turn with it. There might be luxurious hotels; there might also be cloistered, contemplative communities that would welcome you for a month, or for a year, or for the rest of your life. Even hermits’ cells. As a place to withdraw and keep yourself to yourself, the Moon, if you have a good enough life-support system and a reliable enough supply chain, has few rivals.
The sinister obverse of people who keep themselves to themselves is those who seek to keep others to themselves. It is all too easy, in a place where authorities do not have to be the Authority to have warden-like powers, to imagine cults and constraints akin to slavery. A lunar Jonestown could exert its power over its members’ every breath and every ray of light.
The worldliness of the Earth can be read as providing a natural right to walk away. There are times and places where that right seems hardly to exist. In some environments the isolated individual may have little prospect of survival; in some societies extrication may be all but impossible. The first city-states had walls as much to keep their people in as to keep barbarians out, and most of us remain bound today, if by more subtle fetters. We are often happily so. But in a world of free air, of plentiful carbon and nitrogen and of open horizons it is always at least imaginable for the unincarcerated to walk away. Millions do it in search of safety or freedom every year, often in dire desperation but rarely without a shred of hope. To Thomas Jefferson, the ability to walk off to new land was one of the greatest freedoms of the settler, and a reason for enduring hope.
The unworld provides no such source of hope. To me, that means that some sort of structure of law, as well as technology and economics, needs to be in place around the Moon’s encapsulated ecologies. It might be only minimal, but the quasi-constitutional thing I would want from it most would be an actionable right of return—a guarantee that dwellers on the Moon, too, should be able to walk away. The “Responsibility to Protect” embraced by some as a guiding principle of geopolitics in the 2000s has yet to prove a durable or reliable basis for action on the troubled Earth. Built in to the basic laws and mores of the Moon, limited purely to allowing individuals to leave a community they no longer wanted to be part of, it might fare better, a thin link of duty and freedom between Moon and Earth.
And perhaps, though here the moral imperative seems less clear, they should also have some sort of right to stay. There may never be citizens of a Luna state, even if people can live for decades there, even if children can be born and raised there. There is no clear reason why a lunar territory, or set of territories, should have an independent government like that of an Earthly state, and perhaps there is good reason why some would resist such an arrangement. At the same time, if you are long of the Moon, should you be forced to go back because of a falling out, or a lapsed work contract, or the imperious summons of the Earthly nation that controls your settlement? If you are attached to the Moon—or even, conceivably, born there—should you not be able to assert a preference to stay even if there is no absolute legal right? In some British overseas territories there is a status known as belongership; it is not citizenship, but it is a statement of affiliation to the place that carries some circumscribed rights with regard to it. In time, a belongership for the Moon might be something that could be agreed on.
And then there is the regulation of artefacts—and even art. I argued earlier that environmental damage in its Earthly sense may not be an issue on the Moon, where nothing moves unwilled except
present as a set of random absences
in the stochastic jumps of impacts, and thus nothing can move without being moved. This is true for arsenic-in-the-groundwater types of pollution. But when Mary Douglas spoke of pollution as matter out of place, she did not merely mean that the right places were simply empirically safe ones—bottles for the arsenic, as it were. Matter’s right place depends on culture. And the Moon is very open to cultural pollution.
On the unworld, once something is moved, it stays moved; there is none of nature’s endless recycling, no amnesia by erosion. A footprint or a tire track will last for a million years unless overwritten or over-walked—at which point the new trace will be just as permanent. That which is easily spread can only be gathered in with much ado.
There are already worries about preserving some or all of the Apollo landing sites in their current, abandoned and historic state in the face of the visits that will surely come. Such concerns led to a $1m bonus prize for visiting a historic site that was originally part of the Google Lunar X Prize to be withdrawn. In “Artemis” (2017) by Andy Weir, a novel which makes a strong case for tourism as the most plausible basis for a lunar economy, the main draw is a trip to the visitor centre at Tranquility Base, where visitors can gaze in awe at the landed Eagle and the first footsteps. On Mr Varley’s Moon, frat boys from Delta Chi Delta trash Tranquility Base, but re-enactors armed with patience, robots and meticulously digitalized photographs put it back just the way it had been, re-creating each of Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s steps in replica moonboots and being winched out by a crane when they were finished. The future is engaged in a ceaseless re-creation of the past.
In the 1930s, before it was known that radio waves could pierce the ionosphere, Goddard imagined that a rocket to the Moon might signal its success to watchers on Earth by letting off a bomb of black carbon. A relatively small amount of soot finely spread could send a signal easily visible to a decent telescope. But how would that signal be reversed? It is not as though the surface of the Moon can be vacuumed clean. As long as you did not mind the soot’s persistent presence, it could perhaps be raked into the regolith, but the raked would surely then look unlike the unraked; if you wanted the Moon as it was, you would have to gather up each and every speck of soot from where it had happened to fall.
The Moon can thus be written on, like the sky—but unlike skywriting, the words would last. D. D. Harriman persuaded a soft drinks company into buying up the rights to stencil a logo across the face of the Moon and leave them unused with the threat that he would sell the rights to a rival if they did not. In a response to Mr Maezawa’s announcement that he would be taking a BFR of artists round the Moon, the architect Daniel Liebeskind imagined a vast application of soot precisely tailored to produce, as seen from the Earth, a plain black square inscribed within the circle of the full Moon—a cosmic realisation of Malevich’s blending of modernism and cosmism, the shared Anthropocene of Moon and Earth made matte-black flesh. A more modest imagination might suggest instead a pupil in the Man in the Moon’s eye, or carefully curated cairns across one of the seas: a fine line in the manner of one of Richard Long’s walks, say, across Mare Serenitatis. There is a role for art in the landscapes of the Moon. There is also a role for the protection of some of those landscapes in pristine form. But by whom, or at what cost, should others want to defile or improve it? What dents in the universe are worth making, or worth preventing? In Ian McDonald’s “New Moon”, every late-21st-century teenager on Earth with access to binoculars has smirked while training them on
King Dong; a giant spunking cock a hundred kilometres tall, boot-printed and tyre-tracked into the Mare Imbrium by infrastructure workers with too much time on their hands.
I do not expect a black square in the silver circle, or the pinprick lights of crater cities drowning out the ashen light. But over the next 500 y
ears, the chances of seeing a change in the face of the Man in the Moon, or the ears of the rabbit, or the sticks on the old man’s back, are infinitely higher than they were over the past 500.
UNLESS THE PEOPLE OF THE MOON TURN THEIR COLLECTIVE back on the Earth.
Why, exactly, the maria are on the nearside of the Moon and not on its far side remains a subject for debate. It seems sure to have something to do with an asymmetry created by the presence of the Earth—but which one? My favourite at the moment, for what it’s worth, is that it is an asymmetry of heating dating back to
The Earth writhes molten beneath its molten sky.
the very earliest days of the Moon. Earthshine, then, was not a few tears of reflected sun. It was the heat from an open furnace of molten rock taking up a quarter of the sky. The side of the Moon that faced the exposed magma of the Earth would have been significantly hotter than the farside, more roiled up, in a way that may have left its imprint as the magma ocean cooled.
Be that as it may, the maria that dominate the view from the Earth do not dominate the surface as a whole, and give a false impression. Basins that basalt never filled; craters on craters on craters; ruggedness all around: for the Moon that is the rule, not the exception, you must go beyond the limb of Earthset to the farside. The Earth might be diminished by a permanently unMooned sky. The Moon, on its unEarthed side, can come into its unworldly own, no longer an adjunct ceaselessly shone down upon by its overbearing origin, empty of the Earth’s concerns, a thing of space open to the universe at large.
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