The Moon’s brightness has guided mankind
through the night since before we were humans. But literally and figuratively, our Moon also
has a dark side… In the last couple of years we’ve seen renewed
interest in returning to the Moon and a point often raised is that there’s not much purpose
served by short trips to collect more rocks. If you’re going there, you should be setting
up shop in a fairly permanent way, and not just some small base for strictly scientific
research. What we imagine using the Moon for as our
space industry develops isn’t some small base but a vast network of industrial facilities
housing thousands to millions of people who live there for years at a time, if not permanently. We looked at some of these back in our episode,
“Industrializing the Moon”. Such scenarios are still rather far off, not
something we’d see for decades at least, but it raises the concern of how such colonies
might develop over time and interact with each other, and that will be our focus for
today. We don’t see many deep looks at the Moon,
it’s always a waypoint in science fiction, a place we see in its early stages but ignored
afterwards in favor of focusing on distant planets. Now we haven’t been back there in a while,
but we have been there. Because of this it’s lost some focus in
science fiction and doesn’t get the consideration it used too, the same as how a lot of scifi
was set in Antarctica or the deep seas in the early 20th century but less so nowadays. That’s a pity because whether it’s the
moon, the deep sea, or the arctic poles, these are still very unexplored places that have
played a big role in humanity’s development and will play an even larger one down the
line. I particularly enjoyed Andy Weir’s new novel
set on the Moon, Artemis, and much like his earlier work, the Martian, it has a good amount
of hard science in there, but also has a compelling character as the protagonist, and it really
gives us an immersive look at a moonbase that many hundreds of people call home, and how
a culture can arise there. That human part of the equation is our major
focus for today so it seemed a great choice for our Audible book of the month. You can pick up a free copy of “Artemis”
today, and also get a 30-day trial of Audible, just use my link, Audible.com/Isaac or text
Isaac to 500-500. So when it comes to colonies on the Moon,
when the place starts hosting thousands of people, there’s still not too much room
for conflict, the Moon may be a lot smaller than Earth but it still has a total land area
in between Africa and Asia in size. Similarly, until the place has a net population
of at least a modest-sized country, all those various bases are going to be utterly tied
to Earth. This isn’t some distant colony after all,
it’s one where even our early spacecraft only needed a few days to reach and where
light lag is minimal enough to allow real time communication, just with irritating pauses
of a couple of seconds. There’s no isolation requiring a need to
be autonomous and self-sufficient, like interstellar colonies have, and to get colonized to the
point that you have a big population on the Moon, it’s got to be exporting things or
providing services, giving it a very tight trade tie to Earth. We have to put ourselves into a time when
the population is at least a few million, and that also means that it’s not really
Earth and the Moon either. Such a setup strongly implies a huge orbital
infrastructure around Earth, and probably the Moon too, with lots of objects in the
space between the earth and the moon, Cislunar space. The whole point of the Moon, in terms of developing
a serious foothold there, is to supply vast amounts of raw materials for building up that
orbital swarm around Earth and extending our foothold to other planets. So if you’ve got millions of folks on the
Moon, enough to contemplate real conflicts with each other or Earth, it’s because you’ve
been supplying that construction material for space expansion and could easily have
hundreds of millions of folks already working off Earth. If the Moon is big enough to have bits of
it thinking about sovereignty in a serious way, it’s because expansion into space has
truly kicked off and there’s probably other smaller colonies on other planets and in the
Belt, plus vast amounts of space habitats around Earth. Now there’s a chance that the whole Moon
might rebel as a unified group, and could do so at a smaller population than millions
of people, but it doesn’t really seem very probable. If there’s to be major industry on the Moon,
that’s industry many folks will want to get involved in, and no one will be in a position
to monopolize that in the current international setup or anything likely to evolve in the
near future. If it’s attracting serious industry there’s
the economic aspect, which is cause enough, but the Moon would include concerns of prestige
and security too. This tends to imply early colonization will
either be a vast unified international effort, in which case it’s unlikely to be a place
where the residents are suffering vast oppression or neglect, or it’s likely to be a collection
of various separate facilities with separate founding entities and motivations. Neither is very likely to foster a moon-wide
rebellion. They might have many shared concerns but we’ll
probably be looking less at an emerging lunar culture and more at numerous subcultures. You’d have folks living in lava tubes and
others living in craters, some of which are small and some of which are the size of major
nations back here. Geographically, unlike Earth, the poles are
particularly attractive places to live, largely because we do want the ice there, so you’ve
got concentrations of bases in the north and south. You’ve also got a light side and dark side
divide. The Moon’s Dark side isn’t dark in the
classic sense, it gets the same sunlight as the rest, but we can never see it from Earth
and they can never see us. That makes it a great place for telescopes
and receivers for long distance transmission or power-beaming, the dark side of the Moon
is the one place in this solar system you can build a massive laser system for pushing
spacecraft or blowing up rogue asteroids that cannot be pointed at Earth. For the folks on the Dark Side, Earth is never
visible, for the folks on the light side, it hangs there all the time. The moon rises and sets on Earth, it waxes
and wanes, but on the Moon, the Earth does not rise or set, though it would wax and wane,
and it would be a good deal brighter to them than the Moon is to us with it more or less
hanging in the same part of the sky all the time, though which part of the sky would still
vary depending on where you were on the Moon. Days on the moon last a month, the sun will
just slowly crawl across the sky, no air so no blue skies, no pastel sunrises. When it sets the night lasts for a couple
weeks, but Earth is still there, very bright. I think this would have a pretty big impact
on people. When we talk about distant colonies going
independent, they almost have to from day 1 because Earth is so far away, but it’s
only a couple seconds of transmission time away from the Moon and not a long flight either. So Earth is never far away nor out of sight
and mind, particularly for the light side. Folks living on the Dark Side or Lava Tubes
at least would not actually see humanity’s homeland constantly hanging overhead, and
that might make a difference. To the folks living in the crater domes or
in the Moon’s own orbital network or living a nomadic existence on regolith extraction
tractors rolling around the dusty surface, Earth is right there. A lovely, fertile paradise overflowing in
water in contrast to their bleak and sparse landscape, always visible and just a phone
call away. Unlike every other colony humanity has ever
created, every colony we will ever create after that, far away on distant alien worlds,
the Moon will still be in that window of time and space where sons and daughters can migrate
there and still call home. There’s very different types of bases on
the Moon, very different lifestyles for those living there, different priorities, different
founding cultures they are still connected to, different cultures will emerge on the
Moon, but they may differ from each other more than from their founders back home. In that respect, a conflict between two entities
on the Moon seems more likely than with someone back home, and it is likely to be someone,
not the whole Earth. For one thing, that would be suicidal, whatever
scifi says about having a strategic advantage from fighting at the top of a gravity well,
as we saw in our episode on Planetary Invasions, it isn’t a very big advantage, albeit moon
bases enjoy a lot of other advantages over an orbiting fleet. The other thing is it isn’t you versus Earth,
it would be you versus Earth and that massive orbital infrastructure between you and it. The various habitats and industry in orbit
around Earth and in Cislunar space are probably going to outnumber the folks on the Moon all
by themselves. After all, the Moon would have grown by providing
the raw materials to build those areas up. Just as an example, the Moon is likely to
have mass drivers and rail guns for launching cargo, and such a thing could be adapted to
launch kinetic missiles back at Earth, but because the Moon is tidally locked in orbit
of Earth, any mass driver built for that is always aimed in the same direction, down a
single corridor that you can defend, and is built to sling large payloads into orbit of
Earth. That’s not an ideal weapon. Alternatively, Earth probably would have its
own orbiting mass drivers, and odds are many of these would be purpose-built for defense,
be it an attack or a breakout of Kessler Syndrome, particularly since even a minor conflict in
Earth Orbit could result in that exponential collection of debris without them. Now, when we say conflicts, we are not necessarily
talking about a war or violence or even necessarily hostility. In practice in current times that’s often
a losing route to gain an objective anyway, a lunar economy is one that’s going to be
very dependent on trade, and while the sailing ships of the past could convert to warships
or pirate or smuggler ships very easily, that’s a lot harder with spacecraft. Not the warship part, as we often point out,
an unarmed spaceship is an oxymoron, but you can’t just sail over the horizon and raise
the Jolly Roger and do some privateering, no vessel is moving around Cislunar space
with any secrecy as to where it is or what it’s been up to, and smuggling is rather
tricky when every port of call has specific airlocks everything moves through. There are some advantages the Moon enjoys
strategically though, as I mentioned, and one of those is those airlocks. On the Moon, from day 1, every place is a
bunker. Every door is a vault, and odds are even individual
rooms in someone’s home have sturdy airtight doors and backup air supplies and carbon scrubbers. Every room has some little monitor built in
watching for little dips in air pressure or changes to air chemistry. Most of the habitats are likely to be at least
partially underground, quite probably under meters of lunar regolith and possibly sporting
a point defense system for blowing up micrometeors. Consider the effect that has on one’s mindset,
and that could spill over to other areas. Early settlements aren’t likely to have
been big on privacy either, so you could easily have very security-conscious civilizations
emerging there. There’s also some ready made soldiers hanging
around, in at least three types. First off you’ve got the mining crews, those
folks will be very used to wearing spacesuits, which convert easily to wearing battle armor,
and using explosives and mining equipment, in other words the skill list you need for
raiding or invading another moon base. Second, you’ve got all those ships, and
it’s not that most modern vessels tend to have a navy mindset because so many of the
crew are former navy, it’s that the entire navy mindset more or less evolved from what
the norm on ships tended to be. Ships are not run democratically and you don’t
quit mid-voyage or decide you don’t feel like following orders today, and there’s
not much reason to think a spaceship would be any different, as of nowadays, two-thirds
of current or former NASA astronauts are current or former military, and the ratio is quite
high in other space programs too. There will be a lot of ships coming and going
from the Moon and a lot of orbital facility security forces at the various ports and even
those who don’t have a military background are going to be a pretty easy conversion to
troops if you need them. Third, you’ve got those nomadic miners we
mentioned in passing. You can make a pretty good analogy for the
Moon with the old colonies and city-states of classical Greece. The only difference is all those crater or
lavatube cities have no real interest in holding random large bits of territory. There’s no farms or forests producing a
regenerating supply of goods. All that regolith has plenty of materials
in it we want but you don’t set up shop on a chunk of it and keep steadily supplying
a harvest, you harvest and it’s done. You’ve also got low gravity and no air resistance,
so you can make some very big harvesters that sweep over places and get what they want and
move on, possibly never stopping. You could get ones big enough to house a whole
clan, or caravan collections of smaller ones holding families, as opposed to farmsteads,
though you might have some of those too, domes growing food that don’t move around. For those harvesters, they just head from
place to place collecting minerals and mapping spots and stopping to trade in their haul
for other supplies, a nomadic existence. Now, just because nomads have traditionally
been among the most elite fighting forces in Earth’s history doesn’t automatically
make them that on the Moon, but like the miners, they’ll have to be comfortable getting in
and out of spacesuits and operating with less safeguards in a hostile environment. What’s more, they are the group most likely
to have weakened ties to entities back home. They trade with the neighbors and move around,
which means they are also a handy way to sneak spies, saboteurs, or Trojan Horse invasion
parties into various bases. They are also likely to be the group folks
go to who want to leave their own base, possibly the home for those who aren’t very welcome
in their own habitat anymore but can’t go back to Earth. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine such a group
having less than friendly relations with a lot of bases they visit for trade. In short though, the Moon is likely to have
an advantage in terms of living places already being rather fortified and much of its workforce
being easily converted to military personnel, likely many of its industries too. It would probably be the biggest manufacturing
hub off Earth itself, and factories of the future are likely to be a lot more versatile
and faster to switch over production on, plus it is the most obvious place to be locating
defense industries for space. Just because some group has a lot of defenses
and weaponry doesn’t mean they’re hyper-aggressive but in general, if you’ve got a lot of muscle,
muscular solutions to problems tend to be a bit more attractive. In any conflict, peaceful or not, you inventory
your tools and resources, and those of your opponents, and look for an edge. And again, it need not be violence, be it
outright warfare or various covert activities. You might funnel it into sports instead, much
as the Olympics was intended for. And since exercise is going to be vital on
the Moon to avoid muscle and bone loss, and since you have many new or different sports
there with the low gravity, you might have fairly active sports leagues fairly early
on. Another potential economic boost for the Moon,
such games might be popular to watch back home. Of course such things can cause intense rivalries
or feuds too, we did have one war ignite over a soccer game in 1970, one of those wars that
tends to only be remembered for being surprising or confusing, like the US-UK Pig War of 1859
or my own state’s war with Michigan in 1835. I should note though that while such events
tend to be remembered little and mostly for how embarrassing or weird they seem, they
were usually quite important to folks doing the fighting or just the final straw in rising
tensions. Often such events were life and death issues
for the folks there, and were simply seen as minor to third parties outside or in distant
capitals. While the Moon will always be a quick phone
call from home, such things will be a factor in more distant colonies, and even then, close
or not for communications, a remote colony of a few thousand folks having a murderous
dispute with their neighbors is still likely to be seen as a minor and trivial event by
whichever major nation state of tens of millions of people is their sponsor back home on Earth. That alone could be the sort of thing that
triggered a move for independence, if you feel like your home is being neglected by
the empire it’s part of, one that treats it as a footnote and doesn’t really get
its problems, that’s cause enough to seek self-rule. There need not even be any oppression or blatant
neglect or malice on their part, or even the perception of it, just the feeling that they
don’t understand your needs and aren’t trying hard enough to or are even just incapable
of it. A delayed shipment of repairs parts for carbon
dioxide scrubbers or an unwillingness to pay the license fee for an improved design for
one would seem a trivial thing to revolt over, but it wouldn’t be to those revolting. Now, how would such a conflict occur? Obviously that’s impossible to say, as we
note in our space warfare series, military tactics change with each conflict and new
bit of technology, and even a very minor invention can utterly shift the dynamics. However, if it turns violent there’s the
obvious option of nukes. The Moon has uranium too and it’s quite
likely to be a big chunk of their economy. Absent fusion or solar power satellites, fission
is your obvious power source on the Moon, the waste is easily disposed of and it’s
easy enough to build a reactor there, whereas fossils fuels, wind, and hydroelectric are
all off the table, and anywhere away from the poles and their Peaks of Eternal Light,
you have those two-week long nights which make lunar solar power difficult to use. Additionally, while we’re reluctant to use
atomic rockets on or near Earth, they are one of the best ways to make interplanetary
ships move and also ideal for mining missions to the Asteroid Belt; the Moon is likely to
have a thriving industry for mining and enriching uranium. It’s also trivial to build a missile when
you have rocket parts all over the place and those rockets don’t need to get as fast
as on Earth to circle the globe or fight through an atmosphere. On the other hand, they’re much easier to
shoot down without that atmosphere in the way and moving at low speeds for suborbital
trips, not to mention that the Moon will almost certainly have a bunch of orbital facilities
with intercept systems designed to hit superfast targets in the first place, to deal with micrometeorites
and various debris or garbage lost by ships. Also, again, sneaking stuff in, especially
something as hard to conceal as a nuclear device, is difficult when entry is through
airlocks, not thousands of kilometers of minimally guarded borders and coasts. You might be thinking that when we’re talking
about nukes, you don’t actually need to get it into a base, but remember most will
be underground in whole or part and due to the lower gravity and lack of atmosphere,
it’s very easy to pile several meters of regolith on top and around your base. Nukes are quite powerful but not magically
so, a low-kiloton device detonating a few hundred meters from your base has no normal
shockwave as there is no air, but would not blast through a meter-thick section of stone
at even that short a distance. It’s also unlikely to get the whole facility
even if it cracks it, after all, as we mentioned, odds are good every single room has an airlock
on it. Which is not to say they’d be an ineffective
weapon, hardly, but they aren’t going to be as effective compared to back on Earth:
there’s no fallout, there’s no radiation concerns, and no extensive killer atmospheric
shockwave as everyone already lives in an airtight, radiation-shielded bunker. But it’s still a weapon of mass destruction
and it still has all that political fallout. At least in modern civilization, whoever deploys
a nuke first is almost destined to be viewed as the bad guy in any conflict by outside
parties. Odds are good a lot of lunar colonies would
have a nuke if they wanted it, and they’ll only get easier to manufacture as automation
improves, but many would likely view it as merely a defensive weapon, an ace up the sleeve
you can use to keep the enemy from escalating things too far. For those purposes you don’t even need one,
just credible rumors that you have them and the basic capability to make them. In that context we obviously can’t rule
out nuclear conflicts on the Moon but they wouldn’t seem particularly likely. We can pretty much rule out chemical weapons,
they’re not very useful in an environment where every breath of air is filtered and
monitored, and biological weapons are not much better, and those carry an even worse
stigma than nukes or nerve gas too, you’re almost guaranteed to become a pariah state
if you use them and the conditions there make them hard to use and even harder to conceal
the source, there’s going to be logs of every visitor after all. On the other hand, the Moon is exactly the
sort of place where you’d keep your more dangerous biological laboratories and it is
a lot easier to sneak in a small vial of a plague concealed as the inkwell of a pen or
even just a tiny capsule implanted in someone they could remove, viruses are tiny and reproduce,
you technically only need one copy of it. You also don’t necessarily need to sneak
it in, you could probably have a tiny dart missile drone that could fly into the side
of a base and burrow in and be guided to a place it can infect. Still, probably not a likely attack vector. What would seem more likely, beyond non-violent
conflicts like trade wars, sanctions, blockades, or proxy hostility through sports, would be
more like small raiding parties of infantry trying to sneak in through boring tunnels
with mining equipment or commando teams who got into the port and attacked there or concealed
weapon components while traveling innocuously or even made or acquired them on-site. Infantry is more viable there too, as it’s
likely to be lots of tight corridors rather than a place you’d deploy tanks, let alone
aircraft, which for obvious reasons aren’t likely to be a major chunk of any lunar arsenal. Drones might be quite common too, we discussed
those recently in “Attack of the Drones” and while the flying kind might not be common,
we’d certainly expect a lot of ground-rover and rocket propelled drones to be on the Moon
for normal peacetime usage. So lots of options and scenarios for how colonies
might emerge and what their attitudes will be and why and how they might move for independence
from Earth or have conflicts with each other. We can’t possibly cover them all, but I
hope it’s given you some food for thought, the Moon’s been less popular in fiction
in recent decades and a lot of the previous stories are a bit dated. So hopefully we've got a clearer and more
updated view now on such future bases, it’s an important topic and one we’ve been neglecting
in my opinion. I’m glad to see that changing, largely I
imagine because folks like Space-X have managed to make it seem more plausible that bases
on the Moon might happen in our lifetime, not as it often seemed around the turn of
the century, as a thing that would just keep getting pushed back another 20 years. One of the best of these new novels is our
Book of the Month, Artemis, by Andy Weir, author of the novel the Martian from which
blockbuster movie was adapted. I loved the film and the book, in large part
because the science was good and the protagonist and his challenge felt realistic and empathetic,
and they didn’t need a high body count or mustache twirling villains to make it exciting,
sadly a rarity in fiction. Artemis is his second novel, set on the Moon,
and again we get immersed in a compelling character who solves their problems with cleverness
and who makes mistakes like a real person, though there is more classic action in it,
and it is exciting, it doesn’t feel like some implausible world-shaking story. Good choice in the narrator for the audiobook
too, Rosario Dawson gives a good performance and some extra life and flavor to the protagonist,
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara. The novel varies a lot from the Martian, but
keeps that focus on good hard science and technology, and unsurprisingly I have a soft
spot for sci-fi authors who clearly do their research. This is Weir’s second novel and I’m hoping
for many more. If you’d like a copy of Artemis, just use
my link in this episode’s description, Audible.com/Isaac or text Isaac to 500-500, and right now, for
a limited time, you can get 3 months of Audible for just $6.95 a month. That’s more than half off the regular price
and you can give yourself the gift of a number of great audiobooks for passing the time this
winter. An Audible membership is also a great gift
for other folks, you get to give someone a book but don’t have to worry if they like
it, since they can pick out or exchange for ones they like. Before we getting to the upcoming schedule,
I did a couple of interviews this last week over on the Non-Sequitur Show and with my
friend Paul on Facebook, we had some very fascinating discussions, and I’ll link those
in the video description below. Next week we’ll look at another common staple
of sci-fi, freezing people for voyages or putting them in stasis or suspended animation,
in “Sleeper Ships”. The week after that we’ll discuss a topic
that is very uncommon in scifi but more common in fantasy, as we at last return to the megastructures
series to look at building artificial flat or disc shaped planets. For alerts when those and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notifications bell. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like
button and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a Great Week!
Hilarious.
Ohio didn't "win" it's war with us...
from this video i felt we are going to be having dispute problems over the moon and likely true because we havnt settled our problems here on earth yet...expensive to build...easy to destroy
a tip for isaac +/u/reddtipbot 100 RDD some space money may it be worth a hundred times more when you cash it in ))