MMM Classics Year 10: MMM #s 91-100 - Moon Society

MMM #94 - APR 1996
The Cultural Implications of the Moon’s 1/6th G
This month, we
return to our essay
series on the early
days of a permanent
human community
on the Moon, as we
at the “Lunar Condition”,
the defining
set of parameters that
go with the territory
and will leave an indelible mark on early Lunan culture and
civilization. The Moon is a world dramatically different from
Earth. One way this was brought home to hundreds of millions
was the sight of our astronauts and their moon buggies
bounding and bouncing about in the lower gravity. The effects
of “sixthweight” will be more than anec-dotal. For the impact
of the Moon’s environment on pioneers, see below.
IN FOCUS “Alien Shores” -
We’ve been this way before!
In this issue, we take a look at the “environment” of
the Moon in so far as it will deeply affect the paths taken by
future development, settlement, and outgrowth of a uniquely
Lunan culture. It is a global setting that seems utterly barren,
sterile, and hostile — in a word “alien” to everything we
consider within the widest range of suitability, within the
collective limits of human experience.
Indeed, is this not the popular objection to off-Earth
colonization we hear most frequently and spontaneously
expressed? “These are alien and hostile places, where we
clearly do not belong! We should stay on our home planet!”
But Earth, globally speaking, was not always home.
Our progenitors, according to current consensus, evolved on
the East African savannas. If so, we are native to a relatively
small subset of what is a very great range of diverse terrestrial
habitats and climes. Once upon that time, much of the rest of
Earth was effectively as “alien and hostile” to these early men
as the Moon and Mars are now.
Out of this relatively narrow and specialized homeland,
we have spread to rain forest and jungle and swamp and
desert and mountain fastness and coasts. In each case, we left
behind things with which we were comfortable dealing, and
faced new material, climatic, plant and animal resources and
challenges that we could only learn to use by trial and error.
Yes, we’ve been through this before, collectively as a
species, time and time again. In each case, what was once
totally “alien” to all our previous experience became absorbed.
We learned how to cope. Dangers and risks were tamed with
“second nature” habits and new local common wisdoms that
dealt with them effectively.
We learned to clothe ourselves, not once, but many
times in ever more resourceful ways. The same holds true with
our need to provide shelter. And, of course, food. It is this
difference in the set of challenges facing different peoples in
diverse new habitats that is the wellspring of different nonhereditary
cultures. It is too this failure to flinch before the
apparently “alien and hostile” that may have prioritized the
development of language, by which “show” became “show and
tell”, a much more capable tool of tutelage.
Think for a moment of how “worlds apart” are those
early East African grasslands and the Siberian Taiga, the Peruvian-Bolivian-Chilean
altiplano, and the North Polar eskimolands.
Was not the conquest of the latter by native peoples the
“remember the Alamo” equivalent that we find ourselves called
upon now to follow?
Was the challenge of endless shifting ice flows, of
permafrost tundra slopes barren of all but lowly lichens, of
severely cold seasonal temperatures, not just as relatively
intimidating as the raw exposure we find on the Moon to
cosmic rays, solar flares and ultraviolet, and the incessant
micrometeorite rain, all in near vacuum among utterly sterile,
barren, and water-virginal soils? No, we’ve been through all
this before, collectively as man, time after time.
We could go back further. Pre-human life before us is
the culmination of an eons long march out of the “First World”,
the Sea. We ourselves must see our yearning for new worlds
beyond orbit in this perspective. And then we must remind
others (for have we not collectively forgotten?) that this is not a
wholly new thing on which we would embark. It is but a
pendulum swing back to a cyclic theme that has been part of
life for four billion years. And, more than a cyclic theme! A
cyclic imperative!
But here we must be very careful. For this is an
imperative which has never been wide-felt. When conquest of
the land became ripe, most life was more than content to
remain in the Sea. It felt no such challenge. Similarly with the
plant, animal, and eventually human conquest of one new
terrestrial habitat after another. There never was an overall
imperative. In every case, all but the few thrived contentedly
enough where they had always been, within memory.
Colonization has never been the task of the most
successfully adapted. Rather it has fallen always to what we
might call “the second best” - those capable of resourcefulness
but incapable of competing with the dominant sectors of their
own populations. They had to either push out to new and by the
old standards less favorable habitats, or remain downtrodden
where they were, if not perish altogether.
No “whole” population, structured by government or
not, has ever set out to transplant itself except in the case of
total environmental and ecosystem collapse within its homeland
(e.g. the Anasazi). Colonization has always been a rather
disorganized and spontaneous activity of “second best” individuals.
If you want a “Beatitude” especially appropriate for the
space frontier, it is this: “Blessed are the second best”.
Yes, the Russian Empire set out to force-settle the
Siberian steppes and Taiga (with what it considered the dregs
of its own population). Yet these were not empty lands but
areas already spontaneously settled by native peoples.
Yes the American and Australian governments deli-
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 34