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

erately undertook to settle their respective Wests. But in each
case, in all honestly, the government but supported and facilitated
a popular movement of resourceful frontier-minded individuals
in an effort that would have collapsed without them.
Indeed, the only all-government effort to create a
presence in a previously unoccupied land has resulted in no
more than a caricature of settlement. We speak of course, of
Antarctica, presently closed by treaty to pioneering individuals
and their families. Despite the onus of this legal precedent,
space activists, even anti-Moon Treaty diehards, have been
asleep on the wheel, protesting not a whimper when the the
Antarctic Treaty was renewed recently for another thirty years.
If, when all is said and done and written, humankind
fails to establish secured footholds beyond Earth, it will be the
fault not of governments, but of the collapse and dissappearance
of the resourceful frontier-minded pioneer spirit among
individuals. No amount of unlikely government support can
ever make up for such a vacuum.
“These are” by our all too frequent, all too whining
complaints, “not the best of times”. But they are good enough
to endure most of us into contentment with life on Earth,
whether we’ll personally admit it to be good life or not. Many
are those of us who want to see the space frontier open, but few
there are of us who would personally venture out there.
Certainly not while the frontier is full of rough edges and beset
with growing pains. We’ll wait until things become sciencefiction
sophisticated, until the Kansas Cities of the Moon, Mars
and free space are as genteel as the Baltimores of yore.
Yes sir, we’ve been this way before, to alien shores.
But will we ever go again! I don’t know, but proceed as if we
will, because I hope what has been in the “second best” of life
from the outset, is still there. It all depends on whether those of
us with the right stuff are collectively numerous enough to
form a critical mass of talent, resources, and determination.
Meanwhile, all too many of us lay the task not at our
own doorsteps but, let-George-do-it like, at the doorstep of our
governments. That, my friends, is pathetically wasted time and
energy. Government will follow where the people lead, not vice
versa.
But I fear we may have institutionalized this mistaken
stratagem. The moment we did so is ever so clear. It was in the
vote that two-thirds of us chose as our name, “The National
Space Society”, eloquent witness to our belief that opening the
space frontier is properly government policy. The other choice
offered, “The Space Frontier Society”, denotes instead a free
association of people, undefined by national status, determined
to open space “by any means possible”, including, but not
limited to, government facilitation and critical support.
“Oh, you beat a dead horse!” I hope not. Because if
the horse is dead, so is the dream! The name choice is now an
eight year old fait accompli. But that will never make it wise.
We have in so choosing set before ourselves our greatest
obstacle, our own failure to take ultimate responsibility for the
dream. Of such stuff are tragedies oft’ made. PK
Continuing a New MMM Series]
The primitive roots of “Lunan” Culture
This month we return to our series of essays on the
very early lunar frontier. It may at first seem that a particularly
“Lunan” culture will be a development a long time arriving. On
Earth we are used to considerable cultural diversity, both from
place to place and through the generations. It may seem
outrageous to forecast the day when we will see revealed the
considerable family resemblances all terrestrial cultures bear to
one another. But there are certain time-and-place-transcending
aspects of Earth that insert themselves in every human culture
to date. For whatever the differences we love to exaggerate, we
all share one very friendly planet, one encradling biosphere, the
same gravity, the same protective envelope of sweetened air in
which we work and play under wide open blue skies.
The unique equally transcendent wellsprings that will
eventually make “Lunan” culture distinctive from all terrestrial
cultures, making it in effect the first culture of a new family,
will be present from the outset, intensely felt already by the
first crew to take the plunge and “overnight” on the Moon.
The Moon is a world dramatically different from
Earth. It’s gravity is only one-sixth “normal”. It is without
atmosphere of any practical consequence. Its surface lies
naked, exposed to the weather of space. It offers no life
supporting biosphere of its own. These constraints will make
life-as-we-are-used-to-living-it a memory-myth early left
behind. As we deal with these facts and their consequences
with a swim-or-sink urgency, and as we find successful ways
to accommodate them, we will be forthwith face-slapped out of
any romantic reveries we may have had. — this month’s topics.
So much for day one! Hardly will we have begun to
cope and neutralize these brutalities and two other facts about
the Moon will carve nascent Lunan culture even more deeply.
The Moon is very dry. And its mineral assets lack some of the
industrially strategic elements Earth’s more generous endowment
has lulled us into taking for granted. — next month.
We have touched on each of these topics before in
sundry articles. We do so again, all in one place, from the eye
of the future historian and anthropologist interested in the very
early beginnings of what is sure to develop into a uniquely
Lunan culture and civilization.
There will, of course be many other things that add
color to lunan culture. The sports that arise, for one thing:
indoor, middoor, and outvac. Trade relationships and particulars
with other off-Earth pockets of humanity throughout the
Solar System. Political events. Art and Literature. The performing
arts and media. And, of course, the indelible mark of
powerful and influential personalities. But all these things will
but add flesh to a cultural infrastructure grounded in the physical
nature of our host adopted world, the Moon. And this
infrastructure will fall into place almost immediately.
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 35