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

enough of that to comfortable house and feed and recreate a
population of some millions, only a fraction of whom need to
be engaged in production for export. So from outpost to an
appreciable off-world population, a progression that will take
generations, the Moon will remain a “frontier”.
On Earth, pioneering a new territory has always been
relatively easy. On the Moon we will have to cope with an
across-the-board dearth of all the “in situ” assists and
handicaps we have enjoyed in the past. We will find no trees,
no wood, no bamboo, rattan or reeds or bark. There will be no
food for the finding: no fish to catch, no game to hunt, no
berries or nuts or seeds to gather. There will be no rich ores of
iron, copper, or other metals to prospect. In addition to the lack
of wood, there will be clay, no sod, no easy carve stone to use
as building materials for shelter, not that we could seal them
against the vacuum and cosmic elements if they were on hand.
Nor, to make ourselves at home, will we find ready or almost
ready to use art and craft materials.
We’ll be learning what to make and how to make it,
over and over again, medium after medium, for a long time. In
the process we will cope better and better with the exclusions
and substitutions and compensations - the lunar facts of life.
We’ll have to adjust to material excesses as well as
material insufficiencies. Regolith, regolith everywhere, with its
intrusive and all-befouling dust - a challenge to housekeeping,
to machinery with moving parts, to health. For most, that first
fresh-off-the-lander impression of “magnificent desolation”
will soon be replaced with an innocence-lost lasting impression
of scenic monotony and boredom. Lucky the few for whom the
variability of the lunar topography will never cease to amaze,
with every new moonscape around the bend or over the rim!
But for all, on the Moon we will be greeted only by rock, stone
and dust: geology unrelieved by life with its verdant vegetation
in so many forms, along with expanses of water: streams, lakes
and seas. It is this combo of the awesome and the beautiful that
has made our home world the lonely jewel it is, for as far off
into the starry reaches as we have yet to thoroughly probe.
And then there are the black skies - as black by
dayspan as by nightspan, unrelieved by alternating equal time
periods of horizon to horizon sky-blue, variably pocked with
restless white to gray clouds. Again, lucky the few who will
never cease to be thrilled and soul-sucked by the clusters and
clouds of stars - for these, when all is said and done, remain
“the” frontier of human destiny.
Frontier Biospherics 1.01
If “gray engineering” has technical problems yet to be
addressed, “green engineering” as it will be required on the offplanet
frontier is in its earliest fetal stages. Most, amazingly not
all, do appreciate that we cannot return to the Moon “to stay”
without being prepared to aggressively phase in a mini- but
functionally integral “biosphere” to reencradle ourselves on
worlds without atmosphere, hydrosphere, and native flora and
fauna. We may have long taken it for granted, but that does not
alter the fact that we are quintessentially a symbiotic species.
We must take our symbiotic partner with us as we move out
into space. That partner is Earth-life in general, call it Gaia if
you are not too hung up on the speculative excesses of the
Margulis-Lovelock feedback theories. Sure we expect to be
able to engineer an artificial symbiote: chemically regenerated
air and water reserves, and foodstuffs à la Solyent Green. And
need this approach we will, for cramped conditions on space
stations and long-voyage spacecraft. After all, we have a long
tradition of substitution of less than ideal life-support means
aboard submarines, ships in general, and Arctic and Antarctic
research stations. But long term, such measures can only
support a caricature of human settlement.
Normalcy, such as a general population will find
tolerable, will require “nature” in recognizable familiar terms
to be involved. At first this involvement may be token, as with
salad stuff cubicle farms, and CO2 scrubbing algal vats etc. But
without the sure prospect and unquestionable commitment to a
schedule of progress in the general direction of a selfmaintaining
diversified and balanced biosphere regenerating
clean air and water, as well as producing ample food, fiber, and
feedstocks of various utilities, frontier settlement will not be
psychologically tolerable or self-maintaining in any sense.
Think of the ratio of water tonnage to biomass tonnage
on Earth, and then of the ratio of biomass tonnage to the gross
weight of the human population on Earth. Obviously, we have
a tremendously long road to travel on the Moon or in other offplanet
biosphere sites if these terrestrial ratios are the standards
at which we ought to aim. Even with such high ratios, we are
now seriously straining the recuperative capacities of our
environment. How could we pretend to dream of not poisoning
ourselves in very short order if, in off-planet mini-biospherewanna-bes
the ratios of water:biomass: humans are only
ridiculous tokens? Our mini-biospheres must be very
extensive: not landscaped cities, but farming villages with
farms. It is vegetation that must play host to man, not man to
vegetation à la houseplants! Until this is the case, and it is a
direction to move in, not something we can achieve at the
outset, lunar settlements will still be “the frontier”.
Diversity of agricultural crops and complementary
wild plant species, and a certain amount of post-human wild
life as well (such as we find in our own urban and suburban
and farming areas) will also be needed to provide a real biological
flywheel as well as increasingly good mental health.
Frontier Economic Stratagems 1.01
Those whose bottom line dream is of a settlement
invulnerable to the political and economic whims upon which
continued lifeline support from Earth must always rest, face a
long uphill struggle. In such a campaign nothing can be overlooked,
certainly not the dollars, but neither the pennies. In
addition to the obligatory money-earners like Lunox and a few
other export items that have occurred to nearly everyone, there
are innumerable less glamorous potential export commodities.
(Anything Lunans can make for themselves at less expense
than they can upport an equivalent out of Earth’s deep gravity
well, they can also sell to other space markets at a similar
disadvantage: LEO and GEO lab-stations, factories, resorts;
L4 and L5 space oases; and other off-planet pockets of human
presence.) As anyone who has ever managed a budget knows,
the nickels and dimes do add up, inexorably, often to sums that
literally dwarf more attention-getting dollar expenditures.
Thus it is absolutely imperative that the domestic
lunar economy not be neglected in favor of concentration on
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 67