destination:moon

HAL advises Dave to take a stress pill.





What with it being 40 years since the Eagle landed, it got me thinking about mankind's great leap, and I was a bit inspired by an a456 post on moments in space (it is in the nature of blogs to be inter-referential, their own little closed-circuit system of recurring information).

What is the geo-political future of the moon? With China, Japan, Europe, America (not to mention private enterprises) all setting their sites on the moon by 2020, how will the moon be divided in the future?

Will maps be drawn by country, like the Antarctic, or by corporate interest (that is, will lunar cartography be essentially socialist or capitalist)? Will we see frontiers established, border outposts and lunar passport checks, incoming earthlings forced to pass by some great lunar Ellis Island? Or will it be a free-for-all, anyone setting up anywhere and doing anything? What resources are there on the moon anyway? Surely nothing like the amazing lodes of gold that H.G. Wells predicted, guarded over by an agrarian society of moon cow herders called the Selenites– a fragile blue people that shatter when hit by the force of an earth man.

But in time surely the explorers will have children, Lunians, and a new race will sprout up. Will they be able to ever return to the planet of their species, or will the simple fact of their birth on the moon make them forever tied to the barren rock– prisoners of their own chance? Will they repel their earth ancestors, and establish a Lunar Republic, or will it be the opposite, with Lunar Reservations, the type of desolate poverty and mutation of Total Recall?

Final word, the Arecibo Observatory (the level Cradle from Goldeneye- man what a goddamn hard level, like when you have to drop down and shoot Trevelyn off the little platform, or fall to your death), well its in financial trouble, and the guys at SETI are trying to scrape up some funding- have a look and help them out...