I was slung in my favorite deck chair, drink in hand, having a gawk at the night sky. Andromeda, Pisces … I trawled the constellations, mind abandoned, still aware in some curve at the back of my brain that the world is coming apart at the seams and we’re all fucked, and enjoying the gentle paradox of it, the clink of the ice in my glass and the slumber of the dog.
By and by I found my gaze resting on the moon. There it was, the great provider: breeder of wonder, werewolves and all those songs. The place where beauty meets philosophy, where hope and despair alike are lost.
Gnawing through the romance though was a little something I’d read not long before. An astrophysicist had claimed that the moon could save our planet. Not immediately: this would be in about 4.5 billion years when the sun explodes and roasts us in wrath and fire unless we get out of the way. Frankly, the notion of Earth making a break for it seemed implausible to me, but this Canadian professor said we could do it by shooting off an army of rockets on the far side of the moon. Slammed out of its orbit by the collective blast, the moon would sail off with Earth, yoked by gravity, trailing behind it. A thousand years’ travel and we’re out of harm’s way—albeit dark and freezing unless we initiate phase two of the plan. As the sun recedes in the distance, we would replace its rays with a trillion lunar argon arc lamps. A flip of the switch and the moon becomes the sun: blue sky, puffy clouds, everything just as before.
I’m gazing up at the night, not quite in a reverie thanks to the gnats, but thinking yes, well, lovely. Imagine the parades. Still, to get that opportunity the human race would have to last (long pause, phone math) 22,500 times longer than it has already. At that point I heaved myself up and went inside for more booze.
Looking back, I believe that night marked the shift in my thinking from save it (Earth) to save us (me). Or if not me, someone. Because when you’ve got surfing champs riding the curl from an ice wall collapsing in the Arctic, when an Ivy League egghead offers mathematical proofs that the human race is doomed if we don’t get off-world, and Stephen Hawking and others are ululating on the same theme, and thousands are tunneling and stockpiling ahead of TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It), then you have to start wondering if it’s not time to break camp. Or at least to establish a beachhead on the moon, just as some governments, corporations, scrappy start-ups and freestanding oddballs are trying now to do.
Granted, we’ve heard such talk before, back in the days of the Apollo program. Lunar colonies they promised us, farms, industries, a platform to the universe. What did we get? June 2008: “Space Station Resident Fixes Toilet.” The big difference today is that some people are actually serious about it. In the 60s it was just something to say. For despite all the soaring rhetoric the only thing Washington really cared about then was beating the Soviets there.
As a kid when I heard the word Soviets, I got a taste in my mouth like lead pencils. I remember a Weekly Reader from maybe fourth grade with a picture of J. Edgar Hoover beneath the headline, “What You Can Do in the Fight Against Communism.” What winning would mean—Let’s Win the Cold War!—no one ever explained, but the consequences of losing were clear. The Kremlin and the Kingston Trio agreed, when the big one hit, we’d all go, next year, next month, tomorrow … Everyone lived in a state of controlled hysteria and doublethink. To safeguard the nation the Atomic Energy Commission put out a call to any and all Americans to get out there and find more uranium so the government could build more bombs. We pay cash! People were streaming across the Colorado Plateau with picks and shovels, Geiger counters, whole families, some in the newly popular uranium designer-wear including the form-fitting “U-235 suit” for Mom and the “Digerette Jr.” model for Sis. No protection from radiation expressed or implied but so what? Handling uranium was safe. People believed this not just because the Mouseketeers were out looking for it, or even because the government said it was safe. They believed it because it was impossible. A lot of these same folks were putting fallout shelters in their homes. Everybody was. My parents got one immediately. We had a small basement and the shelter took up half of it: a little blockhouse of dank concrete with cans and shelving. My mother had to squeeze past it to get to the dryer. Even as a child I knew that sealing the five of us up together for more than an hour and a half was inconceivable on its face. I’d returned home from the dentist one day to find our cat had killed our hamsters and our dog had killed our cat. That was the kind of vibe our house produced among pets in the living room. Put the people in a hole and you can imagine.
Then Sputnik went up. This was in the fall of 1957, and the whole country plotzed. I remember standing in the backyard on those autumn evenings, like millions of other Americans, staring dumbly at the sky trying to spot its winking light. Every ninety minutes the thing passed overhead, accidentally opening and closing garage doors, and with each orbit the Soviets claimed the universe one more time.
What would the Commies do next? Would they bomb us from outer space? Would they bomb us from the moon?
Not to worry, the Russians said. True, in five to ten years they would be enthroned there but strictly in the interests of peace and science. At eight I was merely skeptical. Washington’s response recalled the time the great acting teacher Stella Adler told her students to react to the bombing of Pearl Harbor as if they were chickens. One of the first ideas advanced, perhaps predictably, was to nuke the moon.
To be fair, it wasn’t the only thing American officials wanted to nuke. If there was one group in those days even more in thrall to the bomb than everyone else, it was the people in charge of it, many of whom united the self-surrender of cultists with a sort of mad curiosity about what it could do. The Atomic Energy Commission went on a campaign to create a deep-water harbor in Alaska with five thermonuclear bombs. But the moon! Not only could we keep the Russians at bay by firing a warning shot into its head; the demonstration of strength would have “beneficial psychological results” for our citizens, as Jet Propulsion Lab chief J. H. Pickering explained—plus, he said, scientists could harvest and study the hail of radioactive debris. Thus in 1958, top-secret Project A119 got the go-ahead with prestige support from the RAND Corporation and JPL. A modest strike, the planners said. We won’t be obliterating the whole moon any more than we destroyed all Japan.
Ten months of work was sunk in this scheme. Along the way team member Carl Sagan, later the face of space on public television, established that a Hiroshima-sized blast in lunar gravity would fly in all directions, not mushroom as on Earth, a plus propaganda-wise since it would be easier to see.
Then just like that it was over. NASA was born and the project was scrapped. The new, karmically improved plan was to put men on the moon before the Russians could. For a time this looked unlikely. The Soviets orbited the first animals, the first man, two men, three, the first woman, with a vaudevillian’s arrogant skill, while NASA’s small successes splashed down to a mix of scorn and anxious clapping. But derailed by infighting, the Russians flagged, and on July 20, 1969, there was Apollo 11 touching down and America waving the big foam finger.
Ironically, when TV screens showed that white beetle climbing down the ladder, it didn’t matter who had won. That’s what people said, and for a moment it was true.
We’re on our way! NASA cried. Next stop the stars!
But with the Russians beaten the rest was gravy, or would have been except there was no gravy: up close the moon seemed to have nothing a person would actually want. By the mid-1970s NASA’s budget had dropped dramatically, and as an icon of the age the moon faded out, to be replaced by the disco ball in Saturday Night Fever.
Why then, all these decades later, the hunger to return to the big white stone? What’s driving it? The one-world ethos of the Apollo program is long gone. Humanity in the main couldn’t care less about understanding the cosmos. Saving mankind? You couldn’t get the funding.
We’re going back because, like the voice of Gatsby’s beloved Daisy, the moon is full of money.
In the 1990s the rumors began: talk of new fuels there, strange isotopes. Probes from India, China, the US dove and hovered like hornets over a jam pot. Then water! Confirmed! In two shakes the moon went from a circular corpse to a whiteboard covered in calculations. Ever since masses of helium were found there, an isotope rare on Earth, some have been calling the moon the “Persian Gulf of the 21st century.” Others foresee there the industrial hub of the inner solar system. They see alien-hunting telescope farms, hotels, zoos, gardens, and everyone having sloooooow sex in 1/6th Earth’s gravity. Plus swimmers like flying fish, cubic basketball, gymnasts like figures in a dream. Lunar eveningwear! Genetic warehousing! Glass roads!
Not everyone is thrilled at the prospect. Among those filled with loathing and dismay are Navahos, Hindus, practicing witches and legions of secularists for whom the moon represents religion’s last dim chime. Eco-activist Rick Steiner of Alaska has petitioned the United Nations to have the moon declared a World Heritage Site on the theory that man, having made a latrine of Earth, will do the same to the moon only faster.
The nobility of that impulse, I have to say, struck me a few beats late. When I first heard talk of “malling the moon,” my thoughts jumped to: here come people with lots of money about to do things to make lots more money none of which I will ever get. I want to be upfront about this, how my own forlorn relationship to other people’s wealth is part and parcel of my animus against the ultra-rich. I fully believe that much of the misery in this fine pretty world is caused by the privileged class enjoying its obscene privileges. But the rest of my grievance derives from the grinding injustice to me personally. Where’s mine? So much money in the world and none touches me. It’s like the miracle of the Red Sea.
Of course top players in the space business are necessarily loaded. They have daring and pantechnicons of ideas, of which we have already seen early fruits. I’ve no doubt that when it comes to the moon, these innovators will make many dazzling additions to the catalogue of human ingenuity.
Historically, it’s true, our ingenuity has been something of a mixed bag. One might even call it the double helix of enterprise and stupidity that dooms us whenever we get near tools. I think in this regard of Thomas Midgley. He was working as a chemist for General Motors in the 1920s when he realized he could eliminate engine knock by adding tetra-ethyl-lead to gasoline. This was great for car sales, but the stuff was tricky to produce. Workers handling the new formula suffered lead poisoning so severe it caused nerve damage and wild hallucinations. At the Deepwater, New Jersey, factory they were beating off clouds of imaginary insects. The problem did get straightened out. Not medically, but politically it was totally taken care of. Lead goes up; life goes on. But Midgley’s not done. He turns around and invents Freon, first of the fluorocarbons. So now he’s the father of ozone-eating coolants too. Later he contracted polio. In 1944 he was struggling with some rigging he’d invented to pull himself out of bed and got tangled in it and accidentally strangled to death, a symbolic gesture if there ever was one.
What’s to be done with such a man? Well, put him on the moon and he’d be no threat at all because the moon has no atmosphere. It’s idiot-proof in that regard. This is what makes the moon ideal for so many kinds of work. It may be a land of boiling, freezing, radiation and chalk, but our genius can fly free there without opprobrium and reprisals. And a lucky thing too if we have to shift operations in any big way.
We’re so busy, all us little Midgleys, that it may just be a question of what triggers the diaspora. Oil? According to one group of catastrophists we’ll be ruined suddenly and soon by “peak oil,” the term of art for running out of it. But other things could go, snap, like that. Peak water, peak farmland, peak fish: pick your death blow. Peak bees! Where the bee sucks there suck I but now I suck alone. You’ve heard of course about bees disappearing. Perhaps you thought, as I did, of a fuzzy few creeping around on the roses. Not so. We’re talking great slabs of bees vanishing wholesale. In California the owner of a commercial apiary lost two billion bees in two weeks. Colony Collapse Disorder: it’s happening all over the world. Pretty soon fruits, vegetables, pfffft. What’s causing it? Everybody’s got a theory: Varroa mites, genetically modified crops, cell phone radiation, hillbilly breeding techniques … No one’s sure. But that’s not the weird part. What’s weird is their mode of departure. Because they are literally disappearing. It’s not as though that guy in California were suddenly shuffling through 40 tons of dead bees, or his neighbor came over and said, “Hey, get your fucking dead bees off my land.” There were no corpses found or reported. The bees were just gone. It’s as if we’ve somehow stumbled upon a brand-new recipe, a witches’ brew so potent it doesn’t just kill things; it makes them actually dematerialize. But since we don’t know the formula, all we can do is watch its effects. Where will it strike next? One day we’ll step out the door and the dogs or the wheat won’t be there. And so it’ll go, one thing at a time, until finally people start to vanish and that’s when the panic starts. Now crowds are pouring through the streets, trampling others on the run from dirty-bomb threats, London fogs of CO2, eructations of methane, rogue viruses, not to mention shortages of food, water, Xanax, whatever it is singly or in combination that sends people streaming toward—toward what? Nobody knows—men, women, children, even the elderly who thanks to medical breakthroughs have joined the growing army of the dead who won’t lie down …
But to return to first principles: corporations, hand-in-glove with governments, will hegemonize the moon. Broad-brush, that’s the plan. Thereafter, whether Earth somehow escapes immolation and becomes the moon’s robust trading partner, or turns into a global hospice with thousands of acres of methane rising from ancient graves and the seas so full of jellyfish they look like cobblestones, the human race endures. I’m not promoting here the rancid mythology that business success drives the public good. Rather, I think the process will probably resemble the tale of the scorpion and the frog. Suffering humanity (frog) hitches a ride on the back of the scorpion, hoping against hope that the scorpion will overmaster its own instincts and save them both—which, given the stakes, it may or may not do.
What follows in these pages then is a tour of the grand bazaar, what the place will look like when the Man in the Moon is no longer the sole tenant—if current plans succeed. We humans are good at predicting some things, but the future isn’t one of them, and here it’s a tarot deck with everything wild. All we know for sure is that eager thousands are straining to realize these dreams as we speak.
So with that, let’s shed 5/6ths of our body weight and make the leap.
1. puffy clouds, everything just as before: Dr. Leonard Whitehead, Discover Magazine (July 1996).
2. surfing champs riding the curl: Watch it happen! “Glacier Surfing Alaska”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKRR 9RMmcIQ
3. mathematical proofs that the human race is doomed: J. Richard Gott III, “Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects,” Nature 363 (1993). Also: J. Richard Gott III, “A Grim Reckoning,” New Scientist (November 15, 1997).
4. ululating on the same theme: Daniel Cressey, “Get us off this planet, says Hawking,” Nature News Blog (April 22, 2008).
5. stockpiling ahead of TEOTWAWKI: See, e.g., M.D. Creekmore, “How to Survive TEOTWAWKI in 14 Easy Steps,” (March 6, 2013), www.thesurvivalistblog.net
6. Space Station Resident Fixes Toilet: Juan A. Lozano, Associated Press (June 4, 2008).
7. the Kingston Trio agreed: In a song written by Tom Lehrer, “Merry Minuet”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp6dsKleGpU
8. “Digerette Jr.” model for Sis: For a full line of uranium-craze products see: “Collection of Radiation Advertisements from 1940–1960”: http://national-radiation-instrument-catalog.com
9. people in a hole and you can imagine: With luck deranged neighbors would have torn it down. See “The Shelter,” The Twilight Zone, episode 68 (September 29, 1961).
10. trying to spot its winking light: Contrary to popular belief there was no winking light.
11. accidentally opening and closing garage doors: Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Walker & Co., 2011).
12. peace and science: Albert Parry, “Soviet Cities on the Moon?” Science Digest (February 1958).
13. react to the bombing of Pearl Harbor as if they were chickens: Elaine Stritch, author interview. Marlon Brando laid an egg.
14. with five thermonuclear bombs: The plan, dubbed Operation Chariot, was championed by Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” For more see Dan O’Neill, The Firecracker Boys (Basic Books, 2007).
15. beneficial psychological results: Gerard Degroot, Dark Side of the Moon (NYU Press, 2006).
16. a plus propaganda-wise since it would be easier to see: The existence of Project A119 came to light in the 1990s when a biographer of Sagan discovered a reference to it among his papers. Edward Teller wanted to bomb the moon too.
17. first man, two men, three: “This Day in History, April 12, 1961,” http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-man-in-space.
18. NASA’s budget had dropped dramatically: See, e.g., “Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables,” NASA Augustine Spaceflight Review, Orion (2015).
19. replaced by the disco ball in Saturday Night Fever: It’s as great as you remember: “Night Fever Dance—Saturday Night Fever”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhDiWkdnMbQ
20. full of money: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner, 1925): Chapter 7.
21. Then water! Confirmed!: Dan Vergano, “NASA: Lunar Water in Crater Confirmed,” USA Today (October 21, 2010).
22. the “Persian Gulf of the 21st century”: Lawrence E. Joseph, “Who Will Mine the Moon?,” New York Times (January 19, 1995); Robert Quigley, “Does the Moon Have Military Value?” (January 26, 2016), http://www.themarysue.com
23. industrial hub of the inner solar system: Adrian Berry, The Next 500 Years: Life in the Coming Millennium (W. H. Freeman & Co., 1996).
24. Thomas Midgley: Celebrated in various dark corners of the Internet as well as in print. See, e.g., “Thomas Midgley and the Law of Unintended Consequences,” American Heritage (Spring 2002). At a gathering of members of the American Chemical Society he demonstrated the safety of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by inhaling the gas and putting a lit candle in his mouth. Late breaking: in a move of unprecedented scope 170 countries agreed to ban the use of fluorocarbons in October 2016.
25. fly free there without opprobrium and reprisals: The financial sector was first to understand this. In 1984 Stanley E. Adams, then president of the Lamar Savings and Loan Association, applied to the Texas banking commission for a permit to open a branch office on the moon. Apparently he planned to run this outpost himself since after that his firm was seized by the Federal Home Loan Bank and Adams himself indicted on fourteen counts of fraud. His timing was off, but his instincts were impeccable. Yes, some might dismiss him as a microbe, one germ in the sluice pipes of international finance, but take it to the other extreme. Consider a Wall Street tycoon, a real fat cat. Think of all the things he has to put up with, the token investigations, the crappy publicity. After a while the moon’s going to look pretty good. No more face-offs with shareholders, no more ritual hand jobs on Capitol Hill. Of course the titans of today won’t have this option. They’ll die rich, have their wives and servants killed and buried with them, and that’ll be that. But for those coming after, if you’ve got the resources, who’s going to stop you? It’s like moving the Colts to Indianapolis; you just load up and go.
26. peak oil: defined as the moment when the rate of production maxes out, then goes downhill forever. According to Kenneth Deffeyes, professor emeritus at Princeton, the US hit peak oil in 1971. See his essay “When Oil Peaked” at: http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/the-peak.html
27. Peak bees!: Perhaps most sharply evoked in documentaries like The Vanishing of the Bees (2009) and The Strange Disappearance of the Bees (2011). Not everyone thinks it’s so mysterious. See, e.g., Natalia Sanchez, “Monsanto’s Pesticides Are Partly Responsible for the Collapse of the Bee” (March 4, 2014), http://guardianlv.com/2014/03/monsantos-pesticides-are-partly-responsible-for-the-collapse-of-the-bee
28. two billion bees in two weeks: “Why Have Our Bees Buzzed Off?,” The Sun (UK) (March 10, 2009).
29. so full of jellyfish: To those stranded on Earth the rise in “gelatinous animals” due to spiking temperatures may be of less concern than the appearance of giant rodents. See Lacey Johnson, “Warmer Planet Could Be Dominated by Mosquitoes, Ticks, Rodents and Jellyfish,” Scientific American (February 20, 2012).