Should we go to the Moon?

Tranquility Base

People who think too much about the moon used to be called lunatics. Is that what I’ve become? Maybe J F Kennedy was a lunatic when he gave his “we choose to go to the moon” speech in 1962...

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong

There were other reasons too. What about now? With NASA’s 30 year space mission at an end should we choose to go to the moon or should we choose to stop thinking about it any more?  I say we should go there, but then I’m biased. I was a teenager at the time of the Apollo missions and was convinced that by now there would be space colonies, settlements on the moon and on mars.

In my short story Being on the Moon, set 100 years in the future, a community of settlers create an extraordinary and exciting life on the moon. Here’s some of the things they love about their life:

• We get to see the night sky at any time without clouds or atmospheric distortion with huge telescopes which are much better than those on Earth.  What’s more we get to see the Earth in its full glory every day. We have the best views of the other planets both within our Solar System and around our neighbouring stars.
  
• We really enjoy the low gravity. Imagine playing tennis, football, golf, skiing and crater climbing when you are 1/6th of your weight. In the story we host the first ever Olympic Games on the moon and use Newton’s laws to work out how far the athletes can jump and throw things.
  
• We’ve created a successful care centre called ‘Old Town’ which is a kind of heaven for elderly people with mobile disabilities. As well as loving the low gravity they get to re-live life when they were 30 years younger and recreate long lost actions, feelings, emotions. They love it here!
  
• Creating a new community from scratch was fun. We were guided from the past but continued to invent new possibilities. We have created sustainable well-being, treat crime as an integrity breakdown and have have done away with money replacing it with a reward system.
  
• We are in open communication with Earth people and communicate fully with love and affinity at all times.
  
• We have become a port and ‘mission control’ for spaceships on route to other planets providing rest and resources.
  
• We have become the leading research centre for solar energy generation from cosmic rays using a Dyson-Harrop satellite.
  
• We are a big mineral exporter and importer from other planets.
  
• Best of all we don’t get caught up in all those Earth scandals and conflicts.