Welcome to moonbase
A handbook for would-be visitors and workers at a twenty-first-century lunar settlement.
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What Hacker News says
- There's a great book called "Welcome to Moonbase" by Ben Bova (1987) written from the perspective of an established colony on the moon providing an information handbook for someone recently relocated to live and work there. A lot of ground is covered, from governance, technology, buildings, recreation, mining, food, farming. I have fond memories of reading this book, and this article reminded me of it. I think about that book often, it was, like this article, very inspiring. It's interesting to see how the ideas about moon habitation have, and have not, changed over the past 30 years. The mention of "3d printing" the building structures in this piece, for example.
- There's a great speculative scifi book called "Welcome to Moonbase" (Ben Bova, 1987)[0] that is written as an employee manual for people relocating to an established moon colony. There are sections on the history of the moonbase, the economy, the social aspects, living and working on the moon. It's a fantastic paleofuture read, and is one of the books that kindled my love for sci-fi and space exploration as a kid. It's fiction, but does make it seem like living on the moon is something achievable within our lifetimes and could serve to answer the question "can we colonize the moon?".
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Moonbase-Ben-Bova/dp/034532859...
- Ben Bova wrote a book: "Welcome to Moonbase."
I purchased that as a kid, in a souvenir shop, on our way out of Cape Canaveral. We were there specifically to see the Space Shuttle slow-crawl to it's launchpad destination. I never got to see a shuttle take off first hand.
That book, though, began a life-long love of space and all things unexplainable.
I love space, science, and the unknown. That love all comes down to a childhood fascination with the Space Shuttle program, and Ben Bova opening my childish mind to the idea of life on the moon, and how different everything would be.
Thank you Ben Bova. And thank you NASA for daring to dream big. You've both made a lifelong friend.
- I was sure that money would be effectively eliminated by MLM (multilevel marketing) plus six-degrees-of-separation, aka affiliate networks.
I figured that once MLMs could be automated they would replace advertising. Folks would make money connecting each other to products and services through a kind of generic MLM network. Word-of-mouth on steroids. Heck, I still think it could work...
What else?
Flying cars, and flying cities (see Bucky's Cloud Nine), fusion power and atomic tools, robots that could wash dishes and do the laundry, factories that build and delivery whole houses (Bucky again: Dymaxion Home), arcologies (ecologically harmonious mega-cities designed and built as single buildings, Paolo Soleri), Moonbase ("Welcome to Moonbase" by Ben Bova), and those are just the plausible things, linear projections of the capabilities on hand. Not even talking about nanotech, longevity drugs, elctrogravity, etc.
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It's much easier to think of things that did happen that I never expected. The first major divergence was Twitter. I don't think anyone predicted Twitter. Then there's Facebook. If you could travel in time to, say, the 80's or a littler earlier and you tried to explain FB to people they would think you were stark raving mad. "Put every detail of your life in the hands of some corporation? A voluntary spy network beyond the wildest dreams of the Stasi or Gestapo? Yeah right." But here we are... I never thought JS would still be with us, let alone turd-polished to such a gloss. People spreading lies and misinformation, that's not what the internet was invented for. It was supposed to put the world's information at your finger tips, not be a mighty bullshit engine. "Phones" that excoriate minds, no one predicted that (except the Church of the Subgenius: the "white stone" came as prophesized.)
- Then we'll merely go to the Moon. :-) (And LEO and the Lagrange points.)
You raise a good point IMO in re: viability of space. In the limit it may turn out that humans can't live anywhere but on or near the surface of Earth. What is certain is that living in space will suck for many years, or likely decades. It will be like living in a mine, but there are more things that can kill you and you're much much further from fresh air and safe ground. And I suspect living on Mars would suck anyway just due to the ~0.4G surface gravity. At least on the Moon you can go home (in a few days rather than lots of months) or fly like a bird under your own power if your cave is big enough. ("The Menace from Earth", Heinlein; "Welcome to Moonbase", Bova)
But even if we can't live there it's still really useful and important to go: micro-gravity manufacturing; robotic asteroid mining; science...
I hope we can live in space, I want to colonize the galaxy. (The green galaxy on the cover of "The Millennial Project" book is one of the more compelling images I've personally ever seen. A photosynthesizing galaxy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni... )
But even if we can't go at all these rockets are really important!
