Moon Yearning

People are going to live on the moon because there is no stopping them. The limitations to human ingenuity, materials science and economic feasibility are massive, both staggeringly vast and blisteringly complex, but they’re no match for deep yearning inside our shared consciousness. The tribulations of negotiating a vacuum, settling on lifeless rock and producing or importing the necessary elements for human survival from a massive inorganic sphere are numerous and obvious. The cost of lifting even a single astronaut into orbit is vast; taking him to the moon more so. Supplying him with years worth of food, water and breathable air… I’m unequal to the task of describing the hubris involved. But that hubris we certainly do have, as a people. A moon colony—even if it must be bleak, boring and lonely—will be achieved because we want it that badly.

I could speculate as to the draw of the moon. I’d point out its prominent place in the heavens and our mythology and language. We’ve had goddesses of the moon, moon men and even men in the moon. We shoot the moon, cows jump over it, and we moon over things we desire. We’re moon mad. In English, we even use the word “lunatic” to describe someone who is mad; a word with the same root as lunar. There’s a fever about the moon. Crime rates, emergency room visitations and marital problems peak on the night of the full moon. The lunar cycle is built into the human physiology through estrous. The moon pulls on us as surely as it does on the tides. Though, truly, our desire to live on the moon doesn’t need any excuses. It’s there. It’s an obstacle which must be surmounted. A story which must be told.

Chuck Klosterman asks a point blank question in his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. Paraphrasing, would you rather spend a full year in Europe with a $2,000 a month stipend, or ten minutes on the moon. I answer unequivocally that I would take the moon. I have no hesitation in making that answer and no anxiety about the risk or complete lack of material benefit. It’s the moon. It’s the fucking moon. Europe is Europe. It’s exciting and beautiful and culturally significant and filled with people I know I’d love to meet. Someone who disagreed with me on this point made her argument that “You could do a lot on two thousand dollars.” This is absolutely true. But Europe will always be there, and I could conceivably find myself in a position to live in Europe, even have money in Europe. The obstacles between me and the moon are uncountable. Barring a major change in manufacturing worldwide, I don’t foresee the price of taking matter into orbit lowering enough for me to be able to afford that trip in the next 80 years.

Of course, there will likely be major changes in worldwide manufacturing between now and 2080. Science fiction and Popular Science notwithstanding, there are plenty of innovations going on which seem to promise a future of space exploration. Will I be able to afford to be a part of this when I’m aged and weaker and less skilled at manipulating the digital and physical tools of the age? Will anyone want to take me? Maybe. I might go to the moon. It’s too soon to call. Still, if given the opportunity now, I’d take it in a heartbeat.

There’s no good reason for it. Nothing that could be blamed on the evolution of my psychology or the presence of an all-knowing, all-loving God. It’s cultural and personal and silly. But for some reason, it’s powerful. It feels like fate. It feels like religion. For an occasionally solipsistic non-theist like myself, that’s a confusing feeling. Irrationality isn’t a normal part of my everyday thought process. The fact that I’m not alone in this lends poignancy to the spiritual argument. NASA scientists build the framework without blinking at the cost involved. Media gatekeepers grant time and airspace to the relentless march of moon science. Politicians immediately see it as a global quest and a national unifier. So I’m not alone in my unreasonable urge to bask in the Sea of Tranquility.

Or, maybe it’s more like love. It’s the feeling of caring for another or wanting something badly enough to supersede the normal process of tacit cost-benefit analysis that drives my decision making. If I’m in love with the moon, I can be okay with that. Ever since that night she winked at me, a giant shadowy eyelid crawling across her bleached surface, I feel like we might have a connection. She’s always there for me, asks almost nothing of me, and lights my way in the dark. My lunar lover is a literalization all the tired metaphors for the guiding hand of a loving partner.

But she’s also a giant rock suspended in a slowly spiraling gravity well, doomed to one day—aeons after my death—crash into the world I call home. She’s not protected by a blanket of gasses, not crawling with organisms, not running fresh with drinkable water and not crawling with continents that dance on a bed of magma. In short, she is nearly without resources. A purely artistic object laden with a beauty unchanged since the dawn of mankind. To settle her surface with landing strip lights and monorail tracks would, for the first time, make our planet’s dance partner into a different being.

All across the world, as long as people have looked up, they’ve seen the same moon. Now we lay poised to plant a more permanent flag on her surface, and I worry that the spirit of this moon yearning might crumble away as her uninhabited surface becomes just another city. We may find ourselves like a child on Christmas afternoon, lying spread eagle in a miasma of wrapping paper and bows, the frenzy of gift opening leaving us cold and a little depressed after destroying the anticipation. I know we’ll settle the moon, despite these concerns. I know humans will live there, if not permanently. But if I could make an argument against this, it wouldn’t be economic or scientific or rational. It would be for love of that pristine object. For love of her as a symbol.

Leave the moon for love.

UFO Haunted World

In the sixth grade I saw a UFO. It was shaped kind of like a blimp and flying what looked to be millions of feet in the air. It was broad daylight, but it stood out black against the bright blue sky above my elementary school, cruising by at a ridiculous speed. My friends looked at me with confusion or maybe even concern for my sanity, but they couldn't see the ship as it zipped across my arc of vision, no doubt carrying a handful of hapless abductees or perhaps refugees from some interstellar war. This was the last I heard of the great visitation of 1993, which suggests either a massive intergovernmental cover-up, a superpowerful technology able to erase the memories of hundreds of millions of earthling rubes, a benign flyby cut short by something like Jean Luc Picard's precious prime directive, or a simple case of an eleven year old with an active imagination and no intimate knowledge of the geometry of our great nation's various airplane fuselages.

I don't believe in UFOs. Into high school I was intrigued by the idea of visitors from other planets, lost civilizations and the Loch Ness Monster. I think it was more out of a desire for it to be true than for any kind of reasoned belief that it was possible. Ufological beliefs and their cryptozoological counterparts possess an enormous counter-culture cache; one that I burned for a piece of from about the time I realized I was defining my persona with every move I made. Even today, the internet breathes with this mythology—from Cory Doctorow's constant linking to cryptomundo to the train-wreck fascination with Raalians that pours out of message boards and news destinations with uncomfortable regularity.

It's an compelling fiction with a full-time cult of conspiracy-minded advocates looking in every shadow for picked over evidence. And the most believable of their tenets is the concept of a military/industrial cover up so powerful it supersedes the need-to-know of even the president. If our government were to recover an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its crew, I have no doubt that they would shy away from full disclosure. Their treatment of everyday issues is proof enough that they don't respect the blind propagation of information through unregulated mouths. The climate we live in requires a certain degree of secrecy to be bestowed on our elected leaders, and that regulatory regime is like dark moist soil for the fungus of paranormal whistle blowers.

They say that more Americans believe in angels today than did thirty years ago. We're inundated with vampire fiction and magical realism. Fantasy is on the rise, and it wasn't so long ago unwed mothers were claiming themselves the victims of a lusty incubus. Information is everywhere, but the deepness of the unknown is still too great for our soundings. Human minds reach out for explanations when the truth is out of reach. I recall that Carl Sagan calls science the “candle in the darkness,” a way to find our bearings; it's important that we have all the details before we decide what story to tell. UFOs and angels other “plausibly fantastic” stories are tempting catchalls for everyday unknowns. They fill so many gaps when proper truth can't be gained or isn't sought after.

I came across this map today and was fascinated by the disparity between US regions and the propensity of a given citizen to report a UFO sighting. The name says it all. Unidentified. Flying. Object. How many of these do you see every day? Do you know if that's a 747 a good distance away, or maybe a solo flight a little closer? Our eyes are affected painfully by distance when there are no objects for reference, as in the sky. Is it a comet or a satellite? Clearly these aren't issues everyone has, but our knowledge gap is generally galling when it comes to bodies in direct violation of the law of gravity. It's easy to make the leap to space aliens when you've been on a steady diet of X-Files or A Fire in the Sky. The same goes for those whose literary palette considers the bible a staple.

Mr. Hynek's map illustrates something poignant and scary. Out here in the Pagan west, UFO sightings are an over-common occurrence. As you move east, they seem to diminish. In the bible belt and south of it, they dwindle away into almost a non-occurrence. Am I the only one who looks at something like that and hears a little preacher preaching? It starts to imply issues a like a kind of locative paranormal insanity... I'm starting to feel a pique in my interest. A curiosity about the generalized explanations people use for the random or the inexplicable. I know I tread on people's toes when I demonize religion or astrology. I can't concern myself with that. I believe in science. I agree that it's the candle in the darkness. Knowledge is sacred, and anything without peer review and scientific method lacks the necessary power of persuasion.

It's strange to look back at your earlier shortcomings—especially those that are only shortcomings from the perspective of your current self. In a way it gives me hope that people can change. In another way it softens the blow. I know I'm not separate from people who see angels wherever they go. We're all in the dark. We all want answers.