It’s 11:08 p.m. CST, Sunday, Dec. 31, 2023, leaving less than an hour along the final stretch of a year-long road to reach 2024. Following a 3-day streak of near fullness across the last few nights, this winter’s Cold Moon is accelerated in its waning now, leaving the Houston sky a bit darker but strangely electric.
The New Year. A time to begin again the weaving of new threads into the tapestry of what humanity, at its heart, collectively hopes will be a future holding better things than the year left behind. It’s a time of celebration and good cheer, a chance to reset and renew all those promises about making life better that we annually make to ourselves and each other.
Judging from the atypical din of shouting, laughter, and muffled chatter pouring over the ivy-draped walls and through the bare landscape of the winter-worn garden out back, it appears this year’s festivities are well under way. As faint as the voices are, you can detect every hue of excitement, joy, eagerness, and communal exuberance.
This editor should be out celebrating, too. So why, instead, is he sitting with a pad and his pen in the dark of the garden? He’s trying to see the moon so he can remember its pristine state before our rapidly accelerating designs for the future alter it.
“soon there’ll be fast food on the moon”
In early December two industry service providers announced that they are jointly developing a control system to support ultra-remote communications required for operating industrial plants on the lunar surface. While evidently a great many of these projects are under development by multiple countries, one project involves a plant designed to use the moon’s water resources to produce hydrogen and oxygen for spacecraft and other manned stations.
The first reaction to these types of projects is typically one of awe-inspiring wonder, including for this editor. Once you get beyond the “Wow!” and “What will they think of next?” dimensions of fathoming how far humankind has come regarding what we can do and how fast we can do it, deeper questions start to arise that dull the glitz and glamour of our technological progress.
We’re seeing this play out most noticeably, of course, in the theater of artificial intelligence, but there are innumerable master showmen competing to hold our attention; politicians, media influencers, and marketers of any consumer good spring readily to mind. With so many directions in which to focus one’s attention, however, this editor has found himself increasingly aware that the one place few people seem to be looking—where, naturally, the spectacle-makers hope we won’t look—is behind the theater’s curtain.
The bitter sting of a song line comes to mind, in which the speaker had similar concerns in the wake of fast-food operators more than a decade ago beginning their race to stake claims for lunar property.
Who owns the moon?
No one stands a chance of arguing human innovation and technological progress hasn’t helped sustain our ongoing survival as a species. Unquestionably, it has. But as our dependence on hydrocarbon-based resources has taught us all, consequences inevitably shadow innovation and progress.
Will structures on the moon one day present consequences for life as we know it on Earth? It seems unlikely, but we don’t know what we don’t know.
While legal experts apparently agree neither a person nor country can own property on the moon, there’s no consensus regarding construction of installations or habitats on its surface. Not yet at least.
With the digital glow of the phone screen now showing 11:58 p.m., though, the doors of 2024 are about to open. Here’s to finding only the best of all that awaits behind them.
