Both the U.S. and (the People’s Republic of) China are trying to establish the first lunar outposts, and it is possible that we will see lunar colonies within our lifetimes. When that happens, do you think there will be a movement towards independence, just as the colonies of Britain, France, Spain, etc. vyed for freedom? Would this be peaceful or violent, and how would either work? How realistic is an independent lunar nation, given the hostile living conditions? What would lunar culture look like? Would it be a mix of American and Chinese culture, or something new entirely?
Or do you think the Moon and other bodies in our Solar System will become internationally run (and protected) areas, a bit like how Antarctica is on Earth?
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It would depend on how much they needed external support from other countries.
Extremely unlikely. The moon lacks sufficient resources so any outposts established in our lifetimes will likely remain reliant on the Earth. Building the industrial capacity capable of sustaining a technological civilization on the moon is hard enough already on our planet. I would expect outposts on the moon to be culturally similar to those in Antarctica.
Fully agree. That said, the Antarctic research stations do have their own subculture and their own accent, so that much will likely occur on a lunar base, too.
Really? That’s really cool!
It really is :D ! Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_English
Very doubtful, at least for a long time. Barring some insane discoveries, sustaining any community worthy of calling “independent” on the Moon would take decades of constant trade.
The Moon also offers very little raw material opportunity too, it’s hard to even consider whatever might happen up there to be “colonizing”
Virginia was a colony for over 150 years before declaring independence. A century and a half may be long enough to build out an agricultural base.
The Moon also has some benefits to colonization, including an easier place to launch spaceships beyond Earth.
This is true and I was mostly just being pedantic. What I was trying to say is that 99% of modern colonization as been mercantilism. Even the few exceptions to this aren’t relevant because self-reliance on the Moon is almost nonexistent. There’s very little “dogmatic” justification for it, too. There’s no fresh continent of non-believers to convert and the Church is certainly in no position to sponsor missions regardless.
The moon offers very little cost-effective extractive industry, at least not without some wild discoveries or decades (centuries?) of infrastructure buildout. There is an almost-garaunteed $0 immediate ROI.
Whatever happens there would probably be closer to Antarcitc research outposts than the New World colonial craze. Nonnational scientific stations whose funding ebbs and flows with the geopolitical dickwagging of a handful of terrestial superpowers.
Most of the colonization of the Americas was mercantilist in origin. The initial discovery was started as a way to find a trade route to China and many colonization efforts were more about resource extraction than anything else; it took a century before colonies started popping up focused on religious freedom.
As for the comparison to Antarctica, there was an intentional pause put on colonization as it became apparent that colonization was finally within humanity’s technological grasp and there were possible mineral rights that would make colonization worth it.
Colonization will likely be slow, but I expect that economic uses for the Moon will be found.
Not until they become self-sustaining with their own food supply.
At first they will certainly be entirely reliant on their origin countries imports for basic survival and that’s a very easy lever to maintain control.
I do not see how they could be independant from earth. No athmosphere, extreme temperatures, constantly bathed in radiation. Maybe an antartic style base but nothing more than that.
The cost of supplying food is going to push colony owners to make the colonies self sufficient with food.
We have Arctic and Polynesian parts of the world imported food prices are already insanely expensive. When you Antarctica like research bases, the food cost gets borne by government entities because the cost is even higher due to shipping. Now, add a zero or two to the shipping cost to get food to the Moon.
So, once a Moon base gets to the size of a McMurdo station, someone is likely going to figure it will be cheaper to build the ability to grow food on the Moon rather than ship everything from Earth.
It doesn’t even have to be a complete meal at first. The Moon could start with basic starches like potatoes and rice to supplement dehydrated meat and vegetables. Over time, more crops get added and some protein like shrimp and chicken are able to be grown on the Moon. You might not get a steak, but it could be enough to make some colonies mostly self sufficient.
We’ll see, I might be very uneducated but I find it very unlikely that we ever get anything of suffient scale built up on the moon. Let alone the fact that humans can’t be in space for very long considering the detrimental effects it has on our bodies.
Imagine living under Emperor Musk of the Moon & Mars…
Only if the colonists manage to produce food and other necessary resources on the Moon. If they don’t, the colonial power can cut off their supplies and crush any such ideas.
Skeptical this will ever happen. Climate collapse is speeding up, and therefore a full collapse of humanity (in the nearby future, say 100-200 years) is becoming more realistic. So colonization of other planets or the moon is a race against time, which humanity probably won’t win. I don’t want to sound too pessimistic; this is a realistic view, supported by many international scientific organizations.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an excellent trilogy about the colonization of Mars that goes through the evolution of colony of earthlings that eventually grow to view themselves as martians and seek independence. Highly recommend!
Sorta happens in the newest season of For All Mankind too, but they have leverage.
Yes, but first they need to develop Gundams.
Looking at the USA, it would be far more likely that American lunar colonies would be given a path to statehood long before independence came up. The USA already has two states not on the American mainland. The only colony rejected from being integrated was the Philippines and that was because Americans didn’t want to integrate such a large non-white population into the country. I don’t think a lunar colony colonized by Americans would have that issue.
Looking at China, I don’t know. China would likely attempt a similar process of integration, maybe to the point where senior political leaders have a stint running a bureaucracy on a lunar colony.
As to whether the Moon would unify its colonies as they kick out Earth colonizers, likely not. The independence wave in the Americas never united across across colonizing powers. The only way that there would be a united Moon is if one nation conquered the Moon and lost it or post colonization wars saw a post-colonization country conquer the Moon; this would likely not happen given the Moon’s strategic importance to Earth. Earth could accept an independent Mars; Earth could never accept an independent and unified Moon.
I’d imagine a few tiny sheds with rpi’s for major players and perhaps a shit museum with gift shop selling vastly overpriced moon rocks.
Wouldn’t fighting people from the Moon be ridiculously easy for Earth people? Earth is like a Hyperbolic Time Chamber compared to the Moon.
It is a lot easier to fling a rock from the Moon to Earth than to fling a rock from Earth to the Moon.
