Dear Friends,
It seems to me that now would be a good time for a world leader to negotiate a world mission to build a permanent moon base in 10 years. Doing so would have many effects on world politics and the attitude of people in various parts of the world to one another. Because I worry the world is setting up for a big war.
It would take huge effort and foresight for a small cadre of Elite to push a thing like this. The political risks would be great but the historical payoff would be prodigious. Imagine being the people credited with such an effort were it to succeed? Great achievements of great men come to mind, Cheops pyramid, Roosevelt’s Panama Canal, Hoover’s dam, Qin’s wall and others, The political effort would be immense but what price for immortality?.
Such achievements give light to the human spirit and make the drudgery of the day less tiresome. They provide us an outlet for our anger, frustration and anxiety that is productive and heartening. There is toil and frustration in the doing but exhilaration in the completing.
Make the thing a team effort complete with milestones to cheer for. If the mission was designed with every participating country having an important part the people in that country will feel connected to the enterprise. The trick would be to effectively educate the people in their various countries as well. Then the people will feel invested in the project and will cheer it along!
It would be important to keep the cost to any individual country small enough so that the percent of GDP effected would not harm the economy. This would minimize the ability of naysayer’s to snipe at the project and protect the participating countries economies. Such an audacious project would necessarily be expensive.
One of the overall aims would be to align the interests of many of the worlds people, at least in this one thing, so that they will be more likely to give another the benefit of the doubt. People love drama and excitement. We get behind a good struggle. Wouldn’t it be better to struggle to conquer the Moon then to struggle to kill each other?
The political effort would be eclipsed by the scientific and engineering effort it would take. The whole project would let mankind flex our muscles. We would see what we can do and in the doing learn how to do other things faster, better, and with less inputs, the definition of improvement in economic productivity… The productivity improvement that raises wages and incomes.
Another goal would be to build critical infrastructure. Spreading out the infrastructure would give many countries the ability to get tangible results from their effort on the project. While any project such as this is not in any way a jobs bill but if it creates some lasting jobs, especially jobs that will be transferred to the private sector in the future, put people to work in the economy.
A major objective would be to get infrastructure in place to harvest helium 3 before the need for it. Our societies can garner benefits from the scientific and engineering advances we all would get from the project today like unforeseen benefits as from the Apollo program. But the potential of helium 3 to generate clean safe electricity on Earth must not be overlooked.
China, Russia, Japan, the European Union and the US have the ability to put a man into space in a pinch, India will soon be able to. The nations of the world are going there anyway why not marshal the effort to the benefit all mankind? The International Space Station is the model, a Moon base would be tougher and more expensive but the payoff would be exponentially higher.
One war averted and the cost will be paid back a hundred thousand times…
