A solar eclipse is happening today, and I happen to live in the path of totality. This is the kind of event which excites me because the rare occurrences of such have had such a profound impact throughout time, all the way back to our earliest ancestors. That we (and even those early humans) exist at all is likely because our only natural satellite was stirring the organic pot, pulling and pushing the oceans with its tidal motion.
Our moon is a thing of pure beauty. I believe it is partly where get our concepts of beauty. After all, how many things in nature are truly round? I have been advising people for so long that they should try to see as many full moons as possible that I was weirdly offended when I recently encountered somebody advocating the same. Also, the moon is beautiful in all its phases, so I don’t want to give any of them short shrift.
Although I was born after it happened, I am still stunned humans have walked on it. Then it seems everybody got bored with the place and, at this time, we haven’t been back there in over 50 years. On February 22nd of this year, the US landed a craft on the moon for the first time since 1972. In a worldwide first, it was a commercial enterprise behind the venture.
That gave me pause. It’s bad enough various nations are crapping up the lunar surface with their landers, successful or otherwise, but now we have the private sector contributing to the trash heap in the sky. I am worried everybody will start cluttering the moon with garbage like we’ve already done to the backyard of our planet. At the time of this writing, we have over 8000 known satellites in orbit around our home.
Not that the public sector is much better. I dread the possibility of nations fighting over ownership of the moon. At best, it will be like Antarctica, where everybody claims just a little piece for themselves and largely collaborates to keep the environment pristine.
But the moon would be incredibly hard not to trash. After all, Antarctica, though technically a massive desert, has some (albeit, trace) amount of precipitation. If nothing else, it has wind moving the sand-like snow around. There’s some amount of heat (alas, an increasing amount of it globally), so that results in some amount of change. But the moon has none of that. Failing a meteor impact, the moon’s surface doesn’t change. Ever. Period. Each scar we add to the surface stays there permanently.
So, until we learn to live more cleanly and always pick up after ourselves, we should leave the moon alone. Until everybody learns to play together better, we should leave the moon alone. Until these things happen, we don’t deserve the moon.
