NASA announced plans to work with other countries to put a permanent base on the moon by 2024. This raises an interesting question: Who owns the moon?
Apparently there’s a legal agreement called The Outer Space Treaty that says no one can own any part of space, including the moon. But I have to think that when that treaty got signed, no one expected NASA to build nerd condos on the moon’s South Pole, aka “the only good part.” As soon as space colonization becomes practical, that space treaty won’t sound like such a good idea to anyone.
You can pretty much predict the next thousand years of lunar history. It goes like this:
1. The base station solves all of the technical problems of living on the moon.
2. A rich guy builds an ultra expensive tourist destination on the moon.
3. Lots of other rich guys build hotels and casinos on the moon.
4. The cost of lunar colonization falls.
5. Israel starts building settlements on the moon because land is free.
6. Muslims see this as an insult because the symbol of Islam is the crescent moon and they don’t want Jews living all over their symbol.
7. Islamic terrorists will try to use rockets built by North Korea to fly to the moon and blow up stuff.
8. The North Korean rockets will keep missing the moon.
9. Islamic terrorists will start blowing up more stuff than usual in America because it doesn’t require any North Korean rockets.
I can see only one way to avoid this horrible future: Blow up the moon before that NASA space station gets built. I haven’t looked at the details of The Outer Space Treaty but if no one owns the moon, it seems to me you could blow it to pieces and no one can press charges. I doubt the treaty-makers even thought of that possibility. Loop hole!
Call me a Kennedyesque visionary if you must, but I challenge the wealthy private citizens of the world to finance the development of a huge nuclear device and send it to the moon by the year 2023. Let’s vaporize the moon before it gives the Muslims and Jews one more reason to fight.
Don’t get me wrong – I love the moon. It’s very attractive sitting up there against the starlit sky. I’d miss it. But sometimes you have to make the hard choices. And as long as the human population is 90% gullible, violence-prone dipshits, the last thing you want to do is increase the supply of unclaimed religious real estate.
Who’s with me?