Getting to why

(Note: the following is one of various posts that were copied here from the Moonwards.com forum for the sake of preserving the early days of the project. It was originally posted there on Nov 7thth, 2015.)

I redid a few things around the website over the last week, and finally i got to the 'about' page. I'd just thrown something on it when i built it. (Which got republished in the NSS newsletter as an announcement of the creation of Moonwards - not what i'd planned.) I take mission statements pretty seriously. I spent hours redoing it. If you want to convince non-space-nerds that a Moon colony is anything but an extravagant luxury, you really have to nail it.

'Why' - that is the name of the page in the menu now. The summary at the top is about a page long and hits all my major points, which are also some of my major buttons. If i start to get on the subject in a conversation i can really go off. The page needs to be more than that of course. I think i'll add a resources section to it, and a sort of snippets section. After i learn the jQuery to do it the way i want or find a plug-in that fits the bill. For now it has a graphic i did for the International Lunar Decade movement, that's it.

But i'm trying to decide how i can rant on that page a bit in a useful way, too. People who know me know i hold the Dark Side of the Moon in reserve. If you seem open-minded, or i'm already off on a tirade, i'll explain to you how even a pretty small Moon colony of a few hundred people could conquer the entire world. (Explained here if you're interested. Pretty straight-forward, really.) If the happy argument of why Moon settlement matters doesn't work, the scary one, i figure, ought to do the trick. I have encountered disagreement on this. I don't understand that. Yes, i too feel a little skittish about trotting it out because it is just so outside the realm of anything normally discussed as realistic planning for the future. But, it could be done. That matters, right?

Anyhow... the disjoint between what is possible now and what we actually spend our time thinking about just seems weirder to me the more i ponder it these days. Not an issue evolution has equipped us for, sure. Maybe our smartphones will change our conditioning in time for us to give the flood of new possibilites something approaching the weight they deserve in the near future. It's high time for space settlement to come in from the cold.