The Space Show on Conquering the World

(Note: the following is one of various posts that were copied here from the Moonwards.com forum. It was originally posted there on June 6th, 2016.)

Here is a link to Friday's episode of The Space Show, where i talked about how the Moon could conquer Earth, and in general about how military acts in space can be extremely effective and hard to prevent.

It is a dark theme i talk about in order to propose a bright future. I believe that it would be by far the healthiest thing for the world to undertake our first extensive venture in space together, in a manner that is as inclusive as possible. This is the only way we can develop the cooperation and trust needed to keep space safe at the same time we create the possibility for it to become very dangerous. No system of laws, treaties, or regulations are going to be enough on their own. They will only work if we build a sense that we have a common interest world-wide in peace, and that can only happen if we feel we've done it together and we are all on the same team.

The timeline for Cernan's Promise will be based on that approach. I have been focused over the last 8 weeks on building rather complicated models (that i am in fact unsure how to display well on the website, they are that large), preparing for, attending, and doing follow-up emails for the ISDC in Puerto Rico, and getting used to being the new junior moderator on space.stackexchange. I have added some content to the site over the last week and hope to add much more in the next two or three. One of those bits of content is the Residency Program.

It has been outlined in the Mission Timelines already (which are screaming for an update, but hey, one does what one can). Basically, any nation can send an astronaut for life to Cernan's Promise for $100 million, and you need at least 200 such astronauts to provide sufficient income for development. There is an overt effort to get astronauts from as many countries as possible as part of this effort, and there are later rounds done on the same model that add more residency spots at increasingly cheaper prices. Once the settlement has a few thousand residents and the price for further spots has decreased to a level a significant percentage of Earth's population could afford, the market is opened to all.

To get across the urgency of doing whatever the first big thing we do in space is, as a world, together, making people realize that we could pay a grave price indeed down the road if we don't is absolutely necessary. So, i've started going on about it whenever the opportunity arises.