Moon: Gateway to Space and...Cooperation?

There are a great many science-fiction tales speaking about space colonies breaking from Terra. And I think there's a great deal of history in support of that as well. This country I'm in, the USA, India. Pretty much the entirety of the British Empire is illustration.

Cooperation would be great. Historically? Maybe that's secondary to what will happen once we're "out there."

At the same time, though, if it *does* bring Terra closer together, who knows how much better things might get?

GeoWriter said:

A bit of an update on moon as portal to space...https://phys.org/news/2018-08-mars-moon.html

Click to expand...

TBH, I've never understood why anyone would completely bypass the moon, a staging post right in our proverbial backyard, on the way to the rest of the solar system. I mean, it's right there, and we have the proven know-how to get there and back. If we can't make a go of offplanet life there, we really can't make it much anywhere else, IMHO...

It's all about the dollars. If fusion energy ever becomes technically feasible, possible financial incentive there. Staging sounds great, but you still have to get the stuff to the Moon in the first place, which means dragging it out of Earth's gravity well. I hate to say it, but I doubt anyone will go to Mars in my lifetime. Probably not the Moon again either. We barely made it the first time, and the program died early due to lack of interest. And dollars.

Then there's John W. Campbell's famous novel The Moon Is Hell.

Which makes a pretty fair case for why there will never be a lot of people living there.

caw