There is already a date: 2040. There are only seventeen years left until NASA builds the first human enclave outside our planet. It will be on the Moon and they will not use picks or shovels, only 3D printers and lunar dust as cement. They have told it in 'The New York Times' and so a priori it seems like a dream, but making this inhospitable surface full of craters a habitable place, I don't know about you, but to me it sounds like science fiction and a Netflix series.
Not the remotest idea of where exactly the writer Ray Bradbury was thinking, yes, the one from 'The Martian Chronicles' and 'Fahrenheit 451', when he claimed that we are the Martians, the man of the future is a space traveler and we will only live forever when we spread around the Universe. Because planting the egg on the Moon, I see it as very complicated: without an atmosphere to protect it there, the 127 degrees in the sun kill more than they burn, not to mention the -173 in its inner core, which is made of iron. Added to these inhuman temperatures is the lunar fregolith, the dust left behind when meteorites collide and which will be used as construction material due to the impossibility of doing it with cement, the same dust that if it gets into your lungs, you are considered dead.
Neither for these nor for these do the Americans give up, they, err or err. This week they said that the first stable lunar colony will be located at the south pole of the satellite where the light is almost permanent and the rays, arriving at a high angle, burn less. The exact place will be next to the edge of Shackleton crater. It is believed that there is water nearby, and the first thing they will build will be a landing and launching platform. Then will come the roads, non-pressurized structures such as garages and hangars and, later, the homes built by robots with a 3D-printed semicircular arch structure and an intermediate chamber between the interior and the façade to guarantee insulation. Each unit will resemble a three-piece African tent: house, telecommunications office and space to park the vehicle in which they travel. Given what we have seen, banish the idea of books and movies of a dream world for human beings: living on the Moon will be a matter of survival.
If man ever manages to be born, live and die there, I will already be underground. Meanwhile, I will continue down here doing what is mine and what is mine, everything else matters less and less to me. And I hope I always have the sea nearby to put my head in, even if it's in the icy water: it's what cures my sadness and anger.
#39Living39 #Moon