Luna
Luna in 2158
Luna is humanity's largest and most important settlement beyond Earth.
It is also the first place where a substantial human population has lived for generations in an environment that is completely incapable of supporting human life on its own.
Nothing on Luna is natural except the rock, the gravity, the radiation, and the vacuum.
Everything else was built.
Living on Luna
Most Lunars live in pressurized settlements buried beneath the surface, built into excavations, lava tubes, or protected by thick layers of Lunar material.
The surface is primarily a workplace.
Industrial facilities, transportation systems, power installations, observatories, landing fields, mining operations, and portions of the Laser Highway infrastructure extend across it. Surface travel is routine, but it requires pressure protection and usually takes place aboard vehicles.
Inside the settlements, life is much less exotic.
There are apartments, schools, restaurants, clinics, bars, parks, workshops, stores, offices, gyms, theaters, and all the other places humans create when they expect to remain somewhere permanently.
Lunar settlements are generally clean, compact, technologically sophisticated, and expensive to build.
Air, Water and Life Support
There is no environment on Luna that humans can safely ignore.
Air is manufactured and continuously recycled. Water is recovered, purified, and reused. Waste products become industrial inputs whenever practical. Temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition, and contamination are continuously monitored.
Lunars consequently have a different relationship with infrastructure than most Earthers.
On Earth, a ventilation failure is inconvenient.
On Luna, it may be an emergency.
Redundant systems, pressure doors, emergency shelters, repair equipment, and evacuation procedures are therefore part of ordinary architecture. Children learn basic emergency procedures early.
Lunar air is generally extremely clean.
Earthers occasionally find it amusing that people living on a world without an atmosphere complain about the quality of Earth's air.
Lunars generally do not find this amusing.
Surveillance and Privacy
Luna is one of the most heavily monitored human environments in the Solar System.
Much of this monitoring originated in safety rather than law enforcement.
A habitat needs to know how many people are inside. Airlocks need to know who passed through them. Life-support systems need to detect changes in temperature, pressure, atmospheric chemistry, water consumption, electrical demand, fire risk, and human activity.
Over time, the distinction between life-support monitoring and surveillance has become complicated.
LUNE is deeply integrated into Lunar infrastructure. Its original purpose was life-support optimization, orbital safety, and resource allocation, and its systems remain central to keeping Lunar settlements functioning.
Most Lunars regard this as ordinary.
Visitors from Earth sometimes do not.
Privacy certainly exists on Luna, but the expectation that a person can move through a large inhabited facility without leaving a substantial electronic record is unusual.
Lunar Society
Luna is no longer simply an Earth outpost.
A significant portion of its population was born there, and Lunar institutions, customs, politics, accents, and attitudes have developed accordingly.
Lunars tend to be conscious of dependence and waste in ways that Earthers are not. Throwing away usable material, defeating a safety system, wasting water, or interfering with life-support infrastructure can provoke reactions that seem disproportionate to visitors.
To Lunars, they often are not disproportionate at all.
The environment also encourages cooperation. A political opponent still breathes the same air.
This does not mean Lunar society lacks factions, crime, inequality, religion, political arguments, or people who behave foolishly. It means that nearly everyone grows up understanding that some kinds of individual behavior can impose immediate costs on everyone nearby.
Lunar attitudes toward LUNE vary considerably, from affection and trust to resentment and suspicion. Almost nobody regards it as irrelevant.
Work and Industry
Luna is one of the great industrial centers of 2158.
Its low gravity and lack of atmosphere make some kinds of construction and transportation far easier than on Earth. Lunar industry supplies spacecraft components, structural materials, propellants, orbital construction, electronics, machinery, and increasingly sophisticated manufactured goods.
Mining is heavily automated. Robots perform much of the dangerous, repetitive, and physically demanding work.
Humans remain important as engineers, technicians, managers, investigators, designers, negotiators, troubleshooters, and supervisors.
A Lunar industrial facility may contain hundreds or thousands of robots while employing comparatively few humans.
The result is an economy in which skilled human labor can be extremely valuable even though humans perform a minority of the physical work.
Gravity
Lunar gravity is approximately one-sixth that of Earth.
For visitors, this is initially entertaining.
For residents, it is simply gravity.
Buildings, furniture, transportation, sports, work practices, and emergency procedures are designed around it. A person raised on Earth must learn not to apply terrestrial assumptions to movement, falling objects, carrying loads, or even an enthusiastic jump.
Long-term low-gravity living has medical consequences, and Lunar medicine devotes considerable attention to maintaining bone, muscle, cardiovascular health, and the development of children.
Exercise is consequently a routine part of Lunar life rather than merely recreation.
Earth gravity can be physically demanding for people who have spent long periods on Luna.
Earth
Earth dominates the Lunar sky.
It is enormous compared with the Moon seen from Earth, and from much of the near side it remains in approximately the same part of the sky.
For early Lunar settlers, Earth was home.
For an increasing number of Lunars, it is somewhere their parents or grandparents came from.
Earth remains the center of human population, culture, biology, and history. Luna depends upon Earth for many things and maintains enormous economic and personal connections with it.
The relationship is nevertheless changing.
Many Lunars believe Earth still thinks of Luna as a dependent settlement long after that description ceased to be accurate.
Many Earthers believe Luna has forgotten how dependent it remains upon the civilization that created it.
Both opinions are common.
The Laser Highway
The Laser Highway is changing Luna faster than perhaps any development since permanent settlement began.
Luna possesses enormous advantages for building, powering, and operating space infrastructure. The new beam network magnifies those advantages by allowing suitable spacecraft and cargo systems to move through parts of the Solar System without carrying all of the energy required for acceleration themselves.
New construction is proceeding rapidly.
Money, workers, engineers, corporations, robots, and political attention are flowing toward Luna and the associated Lagrange facilities.
Lunar confidence has risen with them.
Some people believe the Laser Highway marks the beginning of an era in which Luna becomes the economic center of human activity beyond Earth.
Others believe that prediction itself is becoming dangerous.
Why Come to Luna?
People come to Luna for many of the same reasons people have always migrated.
There is work.
There is money.
Things are being built.
New organizations are forming, and people can rise quickly inside them.
Scientific, industrial, engineering, and transportation projects exist on a scale difficult to reproduce on Earth.
Some people prefer Lunar society. Others come for a five-year contract and discover twenty years later that they never left.
And some simply want to live somewhere that feels as though the future has arrived.
Why Not?
Luna can kill an unprotected human in moments.
Every breath ultimately depends upon machinery.
Living space is expensive. Privacy can be difficult to obtain. The landscape outside the settlements is magnificent but utterly sterile.
Earth has oceans, forests, weather, animals, open horizons, and an atmosphere.
Luna has none of them.
The old Earther-Lunar argument therefore remains unresolved:
- "Earth has dirty air."
- "Luna has no air."
Both sides generally consider this the end of the argument.