Politics of the Moon Kingdom

[robkelk]

For some reason, Yesterday's Scandinavia and the World comes to mind...



Initial commentary on the post:

There's at least one geopolitical... er, selenopolitical concern about all-out terraforming the Moon in this setting: Moonbase Alpha would end up at the bottom of a sea (as Koenig mentions in The Last Sunset). Unless the Alphans are willing to move (unlikely, given their hope of going home as a group some day), Serenity II is powerful enough to move the entire settlement to higher ground, or relations between Alpha and the Crystal Millennium sour so badly that they're willing to attack each other, flooding the lowlands isn't going to happen.

Given that, we'd probably end up with "The Moon is generally not habitable outside of buildings", much like it is in A Miracle of Science. Unless the buildings are large enough to support internal ecosystems, the Crystal Millennium probably ends up losing the free ecosystem services.

Canon does support the life-support around the palace argument, as Serenity still lives to do a great Working after everything else on the planet is destroyed.

That life support is also advanced enough to still be functional when the Sailor Senshi visit the Moon during the Dark Kingdom arc... which means it's valuable in itself, if it can be duplicated, because (a) it doesn't appear to depend on a working carbon and hydrological cycle, and (b) it's operated without maintenance for millennia.

One thing that makes it a bit easier is that we can make a space elevator on the Moon with today's materials, if not quite today's technology.

Once Starfleet shows up, we have access to tomorrow's technology. But this is a minor concern compared to everything else in the essay. If we're relying on trade for survival, we're in a situation similar to the one in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (but not identical, because that Luna could at least feed itself once they stopped sending grains to Earth).