Politics of the Moon Kingdom

[Labster]

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.

This seems like a problem where they'd just hire a few Dutchmen to figure it out.  The rim on Plato Crater is pretty substantial, with 2km high peaks, so I doubt it would need much earthworks to keep dry in the weather, just a few windmills to pump water and some pipes out of the crater.  Possibly they'll be pumping up to the western rille flowing down to Mare Imbrium.  Or maybe even longer pipes -- I can't tell if the Imbrium is at lower elevation than Plato, but there is definitely higher surface gravity in the Imbrium -- and it will sink even further under the weight of water, to keep hydrostatic balance.  There's apparently a semi-molten layer near the core of the Moon, so there will be some floating.

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.

Is it maybe just an air pocket + radiation shield?  If nothing is alive there, it doesn't take much to function at a steady state over millennia, in the absence of weathering.

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).

The environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s seems to have led to SF tropes/memes about overpopulation of Earth and food shortages.  Food is for import to the Moon, not export to Earth -- it just doesn't make economic sense.  Cities like Moscow, with no natural logistics (river, sea), barely make economic sense on Earth.  It turns out biologists, agronomists, and geneticists still have tricks to increase yields, while population growth has started to decline.

Unless Moon Cheese becomes a luxury good.  Luxury goods always make sense to export.  Maybe Nanami Kiryuu wants to open a ranch?

Starfleet poses a more interesting IR challenge that will be fun to write about.  The Moon Kingdom folks are obviously the good guys, so would seem to make natural allies.  But how will that atheist-humanist-republican value set work of the Feds with the theocratic-monarchical-collectivist Loonies?  The worldviews are different, for example: one side thinks of an a legal system as crime and rehabilitation, while the other sees sin, punishment, and forgiveness.