Science Fiction or Science Fact?

The Lunar Elevator Project bridges science fiction and science fact because it is non-existent, and even featured in some works of science fiction, yet the technology to build it is available today. Think about that for a little bit. We have what it takes right now to build, housing, transportation and resource utilizing infrastructure on the moon. These are the first steps of colonizing our solar system. Our Earth is approaching the carrying capacity for humans. Some have estimated it to be around 10 billion humans, but regardless of the number, we are approaching it at an exponential rate.

Human history is characterized by colonizing and expanding to the borders of our globe and the next step is to expand past it’s borders. In the 1960’s, the conception of space and the moon changed from a surreal, almost imaginative or magical musing that existed above our heads, to a frontier that could be expanded out into. However, the scale of existence, meaning sizes of things and the distances between them, once you leave earth is so immense that even though this frontier had been uncovered, it remained an endeavor of curiosity and exploration, a realm too big to be utilized for our benefit. But, with this technology, with an elevator on the moon, the resources of near space become actualized into tangible assets, not simply natural phenomena with which we amuse ourselves.

This is going to happen. These resources are not just going to be looked at for the rest of eternity; someone is going to go and get them and this elevator is the best way to make it possible for as many people to access those resources as possible. This is going to happen because that it what humanity does. It sees something new and useful and it goes there and takes it. The only thing that makes this endeavor any different than Columbus and the new world, or any other historical example of colonization, is that this time we aren’t taking it away from anyone; we aren’t taking anyone’s home. Humans have been colonizing the world, killing millions of others under trumped up pretenses of destiny or divinity. This will be the first example of peaceful manifest destiny, one where all of humanity can work together to expand it’s borders into uninhabited areas and do so without hurting anyone. 

​-Jeremy Wain Hirschberg