Google Moon

The moon looks a lot different now that the Google settlement is in full swing. The orb hanging in this hazy, polluted-pink sky is much different than the one I remember from 50 years ago. It all started with a movement called The Zeitgeist. Named after the very ephemeral element of mankind they wished to change, these visionaries in social engineering and philosophy hoped to attain a true self-sustaining and open-source society. A society constructed from the ground up with inherent protections against greed, warmongering, power structures and hierarchies. A society of ubiquity and affluence, where the real defining choice the daily grind is simply, “What amenities do I prefer?”

Google’s CEOs Larry page and Eric Schmidt happened to fall into a unique category of the corporate ultra-elite. They had all the money they needed to do whatever they wanted. They could entrench themselves forever in power and money, like so many before them, but instead they wanted change. They wanted to share their gifts instead of hoarding them away in a mighty palace. They spent multiple years and billions of dollars to get the framework, the laws, the technology and a strategy written out in plain English. Their singular mission was to transcend the shackles of the entrenched technocracy, to free mankind from monies and currencies and to get even the common man to focus not on survival but, finally, on the greater good. They went on to use a big gift from their’s and other’s corporate coffers, and the advent of new technology, to finally achieve true post-humanism.

The plan was set out in multiple stages, given in brief here as I remember them happening. Build a space elevator, the oft-thought of brass ring of space expansion. Then, build manufacture facilities on the planet for production of robots. This goal has a fractal expansion element built in. The first factory builds the robots which build the next factory, and so on. The first factory was the only one they needed to build with robots carted up, fully assembled from earth. The rest could be assembled on-site from much cheaper (to transport and to purchase) raw materials and mass fabricated, modular parts. With the space elevator and recently mastered ion-thrust drives, the entire process of transportation was fueled by electricity, which rained down free from the sun and rolled in with the tide and swept in with the wind. Lastly the robots would build the starting point of the moon colony and receive their human hosts upon completion.

They figured out through simple arithmetic and best-guess statistics that all of the energy needs of this society could be satisfied by covering roughly one quarter of the moon’s surface with solar panels. These were the first items to be built by the automated construction robots. Large, hexagonal plates, miles across, were arranged on the surface at neat, regular intervals. They were built on platforms that could be lifted if, in the distant future, the real estate became more valuable than merely just for energy production. From earth, the moon kind of looks like a soccer ball, but there are more dark spots in the middle where the sunlight is gathered at the highest efficiency.

The robots would build continuously and furiously. The factories employed highly efficient nano-fabrication techniques, where tiny machines did tiny work and created very intricate designs in a seeming soup of constructivism. The progress ramped up exponentially. So startlingly quickly was the task completed, a mere 10 years, that the pundits were deeming it a dismal financial failure for the companies involved just as they revealed that the colony was up, running and waiting for people to join their cause.

The first city cut its tape and allowed the first envoys two months ago, and last week I got an invitation. I’m standing now in the waiting area of the Virgin Space station in Palo Alto California, which will take me halfway across the world to the Universal Space Elevator, ten miles off the coast of Japan. The space elevator will take me out to the inner edge of the upper atmosphere, a point of such low gravity that the small push of the ion-thrust drives is more than enough to take you all the way to the New World. In the two weeks it takes for the entire trip I’ll be reading and watching movies about what awaits me in my new life in the New World. I can’t help but get a little choked up as the polite flight attendants tell us to bid our last farewells to earth and all things terrestrial and begin boarding the craft.

Sources, further reading :

http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/

Zeitgeist - A German term meaning "spirit of the time." It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.