Living la vida LUNAR
The author of ‘The Martian’ predicts people will move to the moon — and his fiction is pretty close to science
INDonald Trump’s inaugural speech last January, lost amidst his description of “American carnage,” was a more optimistic promise that the country was “ready to unlock the mysteries of space.”
It’s unclear if the line was anything more than political lip service, but one thing is certain: The quest for the stars is racing forward regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. A once impossible but now plausible scenario can be found in Andy Weir’s new book “Artemis” (Crown, Nov. 14), which is set in the world’s first lunar city. The action takes place in the year 2080 in Artemis, a city with a population of 2,000 that’s part tourist attraction, part housing complex and part mining operation. The protagonist, Jazz Bashara, whom Rosario Dawson, the audiobook’s narrator describes as “super MacGyver,” is a young porter who runs a small smuggling operation on the side, obtaining contraband, such as alcohol, for the colony’s population. When one of Jazz’s wealthy clients offers her a chance to make the potential score of a lifetime, the young woman finds herself in over her head and caught up in a far-reaching conspiracy.
Weir, a former software engineer who wrote the 2014 bestseller “The Martian,” is famed for basing his tales on real science. He says he spends much of his writing time pausing to research facts he needs to tell the story.
In an interview with The Verge, Weir said that “Artemis” is “every bit as accurate” as “The Martian.” He spoke with scientists at NASA and researched life on the moon including day-to-day productions, like how people would extract aluminum from rocks.
He set his book on the moon because it was realistic.
“I wanted the book to be about a small city somewhere not on Earth, and I wanted it to be the first one, and I think the first non-Earth city will be on the moon,” Weir told The Post. “It’s just so much closer [than other planets]. You can have trade back and forth with Earth. I just don’t think we’d leapfrog the moon and have our first off-world settlement be on Mars.”
But “Artemis” is more than just a sci-fi caper; it’s also an insight into how humans could exist on the moon — and in space. Here’s what Weir discovered, and what explorers say is probable . . .
THE MOON IS PROFITABLE
If and when people move to the moon (45-year-old Weir predicts not in his lifetime), they will do it for work rather than for fun.
“I’ve always had a problem when I read about a city on the moon or Mars. I always ask, ‘What’s the economics?’ ” Weir told The Post. “People don’t just move to some remote location for the hell of it. They do it because there’s a job.”
In “Artemis,” Weir takes his cues not from alien cities but from Earth’s own tourism industry. All the factors — from its history to its economic foundation were rendered before he even conjured up his characters.
“I tried to be as realistic as possible. I modeled Artemis after resort towns in the Caribbean,” Weir told The Post. “Basically there are two extremely divided groups of people: the tourists and the people who work there. In some cases [the workers] live in shantytowns outside the tourist area. That’s basically the economics of Artemis.”
The moon city’s equivalent workers are people like Jazz, who reside in small quarters in the less-desirable section of town and serve at the whim of the wealthy tourists and retirees.
Strolls on the moon’s surface are pleasant, provided you have a space suit, of course. Because the moon has one-sixth of the Earth’s gravity, people jump higher, run faster and weigh less than on their home planet.
Most people eat “gunk,” a food substitute (not unlike the Soylent of Silicon Valley) made of algae and artificial flavorings, which can be produced on the moon, while the super-elites dine on cuisine imported from Earth.
The sun doesn’t penetrate Artemis’ thick hull, so time is set arbitrarily.
The inhabitants breathe an artificially produced, pure oxygen atmosphere that would be 20 percent of the air pressure here on earth — leading to some interesting problems.
For example, Weir calculated that water would boil at a lower temperature inside the moon base, meaning that any “hot” beverages would actually taste lukewarm. On Artemis, 142 degrees Fahrenheit is as hot as your coffee is gonna get —
— Naveen Jain, co-founder of startup Moon Express Within the next 15 years, we will have people living on the moon. In the next 20 years, I believe there will be a baby born on the moon.