Knowing the company strictly from the perspective of a “yard ape” (aka Outside Lumberyard Attendant), and having moved zillions of tons (or watched it moved by the truly massive forklift that only a few people were allowed to drive) of building materials – from bags of sand to prefabricated trusses…I believed it.
After a moment, I said, “Do you think you could buy the supplies necessary to build a Lunar colony from Knox?” We laughed and I said, “That’s ridiculous!” However, as I thought about it, it occurred to me that it might JUST be possible.
That speculation led to the first “Jax Lunar Lumber” little blurb. It wasn’t even a piece of flash fiction! But lately, after discovering that there are actually things called Moon Trees, and that scientists have just grown rock cress seeds in Lunar soil, I suddenly realized that there might be stories I can harvest from this subject…so to speak…
While Jax Lunar Lumber isn’t going to open up any time soon, it seems the foundation for the concept of farming the Moon is NOT pretty much out there: it’s firmly out there, and numerous interests are exploring what it might take for us Humans to move into space; not just for the thrill of landing, grabbing some rocks, hopping around, or standing in front of the world and shouting, “Taa! Daa! WE landed on the far side of the Moon and you didn’t! Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah!”; but there are serious thoughts about how we could create a long-term presence in places OFF Earth.
The International Space Station has been orbiting Earth for the past 20 years, but everyone knows that, while it’s value as a research station is limitless, it’s not a particularly strong foothold off Earth. Just watch the movie “Gravity” to see how firm our hold in outer space is! (FWIW: https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/movies/movie-science-how-scientifically-accurate-is-the-movie-gravity.html)
If we’re going to have a permanent presence in space, then we need (literally) REAL estate. We need to have places where we can (literally) put down roots.
We need colonies on the asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.
Those social programmers among you may decry such a huge investment, arguing that “the money should be spent on the poor and sick here on Earth!!!!” – know as well as I do that while the real dollars being spent on NASA fluctuates but has slowly risen; the PERCENTAGE of the national budget has dropped dramatically since the 1960s (https://www.lpi.usra.edu/exploration/multimedia/NASABudgetHistory.pdf) and continues to fall. So those favorite social programs are STILL getting far more money than NASA ever did – except in the heyday of the program when we were so paranoid that we had to “beat the Russians to the Moon!”.
My question is that, even with less NASA and more government programs, POVERTY has not dramatically decreased – in fact poverty and food instability, and real income have remained fairly stable between 1969 and today – 56 years…(between a 10% and 15% variation) even though in that same period, NASA funding fell precipitously. Why haven’t we seen a dramatic decrease in poverty as program funding has increased? No idea (or I have ideas, but NO ONE would be interested in them!) (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-month.html)
A bit of background first (so that harsh judgements might be tempered): I grew up in a family that used food stamps; my own family has used food stamps; and I worked for 30 years (retired three years ago) in a school where 65%-80% of the students were on free-or-reduced lunch; and as a counselor for my last ten years, discovered that not only had I kept food in my closet in my classroom, most other teachers, counselors, social workers, and nurses also keep food and gift cards handy to help students whose families are in need. I’m NOT a millionaire – and I’m now on a fixed income.
All right, that being said, I maintain my position that Humans have to get off of Earth permanently – at least some of us need to. I’d never make it into NASA, so I’m eliminated (and “Yes, I DO know that for a fact – I applied for the Teacher In Space program and was turned down.”). So, how can SOME people get there and STAY there?
The more I’ve been reading, the more spreading Humanity out among the asteroids seems a better and better idea. HOWEVER, that doesn’t seem to be the dream that has grabbed our attention. Currently, it’s Mars, using the Moon as a jumping off point. So, I just finished a novel that takes place on Mars sometime in the 25th Century (when PICARD, Season 3 takes place!) so I understand our obsession with The Red Planet, but in my story, space colonization isn’t quite that ambitious, but I’m going to stop right here, or I’ll ramble.
I’m going to focus on the Moon and step back from my idea of a small business called Jax Lunar Lumber…
But it was that step that ran me smack into the fact that NASA actually sent seeds on the Apollo 16 landing and exposed 1000 seeds of several different trees to Lunar conditions, returned them to Earth, germinated, planted them, then passed them out to several American states, Brazil and Switzerland.
Knowledge of the plants disappeared, until a class of elementary school kids and their teacher found one in “their own back yard”, asked NASA – who ALSO had no idea what the class was talking about, then dig around and found not only the information, but where and whether the trees were still alive. Many of them are. While nearly all of them germinated, there remained only 420 when the National Forestry Service handed them out to be planted as their recipients desired.
Today (if you’re interested), you can use the Wiki reference to find them and visit them if you’d like.
FINALLY: all this was to say that not only are there Moon Trees on Earth, as well as underground farms that grow more than mushrooms, several groups are giving serious thought to establishing underground farms on the Moon…
And THAT finally leads to Jax Lunar Lumber Company…
There are lots of threads I’ve gathered in my research, and due to the fact that my current push in my writing is to WRITE TIGHT – that is, tell a story in as few words as possible. Hard for me, because (as you can see), if you get me started, it’s almost impossible for me to STOP. In the original bit of short story and its tag on, which you can find here: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2019/05/possibly-irritating-essays-jax-lunar-1.html; and here: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2022/11/jax-lunar-lumber-chapter-1.html,
I didn’t really do much with the story but play around with a bit of vignette (“a brief evocative description, account, or episode; a small illustration or portrait photograph which fades into its background without a definite border”), and snigger at my cleverness.
That is, until today. It appears that there’s serious thought out there about how to grow Earth plants on the Moon, on Mars, and (for my stories) on asteroids; because if we don’t MINE the asteroids, then Earth is going to eventually run out of natural resources…not tomorrow or even in a hundred years, but the lithium used for today’s dramatically inefficient electric batteries is very limited. The question of this article is “Will We Run Out of Lithium?” – the answer after one second of reading, is “Duh!” (https://energyx.com/blog/will-we-run-out-of-lithium/#:~:text=Global%20lithium%20reserves%20are%20estimated,record%20of%20100%2C000%20metric%20tons.)
We NEED to leave the planet, and those colonies need to be able to take care of themselves – the same principal that ANY CULTURE who set about colonizing had to face. (BTW, before you assume that Europeans were the sole colonizers of Earth, please actually do some reading. It’s broad, varied, sometimes wildly contradictory, and depending on who’s writing it, they excuse or accuse any number of other countries…it’s…complicated…
My main takeaway from that two hours of reading several articles was that: If the Earth itself fractured in so many directions, spawning so many businesses, interests, investments, economic entities, and even countries…what’s it going to be like when we get to space?
That will NOT be a subject I’ll be interested in tackling if/when I start to write Jax Lunar Lumber stories…but it will definitely be something I keep in mind.
Image: https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/FbmtC2oWTDZqbfXoyVZIBgaODM3oCjmpBhQGPZUPnUo.PNG or https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44937/would-it-be-possible-to-grow-bamboo-on-the-earths-moon
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