Hacker News Reader

You might be interested to know that in occultism, Moon is sometimes referred to as "the eighth sphere" for reasons you've just described.

I'm reading Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation just now, and Zagreus is used as a kind of penal colony, with global corporations having their own clandestine security forces that rendition anyone that opposes them.

Unless they're mining straight up bitcoin there is absolutely no way that maintaining a prison facility on the moon would be profitable for the state.

There's a lot of valuable Helium-3 on the lunar surface. It's very impractical today to contemplate using it, but if materials science ever advanced enough that we could construct a space elevator, it might be feasible to do exactly that because 1 ton of Helium-3 can apparently generate 1.5x the energy of a Tsar Bomba.

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein?