Moonbase when?
You might remember, Columbus did not go to America for a vacation.
All the profits and the gold he was obsessed with? They weren’t for him, they were for the crusade; meanwhile he was spending much of the time dressing like a monk.
Does the lunar gateway meet your definition of a "moonbase"? Because if you mean "long-term human presence at the moon" (at least, in the same sense in which we have "long-term human presence in orbit" with the ISS) then the answer seems to be "possibly as soon as the early 2030's.
but seriously, it could be used as a manufacturing and industrial hub for deep space operations like asteroid mining.
think about it like this. if we can manufacture things on the moon we can launch things for almost nothing into both earth orbit and the outer solar system due to how the orbital mechanics work.
this means we can build a million probes and send them all over the solar system, manufacture generation ships, permanent self sustaining space based habitats.
a new era of expansion, exploration, and discovery.
“Why do we need a space station?”
“As practice for getting to the Moon!”
“What can we do on the Moon?”
“Build spaceships for getting to the asteroid belt!”
“Why do we need to get to the asteroid belt?”
“So we can make components for the Mars colonies!”
“Why do we need a Mars colony?”
…
We are the grey goo of the universe. Expansion is our thing.
I know how these question chains go, I have a young son.
the more we spread out the more freedom we have to pursue our individual dreams and aspirations. (I believe individual freedom is inversely proportional to population density)
the more we spread out the less likely we are to become extinct in a single catastrophic event.
the instinct to explore discover and expand is intrinsically human. Implying humans should stay on earth is about as silly as thinking humans never should have left a small valley in Africa that could only support 100 people.
to stay is to die and become extinct. that might be preferable to some. and you are free to do so yourself, but please don't prevent those of us who have that unquenchable fire from pursuing that which will set our entire species free.
Here's a slightly older take on it from that era:
"""
People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'
There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation.
But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron...
If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go.
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.
"""
(That's from George Mallory, for the curious.)
For many who are climbing the highest mountains that sheer joy turns into literal end if life. Wikipedia is trying to collect a list of them [0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_clim...
If we can satisfy their (limitless and still growing) hunger for energy and resources by exploiting the rest of the solar system, the monkeys can be kept pacified. That could buy us time to figure out a more permanent, and balanced, solution.
The great thing about the Moon/Mars/asteroid belt is that we can strip mine it. Can't ruin the ecosystem if there isn't one.
Arguably most people are forced to under-consume, but they’d be happy far below the most conspicuous of over-consumption now happening.
To make things worse, there are also embedded emissions. You can see it with China, coming out of poverty requires infrastructure expenditure, which means "wealth averaged out" would be even worse than the average would suggest, as you can't average sewers and highways, you have to build them anew.
There is just not enough wealth on this planet as it currently is. When you're saying "they'll be happy far below the most conspicuous of over-consumption", it actually means "worse than an average citizen of Mongolia, forever", which doesn't sound as enticing, does it
It’s entirely possible to start from today’s resources and build production far more efficiently if we produce rationally for use.
I don't see any evidence for that claim. What's more, planned economies don't seem to be particularly efficient at reducing waste or improving QoL, examples are plenty, from lake Karachay to unavailability of basic feminine hygiene products in USSR up until its breakup.
[1]: eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/us-corpor...
Life has been here for ~4.2bn years, has another good 500-800m years left until our carbon cycles grind to a halt.
"Why do we need a space station?"
"To save all life on Earth"
I've grown rather disenfranchised with most ecological movements (outside of the Whole Earth branch). Given what we've learned about our planet in the last few decades, and our current understanding of where this planet is heading, it's hard to interpret their arguments as anything other than advocating for letting all life on Earth die a slow death over the next 1Bn years.
if you combine AI with robotics and space exploration, there is not much point to doing all this manually.
I have faith in capitalism, at least in this regard.