Tube Town – Frontier, the How-To Book

 

I started out writing a how-to book. It was How to get Humans to Mars Sustainably. The ‘sustainably’ part means long-term, continuous, human settlement. It is the opposite of “plant a flag and return”. I’m convinced (credit to the late Paul Spudis and others) that the sustainable road to Mars goes through the Moon. The Moon is close, resource-rich, and the place where we learn how to live in space. I wanted to demonstrate the benefits of finding and utilizing a large, safe habitat on the Moon (intact cave or lava tube) to accelerate the pace of the space economy and thus, exploration.

I also wanted to make the story very plausible, meaning this is one way it could actually be done. Therefore, I’ve spent many years researching the heck out of emerging technology and its potential application to space. I wanted to extrapolate existing discoveries a decade or two into the future, knowing full well that there will be scientific breakthroughs during that time that are not on anyone’s radar and that some emerging technology will never actually emerge (cold fusion).  Predicting the future is a fool’s errand but I’m just the guy for the job.

The technologies described in the book are already ‘a thing’ (drone soap bubble pollination, oxygen-producing artificial leaves, mini mags, radiation-eating fungi, etc.) The discoveries exist, but the technologies are at different points of the development spectrum. Some are research projects (mini mags), in the lab, as a prototype, maybe even demonstrated (I’m not giving up on carbon nanotubes!). I’m not wholly making this stuff up but I may have enhanced it with other emerging technologies or extrapolated efficiencies and improvements into the near future.

But technical “How-To” books are boring, or at least severely limiting to your potential market, so I wrote this novel about the people living in lava tubes under the surface of the Moon. The How-To is more than just technology, it's also about the humans and their off-world culture- motivations, relationships, governance, politics, law, economics, competition, and conflict.