What is the moon for? Astrophysicist Joseph Silk’s answer, 80, is simple and very utilitarian. The Moon serves as a platform for the future installation of huge telescopes that will make it possible to identify stars and planets located many millions of light years away.
Silk is the author of “Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind” which campaigns so that, alongside virtual mining, the Moon is also used for observation of celestial bodies distant from our galaxy.
Educated at Cambridge, professor at Harvard and Oxford and researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, Silk was a guest on the Princeton University podcast in December. The veteran scientist claims that telescopes on lunar soil have at least two advantages over Hubble and Webb, which are in orbit around the Earth: they will be much cheaper and they will be outside the area of interference of human magnetic signals.
Silk is campaigning for his idea and makes concessions to spread it by claiming, for example, that, half a century after the Apollo missions, the Moon has everything to become a tourist spot. Travelers would initially limit themselves to remaining in orbit around Earth’s natural satellite —which would already cost them a few million dollars— and only then would they descend to resorts built on lunar soil.
“Of course it would be very expensive tourism”, says the scientist. “But so was air travel in the early days of civil aviation, and then it became a lot more affordable.”
Silk estimates that the best locations for future lunar telescopes will be on the far side of the satellite. The site is not subject to interference from Earth and would open to infinity in search of answers to fundamental questions such as the origin of the universe and the existence of other inhabited planets.
Earth has existed for approximately 2.5 billion years, a relatively young planet. Much older planets may have experienced the existence of some form of life much longer ago. These planets may have had their evolution interrupted and, therefore, in the distant future, they could teach us how to rebuild a civilization after an interval of millions of years. We are in full science fiction. But nothing prevents us from imagining.
The initial motivation for a race to the moon will, however, be economic, says Silk. Powers with technology for the task –today only USA, Russia and China– will go after rare ores in lunar soil. One can speculate about issues of international law, militarization of the Moon, and issues like precedence. To what extent will a power delimit a territory for its mining, preventing the power that arrived later from having access to the same wealth?
The scientist says he hopes that Earth’s governments will have the same common sense they showed in the division of Antarctica, where stations from different countries coexist without sovereignty problems. This set of questions is subject, of course, to the economic viability of lunar mineral exploration.
The tendency is for a lunar trip to cost infinitely less than what NASA disbursed with the Apollo project. Only then will ores originating on the Moon become much less expensive and may become raw material available to the private sector.
Still in terms of cost, Silk puts his spoon back into the project of lunar telescopes. He argues that they will be incomparably cheaper than NASA’s reusable spacecraft program, which has already come to an end and whose modest purpose was to transport astronauts to space stations.
Joseph Silk is a visionary who, due to the institutions on whose behalf he researched, is also part of an institutional circuit that kept him away from anonymity. In other words, if your lunar telescope project succeeds, it is more than likely that in the future his name will be given to one of them. Exactly like what happened to the visionaries James Webb and Edwin Powell Hubble.
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