Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [111]
Suppose the Moon weren’t there in our sky; that it hadn’t been formed along with the Earth by some enormously low-probability accident; or that it hadn’t been captured late in Earth’s life by an equally enormously low-probability accident. Think how that might have affected humanity’s technological development.
It was the Moon that first gave human beings the concept of a plurality of worlds. It was the Moon’s size and nearness that made it an interesting world and lured us out into space toward what was such a tempting target.
Without the Moon, advancing astronomical techniques might have revealed the planets to be worlds, but would human beings have really tried to develop space travel if the nearest reasonable objects were Venus and Mars, and if flights to the nearest reasonable goal would require a round trip of well over a year?
We need an easy target on which to work out the technology of space flight, and human beings have to be encouraged to strive toward that technology with the bribe of an attainable success.
Of course, human beings might still have sent rockets into space and placed people in orbit around the Earth, even without the presence of the Moon. Such flights have many functions other than that of reaching the Moon. The desire to study Earth as a whole—its resources, its atmosphere and weather pattern, its magnetosphere, the dust and cosmic rays outside the atmosphere, the observation of the rest of the Universe from a position outside the atmosphere, the utilization of solar energy—all would have urged us onward to rocketry and space exploration.
It might all have been less likely without the Moon beckoning us in our fictional dreams, but given the lapse of additional time it might have taken place. Indeed, without the Moon, we could imagine everything that has taken place so far to have taken place anyway, except for the manned and unmanned flights to and past the Moon. Even the probes to the far-distant planets would have taken place.
But would we then have progressed onward to space settlements? If such things seem impractical to many “hardheaded” human beings now, how much more impractical would it seem if all the material for the construction of settlements had to come from Earth itself; if there were no way of using the Moon as a source of raw materials?
And without the space settlements, the true exploration of the Solar system would, in my opinion, be most unlikely.
If, then, it is true that a large Moonlike satellite is a very unlikely possession for an Earthlike habitable planet, and that Earth is the beneficiary of a very rare astronomical accident in this respect, then we must wonder if other civilizations have ever developed space-flight capacity greater than that which we possess right now.
Are other civilizations, one and all, confined to their planet and its immediate environs, and are they capable, at the most, of sending probes to other planets? And is this true, no matter how advanced their technology? It is a tempting thought. It would so neatly explain why the Universe seems so empty, even though half a million and more civilizations may exist in our own Galaxy alone.
It would also offer a sop to our pride. Thanks to our lucky possession of the Moon, it might be that within the next couple of centuries we will develop space-flight capacities far beyond other civilizations that may be far older, and in other respects far more advanced than we. Will we, and no other civilization, eventually fall heir to the Universe, thanks to the Moon?
It is hard to believe that, perhaps. Surely, given a little more technological development than we have, and given the driving force of the need for energy, a civilization would somehow launch itself into space even without the presence of a Moon. The planet’s own resources would be used, at whatever reasonable cost, and the direct flight to the nearest planets made no matter how tedious and difficult. Once that was done the resources of the nearby planet could be