Aparna Venkatesan is an astronomer and dark sky advocate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of San Francisco.
Johannes Barentijn is an astronomer, historian, author, science communicator and founder of Dark Sky Consulting, LLC.
As long as there have been humans, the moon has been a calendar, ancestor, ritual, inspiration and origin story for humanity. The monthly and more subtle generation cycles have been – and continue to be – meticulously recorded and celebrated by cultures around the world since prehistoric times.
These recurring sequences include the “great lunar standstills” that occur every 18.6 years, when the moon reaches its northernmost/southernmost points, or lunistices, over the course of a single month. We are now entering the period of the last major standstill in 2024-2025.
There have been two major standstills since the United States last sent a manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17, in December 1972. Since then, only four other countries have joined the small club of nations that successfully achieved a soft landing on the moon. moon: Soviet Union, China and, since August 2023, India and Japan. Along with spacecraft and crashed pieces of space hardware, humans have left behind tools, scientific experiments, and even bags of their discarded feces on our neighboring world.
So in early 2024 we wonder: where will humanity and the moon be at the next lunar standstill in early 2040?
Related: Moon group urges protection of the moon’s ultra-quiet far side
In the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed to be the first to realize the age-old dream of, in the words of US President Kennedy, “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth “. The manned Apollo 11 landing on July 20, 1969, was as much a “giant leap for humanity” as it was a demonstration of not only the superiority of American technological knowledge but also, some argued, its political-economic system.
After the fall of the USSR, the successor state, the Russian Federation, joined the US as a partner in efforts such as the assembly and operation of the International Space Station. It seemed as if the Space Race had ended.
But now a new race to the moon is underway, driven as much by the commercial exploitation of the moon’s resources as by the flaunting of military might in the new frontier of space. a sense of urgency due to ‘manufactured fear’ that reflects the Cold War rather than modern cooperation frameworks. As we write this, there is renewed fear of nuclear threats from orbital space following Russia’s November 2021 anti-satellite test, which produced space debris that: in the words of the American Astronomical Society“endangers human spaceflight… the night sky and its accessibility for ground-based astronomy, as well as for other scientific, economic, commercial and cultural purposes.”
Because of the changes wrought by human activities since 1959, historians have recently argued that the moon has entered a new phase of its geological history in which human modification of its surface will far exceed the rate of evolution from natural influences alone. Astronauts who return to the moon in the coming years will be confronted with a world that is more than sixty years into this new era. also called the “lunar anthropocene”..
The name of the New Moon Epoch deliberately reflects our own planet’s Anthropocene, which increasingly encompasses the surrounding space environment. Over the past seven decades human activity has radically transformed the orbital space near Earth. Recently, the pace of this change has increased at an alarming rate. This is reported by the European Space Agencythe number of known objects orbiting Earth has doubled since 2015.
Space debris spreads the same way. Collisions between space objects – some accidental, some intentional – generate cascades of debris, each part of which poses a collision risk to other objects. More than 50 tons of debris can be deliberately removed weekly by the end of this decade, with unknown consequences for the chemistry of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the ocean and all life on earth. Moreover, thousands of functional satellites orbiting the planet are already disrupting observations on the ground radio astronomy as well as optical and infrared astronomy (SATCON1 And SATCON2 reports).
The moon is not far behind. Orbital displacement, environmental degradation and increasing light and radio frequency pollution are the expected consequences of the new lunar space race, which mirrors the effects of similar activities near our planet. These developments threaten the potential the moon otherwise shows as a host for unique scientific research activities, such as the most sensitive radioastronomical measurements ever made from the far side of the moon. Soon the airless moon will no longer be a ‘silent’ celestial body; rather, it will be buzzing with human-generated radio energy.
The moon represents not only shared (solar system) history and scientific opportunities, but also shared heritage and cultural-religious significance for many global cultures, including indigenous communities.
Current practices of state and private space actors conflict with cultural beliefs, including in January 2024 when the Astrobotic Peregrine One mission attempted to transport human remains to the moon, resulting in widespread condemnation from indigenous communities and international outrage.
Notably, the Navajo Nation issued a statement to NASA, reminding them of the need for consultation given the 26-year history of this issue, which represents a desecration of “a sacred place in Navajo cosmology.” Since then, there have been a number of Indigenous-led calls for a stop the practice of sending human (and pet) remains to the moon. So the moon is at risk of becoming not only a future war zone, but a war zone as well a federally subsidized grave.
The moon has been our satellite for almost 4.5 billion years, and despite its annual distance from Earth of a few centimeters per year, it will remain our most visible companion for billions of years to come. This makes the current rush to occupy cislunar space and the moon all the more incomprehensible, with a poorly quantified trade-off between science and safety gains versus potential permanent loss of geological data from the early history of the solar system; environmental and biopollution of the lunar surface and atmosphere; and desecration of cultural beliefs surrounding the moon.
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As more lunar exploration initiatives emerge, the question must be asked: will we responsibly and sustainably protect the ability of future generations to practice scientific and cultural traditions on, near, or in relation to the moon? And will we be able to develop? a lunar land ethic? With a rapidly increasing number of active government and private space actors, and more and more pre-approved space initiatives that circumvent the treaty, it will take courage and vision for any country to deliberately set a precedent by proceeding in a way that respect the scientific-cultural heritage of humanitywhere priority is given to the ‘right way’ rather than ‘right now’.
This feels particularly urgent given the first US landing on the moon in 51 years via the US-based, privately owned Intuitive Machines two weeks ago, which involved both scientific experiments and man-made ‘leaves’ on the lunar surface, such as the “Koons moons“.
Examples like these urgently require addressing the gaps in EU language use 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the recent one Artemis chordssuch as the increasing role of private companies in space and whether their missions, lunar or otherwise, align with the ambitious ideals in the Artemis Accords regarding the preservation of heritage or the benefits of space exploration for all humanity.