That’s it, man. Game over. The news that a tunnel has been found on the moon by NASA’s orbiting satellites has started a public conversation that has long been going on in private: not just about terraforming the moon, but about the rights of various countries, political forces—even individuals—to desirable lunar real estate.
But could this discovery really lead to a world where we inhabit the Moon? Should we get excited? Pack boxes?
The answer is… yes and no. The groundbreaking discovery—which confirms decades of speculation—could indeed help space agencies stay there for a significant amount of time. The caves could be an important way to protect those astronauts from the lunar surface’s extreme environment, which ranges from -248 to +123 degrees Celsius.
The recently discovered 150ft wide, 250ft deep accessible cave beneath the smooth and landable Sea of Tranquility on the Moon’s surface – likely a tube left by flowing lava – could provide just the shelter we need for a permanent Moon base. And if the alternative is exposed lunar rock in 500 shades of gray, that fuzzy satellite photo is quickly starting to look like the lunar equivalent of real estate ads in Country life.
The strange thing is that we predicted it before we found it. And what’s especially fascinating is that the predictors weren’t spectroscopy or moon sightings, but pop culture. For centuries, our brains had to paint a design, a life, on the blank canvas of the night. And while science was still in its infancy, authors, artists, and screenwriters began to describe the tunnel.
The German writer Johannes Kepler first wrote in his 1608 book Nightcap (The dream) of a “race of demons” that lived in its deeper shadowy reaches. But the world’s first came with complex descriptions of these tunnels to the moon in Jules Verne’s 1865 A journey in the moon (A trip to the moon) in which the reptilian lunar population of selenites takes the French astronauts, dressed in suits and carrying umbrellas, into the labyrinths.
The 1902 silent film adaptation was a worldwide success, both for its technical effects and its action. Audiences are still enthralled by the psychedelic caverns, giant mushrooms and finger-shaped stalactites that still amaze audiences. On the moon was for spectators on earth. To the moon meant I was risking everything, even my sanity.
Tunnels in the moon were dangerous, even sexy. And while the film was being shot in 1901, Britain’s H.G. Wells wrote a spoiler hit, The first men on the moon. Again, Verne’s Selenites, crawling out of tunnels to eat strange growths on the surface. In a terrifying moment, the newly landed travelers on what they think is a barren and uninhabited planet hear a mysterious droning resonance from beneath their feet and suddenly realize they are not alone. The moon’s subsurface is alive. It’s pure Whovian. It would become real, too.
In 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Alan Bean and Pete Conrad conducted a seismic experiment on the lunar surface to test the rock’s consistency. Back on Apollo 12, they piloted the lander to crash into the lunar surface—the equivalent of a ton of TNT, creating a “moonquake” that would reveal frequencies from the rock. But what they found initially surprised them.
The moon appeared to be “only 60 percent as dense as Earth.” Not only that, the NASA report noted that “the moon sounded like a bell.” Conspiracy theorists and dreamers, enticed by selenite, seized on the description—which simply indicated the difference in rock consistency, dryness, etc.—and extrapolated. The “hollow moon” theory, one of the more wild conspiracy theories that portrays the moon as everything from full of tunnels to a giant tropical bottle garden, was born.
There is a beautiful side to all this fantasy. Oliver Postgate’s Clammers first aired that same year, captivating preschoolers and parents alike with the prospect of these knitted space pigs (not to mention soup dragons, frogs and the iron chicken) both living in lunar tunnels – And shy enough to close the hatches when astronauts land and start poking around.
Moon tunnel fever has also gripped adults. The Cold War space race years were a golden age of science fiction TV and comics, where the dual necessity of the need for close-up, helmet-less locations for actors – and the use of cheap, available wonder materials like polystyrene for low-budget, reusable sets – meant that “action happened inside planets” was really the new “action that was happening on planets”.
Physics is one thing, but the two immutable factors for alien worlds as we know them are production budgets and what the lead actor wants. (You can almost see a helmet-and-visored Sigourney Weaver standing on the surface of an empty alien world, begging Ridley Scott, “Give me something here to work with.”)
Those repurposed polystyrene tunnels and those close-ups have become the basis of the moon fear.
Where Earth horror has “gone into the basement,” space horror has “stay out of those tunnels!” we shout at the TV as Sigourney and her crew descend into subplanetary caverns in Alien (“they usually come at night, usually….”). Our legs go wobbly as David Tennant’s Doctor abseils into The Satan Pit to face the ultimate truth, again because we need them.
No one has done more for the inner tunnels on the moon than Dr Who. The spring 1967 season showed people being abducted from a moon base by Cybermen through a series of mysterious tunnels. It has taken us, once a season, back to tunnels beneath planets. It always makes for a popular episode. It’s as if our imaginations can handle anything – horror, suspense, bizarre fantasy, fear – but pure absence.
A famous Soviet short story from the 1960s, “The Death of Luna” by Vera Inber, postulates the moment when we realize how empty and dead the film is, as the moment when we lose our childish innocence; a kind of “Santa Claus is Daddy” moment.
And so I’m going to sit and stare at that cave on the moon, looking into it from a safe distance of a quarter of a million miles or so. I’m hoping for soup dragons, but you can’t be too careful. And when we get there? I’ll be right behind you.