The new Cold War and the woman in the moon
The moon rules our months and looms large in mythology and science fiction
In the science-fiction series The Expanse, a future Martian colony gets very upset when one of its two moons, Deimos, gets shot to pieces by the UN on Earth. “They’ve messed with our skies,” yells one soldier, but later one learns Mars won’t retaliate just yet because it was so small, it was just a dot in the sky. That doesn’t pacify the antsy fighters: It’s the idea that counts. How can one live without a moon?
Keeping up with the Joneses is one of the many themes in the rivalry between Mars, Earth and the Belters, colonial castoffs on the asteroids in the show; if one has a moon, the other must too, and two are one too many. But it goes deeper than that, to their enduring identity crisis. Who among us are the truest humans, what with different bone structure due to different gravitational fields? It helps that they all speak either Amazon English or a kind of pidgin, but yearning for a moon and a blue sky is essential...
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