Afloat in a Starry Sea

I don't know about anyone else but now just like when I was young I look up at the night sky with awe.  Out there just beyond my grasp is an entire universe of *stuff*.  By stuff I mean more stars, more planets, more of everything we have here.

In our own solar system we have for the purposes of our species at present an infinite amount of material for construction and fuel and living space.  And yet still more exists in our local neighborhood however that may be defined by cosmologists.  And farther out EVEN MORE.  And yet here we sit...floating in this starry sea of stuff acting as if scarcity is an actual thing rather than a self-imposed limit.

The United States alone could go to the moon and start a colony there if it so desired.  As a nation it could do this within five years.  The EU and China could also engage in such an activity.  So why would they not do it you ask?  Risk aversion, political power, general ineptitude and lack of foresight.

What does the Moon have?

Helium 3 - This is important for nuclear fusion and even charged particle drives (ion drives) and likely other applications we haven't even considered yet.

A Dark Side:  Useful for deep solar system and space obervatories and automated interferometric sensor equipment and for communications beyond line of sight in the solar system.

A Light Side:  Solar power, habitation areas dug into the lunar regolith.

How can we do these things?
We already have the patents and engineering designs for habitation modules and subselene nuclear powered tunnel boring machines that melt their way through the lunar rock using liquid lithium pipes and automated muck removal systems.  That by the way was worked out in the 1980's.  Today's machines would be more efficient by a large degree.

So what use would the moon be other than for fusion/ion fuel?

A low gravity staging point for exploration and exploitation of the solar system and its resources.  It is the natural jumping-off point for a Mars expedition and colony.  It is a ready-made observatory and it doesn't really have an environment to despoil aside from the portions that we want to inhabit or view from Earth.

Can we do it?
Yes
Should we do it?
Yes
Is it worth the cost?/
Yes
Why haven't we done it?
Distractions intentional and otherwise to keep people under the thumbs of terrestrial powers.
Biological adaptations are necessary for living life away from our home.  Low gravity causes calcium to leech out of our bones, the lack of tidal pull may effect our reproductive cycles and there are many other effects that come from having evolved on this planet.

A better human:

A better human will most-likely be thought of as trans-human or post-human.  This theoretical person would have a great deal of artificial genetic manipulation for his/her cardio-vascular, musculo-skeletal and nervous systems.  His/Her entire system will be adaptable to environments other than Earth.  I don't mean that future humans will breathe methane...but that their bones won't crumble in micro-gravity nor will hormone production be disrupted and they would likely have a higher tolerance to radiation dosing.

Humans optimized for space travel would also likely be hairless completely and have vision capabilities at least at 20/20 if not better and be able to see and process colors in the infra-red and ultra-violet.  Their cognitive abilities would be enhanced to require less sleep and irregularities of schedule would become less of a problem.  We have drugs like modafinil, caffeine, and nicotine that already have this effect on our minds and bodies.  Why not hard-wire these effects into features?  Also likely would be enough manipulation that no human past a certain point would age past their mid 30's and never get cancer except from outside sources.  All genetic faults would be corrected or removed.

It could take generations of therapies for this to happen, but it would first happen to humans off Earth.  The benefits would be realized on Earth on an industrial scale.  Sickness and frailty...gone.  We're not talking of a master race or picking a child's sex, hair or eye color...this is about eliminating blindness, deafness, down syndrome, ALS, chromosomal defects that hold back the entire species!

The path to the starry sea is a long, broad and windy path with many other paths feeding into it.

A greater understanding:

Right now all that we conceive of is from the Big Bang onward.  Yet tantalizing evidence exists for something beyond our realm.  Some celestial phenomena from quasars to even the cosmic background radiation maps suggest energy is leaking INTO our universe from some outside medium.  Additionally physicists think that our universe is flat and gravity curves or distorts this relatively 2-D space.  We also know that the universe is still expanding and the rate of expansion is increasing.  What is speculative is the continued duration of that expansion and rate of increase.  What is also speculative is what exactly the universe is expanding into as a medium.

It would seem to me that we are as a small boat floating atop a dark sea of some unknown form of energy or some sort of Hyper/Hypo Space.  This might also indicate the possibility of a multi-verse...a sea filled with islands of expanding and contracting 'Verses'.  The apparent energy exchange could be evidence of this in the same way that small ripples in a pond or glass of water are evidence of the edge or shoreline or some reflective boundary.  It is evidence and we need more of it to come to any conclusion as to the actual implications which are likely far more profound than what we can imagine today.