"¶" "Every single human being, outside of the Kalahari Bushmen, is descended from people who left their homes and struck out on a venture to go to somewhere else." "So in a sense I think you could say that the pioneer spirit is almost in genetic imperative." "¶" "Once you get to that point where you know you can commit to actually launching something, you start placing your launch orders, you start building prototype hardware for things like your lunar landing stage," ""bending tin" as we like to say." "¶" "The first launch contract is for a small rocket, which used to land a little beacon on the moon." "Then you begin launching cargo packages." "After 6 or 8 of those, you begin landing pioneers." "¶" "Eventually there has to be one person who is the first ever to leave planet earth with no intention of ever returning." "I realized there was no reason I shouldn't be that person." "¶" "I'm trying to get across something radical." "The moon may be an alien and barren place, but we can learn how to live on that kind of frontier, make it fruitful, and become at home on it." "¶" "I believe with all of my being that I am the owner of the celestial bodies that I claimed with the United Nations, the only organization on the planet earth that has the right to create laws for deep space." "We have sold just under 600 million acres and that's growing by about 200 properties per day." "¶" "I am the only artist that's been to another world." "When I returned from the moon I began to think" "I have been given a great gift." "Maybe these paintings will help people understand this is one of the great human adventures of all time." "It's not a dream, it's not 'pie in the sky', it's not "Oh gosh, wouldn't that be nice"." "You and I and everybody we know could be on the moon in five years if you'll help me." "¶" "It's coming on 40 years since Apollo 17, since the last human footsteps on the moon today and I really think we shouldn't be waiting any longer." "Luna City or Bust!" "¶" "My name is Christopher Carson." "I like to think of myself as kind of the instigator of the" "Luna Project, although that's kind of a terrible word to use." "¶" "I'm a member of the National Space Society, the Planetary Society, the Moon Society," "And probably some other organizations I don't remember." "Uh... in the space field." "which have nothing to do with space." "The Luna Project, I guess you could say, represents impatience." "I want to go to the moon to live there and I want to go now!" "¶" "I don't know about you, but I'm not content with having to call home the whole rest of my life a place on this side of the sky, and so I will find the people who really want to go" "and are willing to devote all their resources, all their time, all their effort to the colonization project or who would want to if they knew it existed." "It's a multi-billion dollar, multi year deal, but so are a lot of things." "I am going to a variety of conferences and meetings;" "any place where geeks gather is a good place for that." "So that's my first job, to proselytize, to explain to people that expanding man's reach into the universe is something that we absolutely have to do." "¶" "If humanity remains confined to the earth, there is nothing we can reasonably call a future." "The stakes are literally everything." "We are all in, period." "There's a little joke, which runs, why did the dinosaurs become extinct?" "Because they didn't have a space program." "¶" "But why the moon?" "To me it calls." "It's called us since the beginning of life." "What brought life up out of the seas and on to the land?" "And the moon is where life is going to make the transition from earthbound to universal." "You can point at it, in fact I frequently do." "I point at it and say, "Look there." "What's that?"" "And the answer is, "it's the moon"." "Uh the moon..." "You're not gonna be happy and content and want to stay there until it feels like home." "¶" "Home is a place, whether it's a building or a city or a community, where you feel you're among your own." "It's a part of the universe that is not all strange, it's familiar;" "it's comfortable." "¶" "I've lived here on the north side of Malachi all of my life except in school years." "So it fits me like an old shoe." "I have been the president of the moon society." "They want to further the exploration, settlement, and industrialization of the moon for the benefit of earth." "¶" "For 25 years I have been putting out a newsletter about the moon and space in general called Moon Miners' Manifesto." "I had always been more of a Mars fan than a moon fan." "Of course we're going to have to start on the moon." "That's how we are to learn how to live in space." "This is the copy of the first issue of Moon Miners' Manifesto." "This was done on an IBM Selectric Typewriter." "Then I got a Commodore 64 computer... 64k, all the memory you could ever possibly want." "Uh..." "Everything I look at I'd say, "How are we gonna do this," ""how are we gonna do that on the moon?"" "¶" "This is a model of a homestead on the moon." "The thing to remember first, is we can't live right on the moon's surface because there's too much radiation and also it gets extremely hot during the day time and extremely cold at night time." "But who wants to live underground?" "You know, it didn't seem very appealing to me at all until I saw the Terra Luxe, this underground house about 20 miles north of Milwaukie." "Everywhere you look there was a picture window and you were looking right out on the beautiful countryside." "Well actually, there was a picture window, behind the window was a bigger mirror then the shaft through 8 feet of soil; it was like a giant periscope." "And I thought, "Ha!" "We could do that on the moon too!"" "Even though it was 8 feet underground, it was so filled with sunlight, I've never felt so outdoors." "In the back I have an overgrown St. Bernard puppy." "This is Nessa and I call her Allie Shepherd because she has a beard." "People ask me if I would go, I said..." "Only if I could take a dog and my tools because I like to puts around." "¶" "What I am doing is an unexplored niche, trying to show how even though the moon is such a barren place we can actually make ourselves feel at home." "And I really believe we can." "¶" "(RING, RING)" "Good afternoon." "Lunar Embassy Government Headquarters, may I help you?" "¶" "Uh yeah we actually have been selling property on the moon since uh... 1980." "There are some people that are selling properties in outer space that don't own the land." "Um... as far as I'm concerned they're criminal in their intent." "The properties that we are currently offering for sale are the Moon of Earth, Mars, Venus, Io, and Mercury." "If you try and sell something and use deceit it diminishes you as a human being." "Uh... this is as real as any other properties you can buy on earth." "I follow the declaration of ownership with the United Nations otherwise I wouldn't do it." "I've grown up with a work ethic that is based on honesty." "My parents are both from Oklahoma." "I've just always had this honesty quirk about me." "¶" "In 1980 I was going through a divorce and hadn't worked in almost a year and I was almost out of money." "I was thinking... what would make me happy" "I thought if I had property I could mortgage it, move to Los Angeles, get an acting career going." "When I had that thought I looked out the window, saw the moon and thought, there's a lot of property." "And almost instantly I remember starting a brand new 1967 Outer Space Treaty." "Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 states:" ""No nation by appropriation shall have sovereignty" ""or control over any of the satellite bodies."" "¶ does it mention anything about individuals." "This is the loophole that gave me the impetuous to file a claim of ownership for the moon." "Then I sent a note to the United Nations stating that if they had a legal problem with my claim of ownership to please let me know." "And on that note, I have never heard from them." "There is just under ten billion acres on the moon." "And everything you haven't sold belongs to you?" "I'm actually the wealthiest individual on the planet..." "The property itself, regardless of which properties we sell you, are all the same price." "They're $19.99 plus $1.51 lunar or planetary tax," "$2.50 to print the name on the document." "So the total would be $24.00." "Two on the moon and one on mars?" "We have 5 million 740 something thousand individual property owners and 193 countries on planet earth." "I have three former presidents of the United States that are property owners:" "Jimmy Carter," "Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush." "There's also just regular individuals... doctors, nurses, plumbers, contractors, taxi drivers, maids." "The youngest person we ever had as a property owner got the property the day they were born and were named after me, they named him Dennis." "Your order will be mailed out tomorrow and you'll have it in about 7 days." "Thank you very much." "Enjoy the property!" "Owning the moon is very interesting." "It's a tremendous burden, in some respects, to keep everybody happy." "Interesting story, in 1999 a person by the name of Regalo Pop emailed me and told me that he had claimed ownership to the sun and that he was charging me 30 million dollars a year for the energy put out for all planetary bodies that I own." "I waited a couple days, wrote back and said, we decided we don't want your energy." "Please turn it off." "¶ Let's go to the moon, and we could go dancing ¶" "¶ A little romancing, in the crater on the moon ¶" "¶ Just you and me, man on the moon makes three... ¶" "¶" "¶" "If I'm going to go start talking about lunar settlement," "I'm gonna have to lay some groundwork." "I'm gonna have to figure out... where we're gonna go when we get there, 'cause just saying the moon isn't good enough." "¶" "The moon, it's got three things going for it:" "location, location, and location." "I look at the moon from the vantage point of people living there." "If you live anywhere along here the... sk... the earth is going to be right over the horizon, easy to look at." "So I call that the Postcardlands." "This center here, you have to look up like that." "So I call that the Crooknecks." "And then right on the limb sometimes the earth would be above the horizon; sometimes it would be below the horizon." "I call that the Peek-a-boos." "Let me show you how I pick areas that we're gonna select to sell." "All of the red areas, are the areas we've already sold." "Mrs. Batfoot asked me, uh we're out of properties, we need to select another area we've just sold that one out." "Where do you wanna do it?" "...I don't know." "So I just cover my eyes and go like this..." "So that's the side facing Earth." "That's the side facing away." "The far side, I call it the Obliviside." "You never see Earth, it's out of sight, out of mind." "All you see is the stars and the universe." "there are lots of arguments over sites." "One thing which was really important to me was that it's easily recognizable, on a map or in person." "Plato Crater." "That's where I'm headed." "(TIMER TICKING)" "The phenomenon known as "space sickness"" "is related to changes in the effective gravity." "People's heads swell up, and their eardrums fill with fluid, and basically they don't feel very well." "I figure that by dangling upside-down, by reversing the normal pattern of gravity," "I can actually train my circulatory system." "Then when I get to the moon, I will be better prepared." "(TIMER DING)" "The readjustment of the fluid balance causes some interesting effects to, you know, hearing and so on." "It's a bit of a relief really to be right-side up again." "Christopher, he's always been an odd child." "He started to talk when he was eight months old." "His first word was "shoe", and his second word was "sock", and as God as my witness, his third word was "calculator"." "He's always been very interested in everything." "Trains, blimps, motorcycles, you know, I don't know when he started really focusing on the moon." "It wasn't 'till about..." "I don't know, just one day, he sat down and presented it sort of full-blown." "And it just kind of snow-balled." "Or maybe I mean steam-rollered." "It's one of those." "Most of the positive things that happened in this world have happened because a young man dreamed." "So it's a terrible thing to stifle, and I certainly agree with him in principal." "I'm not gonna say, "No, you need a decent job," ""That'd be more useful than trying to save the human race,"" "I don't agree with that." "Yeah, he says, "I'm gonna go to the moon,"" "I'm going, what?" "And I'll never see you again?" "This is not... this is hard, but when you're a parent, you have to let them go." "(radio) T-9, fifty seconds and counting." "(radio chatter) 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 5, 4, 3, 2... (rocket taking off)" "¶" "Great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it?" "He said, "Because it is there"." "And the moon and the planets are there." "And new hopes for knowledge and peace are there." "And therefore as we set sail, we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." "I first got into space like a lot of people in my generation, um, you know, watching the space program start up." "It was something beyond the hum-drum reality of day-to-day life, that you can aspire to." "See, if we can put a man on the moon, we can do anything." "We were exploring newfound terrors, places where man had never been and where we thought we could go." "I remember seeing live Kennedy's speech, and I get goosebumps thinking about it now." "I'm not the world's biggest fan of Richard Nixon, but he said exactly the right thing in his telephone call to the moon." ""Hello Neil and Buzz, I'm talking to you by telephone" ""from The White House." ""Because of what you have done," ""the heavens have become a part of man's world."" "¶" "At one time, many years ago, I was an astronaut." "I flew on Apollo XII as a lunar module pilot." "Since that time, I've been trying to preserve and find art, this great adventure that was Apollo." "Being a technical person, the minute I got on the moon," "I never thought something like," ""Gee, I'm here", or anything like that." "I was always hyper-aware that my neck was out a long way." "Couple of times, as I was running in between exploration sites, I would look up and say," ""That is the Earth, this is the moon, we're really here." ""All of those people up there" ""and I'm back here with these two other guys." ""Then the minute I did it, I would say," ""I'll have plenty of time once I get home to think about it"." "I think I've always been interested in art, but didn't know it." "After I became a test pilot, flying all the planes that the Navy had," "I began to see some paintings on the wall or something..." "I think, I can do that." "So I enrolled in night school." "None of my pilot friends were at all interested in art and they would say to me, "Al, you've gotta quit painting." ""You need to go play golf with all the senior officers," ""you're not gonna get promoted"." "The moon really is grey." "The rocks, the dirt." "The sky is black." "I don't know why it's shiny, but it seemed that way to me." "As an artist, you use reality as the beginning." "I don't think you think about the truth so much." "You start thinking about beauty, or excitement, or drama, or just how you wish it were." "¶" "On the moon, it turns out there are waterfalls, there are forests, there are vast fields of poppies." "Horned goats resembling unicorns, biped beavers, beavers that walk on their hind legs and have apparently discovered the secret of fire." "And most remarkable of all are the vespertilio-homo, the lunar man-bats." "Four-foot tall creatures with wings who talk, who fly, who fornicate in public." "At least, this is what was reported in The New York Sun in August of 1835." "In the summer of 1835, The Sun newspaper, which was this sort of upstart penny paper about two years old, published a series of articles that claimed that the astronomer John Herschel, using a revolutionary new hydro-oxygen telescope" "had made remarkable discoveries on the moon." "The actual author of the articles was the editor of The Sun, Richard Adams Locke." "He had been thrown out of England for political radicalism, and wrote this series of articles not purely as a hoax, but really as a satire of the religious astronomy of the day." "People believed that God, in his infinite wisdom, would not have created these celestial bodies without having also created intelligent beings there to appreciate them." "Locke thought this was all nonsense." "He said, "If you believe in an inhabited moon," ""I will give you an inhabited moon just to show you" ""exactly how foolish this notion is"." "Well, the people of New York were so schooled in the ideas of these religious astronomers that when these articles appeared, they simply believed them." "They simply believed them to be true." "It caused a sensation far beyond what Locke had expected." "Sun became the most widely-read newspaper in the entire world." "And in the end, he described himself as being the best self-hoaxed man in New York." "(tap, tap, tap, tap)" "¶" "¶ By the light, of a silvery moon, I want to spoon, ¶" "¶ To my honey I'll croon love's tune, ¶" "¶ honey moon, keep a' shining in June, ¶" "¶ Your silvery beams will bring love's dreams, ¶" "¶ We'll cuddle soon, By the light of a silvery moon ¶" "¶" "The Luna project is something I've been working on mostly by myself." "I need to find like-minded folks to help me make this happen." "We're here in what the tourist bureau assures me for the 69th World Science Fiction Convention..." "Renovation." "It represents the central common gathering of all the science fiction fans in the world." "My main activity is to sit behind a table and to talk to everyone that comes by about lunar colonization." "So I set up all kinds of eye-catching displays." "One of the things that I am doing is selling merchandise, you know, I've got books, bumper stickers, buttons and so on." "Not only do they bring in a little money, but they also increase visibility." "Hi." "Can I interest you in the moon?" "Hi." "Hi there." "Hello there." "It's always hard to tell what people actually think." "They won't necessarily say to your face that they think you're buggy." "Hello." "Fuck off." "That disturbs me, but it doesn't disturb me enough to change the way I do things." "If someone came by this table, handed me a cheque for half a billion dollars, I would be on the moon in 18 months." "You know, I believe there are several different main types of people who are attracted to the Luna Project." "In some cases, it's the thirteen-year old kids." "Another group is the people who are mostly older, and they saw Mercury, and Gemini and Apollo." "They were expecting, you know, to take that Pan Am flight to the moon, and they are beyond pissed off." "Once everything is said and done, your problems are gonna be mainly financial and political." "There's also a group who just think it's cool." "Oh, that is gorgeous." "Give me a hug, for God's sake." "This man is a genius in so many fields." "There's no such thing as a minimal, fully biological closed life support system." "There are people who actually are advocating this." "It's the inverse problem of utopian socialism." "Some people would call it communism." "Some people would compare it to the Israeli kibbutz sim." "If you want anything to happen in space, you can't wait for somebody else to do it." "If you put money in the tip jar, that's great." "I'm not gonna insist on it." "Thank you." "and actually given me that half a billion dollar cheque, but you never know what can happen and I wasn't really expecting that." "I wish I'd been able to do more." "I wish I had more people to support me in terms of setting the tables up, or you know, if I were twins or something," "Within the constraints of reality as we understand it," "I think it's been a pretty decent con." "¶" "Between all the talking I've been doing this weekend, and the just incredible dryness of the air, my throat is like, dry as a bone." "When I come to an event like The World Science Fiction" "Convention, to a great extent, I'm preaching to the choir," "I like to say, if you don't preach to the choir and if the choir don't sing you can't pass the hat." "And we had a limited amount of cash donations, um," "I would say we brought, like, fifty dollars in income which is less than ten percent of the cost of putting this on." "Uh, so that's not really a spectacular... but it gives a measure of interest." "I have to start with the space enthusiasts, but I can't stop there." "If you want to accomplish something, you need to get in touch with a broader public." "Here you are folks, see the wonders of the moon." "May I have a look, mister?" "Sure, sonny!" "The man in the moon looks friendly." "I'll go up and visit him." "Gosh, there's no man in the moon." "Nothing but rocks." "We only brought back 842 pounds of moon rocks and dust." "That's not a lot." "And now that we're not going back there, that little bit of moon rocks and dust that we brought back is that much more valuable." "¶" "I believe that the moon rocks should never be owned by an individual, but by the people of the Earth." "I'm in awe of them." "In 1998 I led and went undercover in a sting operation called "Operation Lunar Eclipse"." "We were looking for fake moon rocks." "People that were con artists trying to sell dreams to space enthusiasts and elderly people." "I have a letter from some uncle from NASA saying" ""I was given this moon rock, it's worth millions," ""I'll sell it to you for 20,000 because I have to pay my rent"." "But here's the deal, if you ever tell anybody that you have a moon rock, federal agents will kick at your door and they'll take it back." "So what do the people do?" "They put it in a safe, lock it and they don't show it to anybody: the perfect con." "We put an add in USA Today with a caption that read," ""Moon rocks wanted"" "What happened was a man came forward with the real thing, the Honduras goodwill moon rock, for sale for five billion dollars." "When he produced the moon rock we seized it." "¶" "It's important to me to find these moon rocks, put them on display so that the young people can see them and appreciate that a person reached down and picked that moon rock up and maybe he can do the same thing." "Maybe he could replicate that, go back to the moon or mars;" "continue to look to the stars." "I'd love to go to the moon." "I'd love to die on the moon." ""Oh there's Joe Gutheinz's grave up there"" "And inside that grave would be a smiling face looking out." "¶" "¶ I'll never know the thrilling pain of blasting into space. ¶" "¶ I'll never know what mysteries lie in some unearthly place. ¶" "¶ I'll never see new stars be born or watch the old ones die ¶" "¶ I'll never hear a child cry... ¶" "¶" "Over a century ago Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said," ""The earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot remain" ""in the cradle forever."" "In about a week I'm going to be giving a presentation to a group of high schoolers and part of this is going to involve a laser show." "I've always been told I have a penetrating voice, that it's easier to hear my voice than most other people's, that is overrides other people's voices, which is not necessarily a good thing." "Laser show intro narration take one." "Since the beginnings of telescopic astronomy 400 years ago we have slowly come to understand the true vastness of the universe." "(BEEPING)" "Oh for crying out loud." "That's the tape tension." "Laser show intro narration take two." "which is where I'll be giving the laser show presentation." "It's a marvelous opportunity to bring the message of the Luna Project to a wider audience." "Hopefully I can get some more people on board, create a little more interest." "¶" "My uncle by marriage, Tim Walsh, is one of the leading figures in the country in the field of laser light shows." "Uncle Tim was a great help in setting this program up." "Howdy, howdy!" "It's Chris Carson." "Hey, how are you doing?" "Good." "I'm Tim Walsh." "I am a laser lightshow artist." "Chris Carson is my nephew by marriage." "As a young child Chris was totally focused on blimps." "Everybody he met he politely asked if he could speak to them about blimps and usually they said yes and put him on for the ride." "(laughs)" "It's colonizing the moon now." "It's been that for several years." "You know, something's gonna happen." "(laughs)" "It's fun to be part of something, in fact, to be the cause of something that's actually" "I'm just... you know, sort of in a way I'm, you know, duck sick terrified of disappointing everybody." "We're going to do a dress rehearsal and Chris is over there practicing his lines." "How's the speech coming?" "Well uh it's not finished yet but I genuinely am not worried about not coming through." "Testing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10." "All right ladies and gentlemen, can you find the earth in this photo?" "Let's zoom in a little... next line." "Ah there it is." "Next line." "Where was I?" "Go back one." "now I remember what I was going to say." "Okay, missing slide, okay." "I'd really like to say, as you see," "I've got missing slides, I need to grab more images." "Yeah we want you to go ahead, do that." "Just remember you're gonna have like 200 of the sharpest high school kids in front of you." "Yeah." "Just... just passed 6 o'clock now." "Yup." "Oh God." "Ten and a half hours before I need to give my speech." "It looks like I'm going to use most of that uh, you know, polishing things." "If I had to stay awake all the way through tomorrow" "I could do that." "The show must go on." "(students chattering)" "Thank you very much for being here today." "This is uh a pretty amazing gathering we have today." "We're gonna start out with Tim Walsh..." "Tim." "He's the best laser-ist around." "And then our feature speaker today is uh" "Doctor uh..." "Christopher Carson..." "Just "Mister"." "Have a good time." "¶" "¶ there are hundreds of billions of galaxies." "In our own galaxy alone, there are hundreds of billions of stars." "In the family of the sun there are 8 principle planets from great Jupiter to tiny Mercury and people have begun to seriously consider not merely visiting the planets, but settling on them and even altering them to make them more hospitable to human life." "But in 1969 physicist Gerard O'Neill asked his Princeton seminar class this question..." "is a planetary surface the best place for a growing technological civilization?" "For a long time discussion of the next step in space has seemed to center around the exploration, settlement, and even terraforming of Mars." "50 years since the first human went into space, we're still struggling with learning how to live in weightlessness." "The International Space Station doesn't have a shower or a washing machine and what they use for a toilet, the less said the better." "(laughing)" "What we need, then, is someplace halfway between a planet and open space." "This is the Luna Project." "It is nothing less than a proposal that the space minded among us should depart for the moon as soon as possible to establish a new home there." "Who can say what new ways of living humans will develop in a new environment?" "And for the sake of that I am reconciled to giving up the familiar, to leaving the planet of my birth with no intention of ever returning." "I will not, I cannot ask the same of you, but I can and I do ask for your assistance." "Will you take up the greatest work of our time?" "Will you reach out your hand to lift all of us up and out?" "Will you take the Luna Project for your own?" "The stars are ours!" "(applause)" "I think he's a really great speaker." "He knows exactly what he's gonna say." "You three wanna go to the moon?" "Yes!" "Yes!" "Deploying the solar panels ought to be a manual operation..." "The audience seemed receptive." "I actually had them hanging around when they were supposed to be leaving so that the last few had to be dragged off." "Most of my life I've been a complete social pariah, the sort of person that people... literally cross the street to avoid." "So this is really a new sensation for me." "Can I take a picture?" "To be suddenly, you know, popular with high school kids that's a real bolt out of the blue as far as I'm concerned." "Every positive response for me is an impetuous to keep doing what I am doing." "¶" "As humans pioneered one frontier after the other, they tried to develop art media from what was available where they went." "¶" "So the curtain of how are we gonna do art on the moon, it would be expensive to import a lot of things just for artists." "What about mixing metal oxide pigments in sodium silicate." "We can get all of these materials from moon dust." "Now I had always liked texture in paintings so I began to do texture with pallet knife or a brush and I said one day, why wouldn't I use some moon tools that I've got." "First of all I said I've got a moon boot." "Usually I make it so it's like some astronaut walked across the painting." "This is the hammer that I drove in the flagstaff." "I was supposed to leave this on the moon, I brought it back in the lab accidentally;" "it was in my pocket." "See those curve marks?" "That was made with this hammer." "I kept thinking to myself, I wish I had some moondust." "These patches from my suit, they're dirty with moon dust from the ocean of storms." "If I would be willing to cut them up, then I would actually have moon dust in my paintings." "But if I had known I was going to do this," "Pete Conrad, the fella I was on the moon with, pick up some dirt and rub it on there." "They would really have been dirty." "We can make glass on the moon." "Maybe if we paint on the reverse side of glass, foreground first, then the glass would serve as a protection as well as the medium." "And these are the results." "I started calling it regolith impressionism, and regolith being the moon dust." "Now you notice I love blue." "I keep telling everybody, if I can't do blue I'm not going." "(laughs)" "People often say, "Alan, have you ever painted your dogs?"" "I say, no, there's a lot of people that can do that a lot better than I can." "But nobody can paint the moon, period, as good as I can." "¶" "If I wasn't involved in Lunarcy, I would..." "I would say I was a ventriloquist for 24 years." "My technique was the best of anybody out there." "Let's see if I can do the alphabet, okay?" "Uh... a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, I, m... w, x, y, z." "If you want me to I can do it backwards... a, b, c, d, e..." "Funny joke." "In the entire history of our species there's only 6 times where human beings have actually set foot on the moon." "¶" "The last time was during Apollo 17." "That happened in 1972 when I was 14 years old." "¶" "The United States invited all of the countries of the" "United Nations to send a youth ambassador to help commemorate this last Apollo mission." "Canada had a nation-wide competition for a representative between the ages of 17 and 21." "I lied about my age and I won the competition and by the time they figured out how old I was it was too late to change anything." "And so although the astronauts were going a great distance, 400,000 kilometers." "I was flying a much shorter distance from my hometown of" "Chatham, Ontario, Canada... first stop, the Kennedy Space Center and I'm standing 5 kilometers away from the Saturn Five Rockets." "Here's the launch, like a second sunrise." "(rocket takes off)" "Your whole body rattles, an experience that, well, no one will ever have again." "While I and the other youth ambassadors were sitting in mission control, Jean Cernan and Jack Schmitt walked in front of the camera and started talking to us." "An astronaut on the moon was talking to me." "Jack just picked up a very significant rock composed of many fragments of many sizes." "We'd like to share a piece of this rock with so many of the countries throughout the world." "Put that in the big bag, Jean-o." "It's a big bag." "It became known as the goodwill rock and they brought it back to earth and they split it up into many pieces and each one of these was presented unto each of the youth ambassadors." "In a sense, I owned a piece of the moon." "Pretty good bragging rights, even for a nerd, but of course it just wasn't practical for me to keep the rock." "So I gave the Canadian government a moon rock and in exchange as a thank you they gave me... this, an autographed copy of The Birds of Canada." "And I've got to admit the street value of this is not the same as a piece of the moon." "Let's see if I can crack the uh corner and get that contact." "If I can't get her." "Radar Men From The Moon." "Have your ray guns set up ready to blast 'em." "What would it be like to be on the moon?" "Good evening, citizen property owners." "My name is Dennis Hope." "I am the constitutionally recognized president of the Galactic Government." "¶" "In 2001 I received, in a one-month period, 163,000 emails from different property owners." "People wanted to know how on earth we were going to protect the properties from any invading governments." "So I went to Las Vegas, held a press conference and gave notice that the Galactic Government had been formed." "The Galactic Government is the wealthiest government known to mankind." "We currently have 6 quadrillion dollars in our treasury based on Helium-3 reserves on the moon alone." "We just sent a letter to Barack Obama offering to bail the United States government out of its financial mess." "We have an excellent cabinet membership put together." "As security of economic development, we have lengthy conversations about projects that can be undertaken." "We can do great things for humanity on a global scale." "As attorney general of the Galactic Government," "I ensure that proper dealings are taking place with local governments." "On a daily basis we work to get diplomacy with other governments so that we can be recognized as a sovereign nation" "I have met the president and prime minister of Israel." "I've talked with the president of Argentina." "I had the opportunity to discuss governmental issues with Stephen Harper and it looks like we may have a diplomacy match started with Canada." "The programs that we're going to implement will provide hope, faith, and the ability for all of us to be the very best we can be." "These three renditions on the wall here, this was our concept of what we thought the Lunar Embassy would look like on the moon initially." "This seemed to make sense for us at that time because it's celestial looking, but it doesn't house enough people for us and it won't be large enough to create a city atmosphere that we're looking for." "So then we decided the best way to do this would be to create the four-sided pyramid." "We don't have any architectural drawings done yet." "Uh we don't have anything other than a basic drawing." "¶" "The pyramid that we're building will have embassies for every government on this planet including some of the non-earth based governments that we are in touch with occasionally, which I can't speak about too much, but they are here, they are in existence" "and they'll have embassies there as well." "¶" "People on the moon, they'll be living not in a worldwide biosphere, but a little biosphere for their settlement." "Everywhere we've gone we adapt, become at home, because the environment has become a part of you." "It's forming who you are." "I think of all the things that bring us joy and pleasure, the feeling of "it's good to be alive"" "¶" "Why do you think we need music?" "Well it's..." "We love music." "We need it because we love it." "If I am at a wedding and they happen to play" "Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean"" "I'm out there on the dance floor. (laughs)" "Showing the young people how to do it. (laughs)" "How are we going to make music on the moon?" "You think of all of the brass instruments that we have." "Brass requires copper and copper is very scarce on the moon and the wood instruments, not too much wood." "So what are we going to do?" "I came across a fellow who had a steel drum and I was captivated by that music and I thought, now there's something that we can make on the moon and that music is just wonderful." "¶" "What humans need is joy." "They need to drink in what's around them and say," ""This is wonderful." "I love living here."" "If pioneers don't get to that stage any frontier's gonna collapse." "¶ 3, 2, 1" "(radio chatter)" "If I went back to the moon now I would experience it a completely different way." "I wouldn't be near so technical." "I think one of the mistakes that we made was trying to cram as much science and technology into these periods on the moon that we had." "Well human beings aren't that way." "Part of the day they want to goof off." "Al Shepherd hit a golf ball on the moon." "I was in mission control when he did it and I said," ""Why is that guy wasting time hitting that golf ball?" ""He could go pick up another rock or two."" "And I felt that way for a couple of years." "Then I went to see Pete and I said," ""Why didn't we think of something like that?"" "He said, "Well, we don't play golf."" "I said, "Okay, but we could have done something or we could have" ""carried a football and then you could have passed it to me."" "No telling where it would have gone." "But if we got it on TV they would show it at football games." "But I'll tell you, if I went back I would take a football, probably take a basketball or soccer ball, get it on TV, people would love it!" "I'm not really a sports fan." "I watch them and I appreciate them, some more than others." "¶" "On the moon gravity is only one sixth." "You see the astronauts and they weigh 350 pounds and yet they could bounce along." "But traction is gonna be reduced along with gravity." "There's gonna be a lot of collisions because you can't stop." "We'll have the Olympics on the moon someday and high jump will be fun!" "Sprinting will be boring because you can't run very fast up there." "We could do bocce ball." "We could do hacky sack." "I would probably become involved in acrobatic type activities." "Tumbling and flipping and jumping and rebounding." "The ABC wide world of sports on Sunday will soon be the wide worlds sports." "In 1997 I received a phone call from an organization that wanted to build the first golf course on the moon." "You want to have an indoor course." "You'd have to bounce the ball off the ceilings." "But if you make the ceilings, you know, 50 feet high, so you can do like carrom golf." "¶" "I think it would be fun to play golf on the moon." "¶" "¶ There's a rumor going 'round, it's the talk of every town ¶" "¶ that there's something big-a-happenin' pretty soon. ¶" "¶ They're going to fire a rocket ship just for a one-way trip, ¶" "¶ oh they're going to put a monkey on the moon. ¶" "¶ Oh they're going to put a monkey on the moon, ¶" "¶ you'll read it in your paper pretty soon. ¶" "¶ They'll fire this rocket from the cape ¶" "¶ with this hairy little ape, ¶" "¶ oh they're going to put a monkey on the moon. ¶" "(rocket takes off)" "¶" "My late grandfather, we like to say, had a uh severe case of foot itch he couldn't stand to be in any one place for too long." "I've always thought of myself as something of a homebody, which is funny because I'm always going somewhere." "The earth is where I'm starting from, but I believe that home isn't where you start from;" "it's where you're going." "For me, it's um not of this earth," "It's always been difficult to get Christopher to think small." "He's got such a good understanding of science, he can explain it to just about anybody." "When something interests him he goes and he just reads everything there is to know about it." "He originally wanted to be an engineer and then he got sick, he couldn't finish his degree and he says," ""You know, I can't do what I want to do." ""So I want to do this because I think it's important."" "And he says, "I'm gonna give it five years." ""I don't intend to spend my 30th birthday on earth."" "I think that eventually he will have some success." "And that would be a good thing," "I think we ought to go back to the moon." "I think it's stupid we're not there now." "(radio) Tranquility base uh Houston, you're clear for takeoff." "(rocket takes off)" "¶" "One of the things that happened during the space race was this idea that we can do anything." "After all, we've just been to the moon." "¶" "My mother is still upset that there are no vacation hotels on the moon." "She says back in 1969 she was promised vacations on the moon by the year 2000." "They promised us!" "They promised us things like moon vacations and..." "Spaceships and somewhere down the line they said, oh never mind." "¶" "When the shuttle flew we realized that it had all been a lie." "Instead of the advertised a few times a year for 10 million dollars a flight, we've got one that can fly 4 or 5 times a year for a billion dollars a notch." "What was the mission?" "Was to go around and around and around and around the earth." "That's not, "Go boldly where no one has gone before."" "That's, build a space truck." "Many people think NASA'S as American as apple pie, but it's a socialized space program." "How can that be American?" "American is free enterprise." "One of the things that we often overlook is the power of what happened during the Apollo program." "It inspired a generation of geeks and nerds." "These same geeks and nerds became billionaires." "Some of the people who have the wealth today to get involved in space are going to build on the moon." "(reporter) And launch of the Space X Falcon 9 Rocket as NASA turns to the private sector." "Space X, X Core, and the spaceship company, all of them, they are the vanguard of all of us who are to follow." "¶" "¶" "This observatory was built by the Northern Cross" "Science Foundation and this is their pride and joy." "There is a quarter moon tonight and they thought that this would be a great place to look at it through a telescope." "¶ ...like you're looking through a telescope." "There you go... ¶" "I've never seen it in such good resolution." "With a smaller telescope you can see the big craters, but not as much detail." "One time I was at a lake when I was 8, 10, and I swam out there;" "I laid on my back and in my periphery I could not see the shore anywhere all I could see was the stars." "It felt like I was floating in space." "It was awesome." "¶" "Often times when I'm home I'll go out in the backyard, look at the fairway that I live on then I'll look at the stars and the moon and think how peaceful it is and the future's there." "We could see the mountains, we could see the valleys." "I have dreams about where this country and this world could go with respect to the moon." "Is it frustrating you won't get to go?" "I am not frustrated because I am so content with us spreading the ideas and developing the ideas and hoping that maybe someday it'll... it'll have helped." "I remember reading Harold and the Purple Crayon and he's looking for his home and he can't find his home and he realizes that in his bed when he looks up through the window he sees the moon and... that's how he knew he was home." "And so what he ends up doing is drawing a window and drawing the moon in the window and that's the way that he knows that he's home." "I was socially awkward as a child, I suppose I still am but uh, you know, it was much worse then and pretty much any conceivable insult or form of bullying was directed against me." "You can never really completely shrug something like that off because humans are social creatures and what other people think about us matters." "¶" "When I'm feeling really down in the dumps, when I think that it seems like everything is just going against me, I find a nice night when the moon is in the sky and I go out and look at it for awhile" "and I remind myself what it is I'm working toward." "I will find my home in the moon." "¶" "New York, New York..." "it's a hell of a town." "In places like Times Square there are a lot of people and there are opportunities for communicating." "This is not something of a science fiction convention, this is not something at a space convention," "I have actually spoken to about the Luna Project." "¶" "New York always has this well-established feel to me." "It says, "Hey!" "This whole American thing, it worked!"" "The ambition is to have Luna City be the New York of the Solar System." "¶" "Almost anywhere you go you can find moon themed or space themed businesses." "¶ which was known as the astronauts breakfast, it was the typical meal they give would somebody before putting them into a space capsule among other things because it's low residue, if you catch my drift." "¶" "¶ Luna." "¶ Lu-na-na." "Lu-na-na." "¶ Lu-na-na." "¶ Lu-na-na-na-na." "¶ Lu-na ma-ma ma-ma lu-na ¶" "¶" "So how much do you weigh on the moon?" "34.6 including bag." "32.5 without the bag." "¶" "(muffled speaking)" "Got to the museum, managed to fondle the meteorites a little bit." "That, you know, probably sounds insanely perverse and maybe it is, but you know, if I'm gonna be insanely perverse at least it better be a novel perversion and I don't think you're ever going to meet" "anybody else who admits to fondling the meteorites." "¶" "It reminds me always that these things are not forever beyond our reach." "The moon has a... has a special place in the mind of mankind." "For a very long time it was a symbol of the unreachable and it stayed that way, in a sense, right down until the 20th of July, 1969 and suddenly the whole meaning of the metaphor is inverted." "Suddenly walking on the moon becomes a thing that men have done!" "This guy picks up a piece of the moon and brings it back to you!" "And suddenly, what through all of history has been a metaphor for the impossible, for the incomprehensible, for the unreachable is in the palm of your hand." "¶" "So if I sometimes seem like a freak about going to the moon, it's just because of that." "So what do you hope to achieve in Times Square?" "Well you could imagine me standing up on a platform, there's a knot of people clustered in front of the platform." "It just starts growing and growing and the word begins spreading out in an exponential manner until it comes to the entire city, entire country, the entire world!" "And people don't just hear, they go home and they do." "And the end result of it is..." "there are a million people lined up as far as the eye can see and there's the ship rising on a calm flame and there's the sound, which is like no other sound." "It's the joyful noise of freedom." "The moon is calling!" "The moon is calling us up from the world of our birth as it called us forth for the primordial ocean." "The time has come to go to the moon and to stay there and for the moon to go onwards for all the worlds of night!" "Do you hear the call?" "Will you answer the call?" "Will you go to the moon?" "Will you aid me in going to the moon?" "Luna City or Bust!" "Luna City or Bust!" "Luna City or Bust!" "Luna City or Bust." "The moon is calling." "Called us for a million..." "Interest you in the moon?" "No thanks." "Lunar colonization." "Lunar colonization." "¶" "¶" "Going into this I set a difficult goal." "I want to unify the space movement behind this platform and hopefully get boots on the ground by the summer of 2012." "Failing half a dozen separate and unrelated miracles, that's not appearing very likely right now." "¶" "I look inside myself and I see," "I guess for want of a better word, a lack of fulfillment." "In all of these projects that I annunciate to people, do I really believe in them or am I just trying to make myself sound important?" "¶" "¶" "The first distinct memory that I could put a date on is of being in the kitchen, the little boy that I was, with my mom and the phone rings and she says, "Oh hello, mother."" "Her voice goes very flat and she goes over and turns the television on and then there's this image." "I couldn't have known what that image was," "I don't know why it sticks in my mind." "It was the um the cloud which drizzled from the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger." "That's the first memory that I can put a date to." "I thought the flight was going fine and then I heard them say," ""Major malfunction."" "I couldn't speak." "It was... (sighs)" "¶" "¶" "(news reporter talking) ...indicate that the vehicle apparently exploded and that impact in the water." "These searches do not reveal the evidence that the crew of the" "Challenger survived." "¶" "You must try to understand the spirit, bravery, and commitment of what made not only the space program but all of life worthwhile." "We must never stop exploring, stop hoping, stop discovering." "We must press on." "¶" "It didn't seem unusual to us for Christopher to be so bright." "And we've seen a few test scores to bear this out." "He needs a society where people like him are valued instead of looked at and gone, "Where is he from?"" "or, you know him being a geek." "He's not a geek." "He is a genius and he has autism." "These things tend to run hand in hand and as a result that I have it too, and that's why I'm an odd person." "It's really borderline, a very mild case of asperger syndrome, which is the high functioning autism." "It's the absent minded professor thing, where some fellow is brilliant in his field and can't remember how to tie his shoes." "When it became obvious that Christopher was a different kind of a person we knew that he would be doing a different kind of a thing and he needs a society that accepts him." "It may be he feels that one of the ways to do that is to gather like-minded individuals and... isn't that what we all want to do?" "Sure." "I don't deny for a minute that there are ways in which" "I don't behave the way other people do." "It's not a thing that I would change if changing it meant giving up who I am." "¶" "I think of myself, I guess, as an imaginative realist, as a person who tries to find the next reality." "What's wrong with this reality?" "I don't think you have to ask the question," "You get through your day with your five Starbucks coffees." "You don't have to ask the question, because it's slapping you in the face the whole time." "You go to McDonalds and you get your Egg McMuffin and you don't have to ask yourself," "It's there in your hand." "You're chewing it." "¶" "I've been called a crook, a fraud, a scam artist." "I've never seen myself that way at all." "I'm very comfortable with who I am." "It's taken me a long time to get here." "My third wife is just a little bit coo-coo." "Before we got married, I said, "Listen, here's the deal:" ""I've taken all of my life to become the person I am." ""I'm happy with who I am." ""I'm not going to change."" "So we get married, right?" "She says, "I have something for you."" "she hands me this piece of paper, I open it." "It's a list of 17 things she wants me to change." "Six months later we were divorced." "¶" "A lot of people are discouraged about the shuttle being canned and about the moon program being canned." "Well this gives new opportunity, probably something better." ""Praise the darkness and creation unfinished."" "People say, "why didn't God make a perfect world"?" "Well he left it imperfect so we would have something to do." "If it was perfect, what were we going to do?" "Just watch TV?" "Thank heavens the world isn't perfect because that gives each of us a chance to give our existence meaning." "To me that sums up what life is all about." "¶" "¶" "Today I am heading over to have a little chat with the great Alan Bean." "¶" "The path that he took to get to the moon is not anything like the path I'm taking and it's not a path, which is open to me." "I'm attempting to convince people to help me to actually go to the moon to colonize it." "That's my..." "Alan is... is kind of interesting because, in a sense, here's one guy from my town who went to the moon," "You can't ever get anything accomplished" "You've gotta go out there, get actual experience." "people are going to have to actually do it." "And so I suppose the question is, do you have any advice for another hometown boy who uh never thought of himself as being the most special person in the world, but really would like to do those great things?" "If you have anything, you know, you could suggest. (laughs)" "Well I just suggest that moving history forward, which is what you're talking about, a very worthy endeavor, is difficult." "Don't lose your spirit and try to get other people and all of you working together may be able to achieve the dream you're talking about." "Well thank you." "Let me give you one of these newsletters..." "You can see my little..." "Every time I have contact with somebody who really has done these things, it serves, I guess, as a kind of a pick me up or a booster that this is not as one might, in the dark of the night think" "Is this really just a fantasy?" "Is this truly realistic?" "And I can say, no!" "Look, this guy right here, right?" "You know, this guy has got his arm around my shoulder;" "this is the guy who has actually gone, clop, clop, clop, across the surface of the moon!" "So if somebody says, "Oh, that's crazy."" "What crazy?" "What crazy?" "It's not crazy!" "It's as real as the living flesh of the man whose hand I am shaking." "¶" "Some people have said that only people who are dissatisfied with their lives leave where they are, that space columnists will inevitably be a bunch of social rejects, and I don't really see that." "We are the people who choose to change the way we live completely, to get up and to go somewhere in the hope that we can make a difference." "People who are content in Boston and Baltimore stay in Boston and Baltimore." "Those who just couldn't quite climb the ladder any higher said, I am moving out west, and they built the west." "We have to have a place where people who don't fit in or decide to leave the center of the herd can go." "¶" "We're always trying to go beyond where it is we are." "I think it's part of our DNA." "Without dreams I think we're just dogs on two feet." "¶" "The moon seems so close, it's the brightest object in the sky." "It has a sort of enigmatic quality to it that you can project all of your hopes and your dreams onto." "¶" "We all need a dream in this world." "We eat, we drink, we sleep, we die, and if that's it, that's a very shallow existence." "¶" "There are 7000 million people in the world today and most of them couldn't care less about lunar colonization." "The people who say that what I'm talking about is crack pot-ism are not going to the stars." "(muffled radio chatter)" "Eventually there has to be one person who was the first ever to leave the planet earth with no intention of ever returning." "Channel 15, 14, 13..." "I realized there was no reason that I shouldn't be that person." "(muffled radio chatter) 5, 4, 3, and 2, launch." "Roger, we are go for launch." "¶" "¶"