Featured Image Credit: ESA/ YouTube
While SpaceX founder Elon Musk is busy planning to ambitiously transport one million people up to the Martian Planet by 2029 and reach a "self-sustaining economy by 2050", Europe is planning a more long-term project to colonise the Moon.
A vivid simulation by the European Space Agency imagines just what a fully developed lunar community might look like in 2075.
The simulation called "Life Beyond Earth", which has also been shared on YouTube, shows life in the "most desirable real estate in the Solar System", the rim of Shackleton crater beside the lunar South Pole.
An aerial view follows a vehicle driving across the expansive lunar landscape showing a whole town's worth of pods sitting on its surface.
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In collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the firm behind many of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, ESA developed a "semi-inflatable habitat design which could be part of a long-term vision for an international Moon settlement."
Four storey habitats with various indoor plants, sustainable energy resources and astronauts carrying out new experiments are just a few glimpses of what our new world could look like.
"Avoiding the crippling temperature extremes of the Moon’s two-week days and nights, this location offers near-continuous sunlight for solar power, an ongoing view of Earth and access to lunar water ice deposits in adjacent permanently-shadowed craters," the ESA wrote.
In one scene, solar panels are expanded across the surface taking in the early morning sunlight and supplying power back to the base.
Furthermore, a video call on what looks to be a spaced-up version of Fallout's PipBoy with a woman displays the futuristic remote support systems that could be used to maintain contact across the lunar community.
The ESA wrote that the simulation is "peering beyond our post-COVID-19 planet to show how human life can be sustained in the hostile space environment."
Since this vision was proposed by the ESA in June 2021, India has taken a step forward by becoming the first country to land near the site at the moon's south pole.
Viewers were impressed by the realistic - or just downright cool - simulation of lunar life in half a century.
"Very moving. Our deepest dream as a species, to feint extinction by expanding into the universe," one viewer of the simulation described.
Noticing the prematurity of the space exploration, another wrote: "Our generation was born too early to explore the universe. I can't even imagine what humanity will become in space exploration in the next few thousand years."
One more optimistically replied: "This brought tears to my eyes...europe can achieve so much. But we united, as a species, as humans can truly conquer the galaxy."
