An important character in my “Trogs” novel (to be published Sept. 8) works for the FBI Fugitive Detection and Recovery Directorate. He uses the tools of 2075-era forensics backed by a dedicated Quantum computer to chase “ghosts,” or individuals evading arrest who are sophisticated enough to cover their digital trails. As happens all too often, the seeds of what I can conceive in my imagination for the 50-year future are being planted now.
According to QuantumAnalysis’ X post today, that the FBI has created a Quantum Information Science and Technology Counterintelligence Protection Team. This unit isn’t out chasing crooks and political enemies, like the ghost hunters in “Trogs” do. Their aims seem laudable. As QuantumAnalysis explains:
American universities and companies are where most of the world’s quantum breakthroughs happen, in open labs, published papers, and grad programs full of international students. That openness is why the US leads. It’s also the softest target in national security.
And the value of what’s in those labs keeps rising, error correction methods, qubit designs, control software, the exact IP that the government just paid $2 billion in equity stakes to accelerate. Washington is now funding the research and guarding it. …
It’s not the scenario I describe in “Trogs,” but it is a first step in that direction.
THE PENTAGON IS PREPARING FOR A WORLD WITHOUT GPS.
QUANTUM IS THE SOLUTION.
Every plane, ship, missile, ATM, and phone depends on GPS. Although it can be switched off. Adversaries do it daily now by jamming and spoofing are routine over the Baltic, the Middle East, and Ukraine,… pic.twitter.com/KEzfsuZwf0
The future is coming at us faster than even a science fiction writer can handle it. Sensors play a significant military role in my “Trogs” novel, to be published next week. But Trogs contains no mention of quantum sensors. Consider the X post above. The Pentagon, writes QuantumAnalysis, has launched Project Farseer with $200 million to push commercialization of:
“Quantum clocks. Portable atomic clocks so precise a vehicle tracks its own position by timing alone. …
“Quantum gravimeters. Every place on earth has a unique gravitational fingerprint. Read it, match it to a map, know where you are. Farseer’s spec: sensors under 20 kilograms, accurate enough to find things underground.
“Quantum magnetometers. Navigate by the earth’s magnetic field. Detect submarines and buried structures by the field they disturb.
“Rydberg atom sensors. Radios that use atoms instead of antennas, hearing the entire spectrum at once, through jamming.”
Knowing nothing about quantum clocks, I queried Copilot how they might work. GPS receivers use quartz clocks that drift quickly. To correct for the drift, GPS receivers must receive signals from at least four satellites (which carry more precise atomic clocks). With quantum clock navigation, a vehicle carries its own atomic clock. It measures location by measuring the “sent time” and the “return time” of a signal traveling at the speed of light to and from a satellite. Atomic clocks are so extraordinarily sensitive that they capture microsecond differences in that travel time. The nice thing (from a military perspective) about quantum clocks is that they are resistant to spoofing and jamming by adversaries.
Hollywood movies such as Iron Man, sci-fi novels such as Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers,” and computer games such as Starcraft have popularized the image of space-era warriors wearing heavily armored battle suits. Dreaming of something similar, Pentagon planners have poured countless dollars into power-armor R&D. As Jared Keller points out in his website Laser Wars, none of it has worked out.
Designing power suits, it turns out, is incredibly difficult, Keller concludes in tracing the history of failed efforts since the 1960s. Speaking of the Tactical Assault Light Operators Suit (TALOS) launched in 2013, he writes:
TALOS failed not by lack of ambition, but by what its overseers diagnosed as the fatal flaw of every powered exoskeleton before it: “complex subsystem interdependencies.” Too many disparate and complex systems simply couldn’t operate seamlessly together in a way that felt, as Heinlein promised, like simply wearing clothes.
“Decade after decade, the Pentagon stands up a new program, pours in money and engineering talent, and watches each effort collapse under the same recurring challenges,” he says. “And yet, on battlefields and in logistics depots around the world, the dream of military exoskeletons lives on.”
Seventy years after the United States rose to the challenge posed by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite, Americans are only dimly aware that the race to colonize the Moon and access its resources is just as business. Indeed, the stakes are even higher.
The mantra of my “Dust Mites” novels is that he who controls the Moon controls cis-lunar space. He who controls cis-lunar space dominates the Earth.
Humans will be living and working in space by the early 2030s, predicts Voyager Technologies CEO Dylan Taylor.
“We’ll have a moon base, people living and working on the moon,” Taylor tells Fortune magazine. “You’ll be able to look up at the moon and see lights on the moon.”
Taylor, a serial entrepreneur and billionaire, agrees with Elon Musk that colonization of Mars would be worthwhile as a backup to preserve the human species in the event of a disaster on Earth, and that the Moon, would not provide species-saving diversification. However, he also said that few people are adventurous enough to make the voyage.
“This whole notion that we can create an entire civilization, terraform ours, it’s going to take a long time to do that,” he told Fortune.
Taylor said he would like to make the trip to Mars. But his focus is on the Moon, which is part of the “same planetary system” as the Earth.
Indeed, Denver-based Voyager Technologies is focused on business opportunities in near-space. The company makes orbital propulsion systems and advanced spacecraft electronics, and it provides space mission-management services. The company owns the Bishop Airlock on the International Space Station, the station’s first commercial module, and it is part of Starlab, a next-generation commercial space station.
P.S. I, for one, look forward to the day when the Moon is more lit up than North Korea.
It wasn’t easy for earthlings to devise a uniform system for telling time around the world in the 19th century, and it may not be much easier on the Moon in the 21st. Tom Brown writes in Space that the U.S. and China don’t agree on how to do it.
Telling precise time — not in minutes and seconds, but in microseconds — is deemed critical for coordinating satellites and spacecraft using GPS, which works by broadcasting time signals. On Earth, we’ve resolved the challenge by using “atomic clocks” based on the oscillations of cesium atoms. But even atomic clocks, which are infinitely more precise than the industrial-era system built around Greenwich Mean Time, have their limitations. Time is relative. It is affected by gravity. And Earth has stronger gravity than the Moon. The consequence is that clocks on the Moon run faster than clocks on Earth by about 1 to 2 microsecond per year, according Copilot AI.
The challenge of space-faring powers is to translate Moon time into Earth-based Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
NASA is working on establishing a Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT), which could set the standard for the U.S.-based LunaNet satellite system. But China, which already has active lunar relay satellites capable of communicating with the far side of the Moon, has its own protocol. Will one standard prevail over the other? I have no idea.
But I do have a question that the article does not address. How will people living on the Moon tell time? Humans are diurnal creatures that evolved over millions of years to adapt to the 24-hour cycle of the Earth’s rotation. They will construct habitations that mimic that 24-hour cycle, not the Moon’s 28-day cycle. much less oscillations of the cesium atom. They also will have to interact with people on Earth, with whose societies and economies they will be inextricably linked.
In “Dust Mites,” I assumed that that the U.S. lunar colonies time is synchronous with Earth’s Eastern Standard Time because that’s the time zone of Washington, D.C. Although I did not address the point in the novel, it seems plausible that a European, Chinese or Indian colony based near U.S. colonies would calibrate their time configurations to optimize interaction with Brussels, Beijing, or New Delhi. On the other hand, if the colonies come to be connected by MagLev trains, the demands of commerce would push for a uniform system. What would that look like?
I asked AI.
Copilot proposed a three-tier model for tracking time on Galileo Station, the largest lunar colony in the “Dust Mites” universe. The schema pays special attention to the implications for bots, which play an elevated role in the upcoming “Trogs” and an unnamed sequel.
I was interviewed recently about my novel “Dust Mites” for Book Talk Central, a YouTube book-review channel. I had no idea what to expect. But the host, Barley James, dug deep into the major themes of the book. I found the interview enjoyable and thought-provoking, and I hope readers will too. You can listen to the interview here. Or you can read a lightly edited transcript of the interview below. — JAB
AI-generated selfie: Grok
Barley James: Hello everyone, and welcome to Book Talk Central, where we bring you compelling conversations with today’s most thought-provoking authors, the stories that challenge the way we see the world. I’m your host, Barley. And today, we’re delighted to welcome James Bacon, journalist, commentator and author of “Dust Mites, A Second American Revolution,” set decades into the future on America’s lunar colony. “Dust Mites” blends political intrigue, high-stakes conflicts, and philosophical questions about freedom, governance, and the future of humanity beyond Earth. While the novel unfolds in a future setting, it speaks directly to the challenges and debates shaping our world today. James, it’s a real pleasure to have you with us. Thank you for joining Book Talk Central.
James A. Bacon: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here with you.
Barley: Amazing. Now, James, I think I should dive in by asking you a question. I’d like to know the inspiration behind the story. What first sparked the idea for “Dust Mites?” Were there specific moments, historical events, or political issues that inspired you to imagine this future conflict on the moon?
JAB: Yes, actually there was a very particular moment. It was maybe 10 years ago. I was at a cocktail party at a friend’s house and we got into a very lively conversation, and right there on the spot in the middle of this conversation I had this germ of an idea. Wouldn’t it be cool to explore the idea of American colonies on the Moon growing rebellious and restless against the tyrannical rule of the mother country back on Earth? It popped in my head just like that. It took me several years before I actually sat down and started to write it. Once I started with that premise, the next step was, well, how do I turn this into a page turner? Then I devised a plot, which I hope is pretty compelling, in which the U.S. marshals are ordered by the Attorney General of the United States to send an elite squad of commandos to the Moon to arrest the governor of the largest colony, called Galileo Station. Things go awry. The rest of the novel explores a lot of ideas and philosophy and things like that, but it really revolves around the marshals trying to get the governor out of the city — it’s an underground city — to where they can hold him up for trial, and how the inhabitants of Galileo Station, who I call Galiletians, try to get him back. That’s the spine of the novel.
Barley: That’s a fascinating origin story. Now, James, you described the novel as future fiction rather than science fiction. Could you explain that distinction and why it is important for readers to understand your vision in that way?
JAB: There’s an important distinction between science fiction and future fiction. In science fiction, even though Earth may be a character or a place, it bears no recognizable resemblance to any countries or nations or institutions or cultures on the Earth today. The authors tend to have other things they want to explore. I’m trying to project what it will be like 50 years from now. What will the Earth be like? And one of the core premises, which when I first started writing didn’t seem obvious to many people but maybe does now, is that the Moon will be colonized. It’s going to be just a year or two before we get the first permanent human presence on the Moon. The date keeps on getting pushed back and pushed back because NASA seems to have its problems. But we’re almost there.
If we’re serious about settling the Moon and exploiting its resources for the benefit of mankind, it will be crucial to secure property rights.
Nations can’t create a self-sustaining lunar economy through government procurement, argue John Chisholm and Dan Garretson in today’s Wall Street Journal. They will need entrepreneurs and investors. And entrepreneurs and investors will need assurances that the improvements they make won’t be stolen or expropriated.
To be self-sustaining, a lunar economy needs paying customers beyond the governments footing today’s bills, along with entrepreneurs to serve those customers and investors to fund the entrepreneurs. All need assurance that what they buy, build or fund remains theirs to use or transfer. At the lunar south pole, mines may someday harvest ice for rocket propellant, avoiding Earth launch costs. To attract investment, miners will need legal acknowledgment of first and continuous occupation, control over land use, the ability to exclude others and assurance that land and improvements can be sold or transferred. In short, ownership rights to lunar real estate.
The existing patchwork of treaties and statutes, write Chisolm, a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, and Garretson, president of the nonprofit Orbital Progress, is inadequate. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA) provide some protection. But the 1979 Moon agreement — admittedly, never ratified by a major spacefaring nation — specifically disallows lunar land rights. The 2020 Artemis Accords’ “safety zones” guarantee the principle of “free access to all areas of celestial bodies” — the opposite of private property exclusion.
Isaac Arthur gets it — he really gets it. He understands how economics — not the romance of exploration, or the nobility of science — will be the driving force behind the settlement of the Moon. I came across his recent post, “The Great Lunar Boom — Building a Civilization on the Moon,” and I recommend it highly for anyone seeking insight on how the population and development of the Moon as Earth’s “eighth continent” will unfold.
Many people view the Moon as a steppingstone — a kind of cosmic gas station where rocket ships can fuel up for trips to other planets and the stars. Arthur, president of the National Space Society and producer of the popular “Science and Futurism” YouTube channel, sees Earth’s satellite as an integral part of a larger Earth-Moon economic system.
“The Moon isn’t important because it helps us leave Earth,” he says. “It’s important because it’s the first place where leaving Earth actually starts to make economic sense.”
We tend to picture a space settlement as something driven by bold explorers and big destinations. But civilizations don’t grow that way. They grow because moving goods gets cheaper, energy becomes more abundant, infrastructure starts paying for itself, and people actually want to live there.
The first stage of lunar exploitation will be undertaken mainly by machines and robots. Human settlement will follow.
I am delighted to announce that my soon-to-be-published novel, “Trogs” has been nominated for the Prometheus Best Novel Award. Established in 1979, the Prometheus Awards recognize the best in libertarian-oriented science fiction and classic fiction.
“Trogs,” the sequel to “Dust Mites,” is scheduled for release Sept. 8. Set in the year 2075, both novels chronicle the stirrings of a second American revolution in colonies on the Moon.
There are several steps on the way to winning the award. I’ll keep readers posted as to my progress — assuming I progress, that is. (If I don’t make the cut, I’ll just drop the subject!)
