Joseph Silk is not a fantasist or science fiction author. He holds a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University and taught astrophysics and cosmology at Oxford University. But what he wrote in his book Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind will certainly seem like fantasy to many people: He suggests that humans should establish settlements on the moon – whole cities under the lunar landscape. Survival is possible, he explains, in the wide lava tubes that researchers have discovered on the moon. These underground caverns, he claims, could even be large enough to host entire cities and offer natural protection from any life-threatening solar-induced activity. Cities in these large lava tubes would also be shielded from meteorite impacts and could survive micrometeorite bombardments and the occasional violent solar eruption unscathed.
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