Only a lunatic would live on the Moon.
The Moon is a dead rock—eighty-one quintillion tons of dead rock. It’s been dead for nearly four billion years. And—inasmuch as a dead rock wants anything—it wants you dead too.
So you can go quickly. A landslide can bury you. A lava tube can collapse on you. You can plunge headlong into a crater. A meteoroid can strike your habitat at seventy thousand kilometers per hour. A micrometeorite can bust open your spacesuit. A sudden burst of static electricity can blow you apart in an airlock. A slip, a cut, a ruptured seal, a faulty oxygen tank can kill you in minutes.
Or you can go a little slower. A wiring malfunction can shut down air filters. A corrupted computer program can play havoc with climate-control systems. A particularly nasty pathogen—mutant strains of bacteria flourish in enclosed environments—can kill you in days. If you're out on the surface, the sudden temperature plunge between sunlight and shade can leave you with thermal shock. A solar flare can toast you like a TV dinner. A vehicular breakdown can leave you suffocating in your spacesuit.
Or you can go incrementally, over the course of years. Moon-dust can work its way like asbestos into the deepest fissures of your lungs. Prolonged exposure to chemical vapors and gas leaks can wreck your whole respiratory system. Reduced gravity—one-sixth that of Earth—can fatally weaken your heart. Cosmic radiation—galactic rays from dead suns and black holes—can warp your cells. Not to mention a cocktail of psychological factors—sensory deprivation, insomnia, paranoia, claustrophobia, loneliness, hallucinations—that can reshuffle your mind like a deck of cards.
On the Moon, in short, you can be killed by the environment. You can be killed by accident. Or you can kill yourself.
And then of course you can always be murdered. By gangsters. By terrorists. By psychopaths. By ideologues. Or simply because you cost too much to keep alive.
Only a lunatic—or a renegade, or a pariah, or a misanthrope, or a risk junkie, or a mass murderer—would live permanently on the Moon.
Kleef Dijkstra is a lunatic. And a mass murderer. Twenty-eight years ago, two weeks before national elections in the Netherlands, he blew up the Amsterdam offices of the newly formed Nederlandse Volksbond, whose principles he ostensibly supported, in a failed attempt to frame pro-immigration activists and win the party a protest vote. Six people were killed and thirty injured. Later in the same month, infuriated when the Partij van de Arbeid gained an unprecedented number of seats in the House of Representatives, he loaded a Beretta ARX190, shot his way through the security cordon at the Van Buuren Hotel in the Hague, and mowed down forty-seven celebrating party members. Combining the death tolls of these two massacres and a number of smaller, separate incidents, Kleef Dijkstra is directly responsible for the murders of sixty-two people.
After his arrest, court-appointed forensic psychiatrists determined that Kleef Dijkstra was a paranoid schizophrenic. They said he had sociopathic tendencies, narcissistic personality disorder, grandiose and delusional thoughts, and psychotic episodes. He exhibited no remorse for his crimes and had even informed his examiners at one point that he would like to kill them too. The psychiatrists concluded that there was little possibility of rehabilitation, even using the most sophisticated modern techniques, and recommended long-term incarceration in a high-security penitentiary.
Many others disagreed. Notwithstanding the European aversion to capital punishment, numerous commentators in the Netherlands and elsewhere argued that Dijkstra, according to his very own values, ought to be sentenced to death. Incarceration, after all, would be costly and would always leave open the possibility that he would become a hero behind bars, mobilizing the like-minded with smuggled-out missives. Dijkstra, alarmingly magnetic in his way, had already declared that “the battle has just begun,” and that in a hundred years “there will be statues of me on street corners all across Europe.”