Moon doubters

Skepticism about the value of manned space exploration is never far away, and just when NASA starts to firm up a little on a lunar colony, the nay-saying doubters get into print. See this article in Slate, and here at the New York Times. Both sound like re-runs from the early 70's, when the thrill of Apollo 11 was over with pretty quickly.

In the Slate article, when it comes to the question why build a moon base:

NASA itself can't really offer an answer, though it does offer a free, downloadable "Why the Moon?" poster. According to the poster, a moon base would "enable eventual settlement" of Earth's satellite—which might happen someday, but represents an absurd waste of tax money in the current generation. (No one has any interest in settling Antarctica, which is much more amenable to life than the moon and can be reached at far less than 1 percent of the cost.)

The New York Times writes:

Mars has water, apparently, and an atmosphere that greater minds than mine contend could be transformed and thickened enough to breathe, and maybe even past or future life forms. Someday, a few dreamers say, our descendants could walk to a pool of water in the red sand, like the settlers in Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” look at their reflections and see Martians.

I haven't read about terraforming information for some time, but I am sure that even the most optimistic time scales for creating a breathable Martian atmosphere is in the order of hundreds or thousands of years. Even by the standards of someone (like me) who wants humanity to expand beyond earth, it's a very long term proposition.

Basically, for a long time, living on Mars is going to be like living on the Moon, with the added benefit of more water. (Assuming the moon has some somewhere.) The disadvantage is that help is a year or two away, compared to a few days for the Moon.

But my main point is that these articles do not address the obvious potential function that a Moon colony can provide, and that's a lifeboat for planet Earth. It's close, it's old, seems relatively stable, and provides a smallish target for passing asteroids. The decentralisation of information by virtue of its digital format perhaps makes its off-planet storage less important than previously, but still it is hard to say what the human and political effects of a truly global catastrophe would be. (For example, an asteroid strike large enough to darken the skies for a few years, leading to starvation and massive loss of life.) Recently, the idea of using the Moon as "gene bank" was mooted too, and maybe this is a more important reason, if you assume that digital information is unlikely to be lost completely.

I don't understand why science writers can't see that this "big picture" idea, which is familiar to all science fiction readers, is something worth taking seriously if it is within technical reach.