Strange New Worlds and Phenomena in the Galaxy

[Butters]

The other side of the moon is no darker than the one we see. It gets sunlight with the same periodicity and same intensity.

That fact has never been in dispute. What is being discussed is what we call the side of the moon that we can’t see. I’m happy with dark side, but I’m well aware that it’s not actually dark.

 

[MAGolding]

If sunlight falls on a celestial body but no one is there to see it, is it still light?

Dark side is perfectly adequate and descriptive. Farside, nearside? the far side of something that’s already pretty far away. Neither term will make much sense when we colonise the place. But dark side just sounds so much more evocative

Yes, if light falls on a celestial body but no one is there to see it, it is still light!

When we colonize the Moon the colonists might continue to call the hemispheres near side and far side. Or maybe Earth side and anti Earth side. Or maybe they will copy Kepler's Somnium and call the near side Subvolva and the far side Privolva.

I don't think that the far side of the Moon is any more mysterious and "dark" than the near side, now that the far side of the Moon has been mapped.

Look at a map and mark the farthest you have gone in each direction. Beyond the farthest you have gone are places you can't see at this moment and never have seen. But you don't call them dark and mysterious places, because you know they have been mapped and studied, just like the far side of the Moon has been mapped and studied.

When I look at the map, I see places beyond where I have been. Places a block farther than I have ever gone, or a mile farther, or ten thousand miles farther than I have ever gone, or that I have ever seen with my own eyes. I can not see those places without getting closer to them than I have ever been, because of hills and mountains, trees and forests, tiny cottages and vast skyscrapers in my way, and because the horizon falls away and blocks them from sight after just a few miles distance.

But I know that beyond the farthest I have gone there are places, and beyond them other places, and so on to the antipodes. And I can look at maps and other sources of information bout those places, and know they are not dark and mysterious, even though there are many interesting facts about them I don't know.

Long after I went to college, I found out that a village a couple of miles from the campus has a mansion with the largest collection in the Americas of family heirlooms - heirlooms of the Christopher Columbus family, that is.

Going to a relative's wedding reception, I found it was in a park with an old mansion and an art center in a town I had lived in during most of my teen years, a place I hadn't known about while living in the town despite it being just a few blocks away from where I usually went.

I have found that just about a mile from a house where I once lived there are two great mansions on this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_houses_in_the_United_States

They are just a couple of thousand feet beyond the farthest walk I made in that direction when I lived there, never knowing that they existed.

There are all sorts of interesting places we never heard of just a short distance beyond our farthest travels, and many more interesting places we don't know of much farther away. But they are all mapped and known to other people, not mysterious unknown places of mystery. We cannot see places beyond the horizon of the Earth with our own eyes - not until and unless we travel there, but we know that almost all the Earth has been mapped, and almost every distant place is familiar and home-like to other people who live there.

And just as almost no place on Earth is dark, mysterious, and unknown, almost no place on the far side of the Moon is any more dark, mysterious, and unknown to selenographers than the place son the near side of the Moon. We don't need to look up and see the craters and mountains on the far side of the Moon to know they are there.

So I cannot think of the far side of the Moon as the dark and mysterious unknown side.

 

[Discofan]

I doubt we'll ever colonize the moon. It's much much less expensive to keep the earth from becoming a second moon than it is to turn the moon into some kind of earth and we can't even do the former!