Satellite Smartphones on the Moon Connect Communities

The year is 2030. Satellite smartphones connect people on Earth and now the moon–the Kaguya Oriente Basin. Rising above the Moon’s surface, satellite dishes point to the sky, sending and receiving voice and data from Moon to Earth, Earth to Moon, anywhere in Space, really. It’s the era of lunar smartphones and unlimited wireless communications.

Credit NASA, TerreStar, SkyTerra Communications, Iridium and the Japanese who, decades earlier, built trial mobile phone networks on the moon’s south pole in 2015. In 2012, Google awarded $20 million for the first robotic rover that transmitted one gig of data–pictures and video–from Moon to Earth.  A few years later, satellite smartphones  blossomed on Earth, the Moon and elsewhere in Space.

Upon the advent of lunar satellite smartphones, colonies emerged at the Sea of Tranquility and elsewhere. Now that humans could talk, text, access the Universal Internet (once called mobile), living on the Moon became a reality and lunar communities flourished. Life on the Moon became as common as on Earth, people communicating through multiple voice and data channels, friends and family as close as the nearest view screen.

Satellite Smartphones Saturate the Moon

While silence surrounded humans on the lunar plane, Satellite phones, 3D multimedia panels, two-way videophones, wireless devices of all kinds proliferated. Communication across the 250,000-mile distance between Earth and Moon occurred at the speed of light. No one really noticed. Mobile life on the lunar surface greatly resembled the Planet below.

Social media morphed into splintered communities of thought, technology no longer driving change. People communicated across large distances, immune to location, drawn by uncommon interests, the definition of friendship itself transforming. Perhaps it was the Moon’s lower gravity. No one truly knew, but differences, rather than similarities, became the focal point of human interaction.

The rocky surface attracted  thinkers, artists, visionaries–those who had tired of large cities, freeways and crowds. The darkness of Space brought philosophers, historians, scientists and travelers who liked silent places. Although lunar satellite smartphones were in every pocket, some people, occasionally, turned them off, relishing the peace of solitude, stars quietly flickering above.