There was a brief moment during the trial of the Artemis II mission when it felt like humanity had collectively decided to stop being cruel and start cooperating with each other to accomplish profoundly cool shit. The whole mission marked humanity’s return to the moon (okay, fine — our return to moon-adjacent space), but really, it felt like more like a sightseeing tour as we reminisced about the barriers we once broke and were floored by the wonder we’ve yet to behold ahead of us. In a sense, it was a space mission appropriate for an era of reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, and legacy sequels, but far more emotionally affecting than any Star Wars sequel ever was.Its powerful optimism stood in stark contrast to the other half of the news cycle, which was being sucked in by the powerful gravitational pull of Donald Trump’s second run in office. As he threatened to wipe entire civilizations off the map, Artemis II provided an optimism that I couldn’t help but feel had a tinge of cynicism buried deep within it, nestled off on the moon’s distant future, a future that Artemis II and its follow-up missions will attempt to make real.The Artemis II mission was competency porn, and as we live in the fading afterglow of its success (its crew is scheduled to splashdown back on Earth on Friday, April 10), you may feel yourself coming down from the high of the wondrous things humanity can achieve and finally start asking yourself maybe the most important questions of the whole mission: why now?Why go back to the moon at all?The obvious answer is that we should be constantly exploring space to better understand our place within this vast universe. While I’m sure some feeling all along those lines is shared by most, if not everyone, working at NASA, I’m not sure that sentiment is shared by anyone within the rest of the government, who see the wonder of Artemis as the first salvo in another space race, with China as our opponent this time around.I was hoping all the optimism would feel purely Star Trekingly utopian, but it doesn’t. Not completely. There’s an undeniable hint of old-school colonialism to it, but now IIIIIINNNN SPPPPAACCE-Ace-ace.The Outer Space Treaty is a document dating back to 1967 that established the foundational international legal framework ensuring that space and all celestial bodies are only going to be used for peaceful purposes. In short, it ensures that nobody owns the moon. It’s worked well all these years, but only because there’s been no one up there to test its limits, because in that hazy liminal space left by the broadly written text of the Outer Space Treaty is where the tiny microscopic bacteria of cynicism will fester, thrive, and grow. The United States and China are racing to be the first to test them. For instance, the treaty doesn’t impose many restrictions on what you can take from the moon, and only speaks in broad generalities on what we can do to mine the stuff we take.That’s when the hopeful optimism of Artemis II gives way to ruthless Earthly resource wars. Lunar bases are inevitable because you can’t mine a giant space rock for the trillions it’s worth in a single afternoon. So, permanent or semi-permanent mining operations will need to be established, ones that just so happen to have a Chinese or American flag planted on them, you know, just to spruce up the joint and not as a way of staking a claim on a territory or anything.Is the Artemis II Paving the Way for More Human Nonsense, But Now on the Moon?In retrospect, we’ll probably realize that the awe-inspiring achievement of Artemis II was just paving the way for humanity to do what we do best: drag our shitty problems around with us everywhere we go, even beyond the stars.Every other nation with an upstart space agency is going to be closely watching what the US and China do (China wants to put astronauts on the moon sometime before 2030) in the hope that they, too, can scamper up there and stake their claims in the new resource frontier, all while pretending that this isn’t all exactly what the Outer Space Treaty was specifically designed to prevent.Ultimately, the moon is just another chunk of land with strategic value; we just couldn’t take advantage of it until now-ish, which I qualified because it’ll still be some time before we start to see permanent moon settlements.All of this tinges Artemis II’s triumph, making it feel a bit like when, for the first time in years, you see a realtor scoping out the long-abandoned lot at the end of the block. It’s nice that there’s someone finally interested in it again. All you can do now is hope that whoever eventually moves in isn’t an asshole. The whole mission has been a beautifully executed reminder of what we can achieve when we aren’t selfish monsters. Unfortunately, as humanity loves to prove time and again, we are still very much those selfish monsters, and if we continuously refuse to evolve beyond our monstrous ways, the achievement of Artemis II will just lead to the monetization, corporatization, and eventual exploitation of its achievement.We needed this moment of glory amidst the nihilism. I just hope it all doesn’t ultimately become, in retrospect, a bit of hopeful space-based theater that opens the door to even more nihilism.The post The Optimism of Artemis II and the Cynicism of the Moon’s Future appeared first on VICE.