Settlements need more than engineering.
We're entering the decade where permanent lunar habitation becomes real. The aerospace engineering is being solved. What's missing is the other half: governance, resource operations, AI systems, spiritual life, economic design — the civic layer that turns a base into a place people actually live.
SpaceX will solve the transport economics. NASA and its partners will validate the surface systems. But less attention is being paid to seriously designing the operational, civic, and human infrastructure that determines whether a settlement works — whether people can sustain meaningful lives 384,000 km from everything they know.
This site is a working document exploring that problem space, drawing from utility operations, AI systems design, frontier history, theology, and the practical realities of keeping people alive and purposeful in hostile environments.
Power distribution, water cycling, habitat allocation, supply chain logistics — what terrestrial utility infrastructure teaches us about running a settlement where everything is scarce and failure is fatal.
When your air recycler is AI-managed, alignment isn't theoretical. Exploring the role of autonomous systems in life-critical settlement operations, authority delegation, and the unique human-AI relationship that emerges off-world.
Authority structures, property rights, dispute resolution, information systems, and democratic participation in a community where you can't leave. The political philosophy of permanent space habitation.
Ritual, purpose, grief, community cohesion, and the deep human need for meaning — examined honestly for a context where the familiar frameworks of terrestrial life no longer apply by default.
Essays, analysis, and working notes on the problems outlined above.
I'm Joshua — an engineer and program manager in the energy sector with experience building complex operational systems, managing vendor ecosystems, and thinking about how infrastructure actually works when it has to work every day without fail.
I believe the next chapter of human settlement will be shaped as much by operators, civic designers, and people who care about meaning as by the engineers who get us there. This site is my contribution to that conversation.
Thinking & writing about space, AI,
technology, philosophy, and the human
experience.