Space Baby TV?

Someone else has already taken Bill Hartmann to task over his silly anti-commercialization comments in this article, so I’ll focus on Freeman Dyson’s intriguing suggestion regarding the purpose of manned activities in space:

A return to the Moon should be primarily an adventure and a test of survival skills, Dyson believes.

“With good television coverage and some genuine human drama, the public will probably be willing to pay for it,” he tells me. “Best of all would be to have a man-and-wife team and watch them raise the first lunar baby. If we go back with the pretence that it is for science, the public will probably switch to another channel.”

Would people really pay to watch an astronaut couple raise ‘The First Boy on the Moon’ or ‘The First Girl on Mars’? It doesn’t seem like such a concept would keep public interest over the years, and it surely wouldn’t be fair to the child — think “The Truman Show”. Who would like to grow up thinking they were brought into the world simply to be the fish in an interplanetary fishbowl? Or that they were indentured to the sponsors to whom they owe their existence?

Then there are the “human drama”-enhancing hijinks the producers might stage to boost ratings. Or the unfortunate probability that the kid in question might grow up to become an embittered “former child star”, rediscovered some decades later by “Where Are They Now?”, turning tricks in the red-light warrens of Syria Planum to pay for a thousand-credit-per-week Dust addiction.

On the other hand… the ‘First Child’ on the Moon or Mars (or in space or on an asteroid or gas giant moon or what have you) will someday be born. If it happened in the routine development of a permanent settlement, rather than as a publicity stunt or TV-show gimmick, it might be interesting as a sidebar to the primary attraction of the settlement itself. Coverage in the form of occasional updates would be more palatable than a lurid, intrusive, moment-by-moment documentary of his/her life. Somehow, though, I don’t see such coverage filling the inspirational role Dyson describes — precisely because it isn’t lurid and dramatic enough for a reality TV show.

It’s a moot point, anyway…by the time an astronaut couple could get to the Moon (let alone Mars), the whole reality TV fad will have long since died the death of disco.