In small towns or countries, Universities produce a subset of individuals with tenuous connection to reality. When that connection snaps, the individual receives tenure. Small towns become University towns where economic activity depends upon the campus; this leads to the Campus Poobah having the influence of the Pope on Rome.

In small countries, the University is looked to as a source of enlightenment. Tenured personnel, with their less than tenuous grip on reality, are revered as “experts”. It is odious, (putting it mildly) to live in a small town where persons incapable of functioning in the real world take sanctuary behind “ivy halls”.

It is chaffing, (again, putting it mildly) to live in a small country where buffoons who can not gain a real job create academic bailiwicks where they posture and pontificate as their droolings become canon.

And then there is Tranquility University on Luna.

It started as Tranq Training center until a power hungry primary school administrator saw the potential and began slapping courses together to make a curriculum. This was followed by pressuring our “government” (so-called) to grant accreditation to “our” University.

This enabled a coven of obnoxious power mad little people with Nero syndrome who assumed ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ (though there’s one on the surface) to fill it with bogasity.

The Lunar colony started as a waste of resources to prove the toughness of the human spirit and how much better it is to filth up a pristine blob of rock which was lifeless anyway, than Earth.

The protocols worked because they were snatched from the pages of respectable sci-fi novels which created, populated and organised underground caverns as a closed eco-system. I liked the idea. I liked using all those stories I read as a kid, (read as if they were pornography having to be hidden behind acceptable literary offerings) as our manual.

The astronaut/engineers from their Quonset huts on the Moon’s surface built a burrowing machine. They began digging corridors one hundred meters below the surface. They used the moon dust to fill prefab steel reinforced plastic segments; easy to assemble as a set of leggos with groove and tongue, attaching pre built panels for electricity and plumbing, creating a kilometer long tunnel with removable portals for expansion when necessary. The first corridor, called Long Cellar, proved humans could create a livable environment.

The Original industry was soil production. This was done by carting a trailerload of topsoil from Earth, mixing it with equal parts moon dust and locally produced waste, troweling it into beds three centimeters deep one meter wide with a half meter between them similar to the design by Bradberry. A few thousand imported Earth worms were added so the dead half meter would slowly become productive soil able to sustain the planting of useful seeds.