Talking about other planets often seems to be another way of talking about Earth. ‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey, the poetic, beautiful book about a day in the life on the International Space Station, much of what made it so wonderful to read was being taken to somewhere else I’d never get to go to and seeing Earth afresh. Being shown the wonder, richness and improbable aloneness of our Earth in the universe.

In ‘Moon’, Duncan Jones’ 2009 film, so much of the story is about the focus of Sam Rockwell’s character Sam Bell on looking after himself as he counts down towards the end of his three year stay on the Moon so he can return to Earth, his wife and family. Sam is all alone on the Moon, alone apart from an AI helper and ‘buddy’, mining for helium-3. He is limited to getting intermittent messages from them as the live communications links between the Moon and Earth are down.

At the start of the film we see Sam trying to keep himself together physically and mentally. The toll the work, location and dislocation from home, his life and family have taken on him is increasingly apparent. We see how much he wants to get back to Earth, to his home and family, how close it all seems and yet how far given what seems to be a declining state of health. As the film unfolds, we watch his health deteriorate.

Seeing him as he gets physically injured, as his mental health seems to be affected, it felt like I was seeing the madness of our pursuit for energy playing out on one person. Getting sick and going mad as an allegory of our collective madness. How this plays out on him – his health suffering, physically and mentally scarred, bruised, burned and eventually left for dead. Disconnected from those he loves, watching them from afar, intermittently, as they grow and change without him there.

Heidegger talks about how technology can alienate us from ourselves and our true sense of being. That we are all beings in this world, having relationships to each other but technology can lead us to see nature and other people simply as raw materials. This takes us away from our sense of self, our way of being in the world which Heidegger sees as crucial to our humanity. Although there’s much to criticise Heidegger for – professionally and personally – ‘Moon’ gives a cinematic view of what that disconnect can look like.

The distant company Sam is working for, distant both physically and emotionally, seem to be operating from this Heideggerian perspective – they give meaningless platitudinal reassurance but don’t do anything to fix equipment or look after him in ways which would actually be useful to him. Sam continues to work even whilst he is unwell out of a sense of obligation. Potentially also because it is hard for him to imagine what it is that he would do if he doesn’t work. He has some interests there – making a model replica of his hometown and exercising – but his whole life has become so built around the work that perhaps he needs to keep working to not have to grapple with who he is without the work. That there isn’t anything there for him apart from the work, so he needs to keep working to help make sense of the place.

Seeing the mining unfolding on the Moon, what I think of as a pristine environment, somehow seems more shocking and throws into further relief what we are doing on Earth. Compared to earth, where it’s estimated there is only about 100kg globally, the amount on the Moon is relatively more abundant. Although there is only a low concentration of helium-3 on the Moon, different samples have found up to 10 parts per billion(ppb), with the average about 4 ppb, it’s still something lots of companies and organisations have considered or investigated. Currently helium-3 is used in a few ways, including in cryogenics and quantum computing but it’s also considered a potential future source of energy, as the film proposes it is used. The film shows the Moon’s surface getting utterly churned up as Sam tries to find crumbs of helium-3 to send back to Earth.

Reading about energy transitions and one of the key discussions in that area is whether there have in fact been energy transitions or whether it’s simply a case of energy additions. The argument for energy transitions is about progress away from older energy sources and bringing online new ones. Particularly one, the discussion is about a transition away from filthy fossil fuels to cleaner sources of energy – renewable sources such as solar, wind or hydroelectric, as well as cleaner by some metrics ones such as nuclear.

Fressoz’s book ‘More and more and more’ talks about how, rather than energy transitions, what we’ve had, and are going through, are energy additions. What we’ve seen over time, and see still, is energy additions, we’re still using old technologies. Data from ‘Our World in Data’ shows that more traditional biomass is burnt globally now than 100s of years ago. We’re still using coal and gas. This year has seen the highest ever level of coal usage globally. Whilst more renewable technologies are coming online, we’re also seeing an overall increase in the amount of energy being consumed globally.

As Fouquet and others show – for instance in Fouquet and Pearson’s 1998 article ‘A Thousand Years of Energy Use in the United Kingdom’, the more energy that becomes available, and the more affordable it becomes, the more likely we are to spend any disposable income on energy. The more people are using energy, the more it becomes worth investigating how people can more efficiently use energy, or finding new ways to use energy. So then it becomes more affordable, and more normal, for more people to use energy. Then we go around the loop again.

Shove talks about the adoption of practices and how comfort becomes something that people seek. This feedback loop between availability, use and rising expectations or changing norms can then feed off itself. We can justify the mess we make of places on Earth or, in a potential future, the Moon or indeed other planets – apparently Jupiter has the most helium-3 of all the planets but that’s even more inaccessible than the Moon – because of all the uses we make of energy.

I found the watching ‘Moon’ to be an unsettling story in many ways, yet it was also like watching a story I’ve seen many times before. The film provided a near-future reflection on scenes and stories that continue to be played out across the world for other resources.