Discussion Topic
Survival of Earth's nuclear holocaust in "If I Forget Thee, O Earth ..."
Summary:
In "If I Forget Thee, O Earth...," humanity survives Earth's nuclear holocaust by escaping to a lunar colony. The story highlights the bleak reality of Earth's destruction and the hope of one day returning to restore the planet.
How did the Colony in "If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . ." survive the Earth's nuclear holocaust?
"If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . ." by Robert Heinlein is a coming-of-age story in which a father in an isolated Moon colony takes his son to see the planet Earth, which has been ravaged by a nuclear holocaust, for the first time. The surface-level answer to your question is that the Moon colony survived because its inhabitants were safely away from Earth during the devastation. As the story makes clear, though, it's not that simple. Once supply ships no longer come from Earth with provisions, the colony has to learn the difficult lessons of how to survive on its own.
Then had followed the years of despair, and the long-drawn battle for survival in this fierce and hostile world. That battle had been won, though barely: this little oasis of life was safe against the worst that nature could do.
However, even the battle for physical survival...
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doesn't tell the whole story. The pilgrimage that Marvin and his father make is to ensure the continuing moral and spiritual survival of the colony's inhabitants, to give them a vision of something for which to strive.
But unless there was a goal, a future towards which it could work, the colony would lose the will to live, and neither machines nor skill nor science could save it then.
So Heinlein makes clear that there are three facets to the colony's survival of the nuclear holocaust that destroyed Earth: its physical presence on the Moon where it is safe from the radiation, its continual struggle against the harsh natural conditions on the Moon, and the vision that the original colonists impart to their children of someday returning to Earth, their homeland.
They survive the nuclear war on Earth because they are not on the Earth. Instead, they are up on the Moon.
The colony that survives in the story is a bunch of scientists who are living up on the Moon. There has been a colony up there for quite some time (Marvin's father was one of the original colonists, but Marvin himself has never lived on Earth). The colony is supposed to be working on being able to live on their own—to not need any help from Earth. But at the time of the war, they are still depending on shipments of supplies from Earth.
In "If I Forget Thee, O Earth ... ", who survives nuclear warfare and how?
In "If I Forget Thee, O Earth ... " a small remnant of humanity survives (and only just barely for that matter) because it was isolated from the destruction of the rest of the species. The story in question is set in a lunar colony, focused from the perspective of a ten-year-old-boy, Marvin, who travels with his father to observe the irradiated Earth.
The colony ultimately predated the destruction of the Earth. As Clarke tells us, the initial destruction of humanity proved disastrous for the colony as well, which was suddenly cut off from all resupply and support from the planet and forced to fend for itself. What followed was a bitter fight for survival, one which came very close to failure, but the colony survived, enduring even while the rest of the human species has apparently been destroyed.
Since then, the colony has gone on, animated by a shared sense of purpose that eventually, far into the distant future, when the Earth becomes inhabitable again, their distant descendants will be able to return to the planet from which humanity emerged. This is why Marvin's father has taken him on this journey and why, Marvin realizes, he himself will one day take his own son on the same trip: they need to keep this dream alive, generation through generation, in the hopes that one distant day it will come to fruition, even if they themselves will never be able to see it.