A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
One useful way to inform our current debate over space exploration and planetary colonization is to contrast the swashbuckling dawn, in 1977, of the George Lucas/Walt Disney Company Star Wars franchise with the ominous warnings punctuating Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Either humanity will find its future in an Eden of our own making on the verdant surfaces of distant planets and switch solar systems as easily as we change socks, or our species will vanish into a morass of indecipherable hallucinations catalyzed by a final confrontation with artificial intelligence.
Pop music has also drawn straws for a future beyond Earth. David Bowie’s 1971 song “Life on Mars?” was about poetic escape from our planet’s dreary prose. Prince, in the wake of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, waxed existential in his 1987 hit “Sign ’O’ the Times”: “It’s silly, no?/When a rocket ship explodes and everybody still wants to fly … ”
Since then, and thanks to a phalanx of tech billionaires with fortunes to burn, space exploration has jumped from hypothetical sci-fi film sets devoid of scientific reality to ambitious blueprints of space settlement with an end-goal of human survival in mind. But has anyone yet taken a critical eye to this most ambitious of exploratory projects?
Fear not. Here to throw some much-needed cold water on the overhyped mission of colonizing space are authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, with the latter providing mirthful illustrations that punctuate the punchlines along the way. Both profess love and admiration for those they call “space-settlement geeks.” But deep in the pages of their most recent book, A City on Mars, it soon becomes clear that what they are most interested in delivering is the toughest of love to proponents of a human future beyond Earth, whether in space generally or on planets such as Mars specifically.
The Weinersmith’s tone comes across at times like a parent’s admonition to a child threatening to run away from home—“Where will you sleep? And who will feed you?”—but there is no denying the rigor and reason of their book’s opening checklist of questions.
Cheerleaders for space settlement have had the floor for an impressive number of years. Chief among them, you may have heard, is Amazon founder and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos, who came under the spell of Gerard K. O’Neill, a physics professor at Princeton University, deceased since 1992, whose classes Bezos attended as a student. Then, of course, there is Elon Musk. The world’s richest person and current DOGE animal vicieux expresses his long-time quest to colonize Mars in starkly political terms. Humanity must break the shackles of Earth, Musk has repeatedly emphasized, before “the woke mind virus” can “destroy civilization.” Between the arguments of multi-billionaires, the Weinersmiths also entertain the endorsements for space settlement of esteemed, and semi-esteemed, scholars and scientists. No less than Stephen Hawking, who believed that space settlement held the key to our species’ long-term survival, gets a cameo.
The Weinersmith’s tone comes across at times like a parent’s admonition to a child threatening to run away from home—“Where will you sleep? And who will feed you?”—but there is no denying the rigor and reason of their book’s opening checklist of questions, collected under the chapter heading “A Preamble on Space Myths” and divided into bad arguments, of which the Weinersmiths count eight, and good, amounting to no more than two.
Using common sense and the parameters of science, the Weinersmiths lay skeptical waste to most arguments in favor of space settlement. Their first point of business is to remind readers that Earth must remain viable long enough for us to advance far enough technologically to make space settlement even possible, much less affordable. It is highly unlikely to the point of nearly improbable that settling Mars will save us from climate change, meteor showers, or any other natural or human-generated calamity. As the Weinersmiths put it, “If you want a Mars that can survive the death of Earth, you’d better make sure Earth doesn’t die for a very long time.”
Nor will space settlement, the Weinersmiths point out, allow us to relocate industry and the strain of overpopulation “off-world.” The costs of moving everything back and forth are insurmountable. Nor will leaving Earth, as many moneyed advocates insist, make us rich, wise, end war, or otherwise fulfill any alleged evolutionary destiny to transform our nature beyond Earth. The Weinersmiths admit that, like other unnecessary indulgences in life, space settlement advocacy is perfectly fine under the rubric of “because it’s awesome,” which they call “The Hot Tub Argument.” They also admit there is nothing wrong with trying, as humans have, through history, gravitated toward grand, and often stupid, undertakings.
With space-settlement enthusiasts’ reasons largely dispensed with, the Weinersmiths spend the rest of their book interrogating the current science of space flights and exploration to answer whether colonizing other planets is possible, and if so, desirable. The advent of reusable rockets in 2015 made commercial space travel affordable, at least for billionaires, and almost routine. This remarkable advancement, however, only masks and delays the more vital questions of what we will eat and how we will breathe, procreate, and govern ourselves off-Earth. “Getting there,” as City on Mars makes plain, is not even half the game. It also implies a likely return in the high probability that something on Mars goes horribly wrong. In that case, a “launch window” from Mars back to Earth demands a wait of up to two years. Even that is likely to be delayed by a major dust storm on the planet’s surface, to say nothing of technical problems that will dwarf the many headaches we already experience at Earth’s airports.
The Weinersmiths employ no end of snarky, fun phrases to remind us how great we have it on Earth compared to space. In essence, the scientific data on extended human forays in space is either nonexistent, or so sparse in meaningful sample size that it “sucks.” We know next to nothing about sex, birth, raising children, and agriculture in space (although eating insects shipped from Earth is likely). “The short version is that space on a day-to-day basis isn’t so great. It’s not the least bit Star Trekky.” ( 92)
What we know for certain about Mars itself, meanwhile, should be enough to give us pause. Radiation from the sun means humans will be forced to burrow massive holes and networked tunnels below Mars’ surface. Otherwise, sandstorms lasting months can blot out the Sun altogether. Martian soil is rich in thyroid-thwacking perchlorates. With an average surface temperature of -60°C, energy sources will almost certainly alternate between solar, barring dust storms blocking the sun, and nuclear. In other words, life on Mars will certainly be interesting for those who love a good struggle. But there is no way it will ever be a safer bet than Earth, even when ravaged by climate change. “Leaving a 2°C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.”(2)
It is highly unlikely to the point of nearly improbable that settling Mars will save us from climate change, meteor showers, or any other natural or human-generated calamity. As the Weinersmiths put it, “If you want a Mars that can survive the death of Earth, you’d better make sure Earth doesn’t die for a very long time.”
A City on Mars leaves few details of hypothetical life in space untouched. As a result, it makes clear all that we take for granted about life on Earth. “How does democracy function in a society where air is rationed?” the Weinersmiths ask. How, indeed. Amidst the advent of rocket launches to the moon in 1967, the United Nations ratified a loose legal framework for governance in space, known as the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Yet all these years later, the Weinersmiths point out, its ramifications for national ownership and law enforcement in space remain up for debate. It is a starting point for negotiations, but hardly a guarantee, they add, that “Star Trek will not become more Star Wars.” And if other planets are to become the playthings of Earth’s multi-billionaires, interstellar laws and law enforcement will almost certainly follow. In a book already dripping with sardonic humor, sentences such as this make the blood run cold even as you laugh: “No matter how bad an Appalachian coal town got, there was always a train ride out. In a Mars settlement, this will be far harder, and corporate ownership will control more than any Earth corporation ever did—not just housing and food, but the biosphere itself.” (336)
We can dream big about a future life in space and on other planets, but with dreams come equally big, life-altering responsibilities. If any portion of the book’s subtitle speaks the loudest, it is the question of whether we have “really thought this through.” The Weinersmiths overriding point is that the logistics of space travel, daunting enough to be sure, will almost certainly prove easy compared to the dreary issues and infighting that will travel with us from Earth. If laws and treaties are not hammered out and agreed upon in advance, competition for space could trigger another disastrous war on Earth. So much for any proposition that space settlements will usher in a new era of human enlightenment.
Ironically enough, and coming full circle to the consequences of earthly conflict, the Weinersmiths underscore the history of space travel as an era launched in political competition between the United States and Soviet Russia. Before President John F. Kennedy understood that human rocket travel would make an awesome rejoinder to his Bay of Pigs debacle, President Eisenhower thought it “hysterical” that any nation would engage in such folly. What Eisenhower failed to understand, and what Elon Musk has since come to comprehend, is that space exploration is impressive in and of itself. “Human spacefaring has little utility for the price, especially compared to things like military or commercial satellites, but what it does do is dramatically demonstrate wealth, organization, and technical competence,” the Weinersmiths point out. “Throw in the fact that early space rockets were often literally the same as military rockets, and you have an excellent show of raw power that demands to be taken seriously.” (225)
In the case of Elon Musk, who recently leveraged his own SpaceX prowess into considerable political capital in the Trump administration, the veracity of such statements seems obvious.
Between stabs at astute political observations, A City on Mars delivers tantalizing and zany space trivia. For example, among NASA astronauts on the 1991 Space Shuttle Columbia, taco sauce was so sought after that it quickly became the first space currency. The first attempt at formulating a concrete-like substance viable on Mars was attempted at the UK’s University of Manchester, where researchers extracted a protein from human blood that bound with simulated Mars soil to produce a sort of “bloodcrete.” Early NASA Space Shuttle plumbing for astronaut waste involved a sling-like contraption that flattened human feces into particles small enough to freeze-dry, lest they float in zero-gravity among crew members in a shape they lovingly called “brown trout.”
We know next to nothing about sex, birth, raising children, and agriculture in space (although eating insects shipped from Earth is likely). “The short version is that space on a day-to-day basis isn’t so great. It’s not the least bit Star Trekky.”
If there is a fault in the Weinersmith’s book it is that they often ignore, or at least fail to mention, that large-scale scientific pursuits, space travel among them, often result in surprise and even accidental discoveries and inventions that benefit millions of people who will never be shot into space. Satellite communications and deep-space observatories may seem commonplace to us today, but before NASA they were mostly non-existent. Also, the wife-and-husband team neglect, almost to a curious degree, the foremost reason for us to remain (mostly) Earthbound. That reason is, of course, the reality of evolution by natural selection. That we evolved over billions of years as a species on the biosphere of Earth, and nowhere else, is the strongest possible argument that it is on Earth where we most belong. Of course, “transplaneting” ourselves elsewhere will involve difficulties so insurmountable they will dwarf problems here at home.
Space exploration and colonization will continue to seduce multi-billionaires eager to display their technical competence and power, but that does not mean they deserve such outsize attention. We as a species are much better off, the Weinersmiths point out, using a “wait-and-go-big” approach of solving more problems on Earth prior to introducing our fraught selves to additional solar systems. Space settlement is not a goal to pursue, but a milestone that must be earned.
“However much we the nerdy are moved by space travel, and however alien and fascinating its environment is, no social magic happens there,” the Weinersmiths caution. “Space is one more place where humans will be humans.” (230)
