In A City On Mars, biologist #KellyWeinersmith and cartoonist @ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren’t going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead
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The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is *vastly* beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What’s more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back *real* space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).
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Every place we might settle in space - giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars - is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today - the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else. Mars is covered in poison and the sky disappears under planet-sized storms that go on and on.
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The Moon is covered in black-lung-causing, razor-sharp, electrostatically charged dust. Everything is radioactive. There’s virtually no water. There are temperature swings of hundreds of degrees every couple of hours or weeks. You’re completely out of range of resupply, emergency help, or, you know, *air*.
There’s Helium 3 on the Moon, but not much of it, and there is no universe in which is it cheaper to mine for Helium 3 on the Moon than it is to mine for it on Earth.
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That’s generally true of anything we might bring back from space, up to and including continent-sized chunks of asteroid platinum.
Going to space doesn’t end war. The countries that have gone to space are among the most militarily belligerent in human history. The people who’ve been to space have come back perfectly prepared to wage war.
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Going to space won’t save us from the climate emergency. The unimaginably vast trove of material and the energy and advanced technology needed to lift it off Earth and get it to Mars is orders of magnitude more material and energy than we would need to resolve the actual climate emergency here.
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We aren’t anywhere near being a “multiplanetary species.” The number of humans you need in a colony to establish a new population is hard to estimate, but it’s *very* large. Larger than we can foreseeably establish on the Moon, on Mars, or on a space-station.
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But even if we *could* establish such a colony, there’s little evidence that it could sustain itself - not only are we a very, very long way off from such a population being able to satisfy its material needs off-planet, but we have little reason to believe that children could gestate, be born, and grow to adulthood off-planet.
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To top it all off, there’s space law - the inciting subject matter for this excellent book. There’s a lot of space law, and while there are some areas of ambiguity, the claims of would-be space entrepreneurs about how their plans are permissible under the settled parts of space law don’t hold up.
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