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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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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But those claims are robust compared to claims that space law will simply sublimate into its constituent molecules when exposed to the reality of space travel, space settlement, and (most importantly) space extraction.
Space law doesn’t exist in a vacuum (rimshot). It is parallel to - and shares history with - laws regarding Antarctica, the ocean’s surface, and the ocean’s floor.
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These laws relate to territories that are both vastly easier to access and far more densely populated by valuable natural resources. The fact that they remain operative in the face of economic imperatives demands that space settlement advocates offer a more convincing account than “money talks, bullshit walks, space law is toast the minute we land on a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid.”
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The Weinersmiths have such an account in defense of space law: namely, that space law, and its terrestrial analogs, constitute a durable means of resolving conflicts that would otherwise give to outcomes that are far worse for science, entrepreneurship, human thriving or nation-building than the impediments these laws represent.
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What’s more, space law is enforceable. Not only would any space settlement be terribly, urgently dependent on support from Earth for the long-foreseeable future, but every asteroid miner, Lunar He3 exporter and Martian potato-farmer hoping to monetize their products would have an enforcement nexus with a terrestrial nation and thus the courts of that nation.
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But the Weinersmiths aren’t anti-space. They aren’t even anti-space-settlement. Rather, they argue that the path to space-based scientific breakthroughs, exploration of our solar system, and a deeper understanding of our moral standing in a vast universe cannot start with space settlements.
Landing people on the Moon or Mars any time soon is a stunt - a very, very expensive stunt.
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These boondoggles aren’t just terribly risky (though they are - people who attempt space settlement are *very* likely to die horribly and after not very long), they come with price-tags that would pay for meaningful space science. For the price of a crewed return trip to Mars, you could put *multiple* robots onto every significant object in our solar system, and pilot an appreciable fleet of these robot explorers back to Earth with samples.
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