A City on Mars: Debunking the Myths of Mars Colonization

Sunday - December 3 2023, 20:13 UTC - 11 months ago

In their book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith outline the immense challenges of sending humans to Mars. While rocket technology and determining the power needs of a settlement or the available minerals on different planets or asteroids is the easy part, managing radiation exposure, medicine, reproduction, law, ecology, economics, sociology, and warfare is far more complicated. Additionally, the public typically imagines colonies on Mars as futuristic domed cities, but construction of such structures is presently infeasible.

In August 1998, 700 people came to Boulder, Colorado to attend the founding convention of the Mars Society. The group’s cofounder and president, Robert Zubrin, extolled the virtues of sending humans to Mars to terraform the planet and establish a human colony. The Mars Society’s founding declaration began, "The time has come for humanity to journey to the planet Mars," and declared that "Given the will, we could have our first crews on Mars within a decade." That was two and a half decades ago.

In their hilarious, highly informative and cheeky book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith inventory the challenges standing in the way of Zubrin-like visions for Mars settlement. The wife-and-husband team serves a strong, but never stern, counterargument to the visionaries promising that we’ll put humans on Mars in the very near future. "Think of this book as the straight-talking homesteader’s guide to the rest of the solar system," they write.

Just as in their previous book, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, the authors—she’s a faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice University and he’s a cartoonist—use humor and science to douse techno dreams with a dose of reality. "After a few years of researching space settlements, we began in secret to refer to ourselves as the ‘space bastards’ because we found we were more pessimistic than almost everyone in the space-settlement field," they write. "We weren’t always this way. The data made us do it." .

While working on their deeply researched book, the Weinersmiths came to view sending people to Mars as a problem far more complicated and difficult than you’d know by listening to enthusiasts like Elon Musk or Robert Zubrin. It’s a challenge that "won’t be solved simply by ambitious fantasies or giant rockets." Eventually humans are likely to expand into space, the Weinersmiths write, but for now, "the discourse needs more realism—not in order to ruin everyone’s fun, but to provide guardrails against genuinely dangerous directions for planet Earth." .

Figuring out rocket technology and determining the power needs of a settlement or the available minerals on different planets or asteroids is the easy part. The bigger challenges, they argue, are "the big, open questions about things like medicine, reproduction, law, ecology, economics, sociology, and warfare." .

Take physiology. Although we now have a small number of astronauts who have experienced living at the International Space Station for long stretches, these astronauts have not had to deal with nearly as much radiation as would befall travelers far beyond. "With current knowledge, it’s hard to predict the effect of radiation on the body," the Weinersmiths write, adding that the need to manage exposure to radiation is "one of the major factors that will shape human habitation designs off-world." .

In the book, they recount architect Brent Sherwood dismissing those popular images of crystalline domes with sweeping views of space as "baseless." As Sherwood wrote, "Such archi­tectures do not and likely never will exist in space, as there are no practical ways to build them." .