A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

by Kelly Weinersmith

The truth is that settling other worlds, in the sense of creating self-sustaining societies somewhere away from Earth, is not only quite unlikely anytime soon, it won’t deliver on the benefits touted by advocates. No vast riches, no new independent nations, no second home for humanity, not even a safety bunker for ultra elites.

If humanity survives the next few centuries, it’s probable we’ll expand into space. People, nations, and the international community have options about how to proceed. The choices we make now—about the pace of expansion and the rules underpinning it—will shape that future in ways we can’t yet imagine. The wrong choices wouldn’t merely slow us down, they might create existential risk for humanity.

you look at just the period from the first orbit in 1957 to the end of the 1960s, the price of putting something in orbit fell by around 90–99 percent.

the prices stopped falling around the early 1970s, and the Space Shuttle, which was supposed to make travel routine, cheap, and safe, failed on all three fronts,

That was the state of play until the 2010s when, largely as a result of a US policy shift and SpaceX in particular, the cost of putting stuff in space began to fall dramatically again.

This doesn’t just mean more rocket launches, it means more spacecraft.

And ergo: more space junk

people in the United States interact with satellites an average of thirty-six times a day.

But if you are starting a settlement in space, asteroids are quite interesting indeed. The asteroid belt contains over 2 sextillion kilograms worth of stuff: metals, carbon, oxygen, water, all of it already boosted away from Earth and ready for use.

The Expanse taught me that much at least

in 2015, the United States passed a law specifically codifying the idea that Americans can exploit space resources without limit.

Of course we did

How does democracy function in a society where air is rationed—and possibly under corporate control? How does sociology change if humans can’t reproduce unless they’re in Earth-normal gravity? How do we avoid a scramble for territory if some regions of space are better than others? Incidentally, what is the actual space law today, how did it get that way, and is it likely to change? These questions seemed very basic to space settlement, and frankly really interesting, but were typically skipped over as things that would just get worked out as the rockets got bigger.

All of these questions come up in one form or another in The Expanse, which is cool. Maybe it will be a primer of sorts…

the problem here isn’t just that the technology is challenging. Computers were challenging and so were airplanes, but we still built them. The problem is that getting from here to there is going to require understanding an extremely complex biological system that settlers will be reliant on for food, clean water, air, and not-dying in general. We can do it, but at the pace of ecology, not venture capital.

Humanity has peacefully regulated Antarctica and the bottom of the sea—areas that are similar to outer space, in terms of being basically terrible and largely inaccessible until the mid-twentieth century. Whether we can continue to do that in outer space, which since the 1950s has been deeply tied to national prestige, is trickier.

generally imagined might be especially likely to produce cruel or autocratic governments.

Both Bezos and Musk overhype things, yes, but the evidence is that they actually believe in a space-settlement future. What concerns us is not that they’re lying, but that they have weird beliefs about human sociology that may shape the future in undesirable ways.

rocketry founding father Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote in a 1911 article, “The earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot forever live in the cradle.” Perhaps. But we should remember that what emerges from a cradle is not a full-grown adult, but a toddler—lacking in knowledge, very excited, and prone to self-destruction.

Idyllic views of the future always seem to come with the hidden assumption that human nature will change. That somehow, the flaws of mankind will just melt away amongst the awesomeness of living among the stars. People will abandon mundane flaws like booze and drugs, and also everyone will be super-efficient like some kind of environmentalist’s dream. But that’s never been the case as we march forward, so I don’t see why it would happen in the future. —Andy Weir,

A related idea is that space should be zoned for heavy industry, while Earth returns to an unpolluted Edenic state. All the nasty mining and manufacturing can be done elsewhere, with by-products cleanly disposed of into the vast landfill that is the solar system.

But the “money makes us all friends” argument isn’t one that all war scholars buy. Wars start for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with a bunch of people looking at their resource base and saying “hey, this is pretty good.”

This is not the most noble or uplifting argument for any particular action, but then we suspect appeals to human nobility tend to co-occur with appeals for taxpayer money.

Lmfaoooooo …not wrong

regardless of where your habitat is positioned, the fact that death is ever present is going to have social and political consequences.

In one experiment, iron nuclei with high energy were fired into a gel-like substance to simulate what space might do to the human body. Individual iron nuclei—single atoms—blasted out tunnels as thick as a human hair.

Four months in space means about 1 percent loss of mass in the spine per month.

For now, take a moment to appreciate the scale of our ignorance. Our longest-term space voyage is about 1.3 years. Very few astronauts have gotten anywhere near that total. We have no data on long-term effects of radiation on human bodies outside Earth’s magnetosphere. We have almost no data for partial-gravity regimes. We have almost no data on people with chronic health issues.

Imagine this: you’re informed there’s a drug that’s really fun, but that results in slow bone loss, major fluid shifts inside the body, renal stones, muscle weakness, dizziness, and eyeball damage. You might still take it if all the cool kids are doing it, sure, but you’d be substantially more careful if you were carrying a baby in your body. Replace the drug with space and you understand why you shouldn’t quit birth control in orbit.

Historically, the human drive for survival has a way of displacing morality and ethics in times of desperation.” Perhaps most openly there is Dr. Konrad Szocik, a philosopher specializing in the ethics of space exploration. In a 2018 paper, he and coauthors write, “The idea to protect life at every stage of development may not be suited to a Mars colony.”

If you accept Daniel Deudney’s argument that a large human presence in space gives us a lot of power to destroy ourselves, you should think twice about creating settlements where you anticipate the culture will place a low value on human life.

If current technology barely permits survival and only permits natural population growth via throwing conventional moral standards out the window, and if there’s no reason to leave right this second, why not be patient? Spend a few decades at least in order to advance the science of human reproduction, as well as every other technology relevant to space settlement. Then, we can send a population large enough and with advanced enough technology that we aren’t required to “set new or higher criteria for valuable offspring.”

nobody is on the receiving end. The same goes for the Moon, for Venus, and as far as we can tell for everywhere in the solar system except this pale blue dot. Why? Because space is terrible. All of it. Terrible. Even photos and videos taken on the actual surfaces of the Moon and Mars can be deceiving. They don’t look half bad—sort of like dusty deserts with rolling hills. Not exactly bearnicorns and man-bats in Happy Valley, but not entirely uninviting either. To see these images properly, you need to know what they can’t show you. The Moon isn’t just a sort of gray Sahara without air. Its surface is made of jagged, electrically charged microscopic glass and stone, which clings to pressure suits and landing vehicles. Nor is Mars just an off-world Death Valley—its soil is laden with toxic chemicals, and its thin carbonic atmosphere whips up worldwide dust storms that blot out the Sun for weeks at a time. And those are the good places to land.

It’s thought that the Soviet lunar rover Lunokhod 2 (“Moonwalker 2”) eventually died after it acquired a heat-retaining patina of regolith, ultimately cooking until it couldn’t function.

the Moon is probably only valuable for settlement if somewhere else is even more valuable.

What makes Mars beguiling to space settlers is not its current state, but its potential. On Mars, you have, at the level of chemistry, most of the stuff you need to stay forever. And the most basic stuff like carbon, oxygen, and water is easy to acquire, at least by the stingy standards of space. Mars is thus a place we can not only survive on, but expand into. With enough time and effort, Mars at least holds out the possibility of a second independent home for humanity.

the risk of accidentally killing the only alien life we’ve ever met could give us a good reason not to settle Mars.

That would be pretty classic human behavior though, not gonna lie.

Mars is the most commonly suggested place to settle in space, basically for two reasons: First, it has what life as we know it needs to survive. Second, everywhere else is far far worse.

We can’t do this. Look, your only option for interstellar travel using anything remotely like near-term technology is to build a ship inside of which a human civilization can survive and reproduce for four hundred generations without killing each other. Does that sound like something humans can pull off?

Star Trek may have given you the impression that the future of space will be free from crass consumerism, but the best available evidence suggests commerce is just getting warmed up.

Our perspective in this book is that in the wildly alien environment of space, human nature will remain decidedly earthy.

Effectively, you’re subsistence farming on a tiny plot of land that sometimes requires technical system maintenance. The result in Biosphere 2 was an average workload of eight to ten hours a day, five and a half days a week. This is despite not doing all the chores of a space settlement, including running a power plant, doing construction, manufacturing, and at some point, taking care of children. A long-term space settlement will benefit from quite a bit of division of labor, but that’ll be tricky if everyone has to be a full-time farmer just to not-quite-starve.

The ultimate goal of space settlement isn’t surviving, but thriving. That means accommodating human frailty in an environment that isn’t always welcoming to human existence.

Fission reactors come with risks. Launching them comes with the danger of what aerospace engineers call “rapid unexpected disassembly,” better known as BOOM!

international space law is currently too broad, leaving room for states to interpret what is allowed in dangerous ways. It needs to be updated. The problem is that while space launch has gotten easier, changes to international law have proven surprisingly difficult.

however beautiful an aspiration space travel has been, it has also been a cynically wielded tool of militarism.

US had an unwitting advantage—in January 1945, months before the fall of Berlin, von Braun and his staff and families left Peenemünde in an attempt to surrender to US forces.

The United States not only captured von Braun and his literal tons of documentation, they had absconded back to New Mexico with enough rocket parts to build one hundred V-2s

you could say that leaders successfully steered away from war toward scientific contests. This is a frequent claim, and it’s nice, but isn’t really quite true—nuclear arms kept being built en masse and the world came to the brink of apocalypse more than once. A better way to think about human spacefaring may be as “costly signaling.”

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. 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.

the law we have today largely comes out of a very particular era of history—a time when there are only two players in space, one capitalist and one communist, and when space travel was totally new and moving very fast toward an unknown future.

the OST has succeeded in creating a general norm of hands-offiness in space. But that may have been less about the law and more about how space stayed prohibitively expensive for forty years.

the phrase res nullius goes back to Roman law. It’s a framework for property, and it means something like “nobody’s thing.”

the Moon Agreement would have set up the solar system as a particularly communal form of res communis, known in international law as “common heritage of mankind” or just “CHM.” Although the term has evolved over time, the modern understanding of CHM is as a commons collectively owned by all of humanity.

Res nullius and res communis are very old concepts, but CHM was a new idea even as the Moon Treaty was being negotiated.