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

by Kelly Weinersmith

Did you know the first woman to step foot in a space station was “gifted” an apron and asked if she’d handle cooking and cleaning for the rest of her mission?

An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars. Staying alive on Earth requires fire and a pointy stick. Staying alive in space will require all sorts of high-tech gadgets we can barely manufacture on Earth.

If the reason for going to space is not philosophical or even just about return on investment, well, that’s okay. “Because it’s awesome” is still a perfectly serviceable argument.

And then there’s our favorite space sex rumor: according to G. Harry Stine, an engineer and well-known rocket science popularizer, “clandestine experiments” have been conducted in NASA’s neutral buoyancy tank, confirming beyond doubt that “it is indeed possible for humans to copulate in weightlessness.” But, says Stine, an anonymous source informed him it works best with a third swimmer to “push at the right time in the right place.” People who executed this particular maneuver in orbit called themselves the “Three Dolphin Club” and even had a membership pin.

We are not saying that any of this is impossible to solve. But as with space medicine generally, getting the knowledge we’d need to have reproduction in space that is safe and ethical would be a massive, costly, decades-consuming affair, and strangely, among people advocating for vast space settlements in the next thirty years, nobody is doing the sort of enormous spending necessary to get answers.

So while we don’t know whether your grandchildren’s grandchildren will inhabit underground Martian caves or floating cells of kombucha skin in the Venusian skies, we can be certain that wherever they are in the cosmos, Ronald McDonald will find them.

Science fiction writer Andy Weir said in the preface to Alcohol in Space that fans often ask whether his heroic Martian survivor and potato farmer Mark Watney could’ve made liquor. The answer is no—not if he wanted to live. “It takes almost eight kilograms of potatoes to make a bottle of vodka . . . almost a week of meals for our poor stranded astronaut.”

Taking data from 2020, almost 60 percent of worldwide electricity comes from fossil fuels.

As space architect Brent Sherwood laments, writing about lunar architecture: “The image of miraculous, crystalline pressure domes scattered about planetary surfaces, affording a suburban populace with magnificent views of raw space, is a baseless, albeit persistent, modern icon. Such architecture would bake the inhabitants and their parklands in strong sunlight while poisoning them with space radiation at the same time.”

This suggests that there’s a deep structural dynamic here—when your employer owns your housing, they’re apt to use it against you at some point.

We found one account by a British submariner, in which he claimed to adjust the balance of oxygen to carbon dioxide depending on whether he wanted people more lethargic or more active.

The biggest rockets on the drawing board today could perhaps transport a hundred people at a time.

We’ve chosen to examine company towns because they seem like a likely outcome in space, and frankly because space geeks talk about them a lot. They’re also well studied enough that we can make actual suggestions for would-be space corporate overlords. But the deep point here that we wish to emphasize is that problems arise when you take a familiar economic structure and then situate it in a poisonous hellscape.

We should always remember that these settlers will be regular people, and regular people’s daily concerns are much less about grand narratives than about their homes, their jobs, and their groceries.

If you think Earth is dying and you want to save humanity, you either have to transfer a huge population to Mars—possibly on the order of hundreds of millions—in a short period, or you have to have unimaginably developed robotic technology. Although it’s hard to predict the future, it seems to us that if we’re so good at robotics and ecology that we can build a permanent bubble world for 1 million people on a distant oceanless planet, well, surely we can clean some carbon dioxide out of the air on Earth.

Part of why explosions in space are so rare is that Earth’s militaries need to keep space pacific in order to conduct war on Earth.

“Expensive and easy to attack” is not a promising set of qualities for an attack system.

Going to space will not end war because war isn’t caused by anything that space travel is apt to change, even in the most optimistic scenarios.

Earlier, we mentioned Dr. Daniel Deudney, the international relations scholar infamous among many a space geek for his proposal that the existentially safest move for humanity is just never to create a major human presence in space.

Things are now moving very quickly, and we don’t know to what end. But we do believe that the naysayers should get a little more room to say nay.

Our ability to harm ourselves vastly outweighs our ability to protect ourselves.

Space settlement will be much harder than it is usually portrayed, without obvious economic benefits.

Going to the stars will not make us wise. We have to become wise if we want to go to the stars.