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

by Kelly Weinersmith

But we also had a few nagging concerns. Things we didn’t understand, like how to design the legal regime to make it safe to live in a solar system where dozens of nations, corporations, and possibly single individuals can sling dinosaur-annihilation-size objects at the homeworld. A clear protocol would be nice. What we found was that, with just a few exceptions, concerns of this sort were ignored, sometimes even treated with hostility by space-settlement advocates.

We’ll assume he’s got space babies worked out for now so we can deal with a bigger problem: space sucks. Our impression talking to nongeeks is that while they realize space sucks, they have underestimated the scale of suckitude.

We can’t go in depth here because this book is sadly not about the brave men and women who endured repeated roller coaster–like plane trips to perform precision surgery on a once-oinky friend. No poet will sing their song. Nor should they. But if you’ve ever wondered “can we find out how to do a craniotomy in space?” the answer is yes. When pigs fly.

We suspect that none of these problems preclude space settlement. Assuming a budget of infinity dollars and a lot of technological development, a giant rotating space base with thick shielding might fix pretty much everything. We’ll explore whether that’s a good idea later, but the important thing is that the above issues may not be insurmountable obstacles. You shouldn’t think of them as necessarily deciding whether or not we go to space, but as shaping the constraints whenever we do go to space. The more science and technology we have, the less annoying those constraints will be.

Why do you want permanently cold domains of shadow? Because thanks to their extremely low temperature, some of them appear to have held on to water ice. Neither rover nor human have visited these sites, so they are imperfectly characterized, but the water in them likely comes from sources like comets that crashed into the Moon, and possibly long-ago lunar volcanism. This water would’ve moved around the lunar surface, in some cases for millennia, before finding itself trapped inside these exceptionally cold regions. There it remained, confined in darkness for eons, crystalline and mysterious, until a Blue Origin spacecraft landed nearby and Jeff Bezos needed a fill-up for his hot tub.

We’re going to argue that Mars is a good bet for space settlement, but first let us be clear: by earthly standards Mars sucks. Sucks more than Scott Kelly’s pants. Mars is nowhere near being a Plan B home for humanity anytime soon. Consider a worst-case climate scenario. The oceans have swollen ten meters higher, drowning New York City and Boston. Low-lying countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have been swallowed up whole. Heat waves make parts of the Southern Hemisphere uninhabitable as the planet is ravaged by floods, droughts, wildfires, and massive tropical cyclones. More than half of the world’s species die, coral reefs become bleached skeletons, freshwater sources from snowpack melt away or are fouled by rising seas, tropical diseases make their way into formerly temperate climates. Crops fail, people starve, and violence breaks out as over a billion climate refugees beat against the closed gates of the comparatively livable North. That planet? Eden compared to Mars or the Moon. That Earth still has a breathable atmosphere, a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and quite possibly still has McDonald’s breakfast. It’s not a world we would like to inhabit, but it is the one world in the solar system where you can run around naked for ten minutes and still be alive at the end.

There are other issues we could get into, but the upshot is this: even a lot of the very basic aspects of rotating space wheels are difficult and dangerous and wildly expensive. While it is literally true that there is enough of the right stuff in space to build these things, it’s kind of like saying we can build solar panels on the Moon. What seems easy to the physicist may not work so well for the engineer, or the investor for that matter.

Earth contains about 1023 tons of iron.

Swap kg for tons??

even as CO2 kept rising.

Opposite given the next few sentences?

Biosphere 2 cost around a tenth of a percent of the ISS. People can debate what the point of space stations is, but if they’re part of a project leading to human settlement off-world, this is not a good allocation of resources. For the same cost as the ISS, five hundred biospheres could’ve been built. Better yet, a decades-long sequence of experiments could’ve been run in order to create what we really need—an extremely detailed computer model for how to design sealed worlds. What life forms to use, how to arrange them, how to make them as efficient as possible, and how to maximize human population and well-being inside. Oh, and there’d be the side benefits of deeply enhancing our knowledge of ecosystem sustainability and our ability to create food efficiently in environments without hospitable climates—both potentially relevant in the coming decades.

Even if nations don’t want to do this stuff, could we get dragged along by individuals? One of the most common arguments we hear is that all law is pointless because if Elon Musk has a Mars settlement, who’s going to stop him? One of your authors has a brother who makes this argument. His name is Marty and he is wrong. We call this sort of thing the “treehouse theory of space law.” Imagine this: a bunch of kids build a treehouse up a tall tree. The ladder is too light for an adult to climb, so once the kids are up there, they can’t be reached. Their father comes out and says, “Kids! I made dinner! Come inside!” The kids smirk confidently and reply, “Never! We do not obey your Dad Law in the treehouse! You will try to oppress us in vain!” In this scenario, what do you expect the dad to do? That’s right—stop supplying the kids with food and water, seize all of their stuff, and patiently await their change of heart.

The judges ended up hearing the arguments of top international lawyers from around the world. There’s a lot of nuance to their ruling, but as to the question of whether Quebec could unilaterally secede, the basic finding was that no, no they couldn’t. Why? Because although the Quebecois are by general agreement a distinct people with a land, a language, their own customs, and really really good pea soup, they are not persecuted by the Canadian government. They are allowed to run for office, they can vote, and they’re not being jailed or murdered or having their culture actively suppressed.

Space geeks often cite a quote by science fiction author Larry Niven: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!” But as Deudney notes, giant asteroids are rare. Humans haven’t been around that long, while the dinosaurs had a good long run. “Given these possibilities, perhaps the reason the dinosaurs lasted for nearly two hundred million years is because they did not have a space program.”

We don’t know how to do it yet, but we still believe that someday, with enough knowledge, we can have Mars. And one very faraway day, other solar systems. But we have to earn it, both by gaining in knowledge and by becoming a more responsible, more peaceful species. Going to the stars will not make us wise. We have to become wise if we want to go to the stars.